by Marianne Apostolides I have a favoured reading spot in my home. Sometimes it glows like a mystical oracle, possessed of all the words I’ve absorbed there these past four years, since I moved into this apartment. (My place occupies the first floor of an old High Park house; my landlords live upstairs. She’s a […]
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Poetry on the Way
by Leigh Nash I recently started working at a new job that requires me to commute on the subway for half an hour, morning and evening, in and around rush hour. That in itself is disorienting, as I’ve spent the better part of the last three years working freelance, often not getting dressed before noon […]
Jesse Patrick Ferguson discusses Peter Norman’s poem “Playground Incident”
Jesse Patrick Ferguson discusses Peter Norman’s poem “Playground Incident”
Debunking the Myth of Newness
Gregory Betts reviews David Shield’s Reality Hunger Reality Hunger: A Manifesto David Shields Knopf, 2010 240 pages, $24.95 “89: If my forgeries are hung long enough in the museum, they become real.” David Shields — prize-winning author and almost New York Times bestseller — has a new book out that contemporary prose writers would be […]
From the Preface to Exit Interviews, a work in progress
by Jim Smith INSTRUCTIONS Take a name from Column 1, match it to the correct age in Column 2, and match that to the correct cause of death in Column 3. — Collapse COLUMN 1 bpNichol; Roque Dalton; Vladimir Mayakovsky; Federico Garcia Lorca; Jack Spicer; Leonel Rugama; Daniel Jones; Arthur Rimbaud; Paul Eluard; Ed Dorn; […]
Revisiting Di Cicco
by Denis De Klerck As a young writer, Walt Whitman famously reviewed his own work in the New York papers, describing the first edition of Leaves of Grass as “transcendent and new.” As it happened, he was right about himself, but in general it’s not wise to pretend objectivity when your bias is bound to […]
An Open Invitation: Moez Surani’s Reticent Bodies
Reviewed by Jacob McArthur Mooney Reticent Bodies Moez Surani Wolsak & Wynn, 2009 90 pages, $17 So take the tone of unswerving devotion the iambic heart and sound proclamation leave everything that squabbles. The woman you love will leave the man she is with if you can offer better carnival or thrill her […]
Jim Smith: The Match
I wish they’d had YouTube in 1787. Instead, all we have is a period illustration of a curious fencing exhibition match held on April 9, 1787, in Carlton House, England. The fellow in the red jacket is the Prince of Wales. He arranged such matches for gambling and entertainment purposes. It […]
The Certainty Dream
Reviewed by Nyla Matuk The Certainty Dream Kate Hall Coach House Books, 2009 96 pages, $16.95 A book about dreams, and about certainty, needs a Familiar. That is, it needs something the mind returns to and recalls, a touchstone that shape-shifts and interrogates familiarity and certainty, allowing readers to contemplate the opposite of certainty in […]
Jim Smith: Neruda Saves Lives!
What poet described Chile as a long, thin ship? Neruda. — Collapse What poet was nominated for the Chilean presidency in 1970, but in the end threw his support to Salvador Allende? Neruda. Same poet who 31 years before was personally responsible for saving over 2,200 lives. Neruda. Here’s the scoop. As the tragic endgame […]
