Featuring Chelsea Humphries, Jenny Berkel, Edie Reaney Chunn, and Jordan Redekop-Jones
Chelsea Humphries, author of Flower Language
Flower Language emerged, in part, from my fascination with the Victorian age and my love of secret codes and hidden meanings.
Floriography is the language of flowers, popularized by the Victorians in the nineteenth century. It ascribes significance to different species, colours, and even the handling of flowers to convey feelings that could not or would not otherwise be spoken. A red rose, for instance, might mean “I love you,” but a red rose held upside down might silently mean its opposite.
When I learned about this so-called language of flowers, I immediately wondered what the most subversive blooms might be. How expressive was this language? Were there flowers that could express anger, malevolence, or foreboding? I consulted digitized volumes of floriography from the 1850s–on and ruminated. I wanted to explore how beautiful, seemingly innocuous things, like flowers, could be used to express challenging ideas—things that simmer, or are otherwise repressed, held in, unspeakable. To me, writing poetry is like simultaneously creating and solving a puzzle. This was an invitation into a new kind of riddle.
This concept became increasingly interesting to play with insofar as flowers are frequently associated with the feminine and dismissed as being small, soft, and ephemeral. Too often, poetry can be misunderstood in the same way, reduced to “flowery” language. I wanted to explore how, together, the language of flowers and poetry could surprise—how they could be twisted into unexpected statements laced with threat and innate strength. Flower Language grew out of this tension, wrestling with unspoken and unspeakable deep feeling using the secret, sidelong-glancing language of the natural world.
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Chelsea Humphries is a writer and academic librarian who has found home in Corner Brook, NL. She has previously been published in Horseshoe Literary Magazine, the Hart House Review, and Star 82 Review. Flower Language is her debut chapbook.
Jenny Berkel, author of Colossal Wreck
Colossal Wreck is a collection of watery wreckage poems. Anchoring this wreck are miscarriage poems, poems written in the aftermath of that complicated loss—the loss of somebody you will never meet, somebody you will only ever imagine. The briefly shared body.
Many of these poems were written beside the sea, in a town that was in the middle of implementing an emergency response to rising sea levels. I spent a lot of time walking. Down the path through the woods—the perfume of cedar and pine needles, the ever encroaching ticks—across the old train bridge, back into the woods, and around to the windy, salted bay, where the town was building a living shoreline to help protect it from erosion. Those landscapes are part of these poems, those anxieties and dooms and guilt underpin them.
I live in a city now, and some of the poems in this chapbook were written here while thinking about new losses, including the death of an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. Not the same, but another grief that was difficult to place somewhere concrete.
Anne Carson says she writes “to find out what [she] think[s] about something” (Paris Review issue no. 171, Fall 2004), and I love how you can surprise yourself while writing a poem. I rarely sit down to write with a theme in mind; I wrote the poems in Colossal Wreck with image, feeling, and sound first, and through that what I was thinking would surface, including some previously unthinkable thoughts (“Boats”). I’m glad now for how these poems articulate and memorialize that grief and, in particular, that love that clanged through my body (“Big Sky”).
Poetry! Another living shoreline.
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Jenny Berkel is a poet and singer-songwriter from rural Ontario, currently residing in London, Ontario (Treaty 6 territory), where she owns a small bookshop and teaches poetry. She has released three albums, and her debut chapbook, Grease Dogs, was published with Baseline Press. Her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in 2028.
Edie Reaney Chunn, author of The Letters of Puppet and Clown
Sometimes, there’s a puppet inside of us who wants to follow the rules, but she can’t quite manage to. Or else there might be a clown, who has been told the rules over and over, only to find the rules won’t stick. Maybe the puppet decides to find a more puppety way of doing things, and the clown decides they won’t bother with the rules at all and chooses to lean in to their clownishness wholeheartedly, missteps and slip ups and all.
Sometimes, choosing to lean in to oneself wholeheartedly is a lonely endeavour. What could happen if the puppet and the clown were to meet? Could loneliness be reckoned with? I wrote this book because I wanted to find out what these parts of ourselves would do when brought together. I found they had moved past being told they are too little or too much, or that “a sentence is a sentence” and “a line is a line”. In their letters, Puppet and Clown understand one another, and feel understood; love and alignment arrive.
A couple of times, people have asked me if I ever write about my family (I guess because, often, I’m writing about things that seem more imaginary). I do: I wrote this book because, when my grandmother died, I wasn’t sure if or how I would ever hear her voice again. Then, unexpectedly, I heard a recording of her speaking; then I had a dream of her; then I wrote a book.
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Edie Reaney Chunn is a writer, library worker, and weather-appreciator who lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. In 2025, The Letters of Puppet and Clown was shortlisted for PEN Canada’s RBC New Voices Award; it is now available in chapbook-form with Anstruther Press. Edie enjoys working collaboratively & inefficiently on theatre projects, and other pursuits.
Jordan Redekop-Jones, author of Hybridity as a Phantom Body
I knew that I always wanted to put out a chapbook before committing to my first full-length collection of poetry. While the future collection is intended to give a more detailed and cohesive look at my reconnection journey as a product of diaspora and displacement, compiling a select number of pieces for my chapbook was a way to provide readers with a more digestible look into the experience.
This selection of poems is really special to me, because each one represents a different phase in my journey of reconnection. These pieces have grown from and with me throughout the past four years and I am grateful for the illumination writing them has provided me in times of great need.
I wrote this chapbook because I desperately needed a form of release in my life. In my early twenties I became a caregiver to a parent with progressive illness and at the same time felt an unrelenting pull to look more into my cultural background/ family history. Hybridity as a Phantom Body is really a mark of the absences I was trying to fill; the cultural bodies that had quite literally stood as phantoms throughout my childhood, adolescence and into early adulthood.
In the back of my mind while writing this collection, I found myself thinking that somewhere out there, there might be an individual who has also found themselves in my unique position. Someone who is reconnecting or is a caregiver at a young age and feels entirely alone in the process. Writing this chapbook has almost been a way of being my own witness and I hope my words can be a similar stand-in for someone else’s pain and joy as well.
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Jordan Redekop-Jones is a mixed Indigenous/ Anglo Indian writer from Vancouver BC. She is the winner of several awards including the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize, the 2024 Austin Clarke prize in Literary Excellence for poetry and was a recipient of a 2024 Indigenous Voices Award in the unpublished poetry category. Her work has appeared in publications including Prism International, Arc Poetry, the Ex-Puritan, Rungh, SAD Mag and more.
Her debut chapbook Hybridity as a Phantom Body was just recently published by Anstruther Press. She is a graduate of SFU’s the Writer’s Studio and is a current MA English Literature student at Simon Fraser University. You can follow her writing journey on her Instagram page: @j.r.jones__
