Poet Cameon Wade on Creative Instinct and a Life Shaped by Story
Moving between the written, spoken and on-screen world, she is creating a growing body of work and personal style that reflects the same lived-in honesty
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Not every poet is easy to recognize.
There’s no uniform. No fixed setting. No single way the work is supposed to appear. No perfect moment or atmosphere. The muse turns up in trenches, and a working poet but be prepared.
Cameon Wade creates on the move, telling stories in real time that readers recognize themselves inside. Her work evolves as she does.
In doing so, she has carved out a space in contemporary poetry that meets people where they are, giving language to difficult experiences that often struggle to discuss and, in the process, making them feel a little less alone.
Here, we meet her in that movement, following how ideas take shape and how they are expressed, offering us a glimpse into the life of working poet, in real time.
Poetcore Revival: Letters, Journals & the Romance of Writing
For National Poetry Month (and beyond), rediscover the grounding ritual of writing words intended to last
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
A woman sits at the edge of a calm lake, a leather journal resting against her knee, while evening gathers around her like warm wool blanket. Across the world (or in another time), a shadowy figure leans over a desk, scribbling furiously by candlelight as though the page itself understands that certain thoughts must be caught before they disappear.
Regardless of time or place, time impulse doesn’t change; putting pen to paper claims an idea and anchors it to a moment in time, so that a memory becomes something you can hold in your hands. A portal to the past.
In a culture built on keyboards and disappearing messages, the act of writing by hand offers a more romantic rhythm.
For National Poetry Month, we invite you to slow down with us and return to the page.
Names in Shadows: 9 Women Who Wrote Under Male Pseudonyms
A gothic International Women’s Day feature reclaiming the women who concealed their names to claim literary legacy
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
History remembers the names that were permitted to endure.
For centuries, women entered the literature landscape through side doors, signing manuscripts with male-presenting pen names so their work could circulate without prejudice. Some adopted masculine initials to avoid dismissal while others built entire identities that shielded their gender from scrutiny.
This International Women’s Day, we turn toward those shadows to illuminate the lineage of women who succeeded by any means necessary, carrying stories that burned so fiercely to remain concealed, demanding their place in our hands, heads and hearts.
Sylvia Plath, Still Singing
Art, mental illness, the ache of perception
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Some poetry doesn’t age because it never belonged to its moment of conception.
Sylvia Plath wrote from a place that continues to feel familiar to anyone who has lived inside their own mind for too long.
Her work sits at the intersection of brilliance and fragility, without ever asking the reader to choose between them.
2026 Goth-Coded Reading List: 7 Books to Preorder and (Obsess Over) Next Year
The upcoming launches that deserve a spot on your nightstand next year
Cold days are coming, and honestly, that’s half the joy. Winter gives you permission to disappear into your room, wrap yourself in a blanket and lose yourself in a book that you have no intention of reading slowly. The world goes quiet, the light turns warm and suddenly spending an entire afternoon horizontal with a novel feels less like procrastination and more like seasonal self-care.
And 2026 is giving us plenty to escape into. New releases are dropping all year long; memoirs, thrillers, heartbreak, strange stories that stretch your imagination and demand your full attention. Some will wreck you, some will restore; all will decorate your night stand seducing you to devour it.
Consider this your curated permission slip to stay inside, brew something warm and let the titles take over your winter.
The Anatomy of Grief: An Analogy Through Poetry on Día de los Muertos
Loss reshapes the self.
This piece, by Meara Simone, explores grief through poetry, bilingual expression and the sacred ritual of
Dia de los Muertos, a time when the the veil thins and memory becomes a bridge.
Baroque Rebellion at the AGO: Jesse Mockrin and the Art of Feminine Agency
Through light, crop and intentional negative space, Mockrin challenges the stories surrounding women painted into obedience.
The gallery hums with the sound of breath held between centuries. Light pools against oil and linen, bending around bodies that seem to remember something the rest of us have forgotten. Jesse Mockrin’s paintings live in that hush — between devotion and defiance. Her brushwork recalls the chiaroscuro of the Baroque old-world, yet her vision belongs to the present.
Mockrin’s breakout moment came in 2020 when her Baroque-style portrait of Billie Eilish captured international notoriety, a work that merged pop iconography with Caravaggio-inspired drama. The image went viral for its eerie serenity – a siren saint reborn in a hoodie. It marked the arrival of Mockrin’s unmistakable style: classical technique charged with contemporary subversion.
Now, five years later, Mockrin debuts Echo, an exhibit including 25 paintings and eight drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario, on now until spring 2026. Echo feels both contemporary and timeless — a meditation on how myths around gendered violence persist beneath history’s gilded frame, until the story feels palpitably diluted, sneaking into our subconscious without setting off any alarms. Every canvas asks what moral survives when a story is told often enough to seem true. The work was three years in the making, realized in close collaboration with the AGO’s European Art department, its foundation drawn from Renaissance and Baroque paintings in the gallery’s own collection. “To study the past helps us to better understand the present,” Associate Curator Adam Harris Levine explains. “Historical paintings contain great beauty and tell us much about how we live today, but mask with their grandeur great violence. Mockrin draws our attention to these stories, because they offer insight into how and why society still expects women to be treated with cruelty.”
Ink That Outlives Us: Five Classic Poems Every Goth Romantic Must Read
There are some verses that do not age. They haunt. They seduce. They outlive.
For the romantic goths who find solace in ruins and rapture in the ache, these are your literary bloodlines.
The poems that read like slow kisses in candlelight, whispered elegies between silk sheets or final confessions scribbled before the blade falls.
These five works are not merely classics—they are heirlooms. Inked by hands that understood the exquisite sting of being human… and beautifully doomed.
Horror as a Love Language: Desire in the Dark
Not everyone whispers I love you in candlelight. Some of us say it in the flicker of a TV playing slashers, in the thrill of holding hands during a jump scare or in the way blood and lipstick smear equally across the mouth.
For some gothic souls, horror isn’t just entertainment — it’s intimacy. To love horror together is to share adrenaline and reveal the parts of ourselves that thrive in fear and hunger.
Horror, in its most decadent form, is already sensual: gasps, moans, vulnerability, the delicious mix of dread and desire. It’s no wonder that horror smut has emerged as a sub-genre, stitching together sex, gore and gothic romance into pages that pulse with danger.
Revisionist Memory — Rewriting The Good Ol’ Days
Memory rarely tells the truth. It isn’t a neutral archive; it’s an artist, reshaping scenes to fit the narrative we need. What was once unbearable becomes romantic. What was once a struggle transforms into grit.
This is revisionist memory — not a lie, but a re-vision, an alchemy that makes the past more beautiful in hindsight than it ever was at the time.
Ink, Ache and Intention: How to Pen a Love Note
A gothic guide to writing letters that bleed with romance, longing and the kind of words that the soul remembers.
In a world of vanishing texts and fleeting DMs, the love note remains deliciously defiant—ink pressed to paper, destined to be kept in a drawer, beneath a pillow or between the pages of a well-worn novel.
National Love Note Day (Sept 26) invites us to resurrect this ritual. For romantics, and/or anyone with an ache too heavy for the screen, the art of the letter is both spell and surrender.
Before we get into our how-to guide, we reflect on history’s most enduring love notes that remind us why ink endures where breath cannot.
Bound in Season: Fall/Winter 2025 Reading List for Every Goth Archetype
Although we are all darkly inclined, some of us haunt boardrooms in full black tailoring while others write poetry at 3 a.m.
Whether you’re an Heiress, a Dark Academic, a Brat or a Whimsy Goth, your bookshelf should be as personalized and iconic as your wardrobe.
Here’s your goth-coded Fall/Winter 2025 reading list, handpicked for each archetype—with new and upcoming releases, cult favourites and deep cuts that speak to your specific font of poetic shadow.
Kiss Me, Curse Me: Iconic Love Poems to Recite to Your Beloved
Hauntingly beautiful words to articulate your quickened heartbeat.
Love letters are an art. But love poems? They’re an invocation.
Whether you’re in the throes of devotion or teetering on the edge of obsession, there’s a poem for that. Throughout history, poetry has been the preferred weapon of the heartstruck and the twitterpated—used to seduce, sanctify or even scorch a former flame.
Below, we trace the evolution of love poems from parchment to plasma screen—and offer tips for crafting your own unforgettable prose.
Witch-Written: 7 Female Poets Who Hexed Us With Their Words
Some women write to soothe. Others write to awaken.
And then there are the ones who write like they’re reaching into your chest, curling their ink-stained fingers around your heart and daring it to beat truer.
These are the literary witches—femme sorceresses whose verses hex, haunt and seduce.
Whether whispering love spells or shrieking grief, the seven poets below didn’t just tell stories, they invoked something deeper.
The Goth Girl’s Guide to Canadian Poets
Canada is home to soul-splitting poetry composed by a host of talented poets from coast-to-coast.
If you’ve ever wept into your black satin sheets, scribbled in a leather journal by candlelight or whispered a memorable verse to yourself as a compass lost in thought, this guide is for you.
Whether you’re into slow-burning lyricism, sharp-tongued rebellion or grief in a black lace veil, these Canadian poets deliver the goods with gothic flair.
Ink That Outlives Us: 10 Classic Poems Every Goth Romantic Must Read
Love. Death. Longing that lingers beyond the grave.
There are some verses that do not age. They haunt. They seduce. They outlive.
For the romantic goths who find solace in ruins and rapture in the ache, these are your literary bloodlines.
The poems that read like slow kisses in candlelight, whispered elegies between silk sheets or final confessions scribbled before the blade falls.
These ten works are not merely classics—they are heirlooms. Inked by hands that understood the exquisite sting of being human… and beautifully doomed.
Love Hurts: 5 Poetry Collections That Will Help Heal Heartbreak
Because why shouldn’t the cure be as exquisite as the wound.
There’s something sacred about reading poetry after heartbreak. It’s a ritual in itself—one hand on her chest, the other tracing the curve of verse as if it might contain the secrets of her agony.
These five poetry collections won’t try to fix you. They’ll sit beside you in your silk robe, pour a glass of something dark and hold your hand while black eyeliner-stained tears stain your cheeks.
Because healing isn’t always gentle—and love takes its pound of flesh.
Each book below comes paired with a ritual or scent. Because recovery, like romance, should be decadent.
Notes from the Funeral Pyre: Poems About Grief Worth Memorizing
Because some elegies are meant to be carried in your bloodstream.
Grief takes many forms.
Unfortunately, it’s not linear, pretty, polite, predictable or easy to witness.
But, poetry? Poetry knows how to sit, steadfast, with grief.
In the wake of loss—whether of a person, a love, a dream or a version of ourselves—we often find ourselves without language to articulate the ache we feel.
Poetry becomes the balm and the eulogy. A ritual. A reckoning. A quiet companion when the house has gone still and the mind is in agony.
Below, we’ve curated a collection of beloved verses that know mourning intimately.
Some are meant to be whispered.
Others to be memorized—like spells—to carry in your mouth when memory presses too hard on your ribs and you can’t find words that feel right.