This book, Tamil Terrains: poems, translations, reflections, edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran (Trace Press, 2025), emerged from “Root, Branch, Driftwood,” which were Tamil literary translation workshops held on Zoom but rooted in Toronto.
Beaulieu asks, why are we writing?
In the best years, there is a lack of uniformity in poetic styles and moods. This is a good year. Most of the names are familiar with a few poets new to me.
Sincerely Katherine: Life, Gender, Inclusivity and Leadership for the Future by Katherine Dudtschak is a memoir that is synthesizing the past in order to better live the future. As the subtitle indicates, through Katherine’s story she frames a way forward for a better society. Personally, I like what I don’t know anything about, so Katherine’s …
As with movies that start gritty and move to hope or start sunlit and move to grim, this book has an arc starting quiet and small and becoming more vivid and joyful as it progresses, as if affirming to live every day.
The focus of the book is that compassionate curiosity of the narrator Eric as he tries to puzzle out his life, his times.
There’s a haiku quality to her observations, and symmetry of sound, with profound weight.
Occasionally you read a book and love it and then you reread it and it is deeper, more architecturally sophisticated, not just an absorbing read, and you love it more and hope it will be on curricula for decades.
Featuring Pearl Pirie, Alexis Von Konigslow, Caitlin Galway, and Farah Ghafoor
A widening gaze from a personal, deep past to a path forward for the wider scope of society.
Letters to my Dead Name is honest, dynamic, and vulnerable.
The poems have a casual swagger and impish play with their subjects.
It’s lovely to read a collection and not once be pestered by the question, why is this a poem? Like her previous poems are not facile or conversational narratives. They are dense and intense.
[Burdick] concludes with admission of ephemerality of both grief and grace, “Our bodies take everything in, then dispose/ of the everything, gradually.”
From what I’ve seen his form of poetry makes use of the whole page, not as in scattered individual words but as metrical spacing of phrases.
© 2025| THE Miramichi Reader
