Eric Schmaltz’s I Confess (Coach House, 2025) and Hajer Mirwali’s Revolutions (Talonbooks, 2025), offer the promise of revelation and the certainty of obfuscation, probing the ways that language simultaneously creates and elides truth.
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.
These poems, both by design and content, are watercolours.
I’m surprised that the woman in these poems keeps trying, but she does: “It’s embarrassing to still hope / to be loved.”
As this suggests, for the author, family came with considerable pain, both psychological and physical.
Anyone who lived in Toronto in the late 80s/early 90s will know this place, will know what this time did to bodies trying to find love and acceptance, bodies willing to pay any price.
Attic Rain brought a refreshing authenticity that I didn’t want to part with. Sometimes you’d smile or hum in agreement with how relatable the poems are.
This is a particularly raw collection of poetry, I felt, the blank verse tumbling across the page in a cry to be read and felt.
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.
Here, Skeet’s invasion of white space picks up where Eyes Bottle Dark left off and begins with the haunting image of a herd of 191 free-roaming horses found dead, thigh and neck-deep at a stock pond on the Navajo Nation, evaporated through extreme drought caused by “decades-long aggression by the United States and the changing climate”.
In Crowd Source, Cecily Nicholson’s latest collection of poetry, she uses a flock of crows as her framing device, linking meditations on a wide variety of topics with the movement of crows.
He describes We Survived Until We Could Live, his latest collection of poetry as an “attempt to portray a glimpse of war’s horrific aftermath on the family.” In his “attempt to converse with the past,” he believes it is with poetry that he “can document the untold stories of suffering, invite readers into this world, and sharpen their empathy for fellow human beings in pain.”
This collection contains 31 poems arranged in three acts. Miles’s compelling photos—mostly black-and-whites with a few exceptions—appear on facing pages.
I was very intrigued by Vessel, Dani Netherclift’s work on the drowning deaths of her father and brother.
© 2025| THE Miramichi Reader
