Madelaine Caritas Longman is the author of The Danger Model (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), which won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in PRISM international, The Ex-Puritan, Vallum, Room, Grain, and elsewhere. In 2025, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded her the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature. She lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.
“‘River at Night’ responds to a painting of the same name by Matthew Wong (1984-2019). Featured in Wong’s gallery show, Blue View, which he had been working towards at the time of his death at age 35, River at Night (2018) depicts a nightscape using thick layers of oil paint in numerous tones of cool, saturated blue. Like much of Wong’s oeuvre, the richly-pigmented painting evokes both meditation and melancholy.
“Many have read Wong’s work through the lens of his experiences with depression and autism; I am often uncomfortable with these interpretations, both for their stripping away of individuality and for their retroactive projection of inevitability upon his death. As a neurodivergent person in my mid-30s, I see abundant cultural narratives of neurodivergent Genius (often deeply othering) but few examples of neurodivergent futurity. At the same time, I find it vital to contextualize artists beyond the circumstances of their deaths—to remember not only a person’s final moments, but their lifetime of being and creating.
“During a period of insomnia, Wong’s paintings offered an anchor, a focal point during the seemingly endless, unbearable hours. They were a bridge between dusk and dawn: a way to continue, minute to minute and hour to hour, when my mind could conjure no image of a future. Amidst this painting’s melancholy, there is also beauty, attention, effort, a moment of peace held out to the viewer. My poems attempt embody this experience of simultaneous unease and appreciation, visually replicating the painting’s layered appearance and the racing intrusiveness of sleepless thoughts.
“I am also indebted to Adam Haiun’s textual experimentation in his poetry collection I Am Looking For You In The No-Place Grid (Coach House Books, 2025) and to Misha Solomon for his generative prompt.”
