"Pain is very difficult to speak about except in symbols, metaphors, and analogies. It reminds me of poetry: the best poems can’t be paraphrased because how they say what they say is, to be tautological, what they say." - Matt Rader

"I love the poetic spaces that the reader can drop into. I remember my first encounter with Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. I still like falling into those gaps. Reading poetry is like that, I think. The reader enters the poem, ultimately filling those spaces in their own way." - Gillian Sze

"I was surprised that the words emerged as poetry. I’m not a poet. I’d never written poems (other than the rhyming poems of Grade 6, of course). For the past decade, I hadn’t written at all, not even in my journal; I had only recently begun to journal again when I met the friend, the love, six months after the fire. There was no reason that the memories would come out as poetry. But they did." - Meghan Fandrich

"Poetry gave my life purpose— I was part of something fine— and that made me feel like I mattered in some way. I was a poet, goddamn it! By my late teens when I dropped out of school I was already a drunk and a drug addict. I lived on and off the streets and worked horrible, humiliating jobs and got fired regularly. I got into fights and often got my ass kicked. I spent many nights in the Vancouver drunk tank. So while my poems were awful they kept me going. I was betting everything on them. Now, I think differently about those poems. Sure, they weren’t much but learning to write poetry is a long, unbroken process that is never finished. The poems I write now contain the DNA of those early poems no matter how awful they were. So yeah, my wonderful, worthless poems. Without them I wouldn’t be here." - Rodney DeCroo

"I get teased sometimes for how often I talk about prayer. I’m not a religious person. For me, prayer is the word I use to describe moments of meditation and communion that ground me in myself and the world around me. In that sense, absolutely—each poem is a prayer, regardless of the title! Because each poem depends on beings and places and ideas outside of myself, and so each poem is relational and connective. I hope that, taken together, they feel like a ceremony or practice grounded in communal blessing, curiosity, and thanksgiving." - Jess Housty

"It has been a very strange and absolutely beautiful experience seeing how strangers and people close to me relate and react to my book! I’ve always looked at my poems having a very specific audience: other Indigenous people, specifically northern Cree Métis kin, my family, and the BC Peace Region. But just because that is who I was writing too doesn’t mean that I think my work is not “for,” or inaccessible to, people who are outside of that audience. I absolutely love hearing how people have found themselves in my work and the ways they relate to it or feel called to it. There is a teacher who I am in contact with who teaches some of my poems in their class and they will share their students’ reflections with me. It honestly has made this entire ten-year process of writing this book worth it." - Samantha Nock

"I am... obsessed with the liminal space between one moment and the next. I feel like that hinge, that transition point, is where the real mysteries lie. I hadn’t actually thought about the silence of the blank space or pages between poems as reflecting this same sort of liminal space, but it’s a great observation. Because my poems have always focused more or less on the same subjects—the material world, phenomenology, consciousness—I feel they have always been in conversation with each other. I think any poem we read is in conversation with all the other poems we’ve read or written. " - Donna Kane

"It was important [for me] to get at an emotional truth that was authentic to my own experiences. I think that’s sort of the freedom in poetry—there is little expectation to get things “right,” only to get things to feel true... Writing about my parents was a way to get out of my own head, an exercise in empathy and creation, a sort of “negative capability,” as Keats would say. I’m writing about myself, but not really—I’m putting on the page ideas that branch out and become larger than myself, a self that, after all, is an insignificant thing given the scope and nature of life itself." - Onjana Yawnghwe

"When it comes to making art, I like to think of the idea of cross-training. Cross-training refers to using various modes of exercises outside of a central activity so that other muscles in the body are engaged and balanced in strength. For me, cross-training is key to my practice and involves me working in one discipline in order to keep my senses sharp in another." - Leanne Dunic