Dominik Parisien : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Fighting the narrative impulse. For poems dealing with disability: allowing for emotional vulnerability without letting it overwhelm the piece.

Dominik Parisien : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Early on I didn’t think elements relating to identity could be the subject of poetry. When I was younger I never saw myself or people like me - disabled, queer, bilingual - reflected in the work we studied. The disabled body and disability experience in particular never seemed worthy of poetry. When I was finally introduced to disability poetics, and to the study of gender and sexuality, it opened up the world to me. Poetry expanded from language, psychology, and imagery to include experience, identity, and the political.

Dominik Parisien : part three

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

I return to the poetry of Jim Ferris over and over again - The Hospital Poems and Slouching Towards Guantanamo especially. It drives me forward in my own work, particularly in times where I am in a great deal of pain or my disability has been manifesting in very public ways (convulsing in public, losing consciousness, etc). The anthology Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry is Disability is another source of renewal. Tainaron: Mail From Another City by Finish author Leena Krohn is a grounding text. Tainaron isn’t poetry, although it is quiet, imagistic, poetic, obsessed with metamorphosis, and it fires up my imagination in ways nothing else does.

Dominik Parisien : part two

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Voodoo Hypothesis by Canisia Lubrin, Port of Being by Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Anatomic by Adam Dickinson, and the chapbooks From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris by Lamees Al Ethari and The Machete Tourist by John Elizabeth Stintzi.

Dominik Parisien : part one

Dominik Parisien's poetry chapbook We, Old Young Ones is forthcoming from Frog Hollow Press through its Dis/Ability series and his recent work can be found in Quill & Quire, The Fiddlehead, Plenitude, Train: a poetry journal, as well as other magazines and anthologies. He is the co-editor, with Navah Wolfe, of The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. His latest project is Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, with Elsa Sjunneson-Henry. Dominik is a disabled, bisexual, French Canadian. He lives in Toronto.

What are you working on?

The latest round of edits on my poetry chapbook, We, Old Young Ones, forthcoming from Frog Hollow Press. The chapbook explores disability, ageing, and intergenerational dynamics. The occasional non-fiction piece. I’m also co-editing an original anthology of retold myths from around the world for Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press.