Spring is here

April 16, 2013 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

At long last, the new issue is loaded up in our machines and awaiting your toonies. Some of you have already been dropping coins, and there seems to be more serendipity in the random dispensation of the candy-coloured words than usual this time around.

Speaking of getting lucky, some of you may notice that this issue has a “smut and heartbreak” theme (thanks to issue contributor Benjamin Hackman for lending the phrase), something that we haven’t tried before over here at  TPV HQ. It is extremely easy to write a bad love poem, and equally tough to write a good one. But anyone who reads Lynn Crosbie’s heart-slaying excerpts from Liar, one of my all-time favourite books of poetry on this theme, or Natalie Zina Walschots’s hyper-charged love bites from DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains, the two poets that bookend this issue, will know that Toronto has a solid history of tingle-inducing poetry.

As always, there is new, previously unpublished work in this issue as well: Jeramy Dodds, Sandy Pool, Paula Eisenstein and Gillian Savigny were all up to the challenge. And while we’re putting out (heh) our fair share of sweaty sheets, there are also more subtle explorations of the theme from Jacob Scheier, Mark Sampson and Stevie Howell.

Since we started vending Toronto’s finest poets in 2010, we have launched our spring issue as part of the flurry of poetic excitement that is National Poetry Month. This year we aimed for an earlier launch, intending to stick our wet thumb in St. Valentine’s ear, but thanks to unforeseen, non-poetry vending related events we are a few months late, or rather, right on time.

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