I mention this now because my wife, who writes short fiction and novels, and I are featured in the latest edition. You can check it out here.

I’ll attach the poem below for those interested in reading it. You can see other winning entries on the official A&L Awards website when they are posted either later today or early tomorrow.

There’s a page for me on FB already, but it was generated from a Wikipedia entry and, as such, will not receive all the content from stephenrowe.ca. Accept no imitations.

You can “like” the page here on the right panel of the website, or you can visit the FB page directly here.

Cheers.

The first he refers to is a recent poem published at Lemon Hound (by Sina Queyras) that details the often sexist way the works of female authors are discussed (this is not always limited to the work, but spreads to a criticism of the author as well). The poet, Zoe Whittall, has taken lines from reviews of female authors in major literary journals and used them as is, with the exception that she changes the sex of the author to male to show the ridiculous representation of and reaction to women. This effectively illustrates a strong bias and sexism that exists in the literary community, and lays bare the unequal way women’s writing is often received.

Fiorentino then gets into a discussion that references another poem from 2009, this one written by literary critic and poet Zachariah Wells, that is viewed as direct hate writing towards one woman in particular (the publisher of Lemond Hound), but can be taken in the context of the broader literary community. The main purpose here is not to focus purely on the poem Wells has written, but to illustrate that more often than not members of this community tend to get irate about such inequality issues between the sexes, but rarely do anything about it. Fiorentino’s article is an attempt to bring this to the fore and stimulate dialogue around this concern.

If you read the original article above, you’ll see links to both poems and get a better feel for the article’s direction. I think it’s well worth the read. You can follow Fiorentino on twitter @stripmaller.

There are some who argue that the time has already passed when a significant change can be made that would allow everyone to live indefinitely at present levels of resource use. James Lovelock, an environmental scientist most noted for his development of the Gaia Hypothesis, has come to some staggering conclusions that many people might consider somewhat extreme. He believes we’ve passed the point of no return as far as our population and resource use are concerned and estimates that with the current standard of living in the developed world, the planet can probably support about a billion people sustainably, that is without the fear of immense environmental degradation. There are now over seven billion of us on the planet, so what does Lovelock think will have to be done about this problem?

The video below is from a BBC interview with Lovelock from a couple of years ago and highlights the main points the man makes about this issue. He argues that we’re fast approaching a point where we will have to make some very hard decisions about who to save and who to leave behind. Much of the world will be stricken by a Malthusian collapse of sorts and only those with the available resources will be able to survive; this will of course be the Old Core developed countries, who must decide who gets in and who must stay out, as far as migration is concerned, as global issues escalate. It’s much like saying the we’re all on a luxury cruise liner and we know she’s going down, but there are a limited number of life boats. In his case, the countries with the money, resources, and weapons are the ones most likely to survive.

So, again, here’s the video. Make of it what you will.