News & Extras
The Perfect Archive by Paul Lisson
Jun 7, 2021
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 of illusion, deception, and the contingent nature of truth itself, is brimful of contested […]
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Best Canadian Essays 2020, Edited by Sarmishta Subramanian
May 12, 2021
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 one year of this “after,” and in many ways, the writing that has emerged during this […]
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I Am Still Your Negro: An Homage to James Baldwin
Apr 23, 2021
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 longstanding disregard for the environment. Among the Baldwin quotes in I Am Still Your […]
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Birds of a Kind by Wajdi Mouawad
Apr 12, 2021
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 hard for at first sight, he struggles to explain such a fateful meeting. […]
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Best Canadian Poetry 2019
Mar 29, 2021
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 and thought-provoking. The poem would have to be vibrant and […]
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The Outer Wards by Sadiqa de Meijer
Mar 17, 2021
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 ambiguity where certainty would oversimplify. The speaker navigates her new parental role and […]
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