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 this week’s installment, Kim Trainor,…

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 (somewhat) for the first twenty years…

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 haiku-reading in her latest book, The…

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 many of the themes and tensions…

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 a jail cell, futilely scrubbing fingerprint…

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 poets exploring the relationship of human and…

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 in literary journals through the globe.…

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 if the poems might relate…

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 of puns about Facebook, the…