Narthex and Other Stories by H.D
Review by Dana Drori “What then is reality? Diamonds?” So wonders Madelon Thorpe in “Ear Ring”, the opening story in BookThug’s curated reissue of Hilda Doolittle’s (H.D) uncirculated prose, Narthex & Other Stories. The collection is comprised of three works: “Ear-Ring”, first published in 1932 under the name Rhoda Peters, “Pontikonisi (Mouse Island)”, published in...
Croak by Jenny Sampirisi
Review by Sarah Bernstein As I read and reread Croak by Jenny Sampirisi, endeavoring to find a point of entry, I thought at last: yes, that’s it. Thresholds. The bodies in Croak spill over their own bounds; they have extra digits or limbs or else they have too few or else those they do have...
Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard
Review by Alan Reed First, I must confess to not being entirely impartial when it comes to Eric Chevillard. He is already among my favourite writers, he has been for years. I discovered him by chance‚ I was a student living in Toronto when I came across one of his novels on a display table...
Skullambient by Liz Howard
Reviewed by Fenn Stewart not for lack of wolves or inside of wolves or besides the point of wolves Liz Howard’s Skullambient makes tracks across the landscapes of anti-Ontari-ari-ario; it meditates on the bleak & vivid spaces of a Canada that’s been built & nourished on appropriated land, trees, water, art. Howard’s scene is...
The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy
Review by Aimee Wall It’s such a cliché to speak of someone having been “ahead of their time.” And a little frustrating. We can only really ever say that in hindsight; it feels like the kind of praise that’s too little, too late. I started writing this review trying to avoid that sentiment, but in...
I see my love more clearly from a distance by Nora Gould
Review by Allison LaSorda Late last year, Russell Smith of The Globe and Mail wrote an article on Canada’s unlikely poetry renaissance; in it, he suggests an increasing interest in poems that are “just on the line between the lyrical and the full-on experimental,” recalling a bygone era wherein there was “a lot of nature...
2500 Random Things About Me Too by Matias Viegener
Review by Jacob Wren I am Facebook friends with Matias Viegener but have never met him. I have many Facebook friends I’ve never met (in fact, most of them.) I am told this is called being a ‘collector’ but I certainly don’t think of it in this way. I suppose what I think is that...
Cosmo by Spencer Gordon
Review by Karl Fenske Cosmo is impossible to tear away from without gushing embarrassing mawkishness. From a galaxy of personalities, a character is plucked and presented to the reader straight. One is led by a benevolent narrator through celebrity and nobody, helium pop and deficient art, all given equivalent currency. For all the presence of...
(NOT) GIRLS AND (MAD)WOMEN: Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines
Review by Heather Cromarty A little less then ten years after her first video, where she played the perfect conception of a virgin-whore, Britney Spears seemingly lost her mind. By then a divorced mother of two, Britney was for a short time uncontrollable, too wild, and unredeemable. She lived as a construction of our society,...
Hoa Nguyen’s “As Long As Trees Last”
Some years ago, during a seminar on Joanne Kyger in one of my favourite classes at McGill (“Poetry at the Mid-Century: the New York School and the San Francisco Renaissance”), my professor compared Kyger’s fragmentary poems to icebergs: “almost all of it is under the page level,” he said. They hint at larger meanings, to...
Lise Downe’s “This Way”
An old wooden sign points both left and right – on it written ‘THIS WAY.’ The cover of Lise Downe’s most recent book is cleverly a sign, both literally [a signpost] and figuratively [semiotics], a symbol for language poetry, that is, a poetry that resists any definitive meaning. Working as both clue and caution, THIS...
Two from Derek Beaulieu’s “No Press”
If you aren’t aware, Derek Beaulieu is a prolific artist who is extremely active within multiple art communities. No surprise then that his newest chapbook imprint No Press is just pumping out the jewels. What really makes No Press special is that Beaulieu curates work from big names and less big names he thinks [and...
