Green Lion Journal is proud to announce our first ever ROAR Showcase: Candice Louisa Daquin. Over the next week GLJ will post Candice’s poems and her Q&A. Her work will continue to be featured on GLJ in the ROAR showcase until December 1st, 2022.

To be ‘indomitable’ by definition is to be impossible to subdue or defeat. Though all human beings are mortal, we all know or have known a person who encompasses this forceful adjective. To be ‘indomitable’ has nothing to do with the body, be the body frail or strong, large or small, male or female or between; no, to be ‘indomitable’ is to be of a spirit that forges on despite all fears, all obstacles, all terrain. 

As such, one can only encounter the indomitable through experience with the expression of an internal, unique self. A body may be fast, but it is not necessarily indomitable; a body may be powerful, but it may not be indomitable. The indomitable is only that which forges on by will, a control exerted, a desire brought to bear. 

Candice Louisa Daquin’s work embodies the indomitable. Through the verses one can sense the will and desire to forge forward, to be unconquerable, to be untamed. The iambic, the meter, the lineation, the enjambments, the marginals, the shape of the work, all these things are disregarded as mere incidentals; it is the indomitable that spears out. The brute force by which the work defies classical categorization is the work itself. Free verse and blank verse at times spiral into rhyme and mixed meter, an ecopoem can be as much a love poem or a confessional. Daring expression of the self, the commitments to one’s opinions, the vulnerability of one’s doubts—this is the work. And at its core, sits the beating heart of all meaningful art.

To forge ourselves into the future. To be indomitable. 

–RB