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…
J’Accuse by George Elliott Clarke | Essay by Dennis Cooley
An essay by Dennis Cooley on “J’Accuse.”
Rosie Long Decter, THREADS OF A NETWORK: A CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW JAMES WEIGEL
THREADS OF A NETWORK: A CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW JAMES WEIGEL INTERVIEW BY ROSIE LONG DECTER This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Matthew James Weigel is an artist of many disciplines. His work includes poetry, visual art, and scholarly research, projects that he weaves together through explorations of colonial violence and acts of […]
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 […]