Reviewed by Marguerite Pigeon Pests lurk through the pages of Laura Zacharin’s assured first collection, including lice and the titular moths. Nagging, unsettling, preoccupying to the point of distraction, these domestic nuisances are symptomatic—but of what? An unnamed woman in the poem “Common Brown House Moths” can’t shake a dread that builds into physical distress.…

Reviewed by Louise Carson You know a book of poetry has possibilities when the opening epigraph is seven lines from W.S. Merwin’s ‘Ancient World’, which function as a kind of extended haiku, beginning, “Orange sunset/In the deep shell of summer” and ending with “…the sound of a door closing/And at once I am older”. And…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Reviewed by Marguerite Pigeon Treaty # opens with a prose poem, “Impetus Ungainly,” in which Armand Garnet Ruffo manipulates language from a 1905 treaty between the British Crown and Ojibwe, Cree and members of other Indigenous groups in Ontario. The poem’s title hints, bitingly, at the treaty’s function. It was the legal body that enforced…

Reviewed by Miles Morrisseau Janet Marie Rogers’ 7th book of poetry is her double album and it may become her classic. Rogers, who is Mohawk and Tuscarora, is a gifted poet and she has written the book that Canada needs to read in 2020. The year we see clearly: if Canadians wish to look honestly…