I've been sick for months and the only salve is poetry

I’m living in a recurring sickness that I can’t make a poem about; I’m just angry now.

The second or third return of this rotten head cold reminds me of the things we try to do with meaning-making or ideating. How it breeds itself. If a head cold can stick around for near months, turning over on itself, can’t an idea?

(Forgive the tenuous connection, my head is foggy with phlegm and with grief.)

This cyclical pull is what I love about Ali Millar’s 3am Things, not just for her prose, but for the lists she shares of notes on her phone. It’s proof of the root, the consistent backdrop of things we keep in our minds and then externalize and collect into a private realm. The what that keeps going amid all the other things. Hers is a level of vulnerability that awes me. A weakness of mine is to gatekeep ideas until I am sure of how I want to use them.

The truth is likely that if I stopped lingering on ideas privately, I’d share them recklessly, knowing—or trusting—that more would come. Because they always do. And I wouldn’t wish them away like this persistent coughing.

This morning I searched for “ice” in my notes. I was trying to find a description I wrote of winter, something I needed to place back into a scene in my novel.

Instead I found different grocery lists I’d written over the years. Right now I’m so sick that I can’t make sense of anything; maybe that’s why everything reads like a poem. I am trying to find the meaning behind all of the disparate parts.

I suppose the best way to put it is that, in this time of grief—personal, deep, collective, sprawling—and in the cloud of head colds—foggy, tiring, consuming—I am obsessed with the work of poetry. How tight it is. How it presents a fog while also clearing it. I want to make a real thing and hold it. I want moments of lightness in recognition, like when you pick a perfect mandarin and peel its skin and the first sliver is sweet.

• MARCH 18 University of Guelph MFA Speakeasy Reading Series w/ Laurie D. Graham, Liz Johnston, Annabel Griffiths-Fitzsimmons, Zachary Tomblin, and Maria Giesbrecht. 7-9pm, Another Story Bookshop.

• MARCH 26 Gisèle Pelicot book launch for A Hymn to Life (Shame Has to Change Sides), 6pm, Trinity-St. Paul's United Church and Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts.

• MARCH 31 McClelland & Stewart Poetry Night 2026 w/ Laurie D. Graham, Kaie Kellough, and Jake Skeets. Curated and presented by Canisia Lubrin. 7:15-8:45pm, Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre.

• APRIL 9 Poet Lisa Richter launches Sublunary w/ readings by Hoa Nguyen and Cassidy McFadzean. Host Jim Johnstone. 7-9pm, Another Story Bookshop.

• APRIL 20 Book launch for Carrianne Leung’s Wonderland Road with Catherine Hernandez. 7pm, DROM Taberna.

• APRIL 23 Toronto Review Launch Party w/ readings by Claudia Dey, Furqan Mohamed, Claire Foster, Cason Sharpe, and Quill Christie-Peters. 7:30pm, Cafeteria @ 1650 Dupont.

• Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World by Anne Enright,April 7, W. W. Norton & Company

• The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescot-Weinstein, April 7, Pantheon

• Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, April 7, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry by Ada Limón, April 7, Scribner

• The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley, April 14, Penguin Random House

• Book IV: On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, April 14, New Directions

• Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh, April 21, Simon & Schuster

• The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis by Fernando Pessoa, April 21, New Directions