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Contemporary Verse 2
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The Winter Issue

Winter 2019. Vol. 41 No.3

The Winter 2019 issue features poems and reviews by thirty-two captivating writers, including the winners of the 2018 2-Day Poem Contest. The writers in this issue invite us to contemplate love and loss, life and death, endings and beginnings. In the Winter 2019 issue you will find new reviews by Karen Quevillon, Douglas Walbourne-Gough, and Aaron Boothby (just to name a few) as well as new poetry by Lara Bozabalian, A. F. Moritz, Jill Talbot, and many others. Their words leave us remembering, aching, and longing for home. Yet the writers also provide us with a sense of relief/resurfacing; they remind us to emerge from a winter’s sleep at our own pace, coming back into the warmth of our bodies slowly and comfortably. Hanna Reimer’s cover artwork, “Pillow,” is evocative of the themes that course through this issue: comfort and connection, remnants of home, and the snowy season.

Online content from this issue

  • It’s Always Winter When Someone Dies

    by Babo Kamel
                               New snow Mother’s high heeled boots track...

  • Snow Day

    by Nolan Natasha Pike
    Through the kitchen window, I watch you shoveling what the plow left. You are talking to the neighbour and I...

  • Well Preserved

    by Pamela Medland
    When you were born I canned thirty-six jars of plum tomatoes. They followed me for seven years until I felt...

  • Sleeping Buddies

    by Jessie Peitsch
    I search the medicine cabinet  for melatonin — my pineal gland  doesn’t produce enough for me.  I’ve lost my circadian rhythm because ...

  • Postcards From Palm Springs

    by Katie Jordon
       i. Elvis Honeymoon Hideaway   Everything is pink—the sand at sunset,  the walls, my tub and its rust, the...

  • Where We Drink in the Dark on Weekends

    by Chelsea Comeau
    Call it thrill, frisson, that unmistakable turn the wind takes  combing its teeth through the shorn grass behind the school where we...

  • By Judge Alone

    by Kathy Mac
    Don’t judge the way I jury-rigged the birdfeeder you hung years ago. Squirrels broke the line. I don’t trust you...

  • Self Portrait with Snacks

    by Katie McGarry
    It’s old blood, not new, your mother reassures you over a basin of rust-coloured vomit           post-tonsilectomy. You’d pictured  a...

  • Simon and Vallier in the Tub

    by Jason Purcell
    Finally, on page 60, Simon (clothed) jumps in after him and the two lovers embrace. He has managed to speak...

  • cenicientas (Cenicienta)

    by Marcela Huerta
    together we are learning how to write in English i am watching movies on the television and you are listening...

  • Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes

    Reviewed by Jon R. Flieger
    LoveGrove’s greatest accomplishment in the work is the deft blending of the horrifically specific — the details of things gone wrong and...

  • The Description of the World

    Reviewed by Karen Quevillon
    Skibsrud’s poetry is most compelling when the language is concrete rather than abstract. For example, the startling poem “They Will...