From Gentlemen of the Shade: Jen Sookfong Lee
RISK, ON AND SCREEN OFF At 15, when I first watched My Own Private Idaho, my sexuality was still a fetal idea. But even though there are few women in the film, the experiences of Mike, Scott, and their group of street hustlers carry many of the same ideas of risk that shadow young women...
From Al Purdy’s Storm Warning 2
In my reading around Al Purdy of late I came across a copy of Storm Warning 2. I would love to get the poems up too, but I’ll start with this amazing gallery of poets circa 1975. Please follow and like us:0
Lisa Robertson on Dionne Brand
In another place, not here, a woman might touch something between beauty and nowhere, back there and here, might pass hand over hand her own trembling life, but I have tried to imagine a sea not bleeding, a girl’s glance full as a verse, a woman growing old and never crying to a radio hissing...
Rob Winger on Al Purdy
The People’s Poet: Al Purdy as Organic Intellectual In recent years, I’ve been looking for a contemporary figure who might qualify as what Antonio Gramsci once hopefully envisioned as an “organic” intellectual: a grassroots leader rising up from the exploited masses to lead a proletariat revolution against the ruling bourgeoisie. But does – and could...
David Seymour: Eyewitness Testimony
Aside from having amazing production values, this little video includes the faces and voices of some of the most interesting writers huddled in Toronto at this moment…how many? Who are they? Who is watching who? I asked David Seymour how a poet came to make such a slick poetry trailer: I had two poems in...
What we, in Canada, have come to think is a review worthy of publication
Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne, eds. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009, ISBN 978-1-55245-221-9, 407 pp., $29.95 paper. Prismatic Publics is an excellently conceived and executed collection of interviews and poetry, but it is also seriously flawed. Okay, so we start out with the book is “excellently conceived and...
PANTONE 185C: A Poem from Jon Paul Fiorentino
There is a mostly red, cylindrical ashtray. Right there. On a picnic table. Concentrate. It is mostly empty. You will notice there is one half-smoked cigarette in it. A Viceroy. The red ashtray on the picnic table is in the park and so are you. Does the ashtray belong to someone? No. It did but...
Pulled off my Shelves #2: bill bissett’s Rush: what fuckan theory: a study uv language.
bill bissett’s work—for the past several decades—has been problematic. His lyrical voice is complicated by his complex idiosyncratic orthography. His concrete poetry intersperses dense typewriter-driven grid pieces with diagrams of ejaculating phalluses. Most problematic is the frequency of his books. Talonbooks has published a new bissett volume every 18 months for decades, and it has...
