Spotlight series #110 : Margo LaPierre

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

STATEMENT

In Olga Ravn’s literary sci-fi novel The Employees, translated from Danish to English by Martin Aitken, crew members on a spaceship report on their work, which consists of attending to mysterious objects that’ve been taken onto the ship. The objects have texture: sometimes marble, or wet, or stringy, or corduroy. They may be warm or cold or kissable. The objects elicit dread, joy, and melancholy, stoke childhood memories, emit fragrances and colourful clouds.

Poems are like these affective objects. A poem is an emotion-mediating technology. It is an object with strange and important work to do, but it is an object nonetheless, one with a physical body, whose body can be more or less successful at communicating emotional information. I often prefer revision to writing. I like the idea of raw thought as an object-record to be manipulated, toggling the dials of visual, sonic, semantic.

A poetic practice is greater than any singular poem, and that includes reading, listening, noticing, attending, communing. My early orientation to poetry — with my first poem published in 2005 in now-defunct lit mag The Claremont Review — has been encompassing. The trajectory of my life is due to poetry.

A devotion to poetry is a way to make friends, while devotion to specificity is a way to make poems.

I write from the elements of my daily life. The days accumulate quickly; the past remains present. The poems become dream rooms that reconfigure these elements weirdly. My poems tend to be moody, tactile, and to play with subversions and compressions of time. In my new collection, Ajar (Guernica Editions, 2025), I write about bipolar disorder, psychosis, gendered violence, in/fertility and the places where these dramas and their echoes blossom: the apartment, the hospital, the clinic, and within.

Asterisms

What’s the worst mistake you made in grad school?
I asked a room full of poets if any of them believed in ghosts.
— @elainecorden

I believe in ghosts.*
But around the time I started disclosing
my psychosis history to strangers and new friends
ten years after my diagnosis, I stopped saying so.
In my youth they shifted
at the corners of my eyelids, tucked
into moving shadows.
My teenage bedroom was in
my parents’ basement, where
an intimidating entity haunted
from behind the cast iron woodstove.
I made a habit of saying hi
as I passed, to be polite.

*I don’t get to claim psychosis and ghosts.
You can’t have both.

Margo LaPierre is a freelance literary editor and a writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Her work has been published internationally in anthologies and journals, including in Arc, carte blanche, CV2, The Ex-Puritan, filling Station, Plenitude, and Room. She won the 2021 Room Poetry Award, the 2020 subTerrain Fiction Award, and was awarded the Claudette Upton Scholarship by Editors Canada as well as a SSHRC graduate scholarship. She has served on Arc Poetry Magazine’s executive and editorial boards since 2019 and is a member of the poetry collective VII. She is a Spring 2025 graduate of the MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and holds a graduate certificate in publishing from Toronto Metropolitan University. She lives as a settler on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land, colonially known as Ottawa. Ajar is her second full-length poetry collection.