Mallory Tater’s poems often unfold like conversations midstream, using a colloquial tone that values honesty over polish. The work is unafraid to draw from contemporary life—pop culture references, everyday objects, shared vernacular—not as ornament, but as a way of grounding emotional truth in the present moment. The speaker in these poems is deliberately imperfect, allowed to hesitate, contradict herself, or lose balance, mirroring the instability of growing up and growing onward. Rather than resolving messiness, the work leans into it, using vulnerability and fluctuation as a method for examining friendship, loss, desire, and the unfinished nature of becoming. Ordinary details shimmer with meaning as they accumulate—objects, rituals, and sensory fragments becoming small reliquaries of memory—so that absence reveals itself through what is left behind. Working in an elegiac register that balances wit with tenderness, Tater’s poetic style aspires to render the mundane briefly sacred.
Mallory Tater reads from Lockers Are for Bearcats Only
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Mallory Tater is the author of four books: This Will Be Good: Poems (Book*Hug Press, 2018), The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2020), Lockers are for Bearcats Only: Poems (forthcoming, Palimpsest February 15, 2026) & Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming, ECW, 2027). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing.
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Lockers Are for Bearcats Only is available here, or from your favourite indie bookstore.
