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Dispatch From My Couch

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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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Oneiric

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 […]

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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 […]

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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.” […]

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