War Canticles George Elliott Clarke Vallum Chapbook Series, 2022 35 pp I was married to a ghost on a mountain in northwest Seoul back in 1994. A trivial enough anecdote; I mention it to suggest that I might know a shaman when I see one. George Elliott Clarke is a shaman. […]
A Conversation With Frankie Barnet | Interview by Rosie Long Decter
Frankie Barnet is a Montreal-based writer. Her debut graphic novel, Kim: A Novel Idea, is an auto-fictional blend of real-world pain and celebrity fantasy that tells the story of a grad student trying to make sense of an online world and her own stubborn sadness. Protagonist Frankie spends her days scrolling Kardashian Instagrams, reading about sexual violence on social media, trying to help her boyfriend process the loss of his father, and talking to her vicious but infinitely wise cat Catman.
Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry, ed. Amanda Earl | An Essay by rob mclennan
It would be hard not to be amazed by Ottawa poet, editor, critic and publisher Amanda Earl’s incredibly expansive, inclusive and long-awaited anthology Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Malmö, Sweden: Timglaset Editions, 2021), a book funded, in part, through an impressive crowdfunding campaign earlier this spring.
I Wish I Could be Peter Falk by Paul Zits | Review by Bill Neumire
Invoking Willem Dafoe, Neil Armstrong, Ryan Gosling, Shia Labouf, Nicolas Cage, and Peter Falk while also tapping into American Psycho, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Instagram—Paul Zits, author of the previous collections Exhibit, Massacre Street, and Leap-Seconds—creates an ironic speaker who marauds the earth searching only its “Instagrammability”…
Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris | Review by Bill Neumire
Although Sylvia Legris’s sixth book of poetry, Garden Physic, opens with a poem titled “Plants Reduced to the Idea of Plants” which are then further playfully reduced to “woodcuts / (circa 16th century) reduced to Victorian floor tile,” this collection clearly accomplishes just the opposite: it elevates, celebrates, and even apotheosizes plants…
Who Am I (To You)?: A Review of David Bradford’s DREAM OF NO ONE BUT MYSELF | By Deanna Fong
Dream of No One but Myself David Bradford Brick Books, 2021 David Bradford’s Dream of No One but Myself sifts through fragments of memory, imagination, and documentary debris, trying—and necessarily failing—to answer the subject’s driving questions: “Who am I (to you)?” and “What do you want (from me)?” At its core, the book is a […]
OЯACULE by Nicole Raziya Fong | Review by Bill Neumire
Nicole Rayiza Fong’s second poetry book, OЯACULE, immediately announces itself as a different kind of reading experience–with a dramatis personae, staging, and theatrical dialogue, the collection embraces a hybridity of theater and verse.
PLUVIOPHILE by Yusuf Saadi | Review by Bill Neumire
Pluviophile Yusuf Saadi Nightwood Editions, 2020 Deifying rain and language, Yusuf Saadi’s debut poetry collection, Pluviophile (lover of rain), flows with a playful dedication to the music of words. In an interview with Ariel Gordon, Saadi said, “I don’t have a theory of language or understand it at all, really, but I do often find […]
RUSHES FROM THE RIVER DISAPPOINTMENT by stephanie roberts | Review by Bill Neumire
rushes from the river disappointment stephanie roberts McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020 Part way through her latest book, rushes from the river disappointment, stephanie roberts’ speaker essentializes much of the collection when she says, in “Now I Know,” “that first loss wakes the whole heart to its task / sometimes forever.” In roberts latest book, the […]