Spotlight: Vallum

featured donor of the day

I am grateful that Vallum contemporary poetry magazine is donating to the AngelHousePress 2023 Caring Imagination Crowd Funding Campaign.

Vallum Society for Education in Arts & Letters (VSEAL) is a federally incorporated charity based in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal, Canada) on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory that is committed to the dissemination of literary education in Canada and internationally. VSEAL’s goal is to encourage and support poets, writers, and artists at all stages of their career, while offering the public relevant tools for a better understanding and appreciation of contemporary poetry and literature.

VSEAL’s publishing projects include the biannual Vallum: Contemporary Poetry  magazine (est. 2000) and the Vallum Chapbook Series. In order to further fulfill its goal of promoting literacy, VSEAL also administers an outreach program, Poetry for Our Future!,  which hosts workshops in collaboration with community-minded organizations throughout the greater Montreal area, Quebec, and elsewhere in Canada. These workshops focus on literacy, creative writing, literary appreciation, and self-expression as empowerment.

Vallum  magazine publishes work that pushes boundaries and invites the exploration of different outlooks and perspectives. In addition to poetry, we also publish essays, interviews, book reviews, and visual art. As one of Canada’s top poetry journals, Vallum  allows Canadian artists and writers to exchange ideas with acclaimed and emerging artists from around the world by being published alongside each other.

Notable past contributors include P.K. Page, Yusuf Saadi, Paul Muldoon, Franz Wright, Charles Simic, Les Murray, Jan Zwicky, Stephen Dunn, Karen Solie, John Kinsella, Fanny Howe, George Elliott Clarke, Andrew Motion, Erin Mouré, Peter Redgrove, Nicole Brossard, and others. Past prizes awarded to poems that have appeared in Vallum include Pushcart Prizes, National Magazine Awards, and inclusion in the Best Canadian Poetry anthologies.

For this campaign, Vallum is donating two issues of the magazine plus two chapbooks.

19:1, Bridges, Spring 2022

The ability to move oneself towards future possibilities and potentials brings us to bridges, to principles of connection. Our current social and mental states can often seem to function on the premise of fragmentation, with past and present chaos always sweeping away a moment of coming together. The bridging of gaps and grounding in the wake of instability is crucial to our personal, and collective, well-being.

The poetry in this issue speaks about these fractures and uncertainties and our abilities to overcome them, to build bridges. This issue features an interview with bpNichol Chapbook Award-winning poet Matthew James Weigel and new poems by rob mclennan, Johnson Cheu, Jami Macarty, and more. The issue also includes poems from the 2021 Vallum Poetry Award winners, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi and Robyn Maree Pickens, as well as reviews by Bill Neumire and Deanna Fong. Artwork is from the winner of the 2022 Vallum Cover Award, Nora Kelly!

19:2, Open Theme, Fall 2022

With an Open Theme issue we offer a variety in form and feeling. Each poem is linked by proximity and intuition in this beautifully balanced issue. This collection of poems conjures the smell of fresh-mown hay and the sensation of finding old photographs of someone you haven’t seen in a while. These poets are speaking and listening, minds open and senses attuned.  

Featuring new poems by Lambda Literary fellow Nora Hikari, Terry Watada, Evan J, and more. Plus, an excerpt from George Elliott Clarke’s War Canticles, as well as a preview of our 2022 Chapbook Award winner. Rosie Long Decter interviews Frankie Barnet on her debut graphic novel. Reviews of Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris and I Wish I Could Be Peter Falk by Paul Zits. Artwork by Fulbright fellow Leah Oates from her series Transitory Space.

House, Chapbook, by Scott Cecchin, 2022

Through various speakers, the long poem House upends the boundaries between dream and memory, growth and rot, house and body. Scott Cecchin investigates the undercurrents of ownership, possession, and inheritance, while quietly observing conflicts between taking and giving. Life, in the form of lions, eclipses, tangled weeds, and crumbs of bread is all held in the structure of the house as “small song- / birds emerge from beneath the carpets.” These poems know what it is for the familiar to become strange, what it is to break and rebuild.

Scott Cecchin (pronounced “ch-keen”) is a poet living on Traditional Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Territory, in Nogojiwanong / Peterborough, ON. Currently, he teaches Communications and studies Ecological Restoration. His first chapbook, Dusk at Table (2020), was published by O. Underworld! Press in Havelock, ON.

Des Monsteras, Chapbook by Heather White, 2021 ($12)

WINNER OF THE 2021 VALLUM CHAPBOOK AWARD

DES MONSTERAS records the hopes and humiliations of arriving somewhere new. Composed by phone, torquing formal constraints into solace, its fifteen notes trace both an insular retreat and an impulse to connect during the Montreal winter of the pandemic. The chapbook is a poptimist’s account of moving and courtship that speaks to the thrill of beginnings, the threat of histories, the whims of grace, and the work of candour.

Heather White lives in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. Her writing on art and culture has appeared in Canadian Art, the Brooklyn Rail, Real Life, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her current practice experiments with hybrid forms and memoir, and she’s now at work on a collection about leaving.

If you support the campaign, you can choose this wonderful and engaging glimpse into Canada’s contemporary poetry. Thank you to all who’ve supported us so far!