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 ways in which the external…

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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 both late night city streets,…

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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 the risk of, at best, being…

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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 the past, and extends sideways,…

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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 of our galaxy. She does…

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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 the book, a photograph of…

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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, it’s your friends,” the opening…

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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 8-poem versioning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses…

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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 the end of the book…

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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 both a lived and written…

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