For Your Safety Please Hold On, Kayla Czaga. Nightwood Editions (2014). Kayla Czaga’s debut collection of poetry, For Your Safety Please Hold On, manages a balance in voice and tone that…
Author: gen rob
What does it mean for the subject of a poem to embody selflessness; to face death with contemplation and elation; to strive to see our screwed up world objectively, but…
Come Cold River. Karen Connelly. Quattro Books (2013). aaaaaaNot a door or a window left of that time aaaaaaNothing to walk back inside aaaaaaonly recollections of people scattered aaaaaaaaaaaaanameless or…
Failure to Thrive. Suzannah Showler. ECW Press (2014) There is a common thread running through these poems – fundamentally, the wry, desolate voice – but Showler’s dark debut collection reveals…
INSTANT CLASSIC, erica kaufman (Roof Books, 2013) “we can’t all be ballerinas, ducks, or robots / and we can’t all heed the ventriloquist and live / in the apothecary’s store…
Cecilia and I talked about her explosively polyvocal book of poetry Titanic; poetic methodologies; abjection; intimacy; Epicurean balance; rebellion against the normal tired format of the poetry reading; her performance…
Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence, Leanne Simpson (ARP Books, 2011) Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories and Songs, Leanne Simpson (ARP…
After Lunch with Frank O’Hara, Craig Cotter (Chelsea Station Editions 2014) In 1959, Frank O’Hara published “Personism: A Manifesto”, a tongue-in-cheek essay that, for all its cynicism towards critical prose…
Sonnets, Bernadette Mayer. Tender Buttons Press, 2014 Grace Notes for Bernadette * I might sing forever with never a goal nor solution * Full of luxury, grace notes, prosperousness…
Dear Alain, Katy Bohinc. Tender Buttons Press, 2014 Dear Katy, I wrote you once to say I was afraid to review your book because I’m afraid to draw the wrath of…
Malcolm Sutton (MS): Your new novel, Bunny and Shark (BookThug 2014), centres on a Playboy Bunny who is thrown out, in a most dramatic and violent gesture, by her long-time…
I guess there are certain things that one is obligated not to talk about in a book review, like one’s personal relationship to the authors of those books one is…