Laura Matwichuk’s debut collection of poetry, Near Miss (Nightwood Editions), considers the relationship between close calls and the tenuous conditions of contemporary life. From actual cataclysms such as meteor collisions and volcanic eruptions to everyday failures and accidents, these inventive poems collide with the perpetual unease created by life’s unpredictability while contemplating mortality, fragility, gratitude and hopefulness.
This month, Laura will be launching her collection in Vancouver, Victoria, Courtenay, and Nanaimo with other poets also published with Nightwood Editions.
This is your debut collection. Tell us about your journey from submitting to literary magazines to working on your final edits with Nightwood.
The poems in Near Miss were written over four years, and having a few poems accepted by literary magazines during that time really helped me to gain confidence. It took a while for me to understand what the structure of the book should be and which poems belonged within it. I did a lot of editing and rearranging. When I started the editing process with Nightwood, I hadn’t looked at the book in nearly a year – gaining distance from the work definitely helped me to be unsentimental about the final edits.
How do the environment and our relationship with the earth fit into your collection?
Climate change is the most consequential example of the way humans will collectively avoid thinking about something until it is too late. Last summer I came across the New York Times Magazine feature “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” and couldn’t ignore that heartbreaking “almost” in the title. It was sobering to be reminded that global warming has been a known fact for my entire lifetime. Though I had been contemplating environmental themes for a while, reading this essay returned them to the forefront of my mind in the last few months of working on the book. I also became a mother while writing Near Miss, which caused me to think about the future of our planet in different terms than I had before.
Who are some of your favourite poets in Vancouver and beyond?
I have so much admiration for the skilled and thoughtful work of Vancouver poets Sheryda Warrener and Raoul Fernandes. A great many contemporary American poets rank on my list of favourites, foremost among them Louise Glück, Dean Young, and Mary Ruefle.
Why did you call your book Near Miss?
I’m preoccupied
Laura Matwichuk‘s poetry has appeared in literary journals in Canada and the US, including Arc, EVENT, The Fiddlehead, The Burnside Review, PRISM international, Vallum and Best Canadian Poetry in English. She was a finalist for the 2013 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and lives in Vancouver. Near Miss is her debut collection.