2020
Review: Love’s Lighthouse by Anna Yin
Reviewed by Susan McMaster May 2020 Anna Yin’s new book of poetry has exactly five English words on the cover – her name, the title, Love’s Lighthouse, and the ISBN if you count that as a word. It is, however, covered in Chinese characters in red and black placed in both vertical and horizontal columns,…
Read MoreResources and Organizations to support BIPOC
The League of Canadian Poets is committed and invested in supporting racialized and marginalized individuals as well as amplifying their work in the arts. We hope that this list of resources, organizations, and arts-related reading specific to BIPOC and allies will be helpful in our mission to strengthen and support our inclusive and diverse arts…
Read MoreReview: Salt Bride by Ilona Martonfi
Reviewed by Vanessa Shields Martonfi’s fourth book, Salt Bride (Inanna Publications, 2019) is a collection of poetry that begs for companionship. This is not a collection for the faint of heart nor for the reader who doesn’t know her human atrocities his[her]story. The Salt Bride is a deep dive into the atrocities that have brutally…
Read MoreReview: heft by Doyali Islam
reviewed by Carole Mertz This review appeared June 2019 at Dreamers Creative Writing. A prolific history lies behind Doyali Islam and her approach to writing poetry. While we may not fully understand the method she applies, we can appreciate the resultant strength of her compositions and respect the idiosyncrasies of the format she created and…
Read MoreScotland Forever: a review of The Walk She Takes by Neile Graham
reviewed by Louise Carson Full disclosure. I don’t know Neile Graham, creator of the poems in The Walk She Takes, but I do know Scotland, the subject of the thirty eight poems in this book. I don’t know it as well as Graham, who has visited multiple times to my once. But I think…
Read MoreThe LCP New Quebec Council Representative: Carolyne Van Der Meer
The League is happy to announce that Carolyne Van Der Meer is the new council representative for Quebec. Why is poetry important to you? In the words of Quebec novelist and poet David Goudreault, “Poetry is just another way of saying” (“La poésie est de dire autrement”). I believe this is true—another way of…
Read MoreReview: Undiscovered Country by Al Rempel
Reviewed by Adrienne Fitzpatrick This review was first published in Thimbleberry (Volume 4, Summer 2019) Rempel’s book arrived in the mail in late August, in the still bright summer. I was still slow with the heat. It was deep into October when I first read through it and it was a good companion. This work…
Read MoreWhispers of Ancient Sounds by Suparna Ghosh
Suparna’s video presentation evokes an expat’s musings from across lands and borders and other incarnations, real or imagined. It was inspired by the event sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets, and the 2020 National Poetry Month, with the theme of “A World of Poetry” Here, she has searched through her collection of poems from…
Read More2020 Raymond Souster Award Winner: Unmeaningable by Roxanna Bennett
and the 2020 Raymond Souster award goes to… Unmeaningable by Roxanna Bennett (Gordon Hill Press) From the jurors: Where and how is meaning made in a body that interferes with its own lines of communication? Roxanna Bennett’s Unmeaningable is a powerful example of embodied cognition. Crafted with rigorous precision, Bennett’s poems bore into a linguistic system…
Read More2020 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Winner: Float and Scurry by Heather Birrell
The 2020 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award goes to… Float and Scurry by Heather Birrell (Anvil Press/A Feed Dog Book) From the jurors: In the rapid-fire collection Float and Scurry, Heather Birrell tackles parenting, patriarchy, personal politics and much more, often while driving the reader to laughter. So many of this book’s subjects and projects…
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