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 […]
Waking to WAKING TO SNOW by Robert MacLean | Review by Jami Macarty
Waking to WAKING TO SNOW by Robert MacLean Review by Jami Macarty In mid-December, 2020, Eleni Zisimatos, the poetry editor and factotum at Vallum, asked me if I would be interested in reviewing Robert MacLean’s Waking to Snow (Isobar Press, 2020). Based on my experience that writing a reader’s response to a book I’m not […]
THE FOOL by Jessie Jones | Review by Bill Neumire
THE FOOL by Jessie Jones Review by Bill Neumire The fool’s manifestation in Jessie Jones’s debut full-length poetry collection comes as the speaker centers herself as an isolated sovereign, as an I fortifying itself against the world, which comes out at times as lonely, and at times as powerfully self-confident. According to the book cover, […]
PHILLIS by Alison Clarke | Review by Bill Neumire
PHILLIS by Alison Clarke Review by Bill Neumire In 1773 with her book Poems on Various Subjects, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a book of poetry. Hailed from New England to England as “the African Genius,” Wheatley, who was a slave, led a complex spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual life, inspiring generations […]
THE OUTER WARDS by Sadiqa de Meijer | Review by Bill Neumire
The Outer Wards by Sadiqa de Meijer (Montreal, QC: Signal Editions, 2020, $17.95, 88 pages) Review by Bill Neumire A hospital room, a distance from a city center, a defended outer enclosure—a ward is a removal. But then, of course, a ward is also a person in your care and charge. The Outer Wards, Sadiqa […]
THE MINUSES by Jami Macarty | Review by Bill Neumire
The Minuses by Jami Macarty (Fort Collins, CO: The Center for Literary Publishing, 2020, $16.95, 92 pages) Review by Bill Neumire According to Jami Macarty, “Even when there’s a minus—a dear one dies—life keeps living itself. This is the ethos informing the poems of The Minuses.” Macarty’s debut full-length poetry collection hovers through a prepositional […]
GHOST FACE by Greg Santos | Review by Eleni Zisimatos
Ghost Face by Greg Santos (Montreal, QC: DC Books, 2020, $15.45 CDN, 84 pages.) Review by Eleni Zisimatos Greg Santos is a poet of intense sensibility, who writes between the spaces of the concrete and the unseen. His book, Ghost Face, indeed embarks on the journeys of ghosts: the feelings or awareness that something is […]