didn't feel tidy enough for prose

The parameters of mental illness, my experience of it, really craved poetry as a vessel. I knew what I knew from my memory, that imperfect source. I had impressions of what it felt like in my body and my mind. And so poetry, with its near-endless boundaries and delicate nuance, let me get at those little recollections. My experiences didn’t feel tidy enough for prose. I never understood them well enough to put them into that form, though I did take a shot at it in a personal essay for Maclean’s that you can read here. I wrote that article after the book was complete. I think writing the poems in Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation allowed me to put my perception disorder into those terms.

- Curtis LeBlanc, in conversation with Hannah Macready over at EVENT magazine. You can read more here.