This past October I had the pleasure of participating in Margaret Christakos’s Influency class at the University of Toronto, an ongoing forum where poets lecture on each other’s work and interact with the students (Margaret actually has groupies for this — devoted students who have taken the class in each of its seven annual installments). […]
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Harmonics
Reviewed by Jonathan Ball Harmonics Jesse Patrick Ferguson Freehand Books, 2009 96 pages, $16.95 Harmonics surprised me. I thought I knew Ferguson’s work, from my time editing dandelion, where I published his visual poetry, some of which I used for one of the journal’s more eye-catching covers. When a friend at Freehand said she had […]
Torque on the Image: Receiving Damian Rogers’ “Paper Radio.”
Reviewed by Jeff Latosik Paper Radio Damian Rogers ECW Press, 2009 120 pages, $16.95 Paper Radio is the debut collection from Damian Rogers, a former arts editor at Eye Weekly and recent writer-in-residence at Open Book: Toronto. Over the past year, she’s maintained a conspicuous presence in Canadian magazines; her collection comes amid one of […]
Robert Earl Stewart Visits LaSalle’s Farenheit Festival of Fire
LaSalle, Ontario, is exactly the kind of buttoned-down town where you’d expect a festival of burning sculpture to have a snowball’s chance in hell when it comes to finding an audience. — Collapse Luckily for the Fahrenheit Festival of Fire, crashing and burning in a small town constitutes an unqualified success. The festival marks the […]
Jason Heroux visits Hotel Dieu Hospital
I’m in the Hotel Dieu Hospital emergency waiting room, waiting for my name to be called. It’s the end of spring, beginning of summer, and I’ve been at this hospital a lot lately after a recent operation to have an abscess lanced and drained. Today, as usual, the room is crowded with people in various […]
God of Missed Connections
Reviewed by Spencer Gordon God of Missed Connections Elizabeth Bachinsky Nightwood Editions, 2009 80 pages, $17.95 “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” So says Stephen Dedalus, famously, in Joyce’s Ulysses. To the speaker of Elizabeth Bachinsky’s God of Missed Connections, history can indeed be nightmarish — the hard facts of […]
Stuart Ross on what’s in store for Mansfield
The summer and lead-up to fall has been pretty frenzied at Mansfield. This week, three great books go the printer: Something Burned Along the Southern Border, the debut collection by an exciting Windsor poet, Robert Earl Stewart; Back Off, Assassin! New & Selected Poems (I love that title!), by Jim Smith, whose often outrageous readings […]
Catherine Owen on Weathering
Raining in Vancouver but on the edge of leaving here, flying back to chilly Edmonton today, then tomorrow driving the Yellowhead to a metal festival in Calgary for the weekend. Hard to write on the road, I find. I need the routine of black coffee, domesticity, a view of the berm from my window where […]
Christopher Doda Muses on Poetic Setlists
Over the Labour Day weekend I was lucky enough to spend time at a friend’s cottage in the area around Minden, Ontario. I was even luckier to be introduced to the nearby “World’s Smallest Bookstore,” a modest building on the edge of the highway with about seven upright shelving units. With low expectations of finding […]
In Memoriam: Kuldip Gill (1934-2009)
It is with great sadness that we note the passing of author Kuldip Gill on May 10, 2009, in Abbotsford at the age of 75. Gill was a contributor to our 2004 Mansfield collection Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets (eds. Rishma Dunlop and Priscila Uppal). She had recently authored Valley […]
