Revelation and Reconciliation in Rob Taylor’s “Strangers”
In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival.
Chris Banks
Mere Extinction: Poems by Evie Christie
Evie Christie’s second poetry collection Mere Extinction forthcoming from ECW Press is a sprawling empire of beating hearts and lost children, apocalyptic prepping and climate change, single moms and human bewilderment.
The Shadow List by Jen Sookfong Lee
Jen Sookfong Lee is a seasoned writer with several notable books, but The Shadow List forthcoming this Spring from Wolsak & Wynn is her first poetry collection. It is so refreshing to see a poet embrace the personal lyric, the confessional mode, so freely and expertly.
Democratically Applied Machine by Robert Colmon
Robert Colman’s third book of poetry, Democratically Applied Machine, is a back-to-basics approach to creation. In poems that inhabit both industrial and domestic landscapes, Colman traces his inheritance to determine how his life echoes that of his forebears, even as the past blurs with the onset of his father’s Alzheimer’s dementia.
Standing On The Shoulders Of Our Mentors
Marvin Bell died yesterday. A poetic giant has fallen. His Dead Man poems are everything good poetry is about: deeply imagistic, humane, formally ambitious, culturally significant, political without pretension, and on and on. It is the work of a lifetime. His death made me realize most of my poetic mentors are now gone. Hayden Carruth. Mark Strand. Philip Levine. And now Marvin Bell.
Red Rover, Red Rover by Bob Hicok
Bob Hicok’s Red Rover Red Rover is joyous and macabre, hopeful and morbid, caring and critical.
Side Effects May Include Strangers By Dominik Parisien
I have to admit I was not prepared for how exquisite the first poem “Let Us For A Moment Call This Pain By Other Words” is in Dominik Parisien’s debut poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers out with McGill-Queen’s University Press. It is the kind of poem that, for a poet when you read it, it …
The Only Card In A Deck of Knives by Lauren Turner
About the author: Lauren Turner is a disabled poet and essayist, who wrote the chapbook, We’re Not Going to Do Better Next Time (knife | fork | book, 2018). Her work has appeared in Grain, Arc Magazine, Poetry is Dead, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Puritan, canthius and elsewhere. She won the 2018 Short Grain Contest and was a finalist for the …
Spotlight Poem #3: “Standing together against ourselves” by Bob Hicok
STANDING TOGETHER AGAINST OURSELVES By Bob Hicok BOB HICOK’S tenth collection, Red Rover Red Rover, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. A two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, he’s also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the …
A Meta-Textual Hive: Double Self-Portrait By James Lindsay
Double Self-Portrait by James Lindsay resembles a meta-textual hive, full of a buzzing energy created by the many connections the poems weave among themselves.
Confessions of A Prize-Winning Poet
When my first book came out, I was suddenly thrust into the spotlight as “an up and coming young Canadian poet to watch out for” simply by having the good luck to land on a few awards lists. My book Bonfires, published by Nightwood Editions, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award and won the …
Spotlight Poem #3: “Tough and rumble” by Alice Burdick
Tough and rumble A view of waves & breaks, sword into fog. A child in a seat talks to a child in another seat. The bicyclist drops a bag of paper lanterns and they roll through the intersection at dusk, little white globes of light. Some people are scared of custard tarts. Tan nightingale, star …
We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite by Conyer Clayton
[dropcap]The[/dropcap] first line from the poem “Seeds” in Conyer Clayton’s debut collection We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite out with Guernica Editions is “I pray to catch on fire” which puts me in mind of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s lines, “who made me as the world’s / first person, breathing / Fire and poetry.” Perhaps it is …
If You Discover A Fire by Shaun Robinson
In his first poetry collection If You Discover A Fire from Brick Books, Shaun Robinson spins out poems that describe, in precise detail, a faded and fallen world.
Curtis LeBlanc’s Birding In The Glass Age Of Isolation
[dropcap]In [/dropcap]Curtis LeBlanc’s Birding In The Glass Age of Isolation, mental illness, masculinity, and storytelling are all explored in this worthy follow-up to his first book Little Wild (2018). Like the hunters he writes about, LeBlanc practices patience and careful observations leading readers through poem after poem as he seeks a verbal equivalent for the …
