Fall 2025

Welcome to Vol.48.2, the fall 2025 issue of CV2, and the last issue celebrating our 50th year of publishing poetry. As in our previous issue, we’ve shared here a mixture of poems appearing publicly for the first time, and poems we ourselves have published before, going all the way back to the year 2000. This issue is, in a sense, part two of our special anniversary retrospective; if you haven’t yet, and would like to read the poems we shared from 1975–1999, do get yourself a copy of Vol.48.1, our summer 2025 issue, and enjoy.

When putting an issue together, we try to find connections that will create a continuity, a conversation from one poem to the next, and doing so in this issue was surprisingly easy. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that the archival poems already had their places, appearing sequentially in the order of the years in which they appeared, with a gap between each of them for a new poem—constraints, so often gifts in creative work. But the new work seemed to slot in so perfectly. A word here echoing one there, an emotional vein connecting 2001 to 2025 to 2002. The speaker in one poem puts ice cubes in her ears; a subject in the next holds a stone in her chest. Asher Ghaffar tours us through the winding worlds of a language and a life, observing that “Each word is growing an attic, / which eats itself even as it is cut” and leading us into Jane Zwart’s interpretation of dreams, where “the attic in my dream // stands for my life, some of it.” A bridge. Pages/years later/back/later, Roo Borson addresses the mice in an attic, then Maggie Burton talks of the spiders in an attic. Just one example of a subject poets seem to love. The connections are many, and we hope you’ll enjoy reading through, finding and creating them for yourself.

Originally, we’d planned to share one poem for each of CV2’s 50 years of operation. The thing is, CV2’s staff are smart, but we’re not really numbers smart. We didn’t initially think about the fact that sharing fifty poems from fifty years would mean sharing poems from…last year. And…this year. And that’s just…too recent. It wouldn’t have worked! Kindly forget that we ever said that. We decided that 2020 felt like the right year at which to stop the retrospective look. That year continues to feel more and more like an inflection point in our collective experience as humans who lived through it, and the poem we’ve decided to reprint from that year, Jaime Black-Morsette’s “they tried to bury us” feels like the perfect close to this look back, with its perfectly haunting, closing image of “fingertips feeling / for home”. It was important to us that our celebrations this year placed poets with strong ties to Winnipeg and Manitoba at centre stage in everything we did. We get to claim as one-time or long-time or lifelong residents of Winnipeg, (as Winnipeg so likes to do), the poets in this issue P.K. Page, katherena vermette, John K. Samson, Sarah Klassen, Duncan Mercredi, Tanis MacDonald, J. Roger Léveillé, George Amabile, Dennis Cooley, Maureen Scott Harris, and Jaime Black-Morsette—and that’s just the poets whose works we’re republishing from past years. It speaks to the staggering amount of poetic talent that continuously emerges from this sparsely populated prairie home of ours, that it was easy and a pleasure to populate this issue with poets of our very own. A source of continued pride for us all.

There’s a line in the Dorothy Livesay poem that helped close out our last issue, as the last of that batch of archival poems. It feels like the perfect bridge between these two issues, as well as the perfect finish to this note, and the perfect end to this 50th year of publishing CV2. Strange to quote a poem from a previous issue? Maybe. But then again, what is this whole project if not a way of bridging one set of poems to another, one year to another, one poet to another. We need this phrase in both of these issues, I think.

So here it is, from our founder, Dorothy Livesay—a reminder that poems are your friends, and always there for you to go back to:

We come back to the poem:
music vanishes
sound vibrates, fades
but the words of our poem
can be tried on, over and over—
– “The Still Centre” by Dorothy Livesay, 1999

Welcome to and back to the poem, dear readers. We hope you enjoy your visit.
Chelsea Peters
Editor