Lynn Melnick’s nouns
Photo of Lynn Melnick (left) by Timothy Donnelly.
Gertrude Stein never trusted nouns. She was wary of their tendency to fossilize meaning, even as she relished their potential to be magnetized: “Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun.”[1] Lynn Melnick’s Landscape with Sex and Violence, eighty years later, takes up this ambivalent and vexed embrace of nouns in the space of rape culture, where adoring and wanting cross use and abuse as matters graver than grammatical concern.
Nikki Sheppy: Three new poems
For many, Calgary poet Nikki Sheppy appeared out of nowhere when she won the 2013 John Lent Poetry-Prose Award, the result of which was published as the limited edition letterpress chapbook, Grrrrlhood: a ludic suite (Kalamalka, 2014).