Paul Vermeersch, Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something, ECW 2014 Like Y2K survivalists and street corner preachers, Paul Vermeersch seems to insist the apocalypse has…
Category: Reviews
Belle: A New View of Eighteenth-Century Racism by Danielle Bobker Belle (2013), directed by Amma Asante and written by Misan Sagay, tells stories that are by turns deeply familiar and…
In an interview from June 2010, Canadian poet Gary Barwin expressed his discomfort with being labeled as a surrealist writer and performer. In the early twenty-first century, the term Surrealism…
Each English version of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal bears the mark of its translator; each one swings so wildly that sometimes a poem is barely recognizable from one version…
Things to Do With Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014) is full-throated and bursting. Published in April 2014 as part of TrenchArt: The Logistics Series by Les Figues Press, this is…
Twenty pages into The Goldfinch (Little Brown and Company, 2013) I started having chest pains, accompanied by shortness of breath. My wrist tingled. I figured it must be something I…
I have spent much of today mesmerized by online video clips. It’s the usual YouTube trail of one to the next, yet this is the future that awaits you too,…
Writing Surfaces: The Selected Fiction of John Riddell (Wilfred Laurier UP, 2013) is an overdue and timely re-introduction of one of Canada’s most radical, enigmatic media experimenters and fictioneers. Riddell’s concretistic,…
They say Your skin is blue because You are infinite like the sky and the ocean of milk You rest on. I wish my skin was blue. So begins the…
“After all: the ‘I’ is not to be expelled, but submitted to sacrifice.” —Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism In the current saturation of social…
There is a reticence in the sentences of Jessica Bozek’s The Tales (Les Figues Press, 2013). This is a slow and heavy read, a difficult text that requires sitting and…
Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Claire Messud’s latest novel, The Woman Upstairs (Random House, 2013), is by her own description one of those quiet women—middle-aged, single, dutiful—who live “at the…