Verse « Buried In Print

Kim Echlin’s Inanna (2003)

“I like telling stories of women who act on their passions.”

“I like these strong female characters.”

“When I talk with readers I feel an enormous appetite in women to explore both their strength and their emotional connectedness, which still tend not to be honoured in the dominant culture.”*

Any one of these statements would [...]

On Reading Margaret Atwood’s The Circle Game (1966)

“If you think you understand what you see on the surface, caution Atwood’s fathomless parentheticals, keep looking.”

1966; House of Anansi, 2012

So says Suzanne Buffam in her introduction to the new AList edition of this classic Canlit work.

(And don’t you love the word ‘parentheticals’?)

I’m not sure that I *do* understand what [...]

Heather McHugh’s Upgraded to Serious (2009)

Please don’t go.

House of Anansi, 2009

Not because it’s poetry.

Just watch this video.

It’s only a minute long.

And know that I’m not a “poetry person”.

So that makes it more inviting, right?

That you don’t need a special gift to watch this?

(Unless you are a “poetry person”, in which case [...]

A White Man’s Whip into a Black Man’s Hammer

With lead type and a hand press: that’s how Gaspereau Press originally produced this collection of poems, in the old-fashioned way.

Even the trade edition is the sort of book which makes you want to run your fingers across the page, not simply hold it by the edges, and, yet, simultaneously, it makes you want to [...]

Weekend Sampler: Featuring Edward Riche’s Easy to Like

“Reality is for people who can’t handle fiction — and that is mostly everybody.”

Elliot Johnson has been writing screenplays in LA, but he’s been having trouble selling his fictions.

House of Anansi, 2011

That’s Elliot Johnson.

Or Elliot Johnston, or Elliot Jonson: it depends which document you’re looking at.

His identity is in [...]

Sniffling in the Toronto Reference Library

Suzanne Robertson’s Paramita, Little Black has been nominated for the 2012 Toronto Book Award.

And lucky for me, because I would not have read this slim volume of verse had it not been.

Lucky for me, because it’s another reminder that poetry doesn’t have to be this far-away thing that other people — smarter people [...]

Memory, regret, dying, avalanches: quintessential Canlit

Dundurn, 2012

The ReLit shortlist was announced earlier this week, but I’m still reading from the longlist.

Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn) was also nominated for the Toronto Book Award.

That’s fitting because the setting plays an important role in this story, but much of the drama is interior, unfolding in geography defined by [...]

Weekend Sampler: Hoogland, Griffin and Burgess

Today’s bookish chatter: featuring Cornelia Hoogland’s Woods Wolf Girl and two snack-sized servings of Daniel Griffin’s Stopping for Strangers and Tony Burgess’ Idaho Winter.

Wolsak & Wynn, 2011

Cornelia Hoogland’s Woods Wolf Girl is a page-turner of a poetry collection.

Even if you are already familiar with the roots of the Red Hiding Hood tale, told [...]

Weekend Sampler: On a Bookish Plate

In today’s bookish chatter: a plateful of Rosemary Nixon’s Kalila and two snack-sized servings of Britt Holmström’s Leaving Berlin and George Elliot Clarke’s Red.

Goose Lane Editions, 2011

If Rosemary Nixon’s Kalila came with a cover summary, many readers would put the book aside.

And, yet, only a few pages into the story, the reader is [...]

Olive Senior’s Shell: Gold within

A dozen years ago, Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics was on my list of favourite books for that reading year.

Insomniac Press, 2007

Afterwards, I read some short stories (Discerner of Hearts is wonderful), but I lost track of her work, and hadn’t even realized the extent of it until I heard her read from [...]