Letters to My Dead Name by Richelle Lee Slota
Letters to my Dead Name is honest, dynamic, and vulnerable.
Pearl Pirie
a disobedient gathering: poems for plants who can’t stay put by Katherine Barrett
The poems have a casual swagger and impish play with their subjects.
UNMET: poems by stephanie roberts
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.
I Am So Calm by Alice Burdick
[Burdick] concludes with admission of ephemerality of both grief and grace, “Our bodies take everything in, then dispose/ of the everything, gradually.”
Robert Duncan at Disney World by Andy Weaver
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.
Dog and Moon by Kelly Shepherd
Dog and Moon is a slow read, not because it is hard so much as it is rich and rewarding, so satisfies early and often.
Throwback: Go by Shelley A. Leedahl
In Go, Shelley A. Leedahl somehow mixes the best ratio of acknowledging muff-ups and small griefs, isolation and loss with a scintillating report of loving life.
Bait & Switch by Jim Johnstone
Do you ever wish poets would include essays to situate their poems? Some frank prose that ponders what their own poetry comes out of or means to do? We can’t follow every crumb trailer life, and not every aesthetic reaches universally. Consequently this book of essays, Bait & Switch: Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and views on …
IGoli | EGoli: Poems by Salimah Valiani
The meaning of the title IGoli | EGoli: Poems, by Salimah Valiani is not self-evident without a search. What does it mean? eGoli means “Place of Gold”.
The Unfolding: Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I have to say I rarely have loved a book as fully or read one as slowly.
When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance by Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel with Sean Carleton
How many of us took “The Oka Crisis” at face value of media portrayal? Something along the line of lawless warriors in masks opposing the police in the summer of 1990? There were blockades and a militarized zone. Traffic inconveniences going into Montreal. You may recall that a golf course was set to dig up an Indigenous graveyard.
The behind the scenes story is more complex, and long-standing, with not a lot of overlap with what was told in the media.
Permutations by Paula Turcotte
Permutations by Paula Turcotte is a high energy chapbook of the urban depressed and stressed. It is fresh and punchy as well as comic at times.
Rooted: poems by Tricia Snell
How not to judge a book by its cover when production values of Spot of Poetry are so high? Heavy, cream, textured cover stock with French flaps and full colour and inside-cover graphics, designed by Berdene Owen.
Groping in the Daylight: poems by Augusta Wynde
The language is striking and fresh in reach without being self-important, adding humour to the poetic palette such as in “Bout” (p. 8) which you’ll have to buy to see— no spoilers on that.
