Toronto-based writer Sennah Yee’s first collection, How Do I Look?, is quick-witted, lucid, observant and constantly rewarding. Though her book is technically classified as poetry, her pieces feel more like vignettes to me, mini-stories and personal anecdotes that seem to be examining their feelings in real time, tackling in the process a wide range of topics such as mythological figures, the movie Mulan, The Sims, sexual awakenings, microaggressions, Grand Theft Auto 5, being Chinese-Canadian and much more.

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new boyfriend says he’s worried. new boyfriend says i should stop saying credit cards are just free money. new boyfriend says i should stop telling strangers at the bar lyme disease

I finally tore Bluets in half @ 12:50 a.m.
I had had enough of it, of its blueness…
I had begun to loathe its preciousness, its precision
What it represents -
Its fans, the copycats

Chicken à la King

I bit. We bred a snoutless dog to lead
us to the prize. We groomed ourselves
with yearning floss. You swam
through scum in the retention pond
and called it flamenco.

Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere: in Laura's 6th grade locker with her roll-on deodorant, in Dr. Davidson's walk—slow and tight-calved, in Mr. Robinson's guitar—Cat Steven's "Wild World" each afternoon before the bell, in Mrs. Roger's wavy, knee- length red hair—smelling of Wella Balsam and cigarettes. 

now the poem is a woman

On November 13, 2012, Hugo Dos Santos awoke shortly after 1 am with an urgent need to urinate. He got up from bed and took two steps out into the hallway when he saw three small creatures in

The Record
Fear
Label: Slash
Released: May 16, 1982
Length: 14 songs, 27 minutes

This is about a dead guy. But it’s 1995 and the dead guy isn’t dead yet. He’s driving. A black

reach inside the incision
up the stomach from the asshole
ribcage gristle light brown mound of heather memory

spill oddities, like miraculous whole red berries
feel for the heart with two

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
~ W.B Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’

One day, your borders shall speak;

Indignant birds will shit on your

Under the cruel glow of inquiry, I want to tell her that the party is over.

By the time I arrived at the Phoenix airport the next summer I was thirty pounds heavier. I’d spent the previous nine months eating vending machine moonpies and packaged cookies in my dorm room.

The sun is a dwarf star 93 million miles away. The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, a spiky glass appendage that sprouts out of the Royal Ontario Museum’s original brick in downtown Toronto, was unveiled on August 5, 2007. 

Hurry, tomorrow’s ashen face is at your door.
Hold out your hands, two tiny suns,
you’re more golden than they ever told you.

This was the year Canseco was the first to join the 40/40 club, hitting over 40 homeruns and stealing 40 bases in the same season. 

It was getting dark outside as me and Naoki walked down the paved footpath of my West Shinjuku neighborhood to the subway. It was rainy, and there were concrete hippos and pigs, and other rusted

My grandfather, his English name was Benson. As the houseboys opened the gates, he came out on the balcony and fired off a shotgun, boom, one or two blasts.

I remember seeing Aladdin on Christmas Eve with my friend Kylie when I was seven years old.

I made my mom promise me that she was going to live until she was 100 years old, and I would be 82 and we would die together, peacefully, holding hands. 

My siblings and I never liked each other as much as we did on those early mornings; we never made a better team. 

It doesn’t make the sound that you think it would make. I mean, I figured it would be loud, or top-heavy. But it sounded like almost nothing, like water dripping from a shower faucet three rooms

You’re from the cornfields, I tease, but not really. Your parents, professors at U of Illinois, both versed in the theories of music, both of them concert pianists. They play hushed, reverent duets

Carefully open the wrapping paper. Inside is Teddy Ruxbin. See his stupid face on the box. Fuck you, Teddy Ruxbin. He reads you bedtime stories if you put a cassette tape in his abdomen.

In this one, nothing will happen, like in life, unlike in life, where everything happens.

I grew up in grass but here / everything is bladeless, // hair thinned past feathers, / sheets slick enough to grease a boar.

So a few weeks before that Christmas, I decided to do some detective work. I was interested in science and generally curious ...