News & Extras
Season of Fury and Wonder by Sharon Butala
Apr 9, 2020
Growing up in rural Ontario, I was surrounded by parents and siblings but gravitated to the elderly, a grandmother and aunts and uncles, but especially the women, fascinated by the stories they had to tell, awed by the humour and wisdom they imparted. When I opened the book, Season of Fury and Wonder, the first thing I […]
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Mrs Romanov by Lori Cayer
Mar 26, 2020
In Lori Cayer’s fourth book of poetry, Mrs Romanov, she beautifully crafts an intimate and passionate interior life for Alexandra Feodorovna, the last tsarina of Imperial Russia. Perhaps because we are so familiar with her story–Feodorovna, her husband, Tsar Nicholas II, their five children, and four family associates, were executed in 1918 during the civil war that broke […]
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The Emperor’s Orphans by Sally Ito
Mar 16, 2020
People and landscapes inhabit our memory but when we want to recall them it can be difficult; we must either pull at them or ask someone, or rely on written records. And it is so with family. What do we remember of our grandmothers and grandfathers or of our distant ancestors? What stories did they tell, […]
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This White Nest by Frances Boyle
Feb 28, 2020
In the title poem of her newest collection, This White Nest, Frances Boyle poses the question “What shines?” This is the question that sits with the reader as they make their way through the poems, but others soon weave their way in, too. In “Tutelage,” Boyle’s keen sense of quiet observation distills itself into a question, when […]
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Against the Machine: Luddites by Brian Van Norman
Feb 18, 2020
Against the Machine: Luddites is Brian Van Norman’s third novel, and is a work of historical fiction that takes place in northern England at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The book follows the birth and progression of the Luddite movement, a revolution of workers who protested the adoption of machines which ultimately threatened their jobs in […]
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Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests by Ariel Gordon
Feb 6, 2020
I began reading Ariel Gordon’s Treed a day or two before October’s unseasonal and devastating storm. This storm, which dropped heavy wet snow all over Manitoba, had an immediate and destructive impact on our trees, trees that had been coming to life for me in Gordon’s essays and meditations on their place in our environment and their meaning […]
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