“The Brightest Thing is a garden of story, blossoming with hardship, ache, love and light—’Everywhere roses slow and rich as honey or amber or blood.’ Each poem glistens with a kind of hopeful magic, the kind of magic that kindles with desire and bravery, a glistening readers will want to share in and pass along like the beloved fairy tales we grew up with and still hold dear.”
—Mallory Tater, author of This Will Be Good
“These are poems of survival; it’s not the belief in fairy tales and romantic endings that ‘magic’ mistreatment and abuse ‘away,’ it’s belief in the potential within self to survive and the power within poetry to sing.”
—Jami Macarty, The Maynard Co-founder & Editor
Here is a selection of poems from The Brightest Thing (Caitlin Press, 2019) which are available to read online. My thanks to the publications in which these poems appear. (Content warning: some of these poems discuss sexual violence within and out of fairy tales.)
Fitcher’s Bird
poem is included at the bottom of an interview with All Lit Up Canada
Love and Impatience
Synaesthesia Magazine
Poem for my Body
Poetry in Voice
Schloss Steinau, Hesse, Germany
Poetry Daily
Main Characters
poem is included at the top of an interview with Rob Taylor
Love and IKEA II
The Maynard
January is terrible so far
The Maynard
Loyalty and Violence
appeared online as part of Room’s “No Comment” project in response to sexual violence
Before appearing in book-form in The Brightest Thing, many other poems were published elsewhere, in print, including “Rapunzel,” which received an honourable mention for the 2013 Young Buck Poetry Prize with Contemporary Verse 2, and “Fire and Safety,” which won first prize the following year. “The Third Eldest Sea Princess” was longlisted for the 2012 CBC Poetry Prize, and “Waiting for spring, or something” was longlisted for the 2013 CBC Poetry Prize. “Lavina” was shortlisted for the Arc Poetry Magazine Poem of the Year.
Ruth Daniell 