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. […]
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.
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 […]
SOME LEAVES by Gary Barwin and rob mclennan | Review by Bill Neumire
SOME LEAVES Gary Barwin and rob mclennan above/ground press, 2020 In a collection with a title that rings Whitmanian, seasoned collaborators with over 50 books published between them, rob mclennan and Gary Barwin offer five brief pages of poetry that come closer to feeling very Bradburian, examining the the collision of nature and the technology […]
WHERE BEAUTY SURVIVED: AN AFRICADIAN MEMOIR by George Elliott Clarke | Review by Giovanna Riccio
WHERE BEAUTY SURVIVED: AN AFRICADIAN MEMOIR George Elliott Clarke Knopf, 2021 Renowned poet George Elliott Clarke begins each of his books of poetry with an epigraph on beauty; fittingly, then, the title of his latest book is Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir. In keeping with the former Parliamentary Poet Laureate’s lifelong preoccupation with the […]
THE ELEVENTH HOUR by Carolyn Marie Souaid | Review by Steve Luxton
The Eleventh Hour Carolyn Marie Souaid Ekstasis Editions, 2021 Both the title of Carolyn Marie Souaid’s latest collection of poetry and the book’s cover graphic—the former warning that time has all but run out, the latter depicting a burnt orange moon overhanging shadowy, monolithic industrial buildings—threaten the reader with a premonitory, possibly dispiriting literary experience. […]
ONE THING — THEN ANOTHER by Claire Kelly | Review by Bill Neumire
ONE THING — THEN ANOTHER by Claire Kelly Review by Bill Neumire From poor to rich, small town to big city, East to West, Fredericton to Edmonton, Claire Kelly’s second full-length poetry collection, One Thing – Then Another, from ECW Press, travels Canada’s vast landmass in a restless search for settlement. Kelly, author of Maunder […]