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 Ariel Gordon
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe Blood Letters to someone picking it up for the first time?
ARIEL GORDON: Blood Letters is a hybrid novel. It is an epistolary novel, meaning it consists of a series of letters between siblings, caught in a dystopian war and forced to do inhuman things to survive.
GMB Chomichuk and I each brought our special skills to the book, so my character Kris also included elegiac poems for his dead/missing friends and fellow soldiers, for the life he’d left behind in letters. Chomichuk’s character Albany sketched the battlefield, which means that Blood Letters is also a graphic novel.
Finally, Blood Letter is a dossier, where personal letters brush up against the groaning bureaucracy of war. It is all telling details and moments of connection and agonizing choices.
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
ARIEL: Poetry is the first form. People pour themselves into poems when they are young / misunderstood / in pain. Poetry is also an accessible form: you don’t need any art supplies to write poetry. It is an anywhere/everywhere art: you can write poems anywhere: in your head, in an abandoned car, in bomb shelters, in refugee camps. And it can be memorized and passed from person to person like a virus.
ALU: What does poetry allow you to say or refuse that other forms don’t?
ARIEL: Poems are take-out containers: they hold thoughts and ideas securely, delivering them as fresh as the hour and day they were written.
Poems are canvases: content and form combine on the page in a way that is utterly different from a short story or an essay. It allows for startling and original combinations of text and white space.
Poems are embodied: they use all the senses to show you how/what/why.
Poems are Tarot spreads: they tell you who we are and who we could be.
Poems are viruses: if you’re not careful, a line or an image or an entire poem will work its way inside you and LIVE THERE FOREVER.
Poems are bullhorns: loud enough for protest marches and memorial services, weddings and retirements. They say what needs to be said.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
ARIEL: I absolutely bloody love these lines from Anne Szumigalksi’s prose-poem In Praise of My Own Breasts: “A lover told me one breast is a giant puffball the other a coconut. One is full of sweet milk the other of ripe spores. He didn’t say which he admired the most.”
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
ARIEL: Community has played an enormous role in my writing and my writing life, by which I mean learning the craft and the business of writing. There were several poets I looked up to when I first joined the writing and publishing community: Catherine Hunter, Robert Kroetsch, Anne Szumigalski, Deborah Schnitzer, Tanis MacDonald, Dennis Cooley.
Each of them understood that it was their job to nurture the next generation of writers. They knew that we were stronger together, that we could, as individuals and as a community, provide each other with comfort, solace, celebration, and a safe place to mourn.
I have also been lucky to be in several strong writing groups with people who are smarter and better than me, who helped me think through individual poems and the manuscripts they became a part of. The best feedback I’ve gotten over the years hasn’t been from teachers or mentors, it’s been from peers.
Now I’m not a scholar, but I like how their work is divided into three spheres: teaching, research, and service. So as a mid-career writer, I feel like at least a third of my activities now have to be community-focused. I see my community work as service.
My current role as Writer-in-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library means that I can afford more service in my day-to-day. I find it inspiring to work with new writers. I’m seeing people at their very best: making something because they feel compelled to, mapping their thoughts and feelings, telling stories.
I am also lucky to have a great network of writers of every genre. There are so many amazing writers in Canada and I’ve made it my mission to commune with as many as possible!
ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?
ARIEL: I’m a naturally hopeful person, so I try to immediately vent any frustration or despair I feel, into poems but also in conversation with friends/family/writer-friends. That way, all the little aches and pains of the writing life don’t turn into bitterness. Bitter poets are no good to anyone!
I also walk the boulevards and riverbanks and wooded areas of my city, searching for trees and mushrooms, and I feel connected to the world. And then take I pictures of the things I see and post them, so that other people can feel something of the same connection. And then I write poems and essays about them and publish them.
The goal is that we can fight together to save them (and us!) from climate change / late-stage capitalism / warmongering.
Read “Don’t Go in the Bag“ from Blood Letters
DON’T GO IN THE BAG
By Kristopher Volsa
Your Mum writes that your room
is exactly how you left it, except she’s miles
& miles away at the Barricades
because she’s heard there might be food.
She’s sick & lonely but:
DON’T GO IN THE BAG
even if your arms are gone.
Worms worms worms worms.
The BAG is full of worms.
Your sister emails that her strong arms
are empty—there’s so much nothing
for her to do. She wants to enlist, take
deep breaths of your stupid stupid war.
She’s sad & desperate but:
DON’T GO IN THE BAG
even if your hands are gone.
Worms worms worms worms.
The BAG is made of worms.
Your buddy texts he can’t go on.
The front lines are swarmed. Faulty
tech. Foooooooooooooooooog.
And look: all his friends are gone.
He’s crazy & old but:
DON’T GO IN THE BAG
even if your fingers are gone.
Worms worms worms worms.
YOU are made of worms.
Reprinted with permission from Great Plains Press.
Watch Ariel read from Blood Letters
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Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Her work appeared in Best Canadian Essays 2025, edited by Emily Urquhart, and in Best Canadian Poetry 2026, edited by Mary Dalton. She is the 2025-2026 Writer in Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library. Gordon’s seventh book is Blood Letters, co-authored with GMB Chomichuk (Great Plains Press, 2025), a hybrid sci-fi novel combining letters, drawings and poems.
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Thanks to Ariel for answering our questions, and to Great Plains Press for the text of “Don’t Go in the Bag” from Blood Letters, which is available to order now (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.
