Spotlight series #35 : Adèle Barclay

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

STATEMENT

“What are you up to this summer?”

“Writing a lot and going to therapy”

TWO POEMS

IN A GROCERY STORE PARKING LOT

Fiona Apple cries
while tucked into the passenger seat
of her father’s car
what she thought was a dove
turned out to be a plastic bag

I saved you half of this sandwich
and it became a carnival tent
where your ribs were the poles
defining my fourth house of home, family
& personal foundations
I know it isn’t fair
how do we choose
how we love

THE FOX SAYS NO

I had forgotten there’s a fox in Le Petit Prince
I had only ever read it in French
it’s much stranger in English

Adèle Barclay’s poetry has appeared in The Pinch, Heavy Feather Review, Fog Machine, PRISM, The Puritan, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, (Nightwood, 2016) won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award. She is the Poet-in-Residence for Arc Magazine and an editor at Rahila’s Ghost Press. Her second collection of poetry, Renaissance Normcore, is forthcoming fall 2019.