Nisha Patel: 5 Alberta Poetry Books That Inspire Me

Nisha Patel is the City of Edmonton’s eighth Poet Laureate and the 2019 Canadian Individual Slam Champion. She co-founded a national queer femme South Asian artist collective, Maza Arts, and Moon Jelly House, a publishing house centering the work of marginalized poets. 

Her debut poetry collection, Coconut, hit the Read Alberta bestseller list before it had even released from Alberta indie publisher NeWest Press this April. It features vitally political, feminist poems for young women of colour, with bold portrayals of confession, hurt, and healing. 

Nisha is launching Coconut AND celebrating her birthday at a can’t-miss Zoom event on Monday, May 17 at 7pm. She will be joined by Bertrand Bickersteth, author of The Response of Weeds (NeWest Press 2020). Tickets are available by EventBrite. Books are available from Glass Bookshop and Shelf Life Books. 

In honour of National Poetry Month, we asked Nisha for a list of five Alberta poetry books that inspire her work and why:

Nisha Patel: Where do we find inspiration to write? As a poet, I journey through history as much as I entice my dreams of love and future out of my imagination. Teenagers, who reluctantly entertain me in their classrooms over video chat, ask me for my digits: how many poems do I write? How long are they? How often? The answers I have are ephemeral: I write in infinities. My poems are invocations and prayer, my connection to the universe’s will. I have more poems I have yet to write than poems I have written. And the only advice I can give is to read poetry like your art depends on it (it does). 

Some of the most influential writers in my life are folks I would call mentors and friends, while others are celebrated authors I hope to meet.  Through Jordan Abel’s poetic instruction in research-based creation I learned that my history is more than a single story— – and a poem is just an entryway to a world of empathy as much as it is a platform for confrontation and forgiveness. Bertrand Bickersteth writes in history and presence, and lineage, and water, all connections to the earth through the self that lives in community.  From the performance and musicality of Titilope Sonuga, celebrated Edmontonian and worldstar, I learnt that the personal voice persists across mediums and generations if you let it. And from yet others, I learnt that poetry stems in the deep belief that the world can indeed become a better place, if only we allow ourselves to dream of love as much as we fight for justice in our words.