www.mtls.ca

03/21/2026

Sweet sadness of surrender
when I know what you want
and you know what I want

and I’ve decided to give in
before you’re finished arguing.
https://www.mtls.ca/issue28/luke-sawczak/

02/17/2026

“Welcome, everyone, to History 111: Foodways in History. My name is Professor Klein. For many of you, this will be your first lecture at university, and I hope I can do the experience justice. I’ll do him justice,” quipped the girl next to Phyllis with a giggle, elbowing her in her side. Phyllis blushed, taken aback by such a random show of solidarity. The girl was right: the professor was cute. He had a look so urban that the word groomed came to mind. Her father would have called him metrosexual. https://www.mtls.ca/issue28/mathea-treslan/

01/19/2026

Uncle Sam is afraid of aliens,
wants to keep them out of his backyard
so he builds a great fence
as big and tall as his domestic fears
to stop their insidious invasion.
https://www.mtls.ca/issue28/jeevan-bhagwat/

01/19/2026

Maple Tree Literary Supplement, MTLS, Issue 28 is finally out of the oven and pops out online like fresh baked bread. Editorial on the poetics of cadence in lyrical poetry; fiction book reviews, poetry, essay, spoken word and more. Go to www.mtls.ca/issue28 for a literary feast.

In This Issue

Sharon Berg
Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
Jeevan Bhagwat
Gordon Ray Bourgon
Louise Carlson
George Elliott Clarke
Patrick Connors
Salvatore Difalco
Amatoritsero Ede
Candace Fertile
Rudy Kremberg
Rion Levy
Lorette C Luzajic
Melanie Marttila
Roy Mclean
Saad Nizam Muzumdar
John Sainsbury
Jack Stilborn
Kai Toh
Mathea Treslan
Uche Peter Umezurike

Literature and the Arts

12/06/2025

With Teardrops on the Weser, Amatoritsero Ede guides his readers on a transformative journey across landscapes and memories bringing to the surface individual and collective (hi)stories of intergenerational trauma and healing submerged in the underflows of bodies of water. https://www.mtls.ca/issue27/elizabeth-tavella/

12/05/2025

A.E.: Your novel, Pull Focus, has a fictionalised Toronto Film Festival as one of its settings. Now, would you say your cultural activism has somehow spilled into fiction? Is it Art mimicking life? https://www.mtls.ca/issue27/round-table/

11/13/2025

The novel tells the story of a protagonist named John who is becalmed with his wife on a small sailboat somewhere in the Caribbean. Whenever Ahmed thinks his way into his story, a strange heaviness descends upon him. He feels the stillness of the water, the motionlessness of the boat. John’s incapacity, a paralysis imposed by humid heat, is overpowering. Ahmed feels the desolation and inexorability of it, the unbridgeable gulf between John and his wife, between John and action of any kind.

“A muse,” Ahmed says to himself. “A muse is what I need.” He is talking to himself in a suburban Tim Hortons while his novel is not getting written. Authors are entitled to be eccentric, but Ahmed knows this is not good. https://www.mtls.ca/issue27/jack-stilborn/

11/08/2025

In a small, redbrick house on a narrow street between John and Union, there live Anne and Robin. They have lived at 25 Severn Avenue for about thirty years. Neither could tell you exactly how long. They have a small, yappy black dog named Molly who lives with them, too. Anne works at the university, teaching primatology. Her favourites are the orangutans. When she was younger, Anne wanted to be just like Birute Galdikas, who studied orangutans in Borneo. https://www.mtls.ca/issue27/bronwyn-clare-lindsay/

11/08/2025

Toyko was tall, over six feet, but she was slender and athletic. Because of her pedigree and the fact that she was usually the tallest woman, or man, wherever she went, she believed much, too much, was expected of her.
https://www.mtls.ca/issue27/john-tavares/

02/03/2025

Time to draw the connections: Black CanLit and Afropolitanism

07/24/2024

Clarke’s poetry possesses in abundance the greatest quality of art and poetry, surprise—freshness, continuous invention, change within unity, adventure on the way to a goal. With the large controlling project and shape of Canticles, he has given himself a grand field for his ability to join far-flung elements from his stores: experience, rhythmic and phrase-making power, grasp of tone and diction and verbal music, knowledge of history, language, society and philosophy.

Reviews A. F. Moritz 0 comments Tweet  Poetry Review   Canticles II (MMXIX) by George Elliott Clarke Guernica Editions, 2019. 505 pp. ISBN 978-1-77183-409-4   In a 2022 text, George Elliott Clarke calls his Canticles series “an expected six-volume epic…that begins with the survey of two mill...