Snapshots
A quick look at the poetry world beyond CV2.
Critiques
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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 ...
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Review: The Book of Festus by John Wall Barger Web-only content Festus, having forgot, woke, citizen in the City of himself. Festus was nothing, was shell, animalcule, glacial drift. Ages on ages roll’d over Festus. Festus uncurl’d to ...
- Abbotsford (Part 4 of “Homestead: Venturing into the Poetics of Place”) Sound travels up from the foot of the mountain, along gentle carvings of switchback and grade, to the rock-terraced garden below the balcony where I sit. A young doe and buck paw cool, red beds in the cedar mulch, then kneel and lie under the Japanese maple. Their ears move like small, articulating satellites: weed ...
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Review: Here Come the Warm Jets by Alli Warren I’ve heard that in a forest fire the Douglas fir sends out streams of flammable sap, ensuring the surrounding trees will burn and the nearly fireproof fir will have room to reproduce. The title of San Franciso Bay Area poet Alli Warren’s collection, Here Come ...
