Featuring Jennifer LoveGrove, Misha Solomon, Saraswoti Lamichhane, and Kathryn MacDonald
Jennifer LoveGrove, author of The Tinder Sonnets (Book*hug, April 2026)
When I started writing The Tinder Sonnets, I didn’t know I was writing a new book. I didn’t set out to consciously write a confessional collection about dating, about misogyny, about my sex life, about my complicated feelings. I was taking a break from a difficult novel draft, and I’d recently left a long-term monogamous relationship. I began exploring these new-to-me things called dating apps. I was probably having a mid-life crisis (also known as perimenopause). As I wrote new poems, my dating experiences kept creeping into them and I embraced that and worked in fragments of actual conversations and text messages, as well as my own critical insights.
Around then, I was re-reading the New York School of poets, like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and I’d long admired how they enthusiastically included references to their daily lives, their relationships, their friends and lovers and other artists in their poems and were revered for their work. Yet women have historically been derided and taken less seriously for autobiographical and confessional writing, which has bothered me my entire writing life.
Simultaneously, I was grappling with aging in my cis female body and how middle-aged women are rendered invisible and considered non-sexual and past our prime, and how completely unlike that I felt. My mid-to-late forties weren’t fitting the mold of what the mainstream culture tells us to expect – decreased libido and invisibility – I was experiencing quite the opposite. So in both my dating life and my writing life, I pushed back hard against these limiting ideas and began to chronicle many of my experiences. In these poems, I wanted to voice being an agent of my own desire and subvert the objectification of women.
Why should we feel shame for seeking pleasure, connection and meaning, rather than the entitled men who exploit these desires, who deceive and cause harm and trauma? The Tinder Sonnets redirects that shame where it belongs.
Once the poems became a chapbook (knife fork book, 2021), then a full-length manuscript, I had been through quite a range of experience in the hetero dating world, from joy and empowerment, to disillusionment and rage, and I think that arc is present in the book. I wrote about the culture of disposability of women, of sexual obligation, of blurred consent, of violence and trauma both past and present. Unfortunately, many others relate deeply to these experiences under patriarchy. In this world dominated by rape culture, led by rapist politicians, amid the ubiquity of images of women’s subjugation, I strove to capture how these structures and systemic violence and entitlement can and does affect our ability to connect meaningfully with one another. Why should we feel shame for seeking pleasure, connection and meaning, rather than the entitled men who exploit these desires, who deceive and cause harm and trauma? The Tinder Sonnets redirects that shame where it belongs.
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JENNIFER LOVEGROVE is the author of the Giller Prize–longlisted novel Watch How We Walk, as well as three poetry collections: Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes (longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award), I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel and The Dagger Between Her Teeth. She is currently working on a new novel, and creative nonfiction. She divides her time between downtown Toronto and Squirrel Creek Retreat in rural Ontario.
Read a POETIC PAIRINGS with Jennifer LoveGrove over on our Patreon
Misha Solomon, author of My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet (Brick Books, March 2026)
I wrote this book because I got an idea that opened up an entire world. When I wrote “To my dear friend Rubin in Bucharest, 1937,” I thought it was a one-off epistolary poem, but the characters I had developed for the poem (Ernest, an entirely fictionalized version of my great-grandfather, and Rubin, his colleague-cum-lover) stayed with me.
I wrote this book because I thought of a good title for it, a title that felt like it made sense as a unifying idea for a collection, a title specific enough to be useful and capacious enough to allow me to explore both this historical story and my own contemporary life.
I wrote this book because I was in an MA program that afforded me the time and structure to write the book, with a thesis advisor (Stephanie Bolster) who believed in the possibility of my work becoming a book and knew how to gently guide me toward that goal.
I wrote this book because I wanted to write a book. I wanted my words to live in people’s houses and in their minds. Their hearts, even, if words can live there. I wrote this book because I wanted to be seen and wanted other people to see something of themselves in my book.
I wrote this book because I could, and also because I couldn’t not. I very much chose to write this book, and yet I can’t quite imagine it not having been written. I wrote this book so I could write more books.
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Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks, Full Sentences (Turret House Press, 2022) and FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020), and his work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Arc, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Riddle Fence, and & Change. He completed an MA at Concordia University and a BA at Columbia University in New York City. My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet is his debut full-length collection.
Saraswoti Lamichhane, author of Karaikhola Flows (Mawenzi House, April 2026)
This book began to take shape since 2018, when I first started writing about my childhood in Nepal—the forests, the river, the land that raised me. I was in the Creative Writing Certificate program at the University of Toronto, taking poetry courses where we workshopped our pieces. In those rooms, as I listened to others share their stories, I felt a growing need to tell my own. The memories flowed: sleeping with the doors open, swimming in Karaikhola, climbing trees, foraging for nectar. It was a safe, joyful place to write from.
As I continued to write, I realized I was retracing not just memories, but a legacy of resilience. My father had built a school and planted trees during Nepal’s decade-long Maoist insurgency—a time when schools were burned, friends were killed, and fear was everywhere. He created a place of learning in the middle of a warzone, a sanctuary amid chaos. Without fully knowing it at the time, I found myself doing something similar through poetry: building a world with words when the world outside felt fragmented.
I found myself doing something similar through poetry: building a world with words when the world outside felt fragmented.
This manuscript grew through that quiet act of return. I read widely—Audre Lorde, above all, made me feel seen and fierce—and participated actively in Edmonton’s poetry communities, like the Stroll of Poets and Parkland Poets. The encouragement from listeners and fellow writers motivated me to keep going. Later, I was selected for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Mentorship Program, where I worked closely with Dr. Jenna Butler. She saw the strength and serenity in these poems and helped me shape them into a cohesive collection. Editing Kavya, an anthology of Nepali poetry in English, also deepened my connection to voice and heritage.
This book is, in many ways, a testament to what can grow in hard soil. It’s about holding onto beauty, belonging, and voice across geographies and generations. It is about finding a line of poems that runs clear and steady, like a river, connecting past and present, Nepal and Canada, memory and meaning.
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Saraswoti Lamichhane is a poet, translator, and editor whose works have appeared in several in the USA, Canada, UK, India and Nepal. She holds a Master’s degree from Pokhara University. Sara has a certificate in the Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto. Her new poetry collection is forthcoming with Mawenzi House Press in April 2026.
Kathryn MacDonald, author of The Blue Gate (Frontenac House, April 2026)
The Blue Gate would not have been written except for life’s events, beginning with a deep and dangerous love as suggested by the first poem: “Married with children – / she thought she knew / but she did not. […] This fire white-hot / she dares to grasp.” The relationship deepened over years, but Jim, who became my husband, died and I fell into the absence he left behind.
Coincidences began to happen during the period immediately after Jim’s death. I did not understand them any more than the surprise of his dying. Within a couple of weeks, a friend invited me to join her on a trip to Kenya in January, I said yes. It was early-September. I did not realize at the time that the invitation was the kind of ‘call’ that the mythologist Joseph Campbell spoke of. As it turned out, my friend could not travel. I went alone. How could one understand either the devastating loneliness or this serendipity without writing?
Slowly, after the flight and return, I began drafting individual poems before discovering that a long poem, somewhat experimental in form, would best serve the narrative that was developing.
So…I was inspired by chance and circumstance, by life. The writing was influenced by Campbell, but also by two books I’d picked up to read on the plane: Out of Africa by Karen Blixen and A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. On my return, I read everything I could find about Africa: memoir, fact, fiction (not much poetry crossed my path).
Writing became a way for me to grasp the intense and lingering grief, sit with it, probe it, and come to realize that I still breathed, I still lived. I began to write in order to better understand the emotions that I was experiencing. Writing became obsessive. I had to write. The particulars of the story are mine, but I think the experience of grief is universal. I hope The Blue Gate speaks to others who have loved and lost.
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Kathryn MacDonald’s poetry has been published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S., and other countries. Her new poetry collection, The Blue Gate is forthcoming Spring 2026 with Frontenac House. Liminal Spaces is a chapbook anthology of ekphrastic poetry by Kathryn and three fellow-poets (2025). She is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (2024 ), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (2010) and Calla & Édourd (2009).
