your hand on someone else's heartbeat

When my husband was in the late stages of his terminal illness, he asked me to read him poetry. He didn't ask for short stories, or essays, or news articles, or the first crisp pages of a novel, with its unfolding narrative weight. The request was unexpected. Despite his five (almost five and a half) decades on this earth, he'd never been much of a reader, though he was incredibly knowledgeable about the world, often serving as my first editor, catching errors or incongruities in my poetry or prose, the wrong slip of a word. And so, without much thought as to why poetry, most evening I obliged him: ferrying a few collections from my study to the living room where he lay on a rented hospital bed, largely paralyzed from both his brain tumour and the muscle-weakening trudge of a year and a half of medications aimed at keeping him alive. From an old loveseat, under faerie lights, our three dogs sleeping around us, I'd read a poem or two from each book, never welling too long on one poet in case the poems I'd selected didn't speak to him in the way he hoped, in that moment, to be spoken to. I suppose, in a strange way, I was curating an anthology for him. 

What strikes me now, about the poems I chose to read to him in late 2018, is how steeped they were in tenderness and knowing. There was one poet's knowing of his own impending death, there was another poet's Buddhist knowing of love - what it means to try at that beautiful and hopeful thing, whether that light is directed at the self, or another, or the world. I've thought a lot about "why poetry" this past year. Why it is, to my mind, the most powerful and instantaneous of the arts. The feeling I get from encountering a good poem is like turning around on a busy street only to discover I've nearly collided with a stranger: the two of us suddenly very close in an unexpected and vivifying way. I admire the visual arts - galleries are one of my life's great pleasures - but in apprehending an artwork there still seems to be a kind of mediating distance that is greater than the intimacy felt when reading a poem. Poetry's cousin, music, is immediate in its own way, but often the maker of the music seems distant - on the other side of the swelling strings and swirling oboes and the musicians playing the composer's notes. In poetry you  have your hand on someone else's heartbeat.

- Aislinn Hunter, from her introduction to Best Canadian Poetry 2025. 

a reckoning by fire

As David St. John—a longtime friend of Levis and one of the figures instrumental in bringing his posthumous work to light—points out in his afterward to Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze (2016), Levis often closes his poems with a reckoning by fire, whether that be a purifying, revelatory fire, such as in “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gates,” or an inferno of damnation, as in “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire.” Even the tender poem about his son that concludes The Darkening Trapeze, “God Is Always Seventeen” (which throws us back to “The Poet at Seventeen,” the opening poem of the 1985 collection Winter Stars), ends with this disclosed, stricken sense of loss and an ache for penance:

there was

Some music playing & something inconsolable

And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget
Being there with [my son] & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.

This ability to elevate personal vulnerability into lyric is one of the many ways I see Levis’s influence echo through the poems written by my generation. Since his death, poetry has moved ever more visibly toward the personal, especially in poems rooted in identity. While the convention of the “speaker” still exists as a kind of protective veil, many contemporary readers assume, or even crave, a closeness between poet and poem. If this has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century poetics, then Levis can be read as a blueprint of how to draw from one’s inner life—even the ugly parts—with emotional precision that doesn’t tip into self-indulgence.

 - Jacques J. Rancourt, from his essay "Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis" from the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry. You can read the whole thing here.

the 2025 roll of nickels year in review

2025 was a very quiet year here at Roll of Nickels, as life and work demands derailed my grand ambitions. I only managed to post five quotes on writing, and archive three of my favourite pieces of critical prose that I've written in recent years: an essay on poetry and companionship; my companion piece to my book Weather, "Some Notes on Writing Haiku"; and my recent interview with Ben Robinson for the Hamilton Review of Books (which, in the months that followed, shut its doors - more motivation to archive old material!).

The aforementioned Weather had a very nice year, being named a finalist for both the Raymond Souster Award and the Fred Cogswell Award. A new poem of mine, "Harrison River, November" was also a finalist for the Arc Magazine Poem of the Year competition. In addition, I published nine interviews with authors, which appeared in Read Local BC, The New Quarterly, and EVENT. I will (god willing) post those here over the coming year.

2025 was also exciting for me as, for part of an upper level Creative Writing course I was teaching at the University of the Fraser Valley, my students each conducted an interview with a Canadian author. Look for those interviews (25 in total!) in lit mags and reviews in 2026. (Here's the first student interview - Xavier Ibraheem interviewing John Terpstra for The Woodlot - to give you a sense of what's to come.)

I will be publishing seven or eight of my own interviews this year, too. I'm very happy to help get more of what I think of as the supreme form of both poetics and literary criticism out into the world! 

As I posted so little this year, I won't be listing the "highlights" of the year at the end of this post, but I will share this article I gathered of writing in praise of Sandy Shreve and this photo of some of my favourite books I read in the past two years:

The books:

the berry takes the shape of the bloom, andrea bennett 

Entre Rive and Shore, Dominique Bernier-Cormier

After That, Lorna Crozier

Midway, Kayla Czaga

Hello, Horse, Richard Kelly Kemick

Devotional Forensics, Joseph Kidney

Shadow Blight, Annick MacAskill

We, the Kindling, Otoniya J Okot Bitek (read my little essay on it here)

Fine, Matt Rader

People You Know, Places You've Been, Hana Shafi

The Work, Bren Simmers

Wellwater, Karen Solie

Existing Music, Nick Thran

I highly recommend giving them all a read, at least while you wait for me to get my act together and post more content here!