Reviewed by Alisha Kaplan Eye Lake Tristan Hughes Coach House Books, 2011 208 pages, $19.95 Where the Lost Things Are: A Review of Tristan Hughes’ Eye Lake Eye Lake is Tristan Hughes’ heartbreaking portrait of Crooked River, a declining iron ore town in Northern Ontario, and of a deceptively simple young man weighed […]
Book Reviews
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Book review: The Reinvention of the Human Hand
Reviewed by Peter Norman The Reinvention of the Human Hand Paul Vermeersch McClelland & Stewart, 2010 88 pages, $18.99 Created more than 17,000 years ago, the cave paintings at Lascaux depict hundreds of animals. The purpose of the images is unknown: their significance may have been religious or shamanistic, or possibly scientific […]
Mammoth
Reviewed by Spencer Gordon Mammoth Larissa Andrusyshyn DC Books, 2010 88 pages, $16.95 It’s not difficult to explain the enduring fascination of Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds exhibits. Using a technique called Plastination—a strange, exciting innovation in the field of anatomical preservation—the good scientist has erected a gallery of authentic human specimens arranged in lifelike […]
“But Never in this World is Odysseus Dead”: On David W. McFadden
by Alessandro Porco Why Are You So Long and Sweet? Collected Long Poems of David W. Mcfadden David W. McFadden Insomniac Press, 2010 240 pages, $19.95 You should be able to see a poet’s mind turning over, you should be able to know what he is thinking at all times … – The Poet’s Progress […]
Reviewed by Spencer Gordon Coming Ashore on Fire Michael Dennis Burnt Wine Press, 2009 135 pages, $16
Reviewed by Spencer Gordon Coming Ashore on Fire Michael Dennis Burnt Wine Press, 2009 135 pages, $16 Now these are poems I could get into, says my partner, who’s been reading Michael Dennis’s latest collection while I’ve been making dinner. They’re direct, easy to understand, emotional, she continues. They make me feel something, but it’s […]
Unleashed
by Melanie Janisse Unleashed Sina Queyras BookThug, 2009 168 pages, $20 “What would happen if critics chose to write from a position of wonder instead?” — Sina Queyras, Unleashed Dear Sina, My friend Ross McKie has been after me to read your book for some time now. So, when Denis asked me to review it […]
Guys Do It All the Time: On Meaghan Strimas’s A Good Time Had By All
Reviewed by Alessandro Porco A Good Time Had By All Meaghan Strimas Exile, 2010 88 pages, $18.95 Let’s just get this out of the way: I’m really digging Meaghan Strimas’s A Good Time Had by All (Exile, 2010). It’s a book filled with consistently good poems and a small few that are as high-quality as […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
