Reviewed by Michael Edwards Rags of Night in Our Mouths by Margo Wheaton (MQUP, 2022) I. Margo Wheaton’s second poetry collection, Rags of Night in Our Mouths, takes the form of a place-based memoir, presented in three ghazal sequences. In what the book’s jacket describes as a “Maritime gothic,” the work is set in areas…

Reviewed by Dawn MacDonald Arborophobia by Nancy Holmes (University of Alberta Press, 2022) “Pray inwardly,” the 15th-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich once advised, “even if you do not enjoy it. It does good, though you feel nothing.” “Read poetry,” one might respond, “even if you do not understand it. It does good, though you…

Reviewed by Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews Poetry, azure coloured glass of a sunlit window, encases celestine light on the glossy cover of this book, softening the view of reality’s stark terrain. An aperture over a land mass in the middle of the deepest, dark ocean, soon shattered in the inset cover image, by the blow of…

Reviewed by Nancy Daoust the correct fury of your why is a mountain (Gordon Hill Press, 2021).  By kevin andrew heslop On page seventy nine at the end of the book, kevin andrew heslop thanks his readers. I’d like to thank kevin andrew heslop, for the puzzles and delights I encountered in the correct fury…

Reviewed by Patricia Keeney  Susan Glickman, Artful Flight, Essays and Reviews. 1985-2019 (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2022) “Artful flight.” That’s critical writing at its best. And it’s creativity. It’s what Susan Glickman brings together in her collection of essays and reviews spanning decades of thinking, writing and being in the Canadian literary landscape and the wider world.  …

Reviewed by Elana Wolff White by George Elliott Clarke Gaspereau Press, 2021; 252 pages ISBN: 9781554472307 In his new collection of poems, White, George Elliott Clarke expands his quartet of ‘colouring books’—Blue, Black, Red, and Gold (yellow) to a quintet, or, as he biblically submits: “a Pentateuch!” White, which Clarke deems a “necessary colour,” is…

Reviewed by Cynthia Coristine Poetry is the soul’s DNA; poetry is the soul’s map. – Stephen Morrissey The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets and psyche by Stephen Morrissey, Ekstasis Editions, 2022 In The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets and psyche, Montreal poet Stephen Morrissey draws upon and revisits a lifetime…

Reviewed by Stephen Morrissey J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence) George Elliott Clarke Exile Editions, 2021 The title of George Elliott Clarke’s book length poem, J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence), is borrowed from Emile Zola’s 1898 letter “J’Accuse”, published in L’Aurore newspaper; Zola’s intention was to expose the injustice committed against Alfred Dreyfus, a young military officer wrongly…

Reviewed by Padmaja Battani The Untranslatable I by Roxanna Bennett (Gordon Hill Press, 2021) Roxanna Bennett’s newest book of poetry The Untranslatable I is a saga of ineffable pain that follows wherever they travel. Their work is an exhaustive struggle in explaining restraints of disabled body and the meagerness of language that fails to decipher their…