Introducing the Quarc Issue

Have you ever wondered what would happen if two solid, award-winning magazines smashed into each other like a pair of star-crossed atoms? Well, we have. Since September 2009, The New Quarterly: Canadian Writers & Writing and Arc Poetry Magazine have been whirling toward each other at a pace just shy of the speed of light.  Like “quarks,” those elementary particles that exist only in combination with other particles, our two magazines have conjoined to create an entirely new entity: “The QuArc Issue,” a single, spectacular summer edition which explores the myriad ways in which the literary arts and the sciences intersect.

Online Features:

we ask scientists about their favourite work of literature

fiction

Mindy Hung Problem Set 5

interviews

Matthew Tierney Lee Smolin on Science, Art, and Clear Thinking

multimedia

Bruce Taylor Microscopy in Western Quebec
Susan Ioannou‘s geology-themed poetry is performed in a gold mine
Erin Noteboom Bow on trading physics for poetry

Inside the issue:

particle fictions

Erin Noteboom Bow Quarks: An Exegesis
Why a Bride Wears White
Tanis MacDonald   Sestina: Whiskey Canyon
Mary Tilberg Truth
Nathalie Sorensen Firmaments: Charm
Pamela Porter Winged & Wind Quarks
Susan Telfer Quark Songs
Kathy Mac Elizabethan Fourposter
Valerie Compton Godwit
Anna Mioduchowska Quark Love Poems
Jill Jorgenson Charm
Carin Makuz (101 Words of ) Truth (without the u)
Fern G. Z. Carr Charm
K.V. Skene What Matters, Matters
Morgan Wade Truth

bestiary

Janine Rogers ‘A picture that hummed around my head’
Margaret Atwood Annie the Ant (with introduction by Jenine Rogers)
Bruce Taylor Little Animals
Monty Reid Three poems from Host
Elena E. Johnson Field Season
Patricia Young It began with the whiptail lizard
Bruce Taylor Life Science

conversations

Alice Munro On the Probability of Happiness
Robyn Sarah Scientist as Philosopher
Alice Major The Ultraviolet Catastrophe
Don Mckay The Holy Ground of Plate Techtonics
Susan Ioannou Rocks & Words
Joan Thomas with Anita Lahey On the woman who unearthed a plesiosaur
Danielle Devereux On Rachel Carson
P.K. Page and Margaret Cavendish Two poems on atoms
Jim Johnstone and Shane Neilson On poetics and scientific theory

collisions

Wayne Clifford Little Things Can Mean So Much
Erling Friis-Baastad Exoplanetary
Lesley Battler The poetics of big oil
Sean Howard Dissecting Nobel 158 physics lectures

free radicals

Colin Morton The Greats of Math
Dvora Levin Blind Date
Zachariah Wells Patchwork Panes
Adam Dickinson Index to Modern Plastics
Erin Knight Blind hope
Heather Cadsby Sunday Geometer

ova aves

Janine Rogers All That Is Made
Thaddeus Holownia & Harry Thurston Ova Aves
Gay Hansen An Egg is Miracle Enough

long fiction

Miranda Hill Rise: A Requiem

artifacts

Robert Bean Obsolescence: a photo essay
David Pantalony Coincidence mixing in Inuvik (photos by Robert Bean)

science as metaphor

Monica Kidd Enamored by Chance
Ken Babstock Sugar Glider
Jeffery Donaldson The Evolution of Metaphor
David O’Meara Background Noise
Aradhana Choudhuri Code as poetry
Michael Lockett On Thrust and Momentum
Matthew Holmes The failing of purity
Adam Sol Dwarf

literature as experiment

Matthew Tierney Poems, Time Machines, & My Weak Energy Condition
Four From The Ides
Christian Bök Phage ΦX174
Daniel Hudon Ten simple science experiments to test the universality of poetry

(science) fiction

Sean Michaels Conductors

Quarclet: Patricia Young

eHARMONY:

WHIPTAIL LIZARD SEEKING WHIPTAIL LIZARD FOR FAKE SEX

 

~Patricia Young

 

In several species of lizards . . . only females exist.
–  Science World.

 

I get so lonely out here on the chaparral,

darting beneath moon and mesquite. 

 

Any day now I expect to go extinct. 

 

I don’t date much. 

I’m terrified of sling-shots

and Natural History museums.

My family’s poor as a footprint,

matrilineal trailer-trash all the way back

to Texas dirt.

 

I’m an interspecies love-child.

Does this make me hot stuff?

 

If I were a superhero,

I’d be Liza, the Bisexual Lizard Brain. 

 

I’m a head-swiveler, an air-sniffer, a tongue-flicker,

a single parent of a

single parent of a

single parent. 

 

Imagine me in nothing

but granular scales and stippled sunlight,

stretched out on a slab of warm granite.

 

Unisexual doesn’t mean

courtship rituals don’t turn a girl on. 

 

My ideal mate is a hyperactive

five-inch dinosaur on dainty hind legs.

Think: gender bender baby.

 

The quickest way to my heart is a pulse.

The quickest way to my bed is on your sturdy tetrapods.

 

It’s Sunday morning and my blood’s

heating up fast. Sister Lagaritja,

I don’t need you

but I want you

 

to be my parthenogenic lover,

my next best guy.

 If your DNA’s identical to mine

I’d love to scoot over the garden wall with you.

What I mean is,

I’d love to bask on your brick.

 

Erratum: a portion of Patricia Young’s poem vanished from print. Arc and TNQ regret the error; it’s a great poem, and we broke it. All required spankings have been administered.

Read the accompanying essay and see for yourselves the strange consequences of unintentional poetic fission out in Quarc.

Patricia Young’s 10th book of poetry is An Autoerotic History of Swings.

 

Various species undressed in Quarc! Offer ends soon—subscribe to both The New Quarterly and Arc for 38% off!

Quarclet: Lesley Battler

Visit the Arc Poetry Magazine website for this week’s Quarclet: featuring Lesley Battler on the Poetics of Big Oil.

These Quarclets will be posted weekly throughout August. If you like them, you’ll love the Quarc Issue! And don’t forget about our 2-for-1 deal: you can subscribe to both Arc and The New Quarterly for a year for one low price: just click here for details.