I love this conceptually and formally playful book by Nasser Hussain, a catalogue of poems composed (we discover) exclusively of international airport location codes. His constraint-based collection glints with wit, humour and daring, uninterested in being compared with less formally audacious poetry carriers.
Hussain’s work invites us into a refreshing conceptual lift-off that textual communication envelops all of our relations, inciting our co-incidental awareness of how language moves us to read, translate, and traverse meanings. We perceive data as semantic communication and non-words as words, toggling the multiple entendre of linguistic figure and ground.
The front cover of Hussain’s book shows us how to decode simultaneous platforms of language. Presented in upper case, four three-letter language bits honk like flashcard acronyms. The first bit, “SKY,” is a recognizable English word, but the next three units baffle immediate reading: “WRI/ TEI / NGS.” The unit
Creative Non-Fiction Contest 2020: The Shortlist
Finally here is the shortlist from our 2020 Creative Nonfiction Contest as selected by our esteemed judge, Amanda Leduc! Our heartfelt congrats to the following six essayists.
Photo credit: Carissa D’andrade
Room‘s 2020 Creative Nonfiction Contest: The Shortlist
“Healing Through Horror” by K. Bell
“Inglorious Bastards” by Katherine Abbass
“Memories and Where to Keep Them” by Nat Lyle
“Natural Disaster” by Sarah Hamill
“The Surfacing” by Rae Shabalin
“You, Too?” by Lorraine Robson
We want to thank every writer for sharing with us and our judge their work. Winners will be announced next week so stay tuned! In the meantime, please check out Leduc’s non-fiction title,
Little Cat
Following the success of
Maidenhead, which won The Believer Book Award in 2012, was short-listed for the Trillium Book Award in 2013, and was the most reviewed book of 2012 according to the Canadian Women in the Literary Arts Count, Coach House Books has released revised versions of Berger’s two earlier novels,
Lie With Me (1999) and
The Way of the Whore (2001), in a single volume titled
Little Cat.
Lie With Me opens with a young woman’s unapologetic acknowledgment of desire and how her needs don’t fit the narrative assigned to her. When men experience sexual pleasure, she feels it’s localized, but for women, she finds it easier to become disconnected from the sensation; she says that a woman “can get lost trying to know herself” (p.8). Then later on the same page she continues with this same line of thought: “[b]eing a slut kind of implies getting lost, going astray.” In this rambling confession, she desperately seeks affirmation or at least ackn
Contests
Poetry | June 15 – August 15
Short Forms | September 1 – November 15
Questions or problems with your submission? Need an alternate entry method due to a disability? Contact contests [at] roommagazine [dot] com.
Read our Contest
FIRST PRIZE: $1,000 +
Room’s
2021 Judge: Jenny Heijun Wills
Jenny Heijun Wills is the author of “Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.” It won the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction prize and the 2020 Eileen McTavish Sykes Best First Book Prize. It was a 2019 Globe & Mail Best Book and a 2019 CBC Best in Canadian Non-Fiction Book. She is Chancellor’s Research Chair at the University of Winnipeg where she also teaches in the English Department. She is writing a novel.