Reading Room

Ruins of Pompeii, or Ancestry

Ruins of Pompeii, or Ancestry

Not whole, the way we know them now, but fragmentary hollow skeletals that seal the human or reveal what it once was. Breath stolen by volcanic gas and corpses dressed in ashes. An imprint of dust upon the body, or the body onto dust. Excavators filled the distance...

Leak

Leak

Each word in Leak, Kate Hargreaves’s debut collection of poetry, is deliberate, carefully chosen to test the boundaries of the English language. In Leak, nouns become verbs, verbs become nouns, words shift meaning, and prose flows loosely, free of punctuation. These...

Gone South and Other Ways to Disappear

Gone South and Other Ways to Disappear

Julia Leggett’s debut collection, Gone South and Other Ways to Disappear, is a look into the lives of eight women as they experience varying degrees of disappointment. These are stories that take place just as the rug of how-the-protagonists-thought-life-should-be is...

Cycling with the Dragon

Cycling with the Dragon

Elaine Woo’s debut poetry collection opens with a birth, a book slipping into life surrounded by a “throng of reading witnesses.” Cycling with the Dragon is this book, a collection interested in the intersection of life and craft, the forming and gathering of thought...

Motion Sickness

Motion Sickness

Speculative fiction author Ursula Pflug ventures into a new realm with Motion Sickness, a “flash novel” told in fifty-five chapters of exactly five hundred words, accompanied by scratchboard illustrations by SK Dyment. Twenty-year-old Penelope spends most of her...

Vagina Dentata

Vagina Dentata

Our 2015 Fiction Contest Honourable Mention. After the conference, in which we distinguished ourselves modestly on a number of issues – the colonial, the survival, the post-colonial, the post-survival, the structuralist, the deconstructivist, the Freudian, the...

Sometimes We Sing Soft Kitty

Sometimes We Sing Soft Kitty

Our 2015 Poetry Contest Honourable Mention, judged by Jen Currin. snow again. no country for thin women. yes it was white this morning – where did it go? the only whites I see are houses   frame or aluminum-sided   among the awakening trees. a gulls’ coffee clatch in...

Room’s 2015 Fiction and Poetry Contest Winners

Room Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Room Magazine Annual Poetry and Fiction Contest as chosen by our judges Jen Currin, and Shani Mootoo. Room Magazine is pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Room Magazine Annual Poetry and Fiction...

Translation of “Sappho, 31”

Translation of “Sappho, 31”

By all the gods I don’t know why the hell I come to these things passed defences farewell parties publications showers house- swarmings Room would like to apologize to Meaghan Rondeau, whose translation of “Sappho, 31” appeared in Room 38.1 without italics as she...

Generations Re-merging

Generations Re-merging

Shalan Joudry artfully explores the poetic relationships between generations. Her poetry charts Mi’kmaw ancestry, identity, parenthood, and traditional teachings in her debut collection, Generations Re-merging. In “Prologue,” she writes, “Each generation must make...

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ROOM 48.1 WITS END
In times of crisis, we laugh to offer tenderness, to ward off despair— so we can be brave. Gather round ROOM 48.1 WITS END and let humour be a mirror held up to the state of the world as we continue to resist.

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ROOM 47.4 FULL CIRCLE
Step back with Room into the past, to parents, to childhood homes, and to people once known and loved; dig into themes of grief and healing; and ultimately explore what it means to come full circle in literature.

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