Snapshots
A quick look at the poetry world beyond CV2.
Critiques
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Review: Saint Twin by Sarah Burgoyne Through its adept use of the technique of bricolage and Oulipian-like language games, Sarah Burgoyne’s first poetry collection, Saint Twin, tackles themes of personal loss, spirituality, and the quest to make sense out of the absurdity of human existence. ...
- from Daily Meditations As a little boy who had no connection to his history or culture, his language or stories, his homelands and to the bones of his ancestors buried there, I was given an incredible and life-altering gift. My late Aunty Georgina. Through her I was brought home. I was brought back to my history, my culture, my language, my ...
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Review: Dysphoria by Shane Neilson Shane Neilson’s Dysphoria formally represents the titular disorder, dysphoria—a deep sense of unease with one’s self or one’s body—by displacing the traditional couplet form within the structure of the poems, producing internal rhymes that are regular but ...
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Review: Waiting Room by Jennifer Zilm In Waiting Room, the debut poetry collection from Jennifer Zilm, form is an expression of the moment. The poems declare their identity one form to the next, in the spirit of what Donato Mancini has called, “writing at the site of writing” (34). Meaning is ...
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Review: Get Me Out of Here by Sachiko Murakami Airports, like subway stations and bus exchanges, have their unique characters and movements, small, intrusive rituals, and a single equalizing feature: everyone is in transit. Around the world, one airport is much like another — the people within it caught ...
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Review: Once in Blockadia by Stephen Collis Once in Blockadia is Stephen Collis’s sixth solo full-length book of poems (he also collaborated with Jordan Scott for 2013’s DECOMP). It comprises five titled suites, two of which are a 12-page meditative poem (“Home at Gasmere”) and an even longer serial ...
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Review: The Significance of Moths by Shirley Camia Toronto poet Shirley Camia maps the immigrant experience through lyric minimalism and vivid imagery in her second collection, The Significance of Moths. Divided into six sections — “In the Palm of an Evening,” “The Portrait Unravelling,” “Humbled Knowing,” “A ...
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A Logos No One Can Agree On (Part 1 of “Groundwork: Tracing the Tradition of Rhetoric in Poetry”)
It's been about 100 years since a coterie of Modernist poets exiled rhetoric from poetics. There have been outsiders and outliers, of course, but for the most part, the Modernists have been so successful that the mere hint of rhetoric in a poem is enough for it to be castigated as non-literary. Poetic discourse has ...
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Review: Bird Beast and Lover by Arthur Adamson A Summer Man Light and contrast of light is the distinctive, stylistic feature of Bird Beast and Lover by Arthur Adamson. As with every journey of initiation, Adamson’s is configured as a transition between two places, a transfiguration, a re-birth or simply ...
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Review: But for Now by Gordon Johnston The late, and beloved, poet Margaret Avison writes, “Poetry is always in / unfamiliar territory” (Avison 27). I hope you can forgive me for opening a review of Gordon Johnston’s recent book of poetry, But for Now, with this quotation from another poet. I do ...
