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“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part … What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.”

― RICHARD FEYNMAN

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Poetry Editor — Taylor Brown
Fiction Editor — Lauren Chang
Reviews Editor — Jade Wallace
Graphics + Website — Obscure Design

2020/21 Editorial Staff
Grace Bilger
Susane Dang
Gabriella Dritsas
Elisabeth Finkelzon
Eileen Hack
Samuel Peacock
Sarah Peters
Jessica Poole
Eva Zheng

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Copyright © 2021 by the contributors. All rights reserved.

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FEATURED ARTIST

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FICTION

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POETRY

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CHAIN: Response Poetry Project
Poems 5–8

WHAT IS THIS PROJECT ALL ABOUT?

Poems are often in conversation with other poems — from those that recreate or re-envision long-standing formal conventions, to those written “after” or “inspired by” poems that came before them. Here at CAROUSEL, we want to experiment with this tradition in a deliberate way, on a large scale, over time. We therefore bring you CHAIN, an ongoing, global series of response poems — each connected to the one that came before it but also different enough to stand on its own and lead somewhere new. It starts with one poem — one link in the chain — and it gets built, link by link, indefinitely … here are poems no. 5-8 in the series:

INSPIRED … WANT TO SUBMIT?

If you want to be the next link in this poetic chain, send us one poem that creatively responds to the latest poem in the chain — visit our Submittable for guidelines + deadlines!

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CONVERSATIONS

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USEREVIEW: 013–029

Last autumn we debuted our USEREVIEW project and began consistently publishing reviews for the first time in our magazine’s history. We started by posting two reviews per month on our blog — one experimental and one traditional — but we soon found that even this robust schedule was not enough to accommodate the many books that merit attention. Beginning in 2021, we switched to a weekly schedule, with a new review going up on our blog every Wednesday — a phenomenon we’ve christened with the catchy name/hashtag: #USEREVIEWEDNESDAY
 
No matter what form they take — traditional, experimental, or capsule — all of these reviews offer thoughtful, playful, sui generis engagements with contemporary books of poetry and fiction. To date, we’ve published nearly 50 reviews to our social media platforms; no. 013-029 are collected conveniently below as a part of our summer issue — if you haven’t been following along each week, here’s an easy way to play catch up!

Published semi-annually. We gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Central Students’ Association and the students of the University of Guelph.

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