We Who Love to Be Astonished: Prismatic Publics
Experimental poetry is a large and hospitable house accommodating the multifarious. From Christine Stewart, Liz Howard, and Nicole Markotić to Erín Moure, Dani Spinosa, Angela Carr, and Chantal Neveu; from Nicole Brossard, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Carellin Brooks to Gail Scott, Daphne Marlatt, and Phyllis Webb; from Margaret Christakos, m. nourbeSe philip, and Judith Copithorne to Dionne Brand, Lisa Robertson, and Anne Carson; from Susan Holbrook, Rachel Zolf, Moyna Pam Dick, and Canisia Lubrin to Sina Queyras, Chantal Gibson, Rita Wong, and Sharon Thesen—each has generated singular texts sustaining a tradition of questioning and regenerative writing practices.
This inventory of names speaks to “a cluster-voice” of poetry (Caroline Bergvall, Alisoun Sings), a chorus of voices matched by an array of critical and creative approaches: Ryan Fitzpatrick, Shannon Maguire, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Johanna Skibsrud, Max Karpinski, Myra Bloom, Eric Schmaltz, Jessi MacEachern, and Klara Du Plessis—to quote but a recent few—have responded with acumen and generosity.
The title of the special issue is a citational homage to those who contributed to the richness of poetics and literary criticism beyond borders: Cynthia Hogue, Laura Hinton, Kate Eichhorn, and Heather Milne. We wish to pick up the threads and expand the critical fabric. Thus, this special issue will amplify a cluster-voice in the making from within Canada and through a dialogue with the transnational community of experimental writers.
We invite proposals that address the prismatic practices of experimentation inflected by topics such as comedy, joy, and regeneration; political power, violence, and resistance; cognition, performativity, and metapoetics; desire, gender, and sexuality; legacies of modernist practices; history, archive, and memory; multimediality; spectrality, opacity, and unnameability; cosmogonies and biopoetics; theory and poetics; transnational poetics. Readers, poets, critics—all are welcome.
Please submit a detailed proposal (500 words) and include a short bio (150 words). We welcome scholarly essays as well as hybrid forms of creative/academic essays. Send the proposal in one document to Anne Quéma at aquema@acadiau.ca by January 31, 2026.