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please visit Prairie Fire Review of Books. - February 8, 2019
Where’s Bob? By Ann Ireland
January 28, 2019Pockets by Stuart Ross
January 15, 2019Believing is not the same as Being Saved by Lisa Martin
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All Reviews | Book Reviews | Fiction
Where’s Bob? By Ann Ireland
February 8, 2019 | Reviewed By: Will J Fawley
Ann Ireland is an acclaimed author of five novels, which have received and been shortlisted for numerous awards.
Read More…All Reviews | Book Reviews | Fiction | Poetry
Pockets by Stuart Ross
January 28, 2019 | Reviewed By: Will Fawley
A seasoned writer of both poetry and fiction, Stuart Ross has melded both forms in Pockets, and has created a brand new experience for fans of both genres.
Read More…All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Believing is not the same as Being Saved by Lisa Martin
January 15, 2019 | Reviewed By: Noah Cain
Believing is not the same as Being Saved, Lisa Martin’s second book of poetry, is a careful examination of grief, change and the lines between things. Read More…
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This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt
January 2, 2019 | Reviewed By: Dr. Ryan J. Cox
This Wound is a World, the first collection of poetry from Billy-Ray Belcourt, is an act of mourning. Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Book of Annotations by Cameron Anstee
December 20, 2018 | Reviewed By: Dr. Ryan J. Cox
Poetry, possibly more than any other form of literature, rewards the testing of its limits. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
29 Mennonite Poets—Edited by Clarise Foster
December 10, 2018 | Reviewed By: Shelley Marie Motz
I am not Mennonite. Nor is Clarise Foster, the editor who curated 29 Mennonite Poets, the first comprehensive collection of Mennonite poetry since the publication of Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Fiction
Bibioasis’s 2018 “A Ghost Story for Christmas” Collection
November 30, 2018 | Reviewed By: Lindsey Childs
Biblioasis and famous Canadian cartoonist Seth have once again released three Victorian ghost stories just in time for the holiday season. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Looking for Light by Susan Ioannou
November 19, 2018 | Reviewed By: James Gifford
Susan Ioannou’s Looking for Light charms and delights. It also feels like a final statement, as if it’s a summing up and a glancing back across the creative process. Read More…
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Grandmother, Laughing by Armin Wiebe
November 8, 2018 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
How a life is measured can take a lifetime of contemplation and along the way there are many questions, some that cannot be answered. What do we learn? Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Non-Fiction
Wisdom in Nonsense: Invaluable Lessons from my Father by Heather O’Neill
October 29, 2018 | Reviewed By: Erin Della Mattia
Heather O’Neill’s Wisdom in Nonsense: Invaluable Lessons from My Father begins with a piece of fatherly advice that must have sounded, Read More…
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The Fairy Tale Museum by Susannah M. Smith
October 17, 2018 | Reviewed By: Lindsey Childs
You find yourself in the forest. You know the one. It’s the forest where the stories you read as a child take place. A forest so green and thick, that it’s positively brimming Read More…
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Nuala: A Fable by Kimmy Beach
October 5, 2018 | Reviewed By: James Gifford
The flyer for Kimmy Beach’s beautifully produced novella Nuala advertises a dystopian future troubled with love, possessiveness, and envy—it lives up to the pitch. Read More…
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Not For The World Would I Compare It To Anything by Hannah Godfrey
September 24, 2018 | Reviewed By: Jennifer Ilse Black
Hannah Godfrey is a formidable storyteller, so much so that even a thoroughly academic dissection of the vagus nerve becomes emotive prose Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Non-Fiction
I Have Something to Tell You by Natalie Appleton
September 14, 2018 | Reviewed By: Jody Baltessen
As I read Natalie Appleton’s memoir, I Have Something to Tell You, I was reminded of a time in my life spent wandering toward a certain something I could not define, but that I believed was out there waiting to be found. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
A Mariner’s Guide to Self-Sabotage by Bill Gaston
September 4, 2018 | Reviewed By: Karen Hofmann
In Bill Gaston’s short story “Hello:,” the narrator tells us that, according to some Tibetan Buddhist teachings, guardian spirits called Protectors exist, whose “sole purpose is to promote our wakefulness” Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
The Heavy Bear by Tim Bowling
August 17, 2018 | Reviewed By: Caitlin Voth
The Heavy Bear is Tim Bowling’s latest novel and like In the Suicide’s Library (2004) its focus is on the ghosts of great male artists.
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Children Shouldn’t Use Knives by Shirley Camia
August 9, 2018 | Reviewed By: Karen Hofmann
Shirley Camia’s eleven spare, imagistic poems are so very slight—wispy, flickering at the edges of what children perceive and remember. Read More…
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The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories by Paulo da Costa
July 25, 2018 | Reviewed By: Carolyn Creed
The author’s subtitle, “60 Sudden Fictions,” illuminates much of what a reader experiences in delving into Midwife of Torment: Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Non-Fiction
One Bead at a Time: A Memoir by Beverly Little Thunder
July 13, 2018 | Reviewed By: E.D. Woodford
In a time of truth and reconciliation, One Bead at a Time: A Memoir by Beverly Little Thunder, is a book that should be read. This memoir is an oral account Read More…
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Slow War by Benjamin Hertwig
June 22, 2018 | Reviewed By: Noah Cain
Written with searing clarity and massive heart, Slow War is narrative poetry at its best. Read More…
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The Rules of the Kingdom by Julie Paul
June 11, 2018 | Reviewed By: Shelley Motz
I first came to know Julie Paul as a storyteller. In The Jealousy Bone (Emdash Publishing, 2008) and The Pull of the Moon (Brindle & Glass, 2014), Paul drew readers into vividly wrought worlds Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Listen. If by Douglas Barbour
May 30, 2018 | Reviewed By: Ryan Cox
Listen. If is Douglas Barbour’s first book of poetry in over a decade and includes work that was produced over a twenty year period. Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
What the Soul Doesn’t Want by Lorna Crozier
May 17, 2018 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
Reading Lorna Crozier’s poetry is always a surprise and a delight, and the poet does not disappoint with her latest collection, What the Soul Doesn’t Want.
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You Are Not Needed Now by Annette Lapointe
May 7, 2018 | Reviewed By: Erin Della Mattia
Witches and teeth, hippies and cleaning ladies, pregnancy and ghosts, tattoos and sex in a Saskatoon bus station bathroom Read More…
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In the Cage by Kevin Hardcastle
April 26, 2018 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
Kevin Hardcastle’s book In the Cage is not for the faint-hearted. Hardcastle takes readers into a part of society where poverty hovers and taunts at the shoulder. Read More…
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Bridge Retakes by Angela Lopes
April 6, 2018 | Reviewed By: Cam Scott
Re-reading A Lover’s Discourse in 2017, it’s hard not to consider how Roland Barthes’ impatient Proustian temperament in love might stand to update. Surely Barthes would be hitting ‘refresh’ incessantly, Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
3 Summers by Lisa Robertson
March 28, 2018 | Reviewed By: Ryan Cox
In her latest poetry collection, 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson manages something exciting: she captures the visceral quality of embodiment—and its corollaries like desire and materiality Read More…
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Frequent, Small Loads of Laundry by Rhonda Ganz
March 13, 2018 | Reviewed By: James Gifford
Rhonda Ganz’s day-by-day structure for Frequent, Small Loads of Laundry makes the reader think Wednesday’s child is full of woe. She is, but much more beside. Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Landfall by Joe Denham
March 2, 2018 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
When I open a new book of poetry, I always have the sense that I am stepping into unknown territory. Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Fiction
The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova
February 20, 2018 | Reviewed By: Erin Della Mattia
Like a demon wearing a porcelain mask that sits on your shoulder, whispering sweet crypticisms in your ear, Camilla Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet captures the alluring texture of nightmares. Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Maunder by Claire Kelly
February 5, 2018 | Reviewed By: Karen Hoffman
These are northern poems—scraps from the end of winter, out of a landscape of hard snow and mud, where “sewers plume,” tulips—and other hopeful, bright things—are “nipped by frost,” Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
I have to live by Aisha Sasha John
January 26, 2018 | Reviewed By: Kara Stanton
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar by Roo Borson
January 16, 2018 | Reviewed By: Carolyn Creed
Ever since I read her poem, “Rubber Boots” (1989), which I found in an anthology that would let me teach classic Canadian poetry to first-year university students, I have been enchanted with Roo Borson’s work. Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Non-Fiction
The Burgess Shale: The Canadian Writing Landscape of the 1960s by Margaret Atwood
January 2, 2018 | Reviewed By: Will J Fawley
The Burgess Shale is not a typical scholarly work, but instead a transcription of Margaret Atwood’s lecture to the University of Alberta Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
#IndianLovePoems by Tenille K. Campbell
December 15, 2017 | Reviewed By: E.D. Woodford
#IndianLovePoems, a poetry collection by Tenille K. Campbell, provides evocative, truthful words about love without silencing her Indigenous perspective. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Dead White Men by Shane Rhodes
December 7, 2017 | Reviewed By: Ryan Cox
Canada is so haunted by the spectres of dead white men that they almost seem inescapable, a presence so persistent as to be definitive. Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Fiction
Bibioasis’s 2017 “A Ghost Story for Christmas” Collection
November 27, 2017 | Reviewed By: Lindsey Childs
As Andy Williams once sang in his holiday standard, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”: There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Common Place by Sarah Pinder
November 17, 2017 | Reviewed By: Ryan Cox
Common Place, Sarah Pinder’s second book of poetry, is a challenging read. This is partially due to the subject matter at hand Read More…
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Mad Richard by Lesley Krueger
November 1, 2017 | Reviewed By: Dana Hansen
Lesley Krueger—A distant relative of the Victorian era painter Richard Dadd— creates a generous and thoughtful portrait Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Non-Fiction
From the Tundra to the Trenches by Eddy Weetaltuk
October 23, 2017 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
“To be frank, I have to say that the mission school, even if it was tough and I hated it sometimes, it was also like a second family for me.” Read More…
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Speakeasy by Alisa Smith
October 12, 2017 | Reviewed By: Caitlin Voth
Alisa Smith’s Speakeasy tells the story of Lena Stillman’s past as a member of Bill Bagley’s Clockwork Gang of bank robbers, Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
How Festive the Ambulance by Kim Fu
September 21, 2017 | Reviewed By: Spenser Smith
How Festive the Ambulance, Kim Fu’s debut book of poetry, is a startling exploration of the banality of modern life.
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Fiction
Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall by Suzette Mayr
September 11, 2017 | Reviewed By: Will J Fawley
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Shot-blue by Jesse Ruddock
August 28, 2017 | Reviewed By: Karine Legault-Leblond
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The Encyclopedia of Lies by Christopher Gudgeon
August 11, 2017 | Reviewed By: Will Fawley
Christopher Gudgeon is an accomplished writer in a variety of forms, mostly nonfiction, but is also well-known for his novel Song of Kosovo. Read More…
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All of Us Reticent, Here, Together by Stephen Brockwell
July 24, 2017 | Reviewed By: James Gifford
The cover says Brockwell’s All of Us Reticent, Here, Together will turn around family, detritus, and the everyday of modern technology. Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Every Night of Our Lives by Rocco de Giacomo
July 11, 2017 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
Rocco de Giacomo is the author of several books of poetry. Over the years his works have appeared Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Fiction
In Search of New Babylon by Dominique Scali, translated by W. Donald Wilson
June 27, 2017 | Reviewed By: Caitlin Voth
In Search of New Babylon marks Dominique Scali’s first novel, and one of W. Donald Wilson’s several translations. Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Little Wildheart by Micheline Maylor
June 13, 2017 | Reviewed By: gillian harding-russell
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Assdeep in Wonder by Christopher Gudgeon
June 1, 2017 | Reviewed By: Jonathan Ball
Christopher Gudgeon’s Assdeep in Wonder weds a raw, intense emotionalism to a wry, detached cynicism. Read More…
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For Love and Autonomy by Anahita Jamali Rad
May 2, 2017 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
The cover of Jamali Rad’s book depicts a building and an outdoor courtyard with slab benches. Read More…
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Tell Them it was Mozart by Angeline Schellenberg
April 3, 2017 | Reviewed By: Jonathan Ball
Angeline Schellenberg’s debut collection of poetry concerns raising children on the autism spectrum. Read More…
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The Effects of Isolation on the Brain by Erika Rummel
March 2, 2017 | Reviewed By: Bev Sandell Greenberg
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Hot Town and other stories by Janet Trull
February 2, 2017 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
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Running on Fumes by Christian Guay-Poliquin
January 3, 2017 | Reviewed By: Ronald Charles Epstein
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The Home Place: Essays on Robert Kroetsch’s Poetry
December 1, 2016 | Reviewed By: Nicole Markotić
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Poetry
Hermit Thrush
August 4, 2016 | Reviewed By: Lesley Strutt
It might seem that Mark Frutkin takes no risks in his fluid and lyric collection Hermit Thrush, but listen closer and you’ll hear the ominous vibration of a thrumming string. Read More…
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calling down the sky
June 7, 2016 | Reviewed By: melanie brannagan frederiksen
Rosanna Deerchild’s second book of poetry, calling down the sky, is a poetically and narratively powerful collection Read More…
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After Light
April 5, 2016 | Reviewed By: Joanne Epp
Catherine Hunter’s fourth novel, After Light, is an intricate family chronicle, a story of stubbornness and self-preservation, Read More…
All Reviews | Book Reviews | Drama
Martini with a Twist: Five Plays
March 9, 2016 | Reviewed By: William Kerr
Clem Martini’s volume of one-act plays delivers what its title promises: Martini with a Twist. Read More…
Book Reviews | Drama
Witness to a Conga and Other Plays / Harvest and Other Plays
February 9, 2016 | Reviewed By: Alan Williams
When I first encountered Canadian theatre, I was told a specific difficulty local practitioners faced Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
My Mother Did Not Tell Stories
January 11, 2016 | Reviewed By: Andrew Vaisius
Book Reviews | Poetry
Bite Down Little Whisper
October 15, 2015 | Reviewed By: Andrew Vaisius
It is fortuitous that I began reading a book on quantum theory while reviewing this book. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Mr. Jones
September 2, 2015 | Reviewed By: melanie brannagan frederiksen
Book Reviews | Poetry
The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
June 30, 2015 | Reviewed By: James Edward Reid
There is such density in Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry, and such a wide range of images and concerns. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
The Opening Sky
May 6, 2015 | Reviewed By: Sara Harms
As I read Reading by Lightning, Joan Thomas’s first novel, I felt grateful to my parents’ generation Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Leaving Tomorrow
March 9, 2015 | Reviewed By: Neil Besner
Aptly, the cautionary epigraph from Ecclesiastes (12:12) with which David Bergen frames this, his most explicit and richest inquiry Read More…
Book Reviews | Drama
The Miser of Middlegate
January 26, 2015 | Reviewed By: Dale Lakevold
Carolyn Gray looks back some 350 years to the French playwright Molière and his play The Miser or L’Avare Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Pluck
December 18, 2014 | Reviewed By: Andrew Vaisius
The first as well as the most lasting impression of Laisha Rosnau’s third book of poetry can best be summed up as “young-maternal.” Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Night-Eater
July 16, 2014 | Reviewed By: Andrew Vaisius
Book Reviews | Drama
Her Voice, Her Century: Four Plays About Daring Women
June 10, 2014 | Reviewed By: Hope McIntyre
Book Reviews | Drama
North Main Gothic
April 22, 2014 | Reviewed By: Dale Lakevold
Book Reviews | Drama
The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama
March 20, 2014 | Reviewed By: Dale Lakevold
In his introduction to The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama, editor Daniel David Moses Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Natural Capital
February 20, 2014 | Reviewed By: Andrew Vaisius
Jason Heroux’s Memoirs of an Alias surprised me with its brilliance. His ability to create images seemed bold, Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
ivH: An Alphamath Serial
January 21, 2014 | Reviewed By: Andrew Vaisius
Victor Coleman has been writing for a lifetime, working at the edges of poetry – never afraid to challenge any reader Read More…
Book Reviews | Drama
Metastasis and Other Plays
December 19, 2013 | Reviewed By: Dale Lakevold
Metastasis and Other Plays by Alberta playwright Gordon Pengilly is a collection of three plays drawn from a sizable body of work dating back to 1975 that Pengilly has written for stage and radio. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Boy
October 21, 2013 | Reviewed By: Andrew Vaisius
In Victor Enns’s Boy, family and locale figure prominently, as well they might when the topic is adolescence. Enns feels dearly about his sister, not as strongly about his brother, he desperately needs his mother, and Dad keeps a leather belt in his roll-top desk. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Firewalk
July 15, 2013 | Reviewed By: Gillian Harding-Russell
In Firewalk, Katherine Bitney writes poems against a spectacular northern backdrop of aurora borealis conceived of as a “forest of green girls” (13), with the stag at the winter solstice standing with the sun “mov[ing] lower, into his antlers” (37), and the ever-hungry wolf watching over the animal and human kingdoms. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
The Age of Hope
May 2, 2013 | Reviewed By: John Toews
Hope Plett, the protagonist of David Bergen’s seventh novel, The Age of Hope, makes her first appearance at the tail end of a misguided attempt at aerial daredevilry. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
North End Love Songs
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: Tanis MacDonald
Katherena Vermette’s North End Love Songs is a debut collection from an emerging Winnipeg poet, a book that combines elegiac and fiercely ecstatic melodies to sing of a complicated love for a city, a river, and a neighbourhood. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
What’s The Score?
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: Andrew Vaisius
It took me a while to figure it out, but now I know who David McFadden reminds me of – the late American performing artist Andy Kaufman. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Dancing, with Mirrors
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: Tom Schmidt
Book Reviews | Fiction
Leaving Berlin
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: Gillian Harding-Russell
The protagonists in the short-story collection Leaving Berlin are typically failed romantics who have been forced to change their perception of the world. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Mongrel
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: Bev Sandell Greenberg
Book Reviews | Fiction
Blood and Salt
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: Dave Williamson
In 1915, at the time of the First World War, the Canadian government rounded up male Ukrainian immigrants and placed them in camps. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Suspicion
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: Donna Gamache
Book Reviews | Non-Fiction
Always an Adventure: An Autobiography
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: J.M. Bridgeman
Always an Adventure is an upbeat and life-affirming story of one ordinary man who has made “a relatively successful career” (vii) and a happy, fulfilling existence for himself. Read More…
Book Reviews | Non-Fiction
A Woman Clothed in Words
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: J.M. Bridgeman
Embodied in a wonderful cover illustration, the title A Woman Clothed in Words is a phrase twice abducted, from a Szumigalski poem which, like a shaman’s robe, is itself woven from sacred flotsam, favourite lines from Patrick Friesen, into an homage to him, “The Thin Pale Man” (91). Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
There are many ways to die while travelling in Peru
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: Anna Mioduchowska
The main difference between travellers of old and today’s wanderers is that the former did not have to travel far from home to find themselves in a truly alien and dangerous territory teeming with shadows and tricksters. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
A Difficult Beauty
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
An accomplished poet with several books of poetry, David Groulx presents us with a new collection, A Difficult Beauty. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Dating
January 24, 2013 | Reviewed By: John Herbert Cunningham
Dave Williamson’s protagonist, Jenkins, is horny. His wife of many years, Barbara, passed away a couple of years before. And now, Jenkins is looking for love in all the wrong places. Will Jenkins find love or, at least, a cure for his horniness? That’s what this novel is all about. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
The Other Side of Ourselves by Rob Taylor
October 24, 2012 | Reviewed By: Gillian Harding-Russell
Rob Taylor’s debut collection, The Other Side of Ourselves – which in an earlier version won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for an unpublished poetry manuscript – shows considerable talent and imagination. Here is a poet who likes to play with a variety of traditional verse forms as applied to free verse: ghazals, sonnets, haiku, and lyrical poetry. Taylor has a propensity for striking metaphors that he likes to extend and mix in pumped metaphysical guise, as in “The Wailing Machines” and “What the Minister Meant When He Said Love Is Like A Flower.” Also, he is adept at analogy and allegory, as in the playful “Happiness” and the nightmarish “The Night.” Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
At the Gates of the Theme Park by Peter Norman
October 24, 2012 | Reviewed By: Andrew Vaisius
Peter Norman’s debut poetry collection covers a lot of ground without staking out any particular section as its very own. Norman rhymes a bit, messes with perspectives, fiddles with techniques, primps a tendency to lists and catalogues, and it all sounds refreshing and at ease. The writing is not laboured and only occasionally over-written. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
A Dark Boat by Patrick Friesen
October 24, 2012 | Reviewed By: John Herbert Cunningham
During a taping of the radio show Speaking of Poets, Patrick Friesen and I were discussing the trip he took to Spain in 2010, following an earlier one to both Spain and Portugal in 2005. Patrick, who doesn’t appear to do anything in half measures, was delighting me with his discussion of Portuguese fado music. If you’ve never heard fado music, you should. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Louis: The Heretic Poems by Gregory Scofield
October 24, 2012 | Reviewed By: J.M. Bridgeman
Finally, a Western Canadian, a Métis, writing about the mythic Western Canadian hero Louis Riel, whose first language was French and who was raised a devout Catholic. Father of Confederation for Manitoba, elected to parliament three times but unable to take his seat in Ottawa because of the warrant out for his arrest. Exiled, begged to return. Resisting armed conflict, turning himself in. Tried and, against the jury’s recommendation, hanged for treason. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
The Girl in the Wall by Alison Preston
October 24, 2012 | Reviewed By: Bev Greenberg
According to author Alison Preston, strange things happen even in quiet suburbs. In fact, her sixth novel spins such a tale. Winner of the 2012 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the book recounts the story of an eccentric young woman and an unsolved murder in Norwood Flats, a Winnipeg neighbourhood. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Valery the Great by Elaine McCluskey
October 24, 2012 | Reviewed By: Bob Armstrong
It may say something about Canada and Canadians that one of our canonical twentieth-century novels was called Beautiful Losers. And perhaps, in light of the 2012 Olympics, it’s instructive that as a nation we’ve focused so much attention on a soccer team that was, arguably, cheated out of a gold medal game, and a pair of triathletes who respectively entered their race with an injury and crashed spectacularly partway through. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
The Sometimes Lake by Sandy Bonny
October 24, 2012 | Reviewed By: Dave Williamson
Science and mathematics are never far away from the consciousness of the characters in this first collection of twelve short stories by Saskatoon’s Sandy Bonny. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Kalila by Rosemary Nixon
October 24, 2012 | Reviewed By: Donna Gamache
Kalila by Rosemary Nixon is the poignant story of a couple whose baby girl is born with severe medical problems, including an enlarged heart, very high blood pressure, breathing difficulties, and an undeveloped kidney. Born just under four weeks early and weighing five pounds, Kalila is transferred after three days to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the Foothills Hospital in Calgary, where she undergoes a battery of tests to try to determine exactly what all her problems are. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Drugs by J.R. Helton
October 24, 2012 | Reviewed By: Shawn Syms
The use of drugs is a fact of everyday life as well as the subject of significant literary scrutiny, ranging from the avant-garde to the conventional in both form and content. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
A Book of Great Worth
July 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Gillian Harding-Russell
A Book of Great Worth consists of a series of interconnected stories that centre on author Dave Margoshes’s father, Harry Morgenstern (alias Margoshes) and his Galician Jewish roots in New York. Although the collection has the distinct feel of memoir due to the inclusion of real names, dates and historical events that lend authenticity to incidents, Margoshes in the “Afterword: Listening to My Father” describes the stories as fictive for the following reasons: the first-person speaker of memoir is not always present; the focus is placed not on the narrator’s experience but on that of other characters in the story and, most importantly, events have been rearranged to make them function more effectively as stories (249). Read More…
Book Reviews | Non-Fiction
Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science
July 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Heidi Greco
A scientist, I am not. The closest thing to a science course I’ve taken in a long time was a requirement-filler at SFU, a delightful 3-credit offering that came to me during an equally delightful summer session. The course, which shifted my thinking – as all great courses should – was Physics for Arts Students. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Day and Night: Poems by Dorothy Livesay
July 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Mary Barnes
Day and Night was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1944 and established Dorothy Livesay as a writer. More than 60 years have passed since then and I wondered why the publishing company made the decision to print an anniversary edition. Upon reading the poems however, I realized that Livesay’s poetry is still relevant, particularly in light of present-day political unrest and economic uncertainty. Her poems concern themselves with the human penchant always to want more and the consequences of that greed, with wars and the unpredictability of weather. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Stopping for Strangers
July 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Dave Williamson
Victoria’s Daniel Griffin makes his CanLit debut with a collection of short stories that are mostly about the demands of relationships. It is rather unusual that four of them deal with grown-up brothers and sisters. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Shrinking Violets
July 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: J.M. Bridgeman
Personally, I’m attracted to skinny books, the way they acknowledge the limitations on my time, my immersion in a culture dominated by 30-, 60-, and 90-minute story times. And the way they whisper “poetry” without actually saying the word. These benefits accompany Heidi Greco’s 120-page novella, Shrinking Violets. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Hold Me Now
July 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Gillian Harding-Russell
Hold Me Now is told from the point of view of Paul Brenner, whose son was beaten to death by a group of homophobic young men who came upon him running naked in Stanley Park. Although Stephen Gauer in the acknowledgments mentions a real-life source for his novel, he notes that his story deviates from the original in some of its most central details, with even the age of the victim changed from real-life Aaron Weber’s forty-two years to the fictive character Daniel’s twenty-seven years. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Dying a Little
July 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Elizabeth Greene
Don’t think that because Barry Dempster has published four books of poetry in three years you can slide your eye past Dying a Little.1 This book is exceptional – carefully structured, beautifully written without a false word, taking us face to face with illness, death and grief, and turning back at points, to life. By the end, we have experienced the other world without ever leaving the poet’s home territory north of Toronto. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Small Change: Short Fiction
July 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: John Herbert Cunningham
Perhaps there are some septuagenarians out there who remember George Amabile as a fixture of the folk-singing circuit, but mostly he is known as a poet and retired University of Manitoba English professor whose work has been published in such notable journals at The New Yorker and Harper’s. There might be others who recall him as the editor of a University of Minnesota student publication who turned down the work of a Minnesotan by the name of Robert Zimmerman, or as someone who jammed with a former refugee from that state known as Bob Dylan – the two being one and the same. What they probably don’t know him as is a fictionista – and yet, here he is in that guise. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth by Stephanie Bolster
April 11, 2012 | Reviewed By: Gillian Harding-Russell
In A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth, Stephanie Bolster uses startling juxtapositions as a means for irony and to perceive the world from jagged, deconstructing angles. Although her milieu is urban, birds and animals, frequently from a zoo setting, inhabit her verses. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
The Odious Child and Other Stories/Shag Carpet Action/The Reverse Cowgirl
March 31, 2012 | Reviewed By: Bob Armstrong
We have all likely heard the criticism that Canadian fiction is too aesthetically conservative: committed to realism, prudish, backwards-looking, and dominated by small-town settings. Our dominant author of short fiction, after all, is so identified with small-town Ontario that the rural countryside beyond Toronto is known as Alice Munro Country. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
What the Bear Said: Skald Tales of New Iceland by W.D. Valgardson
March 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Sally Ito
What the Bear Said: Skald Tales of New Iceland is a collection of fourteen tales by W.D. Valgardson. Told in the compelling voice of a seasoned story-maker, the tales bring to life the ‘folk’ ways of the early settlers in the Icelandic Canadian community in Manitoba. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling by Eden Robinson
March 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: J.M. Bridgeman
Heiltsuk/Haisla/Canadian writer Eden Robinson is a storyteller who bears witness and educates as she entertains. Like her award-winning fiction, the stories in The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling sparkle with Robinson’s self-deprecating humour as she tells of who she is as an individual and of how she is connected. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Hordes of Writing by Chus Pato; translated by Erín Moure
March 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: John Herbert Cunningham
Erín Moure’s translating career can be considered on two planes. The first, the one she began in 2000 in collaboration with Robert Majzels, was the translation of domestic works which, in this case, involved Nicole Brossard’s Installations. Two further translations of Brossard’s works, with Majzels as collaborator, appeared Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
High Speed Crow by Sheila McClarty
March 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Donna Gamache
High Speed Crow is a first collection of short stories by Manitoba writer Sheila McClarty. It was the winner of the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book at the 2011 Manitoba Book Awards. As such, it deserved my attention, and I am happy I read it. This is an author whom I’ll watch for again. Read More…
Book Reviews | Fiction
Pretty by Greg Kearney
March 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Dave Williamson
Toronto’s Greg Kearney has a laconic style that is well suited to his subject matter, be it sex comedy or serious issue. His considerable talent is on display in a new collection of eleven short stories called Pretty. His shock tactics gradually become less shocking and more predictable, but he offers up a variety of distinct and believable characters in sometimes comic, always real, situations. Read More…
Book Reviews | Poetry
Outskirts by Sue Goyette
March 17, 2012 | Reviewed By: Anna Mioduchowska
I am delighted with the new poetry collection from this Nova Scotia poet who stole so many hearts when she launched her first book, The True Names of Birds, in 1998. Firmly rooted in Nova Scotia’s natural environment and culture, the poems in Outskirts feel quite at home in my urban prairie setting. As I feel in Gus’s Pub. Read More…