Kayla Czaga Reads “Midway”

“I feel like the crud / I accidentally touch sometimes, whatever it is / that collects under cushions on my couch,” writes Kayla Czaga in her third collection, Midway, an exploration of grief. In her search for meaning in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths, Czaga visits the underworld (at least twice), Vietnamese restaurants, the beach, London’s Tate Modern, Las Vegas casinos, and a fish textbook. Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, these poems take the reader through bright scenery like carnival rides with fast climbs and sudden drops. The meanings and messages Czaga uncovers on her travels are complicated: hopeful, bleak—both comforting and not. Along with the parents the poet mourns, this collection showcases a varied cast. A suburban father-in-law copes with a troubling diagnosis. Marge Simpson quits The Simpsons. Death is a metalhead who dates girls too young for him. Midway is a welcome and necessary collection from one of the most celebrated and accomplished poets of her generation.

Kayla Czaga is the author of the poetry collections For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019), and Midway (House of Anansi, 2024), which is a finalist for a 2025 BC/Yukon Book Prize. Frequently anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English series, her writing has also won Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year award, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson prize, and The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons poetry contest. She lives with her wife and two senior cats in Esquimalt, BC, on traditional Songhees and Xwsepsum territory.