Reviewed by Robert Earl Stewart Oneiric Nyla Matuk Frog Hollow Press, 2009 63 pages, $36 (limited edition) “All nights are like postcards.” This line appears, rather innocuously, in “Barbados Hotel, Almost Empty,” the second poem in Oneiric, Toronto-based poet Nyla Matuk’s debut collection. Sandwiched between “a lone Panama hat / drunk at the bar” and […]
Archive by Author
Melle Mel Visited Jerusalem but Missed the Meaning
Reviewed by Alessandro Porco The Benjamin Sonnets Clint Burnham BookThug, 2009 60 pages, $18 Try as a poet may for objectivity, for the past to relive itself, not for his living the historical data, he can do only one of two things: get up a most brief catalog of antiquities (people become dates, epitaphs), or […]
New poetry from Lillian Necakov
The Human Hairpin Now this guy’s name I can remember what I mean to say is there is a thought sort of like a daisy chain but more like a paper clip chain willing its way out of me but I can’t remember what to say to you something about hawks and blue jays maybe […]
The Imagined City
by Amy Lavender Harris Things float into your head when you write. Words lodge there; ideas, images, whole paragraphs coming to rest the way driftwood accumulates at the lake edge after a storm. With the right collection of words you can create structures solid enough to dwell in. You can invent people to live […]
The Velocity of Escape
Review by Evie Christie The Velocity of Escape Jim Johnstone Guernica Editions, 2008 51 pages, $15 Jim Johnstone’s debut collection, The Velocity of Escape, is rife with peculiar, redolent detail. The jacket text points out for us the occurrences of “Siamese twins, circus performers, burn victims and scientists” and their uncommon link with “rhetorical science.” […]
Steve Venright on Mondo , Lenny, and the Generator
Not much new to report this month, so I thought I’d do a little excavating. Two years ago this July, I was interviewed by my son Kerry Zentner. He was interim arts editor for an online magazine called Mondo, and that’s where the text appeared: http://www.mondomagazine.net/art-f-aow-08.html Since then, I’ve contributed a couple other pieces to […]
Stuart Ross reports in on Mansfield’s fall list
It’s been a mad spring and early summer. While launching my own new book, the story collection Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books), in Vancouver, the Kootenays, Calgary, Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Red Deer, and Edmonton, I’ve been working, mostly remotely, with fall Mansfield authors Robert Earl Stewart, Jim Smith, and Tom Walmsley. After […]
Catherine Owen: On “siting” oneself and other fabulations
I’ve had my own website since 2003. Initially, it was a compendium of “everything I’ve done,” an exhaustingly unreadable mishmash of muses and manuscripts, photographs and pursuits. I even tried to upload each review I’d written, every essay, and provide a sample poem from each of my books. In 2009, while I’m still a technophobe […]
Pigeon
Review by Andrew Faulkner Pigeon Karen Solie House of Anansi Press, 2009 112 pages, $18.95 We know who Karen Solie is. She is the author of Short Haul Engine and Modern and Normal, which have brought her a fistful of awards and nominations. Solie was the Canadian judge for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize, and […]
Fond
Reviewed by Aaron Tucker Fond Kate Eichhorn BookThug, 2008 80 pages, $20 The modern mind is no longer asked to remember. As Google swallows information, repackages and archives it, the need for memory shrinks; it becomes far more important to know where and how to find a fact than to retain that same fact. Therefore […]
