Snapshots
A quick look at the poetry world beyond CV2.
Essays & Reviews
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Formally Speaking: In the Pen with Pigheaded Souls
My goal in composing these pieces has been to honour gut reactions, however acidic, and to be entertaining about it. I have tried to assume that readers of poetry are smart grown-ups with overscheduled lives, who might appreciate a vigorous opinion. I haven’t felt especially hemmed in by the Canadian border; I have
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Review: Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain by Russell Thornton Throughout numerous collections, chapbooks and anthology appearances, Russell Thornton has engaged with a loosely unified group of themes. Whether one reads the early nature/culture explorations of The Hewed Out Light (1984), the verse travelogue A Tunisian ...
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Review: Archive of the Undressed by Jeanette Lynes Before the internet, before pornography was available with the click of a button, before womens’ naked bodies popped up in front of the unsuspecting web-surfer, Playboy was queen. The centrefold was the epicentre of legal, commercial, mass-distributed ...
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Review: How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir by Amber Dawn The book is divided into three parts: Outside (chronicling her life on the streets), Inside (working indoors, which is safer and pays better, and paid for her university education), and Inward (acting as a coda, containing reflections about love). The book ...
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Review: Correspondances by Anne Michaels and Bernice Eisenstein Beyond the power of the writing, which is reminiscent of Michaels’ acclaimed poetry collections The Weight of Oranges and Miner’s Pond, the book also acts as a physical metaphor of itself. “Forgive me, for beginning / at the end,” Michaels writes as she ...
- Salzburg (Part 3 of “Homestead: Venturing into the Poetics of Place”) A physical voice begins to sound. It sounds. It continues to sound, and then ceases. Silence has now come, and the voice is past. —Augustine of Hippo, Confessions I wander through the labyrinthine streets of Salzburg following an eight-year-old memory. Wandering, to be sure, as I reestablish my bearings, yet I do have a ...
- Introduction Translation is one way that cultures, languages, ideas formed through those languages, historical and social specificities are able to cross borders. This impact of the foreign others is often stopped at the Canadian border because translations of foreign works are hardly encouraged or supported. In an attempt to make such ...
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Review: Indigena Awry by Annharte Perhaps too much has been said about how there are more people writing poetry than reading it in Canada. In the spirit of Indigena Awry’s praxis-based approach to the problems it tackles head on, let me propose a solution: read this book. “But, there are so ...
- Introduction It's easy to picture a poet, marginalized by race, sexuality or another marker of difference, battling against the dominant culture, fighting their way in from the margins to the mainstream, and perhaps shouting to be heard. My experience was somewhat the opposite. I found a welcome mat and was rather hard to shut up. I ...
- Rathven (Part 2 of “Homestead: Venturing into the Poetics of Place”) The imagination of going home so frequently means going ‘back’ in both space and time. Back to the old familiar things, to the way things used to be… the truth is that you can never simply ‘go back,’ to home or to anywhere else. When you get ‘there’ the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. ...
