Sachiko Murakami

Sachiko Murakami’s first collection of poems, The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks, 2008) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second collection, Rebuild, also from Talon, is hot off the presses. She has been a literary worker for numerous presses, journals, and organizations. Most recently, she initiated Project Rebuild, a collaborative poetry project. She lives in Toronto where she co-hosts the Pivot Reading Series, and facilitates writing workshops at the Toronto New School of Writing and the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She recently became the poetry editor for Insomniac Press.


MATERIALS

Give me something classic. Split cedar, spilled glass.
Build me a home with surfaces no one can laugh at.

I piss Paxil and Gravol, Viagra and NyQuil
into the Pacific. Salmon knows nothing of the brand. He breathes us in.

Stir coffee waste (free at Starbucks) into the ground.
Caffeine fuels me and my heirloom tomatoes, sinks into cells
that buy energy from sunlight.

One day I will claim my God-given right
to rot in the loam. Pay into the eco-market.
A stone, paid for, will mark me.

I knock on wood, trust the gravitas of granite.
Rain on pissed-on concrete. Hard and wet as home.


RETURN HOME

Or flip it. Edge towards Pacific,
stuttering in from suburb. There,
nothing’s Vancouver; plain
and river, mall and bypass.

And always the convo turns
to condo: prime plus five,
what point did you get?

What statement does your home make?
At Home Depot plants may be got
for pennies, for gardens on the starter home’s
Juliette. For home, read high-rise,

for Vancouver, read Coquitlam,
for Coquitlam, read unceded Coast Salish Territory.
We grow where we’re planted, in land already used,
every plot torn up and renewed.



Featured Interview

Johanna Skibsrud

Interviewed by Alessandro Porco

So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?

I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading

Featured Review

The Good News About Armageddon

By Steve McOrmond

Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."

The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.

With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading