University of Alberta Press | 2018 | 136 Page | $19.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Jenny Haysom Reviewing the Shortlist is a weekly series in which poets shortlisted for our 2019 Book Awards review books written by their peers. Join us for this series until the award winners are announced on June 8, … [click for more]
Review
NEW Review Page posts
REVIEWING THE SHORTLIST: Ledi | By Kim Trainor
Book*hug | 2018 | 108 Page | $18.00 | Purchase online Reviewed by Jennifer Zilm Reviewing the Shortlist is a weekly series in which poets shortlisted for our 2019 Book Awards review books written by their peers. Join us for this series until the award winners are announced on June 8, … [click for more]
REVIEWING THE SHORTLIST: Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit | By Mikko Harvey
House of Anansi Press | 2018 | 72 Page | $19.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Jim Nason Reviewing the Shortlist is a weekly series in which poets shortlisted for our 2019 Book Awards review books written by their peers. Join us for this series until the award winners are announced … [click for more]
REVIEWING THE SHORTLIST: Listen Before Transmit | By Dani Couture
Wolsak & Wynn | 2018 | 90 Page | $18.00 | Purchase online Reviewed by Klara du Plessis Reviewing the Shortlist is a weekly series in which poets shortlisted for our 2019 Book Awards review books written by their peers. Join us for this series until the award winners are announced on June 8, … [click for more]
REVIEWING THE SHORTLIST: The Missing Field | By Jennifer Zilm
Guernica Editions | 2018 | 80 Page | $20.00 | Purchase online Reviewed by Kim Trainor Reviewing the Shortlist is a weekly series in which poets shortlisted for our 2019 Book Awards review books written by their peers. Join us for this series until the award winners are announced on June 8, 2019! In … [click for more]
Review: Little Red | By Kerry Gilbert
Mother Tongue Publishing | 2019 | $19.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Bill Arnott Grey. That was the day. Like most November days in Vernon, BC. Bundling against cold, I made my way from Sveva Caetani’s pleasantly haunted mansion across a downtown where I lived, worked, and grew up … [click for more]
Review: The Way of Haiku | By Naomi Beth Wakan
Shanti Arts | 2019 | 110 Page | $15.95 | Purchase online Review by Janet Vickers, author of Infinite Power (Ekstasis Editions, 2016) “Outside of truth there is no poetry” Uejima Onitsura” This quote, by Onitsura, is one that Naomi Beth Wakan uses to begin her introduction to haiku-writing and … [click for more]
Review: This Kind of Thinking Does No Good | By Alison Smith
Gaspereau Press | 2018 | 64 Page | $18.95 | Purchase online Review by Annick MacAskill Cerebral, funny, and insightful, Alison Smith’s third full-length poetry collection, This Kind of Thinking Does No Good, reads as an extended response to the feminist maxim “the personal is political.” Picking up on … [click for more]
Review: Homeless Memorial: Poems from the Streets of Vernon | By John La Greca
Ekstasis Editions | 2018 | $23.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Bill Arnott The first twenty years of my life I lived in Vernon, BC. I had a home. Which I usually took for granted. It was where I returned most nights, save for sleepovers and one night in … [click for more]
Review: Insomnia Bird by Kelly Shepherd & Fox Haunts by Penn Kemp
Insomnia Bird by Kelly Shepherd Thistledown Press | 2018 | 112 Page | $20.00 | Purchase online Fox Haunts by Penn Kemp Aeolus House | 2018 | 98 Page | $20.00 | Purchase online Review by Alice Major In two recent collections, urban wildlife becomes a context for … [click for more]
Review: Shards of Crystal | By Fern G. Z. Carr
Silver Bow Publishing | 2018 | 98 Page | $23.95 | Purchase online The Musicality of Stars: Shards of Crystal Reviewed by Cynthia Sharp. Originally published on Canadian Poetry Review’s Facebook page. I’ve been a fan of Fern G. Z. Carr’s work for years, whether it’s orbiting Mars or … [click for more]
Review: Practical Anxiety | By Heidi Greco
Inanna Publications | 2018 | 104 Page| $18.95 | Purchase online Double the Pleasure: Heidi Greco’s Practical Anxiety Review by Susan Ioannou When Inanna Publications announced Heidi Greco’s newest collection Practical Anxiety, it blurbed that the poems “dwell in the hearth of domesticity.” I was intrigued by the title, especially … [click for more]
Review: Checking In | By Adeena Karasick
Talonbooks | 2018 | 96 Page | $16.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Jake Marmer for Tablet Poetry, at its core, is a mystical endeavor: an encounter with the web of language that holds our consciousness. This is true even if the poem, on the surface, seems like a series … [click for more]
Review: The Heart of All Music: Poems about Music and Musicians | By Stanley Fefferman
Aeolus House | 2018 | 52 Page | $20.00 | Purchase online Reviewed by Penn Kemp for Bywords Convergence is a word often used to describe the reshaping of our world by such forces as the Internet. This concept also applies to Stanley Fefferman’s latest collection, The Heart of All Music, … [click for more]
Review: Writers North of 54° Chapbooks
Snow Feathers and Skunk Cabbage anthologies from Writers North of 54° 2016 | Contact Harold Fedderson at haroldfeddersen@gmail.com to purchase these chapbooks poems of winter and renewal Review by Lesley Strutt Whatever else we are, Canadians are a nordic people. Our psyche is shaped by our geography. No matter whether we hail … [click for more]
Review: Auguries | By Clea Roberts
Brick Books | 2017 | 104 Page | $20.00 | Purchase online Signs, Signals, Divinations: Clea Roberts’ Auguries Review by Susan McCaslin Clea Roberts’ spare, finely-crafted Auguries (Brick Books, 2017) is, as the title suggests, a scanning of the Yukon sky and landscape for signs and portents of mysteries both hidden … [click for more]
REVIEW: SISYPHUS: HAIKU WORK OF ANNA VAKAR | ED. VICKI MCCULLOUGH
Catkin Press | 2017 | 85 Page | $18.95 | Available for purchase through editor – inquire at sisyphus@telus.net. Review by kj munro (appeared first in Haiku Canada Review Vol. 11 No. 2, October 2017) – In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is punished for eternity – he must repeatedly push a boulder … [click for more]
REVIEW: FOX HAUNTS | BY PENN KEMP
Aeolus House | 2018 | 97 Page | $20.00 | Purchase online Review by Stanley Fefferman, also found on Opus One Review The way suburban garden fences are a line the fox crosses from the countryside to steal our chickens, is like the line fox, since time immemorial, has crossed … [click for more]
REVIEW: A GENEROUS LATITUDE | BY LENEA GRACE
ECW Press | 2018 | 88 Page | $18.95 | Purchase online Review by M.A. Mahadeo – Lenea Grace’s debut poetry collection A Generous Latitude is an intertwined tale of human interaction, love, loss, and the need for connection. Language transcends literal meaning to reflect today’s dating culture, I found … [click for more]
REVIEW: THE PANIC ROOM | BY REBECCA PAPUCARU
Nightwood Editions | 2017 | 96 Page | $18.95 | Purchase online The Prodigal Daughter’s Return to Memory: Review by Diana Manole Our shared Romanian cultural background has instantly attracted me to The Panic Room (Nightwood Editions, 2017), Rebecca Păpucaru’s debut collection of poems. I was keen to find out … [click for more]
REVIEW: THIS WOUND IS A WORLD | BY BILLY-RAY BELCOURT
Frontenac House | 2017 | 64 Page | $19.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Hannah Karpinski on Lemonhound 3.0: Belcourt’s body, which has been subject to marginalizing inscriptions against both queerness and Indigeneity, tethers him to a world in which “native means lonely and lonely feels a lot like dying.” He … [click for more]
REVIEW: POETRY THAT HEALS | BY NAOMI BETH WAKAN
Shanti Arts Publishing | 2017 | 104 Page | $18.95 | Purchase online Review by Terry Ann Carter Naomi Wakan’s poetry journey Poetry That Heals begins in her “middle years” with a two year stay in Japan. As she began to translate a Japanese friend’s book of haiku into English (with … [click for more]
REVIEW: OUT OF PLACE | BY KATE ROGERS
Aeolus House | 2017 | 65 Page | $20.00 | Purchase online Review by Lisa Richter “How I Was Invented”: Belonging and (Dis)placement in Kate Rogers’ Out of Place Place is a difficult subject to write about. With more obscure or esoteric subjects, poets can maintain a safe emotional distance, … [click for more]
REVIEW: TABLE MANNERS | BY CATRIONA WRIGHT
Signal Editions | 2017 | 88 Page | $17.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Julie Mannell on Vallum: Contemporary Poetry: It might be a stretch to call Wright’s poetry anti-Whitman because it seems both poets are driven by the urge to connect the body with the external world to show the … [click for more]
REVIEW: SIREN | BY KATERI LANTHIER
Signal Editions | 2017 | 80 Page | $17.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Hannah Brown on Toronto Review of Books: In this collection, the poet delivers rich combinations of imagery, much of it urban, and often at night, as in one of the most startling poems, “Guanyin Lamp.” Here … [click for more]
REVIEW: MAUNDER | BY CLAIRE KELLY
Palimpsest Press | 2017 | 72 Page | $18.95 | Purchase online Reviewed by Karen Hofmann on Prairie Fire: “Maunder” is a pejorative term for meandering speech. In this grudging landscape, where everything should have a pragmatic, immediate purpose, to maunder is to go against the grain or flow, at … [click for more]
REVIEW: TRAILER PARK ELEGY | BY CORNELIA HOOGLAND
Harbour Publishing | 2017 | 88 Page | $18.95 | Purchase online Review by Vanessa Shields – Hoogland’s Trailer Park Elegy, a long poem, is a lament that skids down literal and metaphorical roads of memory and grief, shock and love, and pain and forgiveness. It moves jarringly between the present and … [click for more]
REVIEW: VOODOO HYPOTHESIS | BY CANISIA LUBRIN
Reviewed by Geoffrey Morrison on Debutantes: Lubrin’s book is about the dislocated psychogeography wrought by that history, working through the displacements of the African-Caribbean diaspora from her birthplace of St. Lucia in the Windward Antilles to the United States and “that cold Victorian country” of Canada to the outermost fringes … [click for more]
REVIEW: WINNOWS | BY MAXIANNE BERGER
Imago Press | 2016 Review by kjmunro — To winnow is to separate the wheat from the chaff, & in Winnows we find a series of erasure poems mined from Melville’s Moby Dick. These poems come from the novel, but do not tell the same story. At the beginning of … [click for more]
REVIEW: FRIENDLY + FIRE | BY DANIELLE LAFRANCE
Talonbooks | 2017 | 128 Page | $18.95 | Purchase online Review by Cam Scott — Friendly + Fire is a capella pornography, a multi-vocal argument concerning the collateral damages attendant upon military aggression, where the exceptional conditions definitive of combat suffuse an everyday civic. “Honey, it’s not your ginch, … [click for more]
REVIEW: THE CHEMICAL LIFE | BY JIM JOHNSTONE
Reviewed by Chad Campbell in The Manchester Review: …In the corridors of these nested worlds we glimpse, like the wheel on the wall, the slow crash and delayed impact of addiction and mental illness across the sections of The Chemical Life. Divided into 5 sections of 6 poems each (the … [click for more]
REVIEW: SEVEN SUNS/SEVEN MOONS | BY MICHAEL DYLAN WELCH & TANYA MCDONALD
NeoPoiesis Press | 68 pages | $14.95 | Purchase online Review by kjmunro — This unique collection includes two sections – suns written by Welch & moons written by McDonald – followed by several collaborations on the same themes where the poets work together. A brief but helpful explanation at … [click for more]
REVIEW: COMMA | BY JENNIFER STILL
BookThug | May 2017 | 164 pages | $20.00 | Purchase online Review by Cam Scott — Jennifer Still’s latest is a tender document of writing-through: through a traumatic family episode, and through the text of another, foregrounding the bodily saliency of each. In the meticulous title sequence, ‘comma’ denoting … [click for more]
REVIEW: PETALS IN THE DARK | ED. MARSHALL HRYCIUK
Catkin Press | 76 pages Review by kjmunro — Renku is a form of collaborative linked verse poetry, with the emphasis on collaboration. Fifteen from renku master Marshall Hryciuk are included here. What was the selection process for this book? How were these poems chosen? How many more poems are … [click for more]
REVIEW: VIOLET ENERGY INGOTS | BY HOA NGUYEN
Wave Books | September 2016 | $18.00 | Purchase online Review by Cam Scott — Opaquely personal, spare but social, Hoa Nguyen’s writing more than most fulfills Louis Zukofsky’s mandate of a poetry arranging “minor units of sincerity” into shaped apprehension. Nguyen’s verse flits and fidgets by the phrase, conveying … [click for more]
REVIEW: HUE: A DAY AT BUTCHART GARDENS | BY TERRY ANN CARTER
Leaf Press | 2014 | 51 pages | $12.00 | Purchase online Review by kjmunro — Another success from Leaf Press – from the cover photo of the Dancing Fountain & the bright orange endpapers to the signature emblem framing the poems on each small page – Hue: a Day … [click for more]
REVIEW: BECOMING A HAIKU POET | BY MICHAEL DYLAN WELCH
Press Here | 2015 | $9.00 | See more Review by kjmunro — On the first page of Becoming a Haiku Poet, author Michael Dylan Welch states, “While too much information can also impede the poetic impulse, with haiku, as with other genres of poetry, it’s worthwhile to move beyond … [click for more]
REVIEW: INTO THE OPEN: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED | BY SUSAN MCCASLIN
Inanna Publications | September 2017 | 384 pages | $22.95 | Purchase online Review by J.S. Porter — For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things. You must know the animals, you must feel how the birds fly …. You must be … [click for more]
REVIEW: I HAVE TO LIVE | BY AISHA SASHA JOHN
McClelland & Stewart | April 2017 | 160 pages | $16.95 | Purchase online Review by Cam Scott — Aisha Sasha’s John’s third full-length book of poems begins at the beginning, as it were, with a salutation: The first knowledge is of our ignorance. Hi. (3) What follows is a … [click for more]
REVIEW: SILENT SISTER | BY BETH EVEREST
Frontenac House | 2016 | 116 page | $15.95 | Purchase online Review by Sue Bracken — silent sister: the mastectomy poems is a poetic journal of one woman’s particular detour in life, and it is an act of bravery in the telling. True to her moniker, Beth Everest has … [click for more]
REVIEW: THE FACE OF THE OTHER | BY CLARA A.B. JOSEPH
Interactive Press | 2016 | 78 pages | $18.00 | Purchase online Review by Sarah-Jean Krahn — Glimpsing the Face of the Poet through The Face of the Other As a scholar in post-colonial theory and literature, Clara A. B. Joseph is fiercely aware of the forced foreignness of the … [click for more]
REVIEW: BARBARIC CULTURAL PRACTICE | BY PENN KEMP
Quattro Books | October 2016 | $18.00 | Purchase online Review by Kate Rogers — The title of Penn Kemp’s most recent poetry collection reflects her urgent activist response to government announcements she thought could undermine Canadian diversity. As they campaigned to hold onto power in 2015, the Harper Conservatives … [click for more]
REVIEW: BIG MEDICINE COMES TO ERIE | BY D.A. LOCKHART
Black Moss Press | 84 pages | $17.00 | October 2016 | Purchase online Review by Kim Fahner — D.A. Lockhart’s first collection of poems, published under the umbrella of Black Moss’s “First Lines” poetry series, evokes a sense of place and history that reflects the landscape of southwestern Ontario. … [click for more]
REVIEW: LOOKING FOR LIGHT | BY SUSAN IOANNOU
Hidden Brook Press | 83 pages | April 2016 | $19.95 | Purchase online Review by John B. Lee __ Riddle Me This: Hypophora and the question as a device is the poetry of Susan Ioannou For his part, People’s Poet Chris Faiers writes in praise of Susan Ioannou in … [click for more]
REVIEW: THE STONE MASON’S NOTEBOOK | BY CARMELO MILITANO
Ekstasis Editions | 66 pages | 2016 | $23.95 | Purchase online Review by Bianca Lakoseljac — If Carmelo Militano fans have been longing for a new book of poems, The Stone Mason’s Notebook, Militano’s fifth collection, is a welcome gift of thoughtful lyrical exploration of love, of human existence, … [click for more]
REVIEW: ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS | BY PHOEBE WANG
>>From The Wilds, week 18; review by Terry Abrahams Bodies are difficult. Bodies of work often more so. Phoebe Wang’s debut collection of poetry follows several bodies—her own, her family members’, plants, animals, rivers, lakes, buildings—and asks them all a pertinent question: what does it mean to be admitted? Welcomed? … [click for more]
REVIEW: THE WITCH OF THE INNER WOOD | BY M. TRAVIS LANE
Edited by Shane Neilson | icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions | 377 pages | October 2016 | $40.00 | Purchase online Review by Susan Ioannou — To do justice to this 377-page collection of M. Travis Lane’s long poems would take a PhD thesis. As simply a poet, not … [click for more]
REVIEW: THE WAKING COMES LATE | BY STEVEN HEIGHTON
>>From Arc Poetry Magazine, Chris Doda reviews Steven Heighton’s The Waking Comes Late (shortlisted for the 2017 Raymond Souster Award) House of Anansi Press | $19.95 | 128 pages | purchase online In these excellent poems, Heighton shows how technical mastery can merge with acutely relevant subject matter to great … [click for more]
REVIEW: OTOLITH | BY EMILY NILSEN
>>From the Hamilton Review of Books, Canisia Lubrin reviews Emily Nilsen’s Otolith Icehouse Poetry / Goose Lane Editions | $19.95 | 96 pages | purchase online Otolith, Emily Nilsen’s new pastoral, wakes deep in the ear and channels the reader through the speaker’s multifarious experiences of grief, loss, the burden … [click for more]
REVIEW: BAD IDEAS | BY MICHAEL V. SMITH
>>From a review published in The Province: Mark Abbot reviews Michael V. Smith’s new poetry collection, Bad Ideas. Nightwood Editions | $18.95 | 96 pages | purchase online Michael V. Smith is a multi-talented novelist, poet and performance artist whose work has always been expressive and honest. His first poetry … [click for more]
REVIEW: ON NOT LOSING MY FATHER’S ASHES IN THE FLOOD | BY RICHARD HARRISON
Buckrider Books | 84 pages | $18.00 | Purchase online Review by Sharon Berg — Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people. –Spenser Johnson Richard Harrison has written an honest, poetic journal of his search for meaning during the aftermath from … [click for more]
REVIEW: FOREIGN SKIN | BY KATE ROGERS
Aeolus House | 84 pages | $20.00 | Purchase online Review by John Oughton — This is Kate Rogers’ third book, preceded by City of Stairs and Painting the Borrowed House. In this collection, her double(d) identity as a Canadian teaching at a community college in Hong Kong informs the writing. In a hectic, entrepreneurial … [click for more]
REVIEW: SERPENTINE LOOP | ELEE KRALJII GARDINER
Anvil Press | 104 pages | 2016 | $18.00 | Purchase online “Remembered Symmetris” — review by Aaron Boothby, excerpted from original publication on Debutantes. — So much swings on the hinge of what is remembered without being often thought of. To encounter a book titled Serpentine Loop, icy – riverine … [click for more]
REVIEW: LOOK AT HER | BY VANESSA SHIELDS
Black Moss Press | 106 pages | October 2016 | Purchase online Review by Ronnie R. Brown — In this, Shields’s second collection of poetry (she has also written a memoir and edited an anthology), the focus is solidly on women. It is Shields’ aim to examine, explain and investigate … [click for more]
CHAPBOOK REVIEW: BRIAN PURDY’S BLACK INK: PORTRAITS
April 2016 | Big Pond Rumours | 24 pages review by Bianca Lakoseljac — Brian Purdy’s Black Ink: Portraits is an eclectic collection of whimsical poems, each composition a moment in life. The poem “Goddess Sculpture, Greek, circa 540 BC” is a stirring contemplation of the liaison between the artist … [click for more]
REVIEW: A HOUSECOAT REMAINS | BY TINA BIELLO
Guernica Editions | 106 pages | Fall 2015 | $20.00 | Purchase online Review by Vanessa Shields — What happens to a family when aging and disease become its main storyline? In an attempt to keep the heart and mind connected, memories become medicine and hope sews them together. Tina Biello’s A Housecoat … [click for more]
REVIEW: WAITING ROOM | BY JENNIFER ZILM
BookThug | 104 pages | April 2016 | $18.00 | Purchase online Review by rob mclennan, originally published in the Small Press Book Review — MUSE IN AUGUST Her muse for poetry is an old woman. She declares this on an island in the wilderness—it doesn’t matter where as long as it’s either … [click for more]
REVIEW: TRANSMITTER AND RECEIVER | BY RAOUL FERNANDES
Nightwood Editions | 96 pages | March 2015 | $18.95 | Purchase online Review by Clay Everest — Raoul Fernandes’s debut collection Transmitter and Receiver by Nightwood Editions is an amazing collection that explores intimacy and interconnectedness. The poems are fragments, bits that are collected and re-purposed by Fernandes, like the friend from … [click for more]
REVIEW: OBSERVING THE MOON | BY SNEHA MADHAVAN-REESE
Hagios Press | 88 pages | November 2015 | $17.95 | Purchase online Review by Ayaz Pirani — In Observing the Moon Sneha Madhavan-Reese offers plain-speech poems unruffled by pretence. Gratuitous poetic moves are at a minimum in this tender, accessible book that keeps getting warmer in your hands. The first stanza of … [click for more]
REVIEW: A JAR OF FIREFLIES | BY JOSIE DI SCIASCIO-ANDREWS
Mosaic Press | 108 pages | September 2015 | $15.95 | Purchase online Review by Debbie Okun Hill, originally published in Verse Afire and on Debbie Okun Hill’s blog. — Canadian poet Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews collects memories like she collects sea glass along the shore. It’s her quiet polishing of word gems that first … [click for more]
REVIEW: A MORE PERFECT [ | BY JIMMY MCINNES
BookThug | 124 pages | April 2015 | $18.00 | Purchase online Review by William Kemp, originally published in issue 7 of (parenthetical). — Jimmy McInnes’s A More Perfect [ is the type of book of poetry that I’m secretly jealous of. It’s the type of book of poetry I wish … [click for more]
CALL FOR REVIEWS
As part of our ongoing efforts to promote and engage poets and poetry across Canada, the League of Canadian Poets is hoping to create a reviews series hosted here on our Community page. In time, we would like to develop a dedicated network of writers and reviewers who want to … [click for more]
REVIEW: TWENTY POEMS THAT COULD SAVE AMERICA | TONY HOAGLAND
Graywolf Press | November 2014 | $16.00 | Purchase online Review by Colin Morton — Don’t be misled by the title. Author Tony Hoagland doesn’t make unrealistic claims for the power of poetry to save, nor is it exclusively for or about Americans. Among the poems unpacked in these entertaining … [click for more]
REVIEW: MARLENE DIETRICH’S EYES | BY ISABELLA COLALILLO-KATZ
Ekstasis Editions | October 2014 | 128 pages | $23.95 | Purchase online Review by Josie Di-Sciascio-Andrews — A child’s wide eyed beauty transforms into a woman’s gaze brimming with wonder. Innocence and artistic sensibility, tempered by life and the myriad waves of experience, chisel away at the superfluous skin of … [click for more]