The current issue of Vancouver lit magazine Subterrain has published essays by writers Elizabeth Bachinsky and Alex Leslie on their BLACKOUT AT THE CANDAHAR project, an erasure-as-intervention experimental poetry response…
Category: Poetry & Poetics
Fragment of Lisa Robertson The Deviceby Benjamin Spencer I left Lisa Robertson’s December reading at the Atwater in Montreal feeling conflicted. At first listen, her work seemed tight, complex – even cold.…
THE EXAGGERATION OF DESPAIR I open the door (this Indian girl writes that her brother tried to hang himself with a belt just two weeks after her other brother…
With the Are Curators Unprofessional? symposium behind us, I would like to turn to the question of the visual art curator in relation to other media. Are there equivalents? And…
Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice,…
Last week I confessed to having an oneiric bookstore compulsion. I am also (predictably) drawn to libraries. Small and large, a collection of books will no doubt attract my eye.…
Michael Nardone: A lot of your work draws from an immediate environment, both landscape and peers. Thinking about where we are now—Open Space, an artist-run centre—and perhaps trying to locate…
With each of these columns, I’ve attempted to interrogate an aspect of writing by exploring a series of books I’ve pulled from my bookshelves. The question has repeatedly been: what…
In All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, Phil Buehler attempts to document, assemble and continue Jack Torrance’s manuscript from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. Conceptually,…
I’ve Died and Gone to Devon England is a small country, unless you’re driving across it. From the M3/A303 you’d think the whole country was countryside. The deeper into Devon…
Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists is up for a Giller Prize (the “darkest horse” in the race according to the Toronto Star), but she is also a poet, and the author…
SQ: Thanks for agreeing to a little exchange which will follow up where Damian Rogers left off last week. I was quite taken by your new book, particularly the spaciousness…