by prfire | May 24, 2019 | Book Reviews, Graphic Novel
2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike. The strike lasted 42 days, involved around 35000 workers, and took place in the shadow of both widespread strikes in North America and worker’s revolutions in Russia and Germany. It represents...
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...
by prfire | Apr 16, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Graphic Novel
There is a tendency when thinking about the history of comic books to privilege the superhero, to reduce comics as a medium to the mystery men and women who fight crime in all their caped glory. There are both historic and cultural reasons that this happen—the birth...
by prfire | Apr 5, 2019 | Book Reviews, Drama
The uses and abuses of science in playwriting: a review of Hannah Moscovitch’s play Infinity Hannah Moscovitch is an indie darling of Canadian theatre, and her Dora-winning play Infinity reaffirms her reputation as one of Canada’s brightest, most ambitious...
by prfire | Mar 26, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
“Calligraphy”, the opening poem in Panicle, Gillian Sze’s most recent book of poetry, is a masterful distillation of the emotional work of poetry. In this poem, the art of calligraphy is deconstructed alongside the act of writing: the grinding down of the inkstick,...
