Tanis MacDonald on Kathryn Mockler’s Onion Man
Onion Man, Kathryn Mockler. Tightrope Books, 2011. by Tanis MacDonald The individual poems of Kathryn Mockler’s Onion Man, which hover between a novel in verse and a long poem sequence, appear on the page in vertical chunks of text, rarely taking up a whole page or even venturing out into a long poetic line. One reviewer has...
Alex Porco on Victor Coleman’s ivH: An Alphamath Serial
Victor Coleman, ivH: An Alphamath Serial, BookThug 2012 I can explain my meaning best by mathematics.– Ezra Pound Since the late 1960s, Victor Coleman has been committed to innovative poetic practices—from the serial poem to performance poetry (e.g., in 1978, under the name Vic d’Or, he released the album 33/3); from projective verse to acrostics...
Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu
Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu, derek beaulieu, ed. Kit Dobson. WLUP, 2013. by Eric Schmaltz With the release of Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (edited by Kit Dobson), beaulieu has become the youngest author to have a collection published as part of the Laurier Poetry Series to...
Shannon Maguire’s furl(l) parachute
fur(l) parachute, Shannon Maguire. BookThug, 2013. by Eric Schmaltz Following up on her shortlist nomination for the 2011 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing, Shannon Maguire–proving herself to be a stunning new voice in Canadian letters–has released her first trade collection fur(l) parachute. Prior to this release, Maguire has proven to be most industrious, producing...
Julie Bruck’s Monkey Ranch and Steven Price’s Omens in the Year of the Ox
Monkey Ranch, Julie Bruck. Brick Books, 2012. Omens in the Year of the Ox, Steven Price. Brick Books, 2012. by Myna Wallin Monkey Ranch is Julie Bruck’s third collection of poetry published by Brick Books, following The End of Travel (1999), and The Woman Downstairs (1993), which won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry. Perhaps you...
Adam Dickinson’s The Polymers
The Polymers, Adam Dickinson. Anansi, 2013. by Rachael Wyatt This book attracted me, initially, with its use of polymer plastics as a conceit for drawing a collection together. Even before opening the book, possibilities abound: chemical structures are a beautiful, alien language and polymers are ubiquitous in everyday plastics as well as biologically, right down...
Amber Dawn’s How Poetry Saved My Life
How Poetry Saved My Life, Amber Dawn. Arsenal Pulp, 2013. by Heather Cromarty TO WRITE Given the task of writing a lecture on women and fiction in 1928, Virginia Woolf, while searching for first-hand historical documentation of women’s lives, found herself “looking about the shelves for books that were not there” (A Room of One’s...
Jocelyne Saucier’s And the Birds Rained Down
And the Birds Rained Down, Jocelyne Saucier. Transl. Rhonda Mullins, Coach House Books, 2012. by Adrienne Celt As I began organizing my thoughts for this piece, it became clear to me that a straightforward review structure – whether “summarize and contextualize” or “argue-summarize” or “summarize-examine-explain” – would not do justice to Jocelyne Saucier’s novel, which is...
Investigating “Empty Middles”: A Critical Review of Gail Scott’s The Obituary
The Obituary, Gail Scott. Coach House Books, 2010. by Martin Schauss Midway through the ludicrously lucid précis on the back of the folding front-cover of my edition of Gail Scott’s The Obituary (Coach House, 2010), I read the line: “But The Obituary is no whodunnit.” If you are familiar with Scott’s work, or have read...
How to Suppress Women’s Writing: Joanna Russ
Bad Faith Denial of Agency Pollution of Agency The Double Standard of Content False Categorizing Isolation Anomalousness Lack of Models Response Aesthetics I have been gathering found poems such as the one above for several years now. They are, in a sense, too easy and I’m wary of actually doing anything with them, but...
Heather Cromarty: on Pain Porn and Complicity
While reading Pain, Porn and Complicity my mind kept returning to that bizarre Stephen Marche interview of Megan Fox in Esquire. It was mysteriously bad. It was doesn’t-make-sense bad. At the time I thought Marche had played his hand early on in the piece, when he wrote “the symmetry of her face, up close, is...
Clint Burnham: Laura Elrick’s Propagation
Propagation Laura Elrick Kenningeditions.com, 2012 For better or for worse, there’s been a great deal of handwringing over stolen language – appropriation, collage, the overheard, the copied, the received. But perhaps it is not the stealing that is the big deal – or whatever verbs that mask that primary trauma (a trauma for some; not...
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