Overland is the true story of a journey from Australia to Switzerland without flying. From vast deserts to an Indonesian fishing boat, a slow train through Burma to an armed confrontation in Laos, lullabies from middle-aged Chinese businessmen to a cold night on the Great Wall, wolves and reindeer herders, thieves and nomads: this is …
[dropcap]Jean [/dropcap]Marc Ah-Sen is the Toronto-based author of Grand Menteur, which The Globe and Mail selected as a top 100 Best Book in 2015. The National Post has hailed his work as “an inventive escape from the conventional.” His second book, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation*, was just published by Nightwood Editions. He lives …
[dropcap]A[/dropcap] tenth birthday’s no big deal. Sure, you hit double digits, but it’s not like when you become a teenager or hit those high, round decades people lie about. Unless, of course, you’re a poetry group that convenes in a gallery. Then it’s a very big deal. Pandora’s Collective is one of those, a remarkable …
Akin demonstrates yet again that, when it comes to fictional worlds, Emma Donoghue is at home everywhere. The novel is set in New York and Nice, France. Seventy-nine-year-old retired academic Noah—widowed, set in his ways, still living in the same apartment where he and his wife Joan (nine years dead) spent their married life and …
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] met Cynthia Sharp at a Vancouver poetry reading. It may’ve been a gallery or a resto-pub. That part I no longer remember. What I do remember, however, is the depth of her reading, commitment to her craft. This is a writer through-and-through, a committed teacher of poetry as well as an accomplished novelist. Following …
In the broken boat, her fourth book of poetry, Daniela Elza deftly builds a raft of questions to stay afloat amidst the breakage of things. The end of a twenty-year marriage mirrors subtler fragmentations in our world. How to survive this loss of meaning, this “wintering through”? [dropcap]I[/dropcap] was isolated. Isolating. Like everyone, more or …
[dropcap]April [/dropcap]2020 is National Poetry Month and The Miramichi Reader has been putting out poetry and poetry news & reviews like never before, thanks to Bill Arnott, our West Coast Editor and Chris Banks, our Poetry editor. Now, we would like to give away some new collections of poetry. There is a bundle of three …
Karen Draper and her husband are ecstatic to welcome Preston, their first child, into their lives. Joyful anticipation turns to fear when they are told they must prepare to lose him. We’ve all lost someone. It hurts. Horribly. Most often we scar, heal, and persevere. It’s hardwired, more or less, into the species. But the …
In Narrow Cradle, Wade Kearley explores the midlife encounter with mortality and the ways we strive to resist, deny, cheat, and even bargain with it. Grounded in both traditional and modern poetic forms, these poems find in the transience of life a new kind of freedom, a rebirth independent of personal circumstance. In crisp, direct, …
[dropcap]A [/dropcap]few of us were visiting over beers on an English seaside patio. One of the group seated at the picnic-style table was Renaissance man Gray Lightfoot – successful author and poet – a bus driver the rest of the week. I referenced Lightfoot being a bus driver-slash-poet. The others sniggered, thinking I just called …
Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. At the risk of resembling a middle school English report, let’s start with a definition. Pluviophile – (n) a lover of rain; someone who finds joy and peace of mind during rainy days. And so we join Yusuf …
Some People’s Children is Bridget Canning’s second novel, and effectively debunks the myth of the ‘sophomore slump.’ The novel follows Imogene Tubbs as she navigates the difficulties of life as a teenage girl living in rural Newfoundland.
I have a friend (acquaintance, really) – Gunnar Thor Gunnarsson. Best name EVER, I thought. Until I met Lorenz von Fersen. Now THAT’S a name. The kind of name I’d choose for myself, assuming Max Power’s already been taken. Turns out Lorenz’s excellent moniker fits. He’s an excellent man doing excellent work. And has done …
[dropcap]Mark[/dropcap] Bourrie has written a classic Canadian historical biography. The best-selling author, and award-winning journalist, lays bare the mottled myths of colonial settlement. He weaves a compelling, sometimes lurid, but always enlightening narrative of the legendary adventurer, scoundrel, Pierre-Esprit Radisson. Bush Runner chronicles Radisson’s adventures from exploiting the expanding fur trade to finagling European imperial …
[dropcap]I [/dropcap]was drawn to the cover art of Doing Time. I felt it was so very fitting to the content. Thank you, Claire Bennet, at Pottersfield Press for sending me the e-pub version of this book. I had so wanted to read it as part of my personal exploration of poetry, old and new, for …
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Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
