Canisia Lubrin’s books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Her work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Stars prize, and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. A finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Governor General’s Literary Award, Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, Simon Fraser University, Literature Colloquium Berlin, Queen’s University, and Victoria College at the University of Toronto. She studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, and The Globe and Mail named her Poet of the Year. Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.
This profoundly engaged, boldly formed long suite poem probes the legacy of human intelligence put in service of ruin. The rhythm of Morse Code drives the poem’s haunting music as Lubrin records the effects of warcraft on times of peril and possibility for human cohabitation. The result is a book of chimeric monologues in an invented form Lubrin calls the tesseract—a poem of sixteen lines of fragmented music, shaped by the logic of the mathematical cube—four stanzas growing from the quatrain, each increased by one line until the final one-line stanza.
The poet addresses the myth of the developed world’s heirs, casualties, and its wing of weapons that guarantee(d) the successes of empires. Bright Machine reckons with the saga of civilization as the story of arms history—and its emissaries’ expansive appetites for recasting conquest and mass killing—in heartening, urgent poetry for a turbulent world.
Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas. The fourth annual ALCHEMY LECTURE, edited by Christina Sharpe, features award-winning fiction writers, a lauded scholar, and a prize-winning musician in an astonishing, immersive investigation of the meaning of sound in this moment in the world’s soundtrack.
Sound—at the Interregnum: The Alchemy Lecture 2025 asks: What are the sounds you make? What are the sounds you want to make? What are the sounds you need to make? What are the sounds you need to leave to a world on the cusp of becoming something else?
At the interregnum we meet oligarchs and fascists and manufactured crises of housing, ongoing genocides and displacements, extraordinary renditions, the takeover of universities and a deepening anti-intellectualism, the militarization of public space, the shrinking of the commons, the use of sonic weapons (LRADs-Long Range Acoustic Device), the complicit silences of mainstream media, and the refusal by those who have taken power to make a world in which everyone’s needs are met. Their sounds of avarice, capital accumulation, and immiseration do not enter the world uncontested. Sound is also key to life. There are the sounds of protest, of living and witness, of anthems and ululation, of chants and keening, noise of all kinds, blue notes, ghost notes, high notes—which also take us over as vibration, energy, atmosphere, and breath itself.
Alchemists Glen Coulthard (political theorist), Canisia Lubrin (poet), Madeleine Thien (novelist), and Immanuel Wilkins (saxophonist) are acclaimed thinkers, fiction writers, poets, and musicians who in these pages have produced, reproduced, blown out, and made something counter to the sounds of the world at this interregnum—this period of great danger, and also great possibility.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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