Val the cat giving #AnneCarson vibes—wearing her new biker's hat to celebrate Carson's so deserved & long-overdue #Nobel ❤️🔥
Carlos A. Pittella
@pittella.bsky.social
622 followers 496 following 440 posts
latinx poet haunted by borders ⦁ he/him ⦁ researcher @assistedlab.bsky.social linktr.ee/carlosapittella Dante's Bureau (Anstruther, '26) propersitions (Cactus, '25) ALT pfp: buzzcut, polkadot, broken smile ALT banner: blueskyed Shiva humming
![Poetry Matters warmly invites you to "borders, boundaries, margins," an evening of poetry readings featuring Shanice Nicole, Elizabeth Wood, Carlos A. Pittella. The event will take place at the Rocket Science Room (170 Rue Jean-Talon O #204, Montreal, QC) on Thursday, April 16th at 7:00pm.
[bios]
SHANICE NICOLE is a Black feminist educator, facilitator, writer,
(out)spoken word artist, and mother based in Montreal. She is also the curator of free community resources such as Jobs & Things and All Black
Everything Montreal. Her debut children's book, Dear Black Girls, was published in 2021 by Metonymy Press. Shanice Nicole was nominated as Gala Dynastie’s Author of the Year in 2022 and named one of CBC’s Black Changemakers in 2024.
Originally from rural Ontario, ELIZABETH WOOD is a Montreal-based educator, visual artist, art writer, and poet. Her first chapbook Outlaw, Rainy Day was published in 2022 by Turret House Press. She was also a contributor to their collective chapbook XTRACTS Studio #7 (2022). More recently, her chapbook The quiet only knows half of itself was published by Anstruther Press in 2025. Wood’s poems and writing on art have appeared in numerous arts publications, exhibition catalogues, and poetry journals.
CARLOS A. PITTELLA is a Latinx poet and editor and the recipient of a 2022 Frontier Global Poetry Prize. His poetry is haunted by borders and bureaucracies and has appeared in places such as Shō, Jacket2, Glyphöria, & The Capilano Review. His first chapbook in English footnotes after Lorca was published in 2024 by above/ground press, and in 2025 he published Propersitions with Cactus Press. His latest work, the manifesto Dante’s Bureau, will be published by Anstruther Press in 2026.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vdyucqz7c5gplbzwznd4yeot/bafkreifpb3wkpj2cz7nkbjydhcdyp7g5oxncclacesgcfyuemc7stuyym4)
![[First page of the poetry roundup for the fall 2024 edition of mRb]
The Sacred Heart Motel
Grace Kwan
Metonymy Press
$18.95, paper, 104pp
9781998898169
The image-work alone would justify getting your copy of The Sacred Heart Motel, Grace Kwan’s debut full-length poetry collection. I say “image-work,” but multiple senses show up on almost every page, as in the opening of “GLUE TRAP”:
"My heart looks like the old yellow house where thin,
mouse-bitten
walls separated our part of the basement from
another
Chinese family. We could hear their daughter
practice tongue
twisters, they could hear my mother scream when I
went too far […]"
These line breaks are masterful, splitting the thin walls and twisted tongues immigrants know so well. Indeed, the book’s dedication is “For migrants & visitors.” Yet, these are not just visitors to a country, but also to one’s heart. The table of contents, dubbed “directory,” maps seven different sections as if they were chambers – a term applicable to hearts and motels.
One of the sheer brilliances of Kwan’s book is turning migration into a love poem and love into a migration. Don’t even try to separate the political from the personal; there are too many transient rooms in the heart, unregistered hearts in any given room. And, of course, there’s the border – of desire, home, identity – where all the action happens: “the convergence of lives, motivations / riding shotgun,” as Kwan puts it, or rather wrenches it from our very hearts.
For the full reviews, see:
https://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviewers/carlos-a-pittella/](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vdyucqz7c5gplbzwznd4yeot/bafkreigbdcwdxpdoy6j5ypfxnohkoy3efqtafpl25karm5czvwxfjnh4we)
![[Second page of the poetry roundup for the fall 2024 edition of mRb]
Poetry Marching for Sindy
Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau
Translated by Susan Ouriou
Inanna Publications
$18.95, paper, 72pp
9781771339742
Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s third volume of poetry, Poésie en marche pour Sindy in its original French, now has an English translation by Susan Ouriou. The timing is meaningful, marking ten years since the disappearance of the Abitibiwinnik woman Sindy Ruperthouse – which triggered public outrage, a wave of allegations of police neglect, and, eventually, the creation of a Public Inquiry Commission. Pésémapéo Bordeleau dedicates the book to Sindy’s family, whose crushing grief fills the verses:
"Long is the winter
The wait for spring
With its sun burning
The carpet of snow
Shrouding the hope
Johnny and Émily hold onto"
This is a book of silences: the long blanket of winter, the blank of the page always larger than the poems themselves, the passivity of government, the unease of what to say before tremendous loss… The poet steps in to show what can/should/must be said – or asked – putting questions to Sindy and the witnesses of her fate, and letting the silent answers ring:
"Sindy you keep your distance still
But we long for your presence
The ceremonies await you"
Absence becomes a poetic form, charging words with the power of a ritual – the missing ceremony for a missing person. The minimalism of the work points to the unbearable scale of the ongoing tragedy of missing Indigenous women. This too is a function of poetry: a gathering of voices marching against silence.
For the full reviews, see:
https://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviewers/carlos-a-pittella/](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vdyucqz7c5gplbzwznd4yeot/bafkreidff62rditjrbub3p7czahigzrg6lzrfpu6d33blswotuzpt5l6bm)
![CARLOS A. PITTELLA
In case they run your license plate
Once I broke my front tooth
out of a poem & still have the chip
to show—not a great poem but it tasted
like bone it was real I remember
the pain & the scar-tissue
of writing it that became my face.
There goes the poet with the broken tooth
they say while I laugh poking my smile
through the jagged window whistling a beat.
I tell this as a descendant of biting
accumulators who turned on his kin
& is now ostracized for lightness
sudden ballerino reminding all
must pass. I dance the crosswalk
most days feeling the traffic police
looking for my plate before they realize
these are thighs occupying jeans the same
I grew & grew against the fabric of walking
till the border between Macedonia & Greece
—a semi another semi myself.
The immigration officer smiled
when smoke exhausted a backpacker
taking the last steps to the service window:
he stamped my passport but neglected
to mention the dogs the army dogs
[...]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vdyucqz7c5gplbzwznd4yeot/bafkreig44j4z43cj7vajhexwzc52h7iewjbrh52pf43o3smhh77cgqxfji)
