The Torrid Zone
{An Umbrella Special Feature}


Brian Campbell ’s

recent poetry credits include Saranac Review, The Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Nth Position. He was also a finalist for the 2006 CBC Literary Award for Poetry.

His first book, Guatemala and Other Poems, was published in 1994 by Window Press in Toronto. Undressing the Night, his translation of selected poems of the Nicaraguan/Canadian poet Francisco Santos, has recently been published by Editorial Lunes, Costa Rica. 

Prose works have been published in the Pacific Rim Review of Books and The Rock Salt Plum Review. He keeps a literary blog, Out of the Woodwork, where poetry and poetics are discussed.


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Salt

To taste your salt
sweat on your shoulders, arms, thighs
in ridges, winding estuary . . .
moist, fragrant, pungent juices . . .
but salt will remain after you and I are gone,
salt in stone, in shining crystal.
We are salt valleys,
we are dead seas
sowing barren lands.
Now I bury my head in your salt,
rejoice in your sea, rejoice in your cries—
though tasting you is tasting Babylon
Lot’s wife, fires raining down on Sodom.