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 | 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 | 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...
by Lindsey | Dec 17, 2020 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
By the third line of the first poem in My Heart is a Rose Manhattan, Nikki Reimer writes that her new work, this work, “is grief.” It is a grief that she will acknowledge again in the closing lines of that poem when she apologizes for both her grief and her new work....
by Lindsey | Oct 14, 2020 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
There is a sensual, affirming candor to the poems in Glitter & Fall, Winnipeg poet Di Brandt’s reimagining of the Dao De Jing, a text that dates from the fourth century B.C.E., but that remains essential reading for those interested in the Chinese philosophical...
