by Lindsey | Jun 7, 2021 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
In The Perfect Archive, Hamilton poet, archivist and librarian Paul Lisson stretches the boundaries of poetry and prose to perform an exacting/extracting critique of the archive. Reminiscent of Kafka, radical and irreverent, the archive at the centre of this dark tale...
by Lindsey | May 12, 2021 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Essays, Non-Fiction
Last year, the Covid-19 pandemic opened a schism that marks what many people now consider a “before and after.” The before: concerts, commutes, handshakes, birthday candles. The after: masks, six foot separations, grocery store line-ups, Zoom. March 2021 marks...
by Lindsey | Apr 23, 2021 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
Answering civil rights advocate James Baldwin’s call to witness, Valerie Mason-John’s I Am Still Your Negro: An Homage to James Baldwin, is an uncompromising account of the historic and ongoing trauma of the slave trade, gender disparity, homocentric norms, and our...
by Lindsey | Apr 12, 2021 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Drama
Eitan Zimmerman, the protagonist in Wajdi Mouawad’s play Birds of a Kind, doesn’t believe that chance, fate, divine intervention, or “other such nonsense” (6) determine what happens in the universe. Yet when he meets the young woman Wahida, whom he will fall...
by Lindsey | Mar 29, 2021 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
How do you choose the best in language and say this is the finest? In Best Canadian Poetry 2019 editors, Anita Lahey, Amanda Jernigan and guest editor, Rob Taylor, would have searched through thousands of submissions to discover why a certain poem would be enjoyable...
by Lindsey | Mar 17, 2021 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
M(other): “I’m foreign, and she is home” In de Meijer’s sophomore collection, motherhood is defined as a “submerged world” into which former modes of being are subsumed or filtered through (24). These lyrical poems have a quiet, expansive grace, allowing for judicious...
