Madhur Anand
in the ornithology wing at the Natural
History Museum, which I cannot scan because
my position, alignment, and timing are not in

sync with the encryptor. All the minor corrections
in the world cannot replace broken trust, what was there
at the start, a non-human voice, a silence that lives

like a standing wave. When a scanner, and I mean I,
cannot recognize a symbol, it will be treated
as an erasure. Chances are, coloured hands touched those

skins first. Coloured hands kept those blues and yellows alive,
while tiny black squares in large white squares were enveloped
by quiet zones. Are we not so lucky Emily

Dickinson's editor found her handwriting akin
to fossil bird tracks? Every sign between me, dead bird,
you, uniquely mapped to the sane polynomial?

All the truth funds in the world cannot replace error.
Justice is not the thing that seeks Quick Response, pattern,
print, is not the thing that seeks conversion. Tag yourself.
from the book PARASITIC OSCILLATIONS / McClelland & Stewart
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This poem is from my 2nd book of poems entitled "Parasitic Oscillations," a collection that weaves in a close reading of A.O. Hume's "The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds" (1889) and where anticolonial, intertextual, feminist, diaspora, and electronic relationships are interrogated against the backdrop of ecological collapse.

Madhur Anand on "Ode to a QR Code"
"An Interview with Jos Charles"

"I was writing about things that happened within the span of these months in 2016. Once the year ended, I found myself returning to them. There seemed nothing else I could write about. And, to me, a Year & other poems, is about moving through grief—grief and alienation—which can feel so totalizing. Having the limitation of months allowed the capacity to return to these arbitrary demarcations of growth and decay, to measure their proportion."

via THE RUMPUS
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Cover of Billy-Ray Belcourt's book, This Wound is a World
What Sparks Poetry:
Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation, Alberta) on Ecopoetry Now 

"On the coast of Lesser Slave Lake, some of the Canadian government's most brutal forms of colonial oppression played out. I wonder what it means for a lake to be witness to all of it. In a way, that trauma is inscribed in the lake's ontological fabric. But, more importantly, I see the lake as proof of my people's indomitability. The lake precedes the political project of Alberta, of Canada; it precedes the concept of the settler state. The lake has been and continues to be a locus of Cree livability."
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