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From the archives

The Envoy

Mark Carney has a plan

Bubble Weary in Trump's America

A dispatch from the early days of a divided nation

On Familiar Spirits

A senator warns against another witch hunt

Ruth R. Pierson

Ruth Roach Pierson taught women’s history, feminist and post-colonial studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto from 1980 to 2001, and European and women’s history at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 1970 to 1980. Since retiring she has published three poetry collections: Where No Window Was (BuschekBooks, 2002), Aide-Mémoire (BuschekBooks, 2007), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 2008, and Contrary (Tightrope Books, 2011). A fourth, Realignment, will appear from Palimpsest Press in 2015. She is the editor of the anthology of film poems I Found It at the Movies (Guernica Editions, 2014).

Articles by
Ruth R. Pierson

Omnium-Gatherum

March 2015
  I have only what I remember, Merwin writes, resigned not to a dearth but an omnium-gatherum of memories—whether amorphous and unloosed from time or firmly grounded and undimmed as though he’s again playing, in the re-entered past, the protagonist in the theatre of life.   From time to time mine ambush me as I walk down the street in full…

Vanity Fair's Lucian Freud

July–August 2013
  marathoning into the night — only so many brushstrokes left — terre verts mixed with umber — swift swipes of flake white   brushwork — deft and layered — smooth around the man’s shoulders — crusty and impassioned along the arms   every twitch of facial muscle — caught — every bulge of subcutaneous thigh-fat — whorled…

Cracks

June 2011
  Deadly germs, my mother believed, live in cracks – particularly those gracing diner and five & dime dishware. Sent back, to my mortification, any food, liquid or solid, served in a cup or on a plate marred by the tiniest hairline fracture.   So no surprise I’m driven to ditch the patched, the darned, the scotch- and…