In a month-long act of resistance, poets remind us that poetry can push back against forces that marginalize voices, erase stories, and impose control over how we live and imagine.
An interview with poet Amy LeBlanc
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe I used to live here to someone picking it up for the first time?
AMY LEBLANC: I used to live here has a lot of narrative threads, but the biggest is about what it means to be at home in a place and in a body. The collection positions the body as an unpredictable and permeable thing which changes in ways we don’t necessarily expect. There are a lot of different speakers in these poems: some of them are versions of me and others are fictional, like Gwen Stacy or Juliet. Some are historical like Anne Boleyn, Lizzie Borden, or Sarah Winchester. In discussions of homeliness, I like to take the lofty big questions that are hard to pin down (what does it mean to be at home? How do you write about and through illness?) and pair them with something small and concrete (a mouse on my porch or an office chair that looks like a person out of the corner of your eye).
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
AMY: When I think about poetry as resistance, I think about Jeanette Winterson’s memoir Why be happy when you could be normal? where she says: “A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. This is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.” On artistic, cultural, and personal levels, poetry cuts through a lot of the static of everyday life. There isn’t room for filler and the blows aren’t softened, but something happens when we loan a friend a collection with annotations or go to a spoken word performance. When I read/hear poetry, I want to write poetry, and I hope someone else feels the same if they read/hear mine. I think this is what Winterson means by a “finding place”—it’s not just about language and ideas, it’s about community.
There’s a real potency to writing communities as agents of resistance. Writers organize online auctions and readings to raise funds for different crises, they coordinate protests, boycotts, and generally, disrupt things for the better. Methods of resistance change but writers have been and will continue to resist inequality, exploitation, and erasure.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
AMY: It’s difficult to choose just one line out of the many incredible poems I’ve read and heard, but I find myself thinking back to Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s book Knot Body. I read “when was the last time you had the luxury of forgetting about your body?” and it feels like a gut punch because there’s so much weight to it.
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
AMY: Community plays a huge role in my writing and this is one of the biggest lessons I hope to impart on the creative writing students I have the privilege of teaching. There is still this stereotypical image of an author who locks themselves away and bleeds out genius in total isolation. The more that I write, the more I find I need to talk to people about writing in order to accomplish much of anything. I’ve had so many conversations with friends and colleagues which have fundamentally altered the course of a project for the better. I often can’t tell how I feel about a poem I’ve written until a trusted friend tells me how it made them feel. My friend Syf recently told me that a poem I wrote felt like “a dream of a childhood memory [she] forgot.” I didn’t know that this was the exact feeling I wanted to evoke until she articulated it for me. I love being a sounding board for other writers, and it always feels like I’m being let in on a secret when I get to see someone’s work-in-progress. It feels like a privilege.
Read “Patchwork” from I used to live here
Patchwork
The oriole aches to stay hidden, expel the burden in
her throat, keep needles unsheathed and sheltered in
leaves, warble with close-fisted hands. She hears him
call from the canopy of trees: patchworks of branches
and hives. Her aneurysmal nest, a jutting pouch. She
burgeons eggs into nestlings, fledglings into bones
that couch beneath packed snow. If she sings a song of
sixpence with pockets full of rye, will migrating flocks
fly overhead and pass by the home she’s made? She
keens for speckled eggshells—painted with blots of ink
no wider than wingtips. Willow branches bend around
her nest to cushion a fall. The oriole sings a psalm that
resounds in the peaks and the banks, aching for lost
eggs.
Reprinted with permission from The Porcupine’s Quill.
Watch Amy read “Patchwork” from I used to live here
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Amy LeBlanc is a PhD student in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary. Amy’s debut poetry collection, I know something you don’t know, was published with Gordon Hill Press in March 2020 and was long listed for the ReLit Award and selected as a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Her novella, Unlocking, was published by the University of Calgary Press in June 2021 and was a finalist for the Trade Fiction Book of the Year through the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. Amy’s first short story collection Homebodies was published in spring 2023 with Great Plains Publications in their Enfield & Wizenty imprint, and her second full-length poetry collection, I used to live here, with Gordon Hill Press in spring 2025. Amy’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Room, Arc, Canadian Literature, and the Literary Review of Canada among others. She is the author of three chapbooks of poetry—most recently, Undead Juliet at the Museum, which was published with ZED Press in August 2021. Amy is a recipient of the 2020 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and a CGS-D Award for her doctoral research into fictional representations of chronic illness and gothic spaces. She is a 2022 Killam Laureate.
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Thanks to Amy for answering our questions, and to The Porcupine’s Quill for the text excerpt from I used to live here, which is available to purchase on All Lit Up (and get 15% off + FREE shipping Canada-wide with the code POETSRESIST until April 30!).
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
