Jonathan Ball

Jonathan Ball holds a PhD in English and teaches literature, film, and writing at the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of the poetry books Ex Machina (Book Thug, 2009), Clockfire (Coach House, 2010), and The Politics of Knives (Coach House, 2012), the co-editor of Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Poetry (Insomniac, 2014), and author of the academic monograph John Paizs’s Crime Wave (Toronto, 2014). Visit him online at www.JonathanBall.com, where he writes about writing the wrong way.

Submissions

Egretta tricolor

The whole congregation judges him, the new guy. They say he’s cocky—hardy har the irony, of course, being that he, like everyone else here, lacks external genitalia—and they have a million more complaints about him, too, starting with each and every feather on his body. Count them up, and maybe it’s not a full million, but who has the patience to go counting feathers? 

The World Getting Smaller : Gloss

KRISTINE: I’m pasting. I’m pasting.

Un teatro sin cuerpos / A theatre without bodies

Y si no hubiera más límite / And if there were no greater limit : Gloss

All the Worlds

We know in this space that we are not discrete and separate, but fountains of flesh making and remaking ourselves through infinities of possibility...

Scenes of Appalling Human Degradation

There’s a woman on stage wearing slender black trousers cut at the ankle, a t-shirt and a blazer, flat shoes. Very neatly dressed.

All the Worlds : Gloss

Her reflections offer us a thinking-through of thought-making, thought-creation; a play between memory and invention, how feeling shapes itself into words.

Gun

There is a gun in the first act.