You thought we were done celebrating poets in this feature? You were wrong! Here are four more great poets to check out this month.
Featuring Natalie Lim, Kyle Flemmer, Steven Mayoff, and Alexey Soshalskiy
Natalie Lim, author of Elegy for Opportunity (Wolsak & Wynn 2025)
I have spent a lot of time over the past few years—as I think many young people have—trying to reconcile the joys of my everyday life with the feeling that our world is hurtling towards certain doom.
On one hand, I look around me and see the rise of fascism and right-wing populism all over the world, genocide in Gaza, our march towards climate disaster, the backlash against justice, equity, inclusion and human rights for all. On the other hand, here I am, playing Dungeons & Dragons and watching movies and going camping and laughing with friends and falling in love. How can both of those realities exist together? How do we keep sight of both at the same time without falling into total despair, or becoming so comfortable and complacent that we are not motivated to try and make things better?
Elegy for Opportunity is my attempt to answer this question. In the core suite of “elegy” poems, I reach out from Earth to address Opportunity, NASA’s defunct Mars rover. We built this robot and sent out her to space for our own purposes, knowing she would die there, and when she finally did, a period of mourning broke out all over the world. As I write in the title poem, “we are tender / even in our cruelty,” and this book is my attempt to hold the tenderness and the cruelty together, to examine the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief. In so many words: I wrote this book because this world is so impossibly beautiful and ugly and wonderful and rage-inducing at the same time. I wrote it because I needed to write something.
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Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022)
Kyle Flemmer, author of Supergiants (Wolsak & Wynn 2025)
From the first poem written to the final edited draft, Supergiants has taken about a decade to write and edit, and my answer to the question “why write this book?” has shifted over the years. When I began writing Supergiants in 2015, my goal was to explore science through poetry, bringing a lifelong interest in astronomy together with a newfound passion for formal experimentation in my creative practice. This aim was inspired by poets I had recently started reading, including Alice Major, Adam Dickenson, and Christian Bök. I wanted to write something that would satisfy science—and literary—minded people alike because, for me, these fields are already closely aligned through their rigorous attention to detail and commitment to articulating human knowledge and experience.
The first poem I wrote in this vein, “White Dwarfs,” attempts to situate the rise of human cultures within the far more grandiose story of cosmic history. The book of Genesis, Hesiod’s Theogony, and other cosmogonic narratives were top of mind when I wrote this poem. On one hand, the scale of humanity within cosmic history, so far as I understand it, is infinitesimally small. On the other hand, the question of where we come from is of great importance to us all. As someone constitutionally against self—or even species-centered reasons for our existence—particularly the pseudoscience of astrology, which was, at least for a time, widely popular with poets of my generation—the second reason to write this book was to humanize astronomy, to show how the search for cosmic answers is itself among the most essential of human qualities.
The longer I worked on the book, the more an abstract guiding principle of “our search for cosmic answers” shifted toward a practical engagement stargazing. A third reason to write this book emerged: to investigate the act of observation and its documentation. Approximately half of Supergiants is visual poetry, some of which is almost entirely devoid of text. Though I hope these visuals are pleasing and easily digestible, my goal is to make readers notice the formal presentation of information, textual or otherwise. “Astral Projection,” for example, is arranged in small chunks of text suggestive of an asteroid field. Astronomers have devised a variety of clever methods for determining the likely origin of specific asteroids within a field of jumbled material; when navigating this poem, I hope to activate this specific way of looking at and thinking about things in the mind of the reader. My final reason for writing this book only really came out during the editing process, after Supergiants had been accepted for publication. Carl Sagan described learning that we, the Earth, our star, and even our galaxy are cosmically unimportant as “the great demotion,” but he offered what we have collectively discovered about the possible origins of the universe, the formation and fates of stars, and the evolution of organic life as the most wondrous and awe-inspiring of all creation stories. The last and most important reason for Supergiants is to foster a Sagan-like wonder and curiosity about space, and to achieve that it has to be fun. My last round of revisions injected as much fun as possible back into a manuscript that had grown a touch stale in its headiness. Science and poetry are both meaningful for many heady reasons, but we as a species stick with them because they are enjoyable. Learning is fun, language is fun, and I hope Supergiants is the most fun you can have with a book of science poetry.
Read more about Supergiants on our Patreon!
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Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher and digital media artist from Calgary in Treaty 7 territory. He founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. in 2014 and released his first book, Barcode Poetry, in 2021. Flemmer is the author of many chapbooks and his work has appeared in anthologies and exhibitions in Canada and abroad. Supergiants is Kyle’s first trade book of poetry, and his next, The Wiki of Babel, is forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press.
Steven Mayoff, author of Swinging Between Water and Stone (Revised Edition, Galleon Books 2025)
Swinging Between Water and Stone is a poetry collection that first came into print in the spring of 2019 and went out of print at the beginning of 2024. When the publisher and editor of Galleon Books, Lee Thompson, offered to reissue the collection, I knew that I wanted this reprint to be different from the original and decided it would be a revised edition. The majority of my edits were focused on rethinking line breaks rather than language, although there were some minor revisions or deletions in that regard.
Aside from editing the original poems, I also added four new poems. The collection’s general theme is reincarnation. It is divided into four sections that, respectively, are meant to loosely represent Birth, Life, Death and Rebirth. The poems in each section don’t necessarily stick to the topic in question, there is some thematic overlap.
Reincarnation is often taken on faith because it is seen as lacking empirical evidence. And yet something as commonplace as the cycles of the seasons, if not conclusive evidence, then at least offer clues to the mysteries that may lie beyond our mortality. More importantly, ruminating on the possibility of an afterlife and being part of an infinite continuation, can give us perspective to take stock of our lives here and now. That is, if you buy into the idea of Rebirth as a way of building on and learning from the mistakes of past lives.
Although I lived much of my early life in urban centres such as Montreal and Toronto, it was only after I moved to rural Prince Edward Island that I wrote the poems in this collection. I was 45, the onset of middle age, and about to enter a phase of concentrating more seriously on my writing. In some way I was trying to make sense of the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. These poems are meant to celebrate the wheels within wheels that are constantly in motion throughout the natural world and in our imagined landscapes.
I was also considering a different kind of overlap when it came time to revise these poems – that of genre. As a writer of both fiction and poetry, I try to be conscious of any natural crossover between the two. I hope the economy and exploration of language that are necessary to poetry will find their way into my prose and the narrative thrust in my fiction will somehow shape my poetry.
The poems in this revised edition are not, strictly speaking, prose poems. But in the process of rethinking the line breaks — often favouring longer lines (sometimes followed by much shorter lines for dramatic contrast) and concentrated blocks of text — I am trying to use the ideals of prose and poetry to support each other. Or, put another way, I want the poems to celebrate their inner-prose selves. A two-style solution that seeks to recognize the sometimes uneasy, but always mercurial alliance between language and narrative.
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Steven Mayoff is a novelist, poet and lyricist. Born and raised in Montreal, he has made his home on Prince Edward Island since 2001. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. His books include Fatted Calf Blues (Turnstone Press, 2009), Our Lady of Steerage (Bunim & Bannigan, 2015), Leonard’s Flat (Grey borders Books, 2018) and The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief (Radiant Press, 2023). His web site is www.stevenmayoff.ca
Alexey Soshalskiy, author of Starry Ocean (Independently Published)
Starry Ocean was born from a deep need to express the words that often go unspoken. I wrote this collection during a time of reflection, when I felt closely connected to both nature and my inner world. I think I called the book Starry Ocean because many of the poems were written at night—some while I was alone in my room, others while sitting on the roof of my home, staring up at the stars and thinking deeply. In those moments, I often felt like I was sinking into the sky itself. The starry sky began to feel like a vast ocean—one even deeper and more mysterious than the oceans we know on Earth. It felt like the world had flipped upside down, and I was falling into another realm.
In that descent, many of these poems came to life. Some are romantic, others a little melancholic, a few are meant to inspire, and many are simple reflections on nature and life. Writing Starry Ocean was my way of capturing those moments—when the world becomes quiet, the sky seems to become infinite, and the heart has something it needs to say.
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Alexey is a young Canadian poet, who crafts melodious stanza poems in the classical style. Through the combination of rhythm and rhyme, he endeavors to paint vivid pictures for his readers, beckoning them into a profound world of wonder and contemplation. His poems incorporate diverse elements, exploring themes such as psychology, faith, suffering, hope, the meaning of death, and the purpose of life.
