by prfire | Aug 1, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
In The Year of No Summer, Rachel Lebowitz weaves history, mythology, folklore and personal experience into a vibrant lyric essay. Letters from the frontlines of World War I, grim tales about famine, Greek legends, reflections on tourism, museums, and motherhood are...
by prfire | Jul 22, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Theatre
In Indian Act: Residential School Plays, Donna-Michelle St. Bernard (Ed.) calls the residential school system a “dark spectre” upon the Canadian landscape (pg. x) The system of residential schools that existed for 150 years until the last school closed in 1996 has...
by prfire | Jun 20, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
The Air is Elastic, Ella Zeltserman’s second poetry collection, is a yearning journey through time and space. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment is her ability to vividly capture the essence of the collection’s many locales which include Cold War Soviet Russia...
by prfire | Jun 6, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Marriage. We make jokes about it. We have names for it such as jumping the broom, vows, a socially recognized union, a sanctioned contract. A match. But what does a marriage entail? Celebration. Despair. Or more. Early in Kathy Page’s novel, Dear Evelyn, David...
by prfire | May 14, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction
Shawna Lemay’s The flower can always be changing opens with an essay on the life and death and life of flowers filmed in time lapse photography. She writes, “The colours. The fading. The beauty of decline, the simplicity. All of the attendant moods arrive and pass in...
by prfire | Apr 29, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction
Bird-Bent Grass isn’t what I expected it would be. I thought: a memoir about a mother’s Alzheimer’s and a daughter’s three-year sojourn in Uganda in the mid-to-late-eighties—by a Canadian woman writer who is just my age and in the exact same professional role—now...
