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Contemporary Verse 2
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Upcoming Themed Issues

Sick Poetics (Spring 2022)
Guest edited by Eileen Mary Holowka, Rebecca Salazar, and Lauren Turner.

“Nothing I’ve written here is for the well and intact, and had it been, I never would have written it” (Boyer The Undying 279)

“If disease is synonymous with diagnosis and illness with personalized experience, sickness is a relation” (Heather Houser / Ecosickness)

We are looking for poetry that explores the limits and boundaries of sickness, disability, illness, madness, and crip. How do these terms and identities get demarcated, lived, and embodied? What does sickness encompass and what does it exclude? This issue does not aim to be an answer, but rather an opening up: a call for more sick, crip, mad, and disabled poetry in CanLit. What stories are missing from our journals and what conversations can we begin?

We are open to poems and poetic essays on any of the following (or related) topics:

  • Sickness and intersecting identities (race, class, gender, queerness)
  • Chronic illness, chronic pain, temporality, sick time
  • Non-apparent illnesses, marginalized or rare illnesses
  • Accommodations, access, and mobility
  • D/deafness
  • Blindness and vision loss
  • STIs and HIV
  • Covid-19, long-Covid, global health
  • Disability, mad, and crip activism
  • Mental health, madness, neurodivergence
  • Healing, care, and justice
  • Sickness and relationships
  • Pain, pleasure, sexuality, joy
  • Abjection, sickness, and death
  • Neoliberalism and productivity
  • Online communities and social media
  • Representations of sickness
  • Crip/disabled aesthetics and fashion

Submission deadline: October 15th, 2021

This title draws inspiration from the work of Lauren Fournier and Margeaux Feldman and their “Sick Theories” conference. See also:
Feldman, Margeaux. 2021. “Touch Me, I’m Sick: Hysterical Intimacies, Sick Theories.” Dissertation. English Literature, University of Toronto Certificate in Sexual Diversity Studies.
Fournier, Lauren. 2018. “Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33.

Note: If your submission is in a language other than English or French, please include a brief English language preface describing the work in your cover letter.

Contemporary Verse 2 accepts online submissions only. Read our submission guidelines here. Submit your work using the link below:

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