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The International Metatron Poetry Prize Finalists ❋ DON’T ASK DO TELL ❋ Noah Sparrow
The poems in Don’t Ask Do Tell take many forms, fluctuating from the lyrical to the theatre in its hybrid style. The speaker juggles the burdens and joys of self-creation, using the concept of being a “wooden-man” as a means of reclaiming the body from a queer masculine lens. Sparrow’s work interrogates this new kind of wooden-body as a vehicle between the natural world and the queer. The collection is rife with more serious political commentary, and seasoned with bits of humour.
Noah Sparrow is a Montreal-Tiohtià:ke-based writer and a current undergraduate student at Concordia University, studying Creative Writing. He was a finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and his fiction has been published in The Fiddlehead. Currently, he is Co-Editor-in-Chief for Soliloquies Anthology. His writing sits somewhere between the wooden and the water.
Who are you?
A person obsessed with wood and water. I’m also a chicken nugget reviewer on Instagram (@lilnostrieschicken) and an avid baker.
What is your book about?
Don’t Ask Do Tell explores queer masculinity with natural and absurdist images, and extends itself into political commentary and humor. The concept of being a “wooden-man” is continuously explored, and masculinity becomes a site of interrogation, questioning and reclaiming the physical body itself. The work lives at the interaction of violence and love, plays with how memory is in constant dialogue with current circumstances, and highlights how the physical informs our reality.
Could you tell us a bit about the process of writing this book?
In the winter of 2024, I made a goal of writing a poem every day as a way of improving how my fiction sounds. I was also taking a playwriting class at the time, and I liked merging the elements of playwriting into some of the poems. I read a lot of hybrid works in general, or collections that play with form, such as Emily Riddles’ The Big Melt, and Hannah Green’s Xanax Cowboy: Poems, as well many of Anne Carson’s books. By the end of the summer, I realized I wrote a ton of poems, and no prose at all. In this way this collection was accidental: it only became a real thing in my mind after all the pieces were written.
What are some books you’ve read and enjoyed lately and/or books that influenced the writing in your submitted work?
I read War of the Foxes by Richard Siken while wandering through museums in London and across New Zealand this summer. Many of those poems are about painting and creation, and they’re done with such succinct intimacy.
I adore Micheal Cunningham’s prose, and I reread Flesh and Blood while finishing up these pieces. His prose is always exceptional — so specific and visceral. I’d like to believe my style has been influenced by his works.
How would you describe your book using emojis only?
🪵🌊😈🎬🎭
EXCERPT
The Colour I Breathe In Has Turned Purple
The colour I breathe in has turned purple. This is because
in a day or two, I have already washed our towels, and you will get groceries, and
you’ll go to the market, down the river. There, you will think of me
when you notice the dust on the. door handle, the static of it all gone.
In the market, you will mostly buy frozen food. And
I will save my breath and refrain from calling it a waste of time. Besides,
our cupboard space is minimal and yet our freezer is a mountain, I freeze when you
click your shoes on and you freeze if I don’t touch you back.
The colour that I breathe in used to be blue,
but only in the way the black sea is. Which was not something
I expected last summer when we were there, and you laughed at me
so I laughed back and I meant it.