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.
Lust & Lace: Naughty Limericks from the Literary Underworld
Fun, filthy, and faintly poetic—because not all dark desires are dressed for mourning.
Welcome to the sultry side of verse, where meter meets mischief and lace slips just off the shoulder.
These aren't your grandmother's rhymes (unless she was into rope and riddles).
Naughty limericks have long existed in the margins of literary culture—part pub joke, part protest, part pillow talk.
Here, we invite you into the underworld of cheeky elegance: gothic, glamorous and just a touch depraved.
Because poetry is versatile; it can seduce, scandalize and make you blush.
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.