What Can a Poetry Review Do? | Jade Wallace
I’ve been thinking more than usual about a question that all lovers of literature could helpfully ask themselves: what can I do in service of book reviews?
At least once a year, usually on social media, someone laments the death of the book review. Cited causes include: that few venues publish reviews at all; that fewer pay reviewers; that fewer still pay reviewers well; that prestigious venues are ever more disinterested in reporting on literature; that hardly anyone except for the reviews editor and the author read a given review; and, that there is a tacit and stifling moratorium on ‘critical’ reviews.
It would be a fascinating project to fact check these assertions in a systematic way, but for our current purposes I think it’s sufficient to say that several of these concerns are indeed reasonable. I expect most people will agree, for instance, that reviewing is often an underpaid and underappreciated genre, with a review usually netting less than minimum wage, which isn’t great for enticing people to start, or continue, writing book reviews.
On the other hand, some of these concerns might be exaggerated. There is, for example, no real lack of venues publishing book reviews. Using the free submissions database Chill Subs one can, within about a minute of searching, find 593 venues globally that publish book reviews, 115 of which are no-fee and pay, and 42 venues in Canada that publish book reviews, 14 of which are no-fee and pay. This doesn’t even represent the full scope of publishers, just the ones that made it to this particular database, and it certainly doesn’t account for the proliferation of book reviews on social media platforms.
Using the free submissions database Chill Subs one can, within about a minute of searching, find 593 venues globally that publish book reviews, 115 of which are no-fee and pay, and 42 venues in Canada that publish book reviews, 14 of which are no-fee and pay.
Whether wholly warranted or not, this year’s eulogy for the book review had at least two swift, and uncharacteristically productive, results: a new poetry review site popped up, and poet and reviewer Annick MacAskill compiled a partially crowdsourced list of Canadian book review venues that pay, which you can see below. Both of these outcomes, one hopes, will do their part to increase the number of book reviews and book reviewers in the future.
Click to view Annick MacAskill’s crowdsourced list of Canadian book review venues
- Room
- Plenitude
- Canthius
- Prism
- Prairie Fire
- Contemporary Verse 2
- The Ex-Puritan
- Arc Poetry Magazine
- Canadian Notes & Queries
- Quill & Quire
- Vallum
- The Antigonish Review
- The Fiddlehead
- The Ampersand Review
- The Temz Review
- The Miramichi Reader
- Atlantic Books Today
- Montreal Review of Books
- The League of Canadian Poets website
- Event
- This Magazine
- The British Columbia Review
- Herizons
- Hamilton Review of Books
- SubTerrain
- FreeFall Magazine
- Kathryn Mockler’s newsletter Send My Love to Anyone
Since then, I’ve been thinking more than usual about a question that all lovers of literature could helpfully ask themselves: what can I do in service of book reviews?
It’s been a few months since I had to think about this question. From 2020–2023, I was busy every week with the business of editing book reviews for the literary arts magazine CAROUSEL(which, after 40 years, closed shop in December 2023), and in that time I edited 146 reviews of 168 books, and wrote reviews of my own as well. This gave me a lot of time to think about why anyone bothers to write book reviews—and many wonderful examples of all the different things a book review can accomplish.
Here’s what I believe I have to offer now: I’m going to take us through several possible approaches to reviewing books, with special emphasis on how they manifest when reviewing poetry. For each type, I’ll give a brief description and a link to an exemplary review, drawing from the archive I know best. As we go, I expect we’ll be able to rebut complaints about the lack of good ‘critical’ work happening in contemporary book reviewing, and also quiet some of our existential anxiety that asks why even bother with book reviews?
Here’s what I believe I have to offer now: I’m going to take us through several possible approaches to reviewing books, with special emphasis on how they manifest when reviewing poetry.
The Thematic Review
This type of review explores a particular theme in a book or set of books. Such reviews might consider how the poetic approach is deployed to address a given theme, or what the work adds to the existing discourse around a particular theme.
Example: Klara du Plessis’ “Grammar Poetics” analyzes the significance of grammatical motifs in Dionne Brand’s No Language is Neutral (Coach House Books, 1990), Canisia Lubrin’s The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland & Stewart, 2020), Annick MacAskill’s Murmurations (Gaspereau Press, 2020), and Erín Moure’s Furious (House of Anansi, 1988).
The Technical Review
This type is particularly interested in the formal or craft elements of a given book. It will often include analyses of literary devices at play, and may assess how a book fits into particular genres or subgenres of poetry.
Example: Leah Bobet’s “Watch the Left Hand” focuses on the use of literary devices such as imagery, foreshadowing, and tone in Jen Sookfong Lee’s poetry collection The Shadow List (Wolsak & Wynn, 2021), while also analyzing the ways the book departs from the confessional poetry subgenre.
The Explanatory Review
This type of review offers a wide-ranging exploration of the whole book, often with the goal of unearthing concepts, connections, and structures in the book that might not otherwise be evident. Such reviews give a bird’s eye view of a text that allows readers to see it from angles they might not have considered, and may also provide a working theory of how the various components of the book operate together. This style of review is sometimes reminiscent of an academic article, though it doesn’t have to be.
Example: In “Engaging the Emporium,” Sanchari Sur offers a reading of Aditi Machado’s Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020) that attempts to make sense of the mysterious merchant figure at the centre of the text, and links this figure to the book’s formal techniques and thematic fixations.
The Affirmative Review
This type is interested in extolling the virtues of the book under review, and it may analyze several aspects of the book to properly highlight the various merits. Affirmative reviews seem to be immensely popular, not only with authors and publishers, for obvious reasons, but also in general. The affirmative review is a celebration of a text, and celebrations are particularly exciting for small press authors because we don’t tend to have legions of adoring fans.
However, affirmative reviews can be polarizing, at least insofar as they’re the sort most likely to provoke the disdain of people who bemoan the death of true criticism. Such reviews have been accused of being nothing more than long blurbs, and of essentially being designed to sell books rather than engage in meaningful discourse. I’m sure some affirmative reviews exist that are exactly that commodifying type—but many are motivated by genuine passion for the book at hand, and do a careful job of assessing precisely how and why the book works so well.
Example: Hollay Ghadery’s “Prolong, in Fragments” lovingly attends to the minutiae of rob mclennan’s poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022).
The Evaluative Review
This is, to my mind, exactly the sort of review people are referring to when they speak of ‘real’ reviews, ‘critical’ reviews, et al., and they do resurrect the spirit of many an early 20th-century book review from The New York Times. An evaluative review tends to include an analysis of various aspects of the book, such as its thematic and formal concerns, but is ultimately building up to an assessment of how effectively the book accomplishes its tasks.
Such reviews are generally presumed to include a combination of positive and negative feedback. Reviews that lean too far toward the positive may be seen as affirmative rather than truly evaluative reviews, while reviews that lean too far toward the negative may be accused of being uncharitable or even, under certain circumstances, prejudiced.
The controversies surrounding evaluative reviews are not ones I am going to get into here, for they warrant an in-depth discussion, but for now I will simply say that evaluative reviews are, contrary to some reports, very much still being written, though indeed the contemporary reading public does not appear to take as much pleasure as their 20th-century predecessors did in the schadenfreude of a devastatingly scathing review.
Example: Renée M. Sgroi’s “By Definition” considers both the merits and oversights of the essay collection on poetry, Poetry & the Dictionary, edited by Andrew Blades and Piers Pennington (Liverpool University Press, 2020).
The Aesthetic Review
This type is tricky to pin down, and I’m not entirely sure I haven’t imagined it. For me, an aesthetic review is more or less a traditional, essay-form review, but one that is extraordinarily attentive to the beauty of a book, and is written in such a way that the review itself becomes an object of beauty.
Example: Elizabeth Upshur’s “Kenningdom” revels in gorgeous language, and even creates original kennings, to parallel and highlight the wordplay of Nicola Vulpe’s poetry collection Through the Waspmouth I Drew You (Guernica Editions, 2021).
The Experimental Review
An experimental review is, in essence, any review that dares to exceed the bounds of a recognizable essay form. This is a pet subject for me, and if it is for you, too, you can read a brief and incomplete history of experimental reviews.
One of my goals when I kicked off CAROUSEL’s book review section, USEREVIEW, was to make a dedicated place for experimental reviews, which many journals at the time didn’t explicitly have, though several more do now. Over the years,we had reviews that took the form of comics, sound poetry, fiction, or tourist guides—all of which you can peruse here. Experimental review open up the genre to those who might be put off by, or have grown restless with, more conventional approaches.
Example: Amanda Earl’s “Where Words Touch” uses visual poetry to respond to Bahar Orang’s poetry/hybrid collection Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty(Book*Hug Press, 2020).
The Multipurpose Review
This category includes any reviews that significantly engage with two or more approaches to reviewing, and I would venture to say that most reviews could arguably fit this category. (Even some of the examples I gave above!)
Example: In “Doomscroll Poetics,” John Nyman addresses multiple elements of ryan fitzpatrick’s poetry collection Sunny Ways (Invisible Publishing, 2023), including the book’s thematic preoccupations and formal tactics, and also evaluates their effects on the reader and attempts to form an overarching explanation about how all of these elements cohere.
If more people enthusiastically participate in the literary ecosystem by writing and reading book reviews, then we will also have reason and motivation to work on solving some of the other resource issues confronting the genre.
We’ve taken a look at several of the ways book reviews can operate, and what purposes they can serve. Does this solve the problem of lack of funding for book review work? Of course not. But moral support and practical support can have a symbiotic relationship. If more people enthusiastically participate in the literary ecosystem by writing and reading book reviews, then we will also have reason and motivation to work on solving some of the other resource issues confronting the genre. My hope is that anyone—new reviewers, seasoned reviews, on-the-fence prospective reviewers—can use this book review taxonomy as a starting point, or a thought-provoking reference point, for writing their own reviews.
Did I miss anything? What types of book review would you add to the list?
Jade Wallace (they/them) is a writer, editor, and critic whose book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in This Magazine, The Ampersand Review, CV2, and Bywords. Wallace’s debut poetry collection Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There was released by Guernica Editions in 2023, and their debut novel Anomia is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press in June 2024. Wallace is co-founder of the collaborative writing entity MA|DE, whose debut collection ZZOO is forthcoming with Palimpsest in 2025. Keep in touch: jadewallace.ca + ma-de.ca
To find out more about the League’s reviews program, visit poets.ca/reviews.