In the world I inhabit much of what is commonly understood about mutual attraction continues to be based on cis-gendered heterosexual and patriarchal ideas of what “sex” is, of what we understand to be “male” or “female” to be. Anything else is queer, as in othered.
What do we stand to lose or gain from our inherited identities? For Cory Lavender, the answer might exist within how he curates domestic musings.
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.
As children, we’ve all been told not to play with matches, but Spencer Folkins can’t seem to resist the lure of starting little fires in his debut chapbook.
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”.
I have to say I rarely have loved a book as fully or read one as slowly.
Dealing with chronic pain, losing a family member, and Clemente Susini’s dissectible wax woman dubbed Anatomical Venus are among the subjects dealt with in Courtney Bates-Hardy’s poetry collection Anatomical Venus.
There’s something just so nice about a new chapbook with a fun cover. Girl Dinner by Jamie Kitts, a collection of poems largely focused on food and the ways it connects to different ways of being and experiences, has a cover illustrated by New Brunswick artist Dawn Mockler.
Wallin leaves no stone unturned in this collection, probing her memories to figure out what was real and what wasn’t, as well as coming to terms with being an unreliable narrator of her own life, and what it means to be disabled in a world that has yet to accept the less “challenging” forms of mental illness.
Micah Ballard’s latest chapbook Busy Secret is a quippy, somewhat resigned meditation on the liminal spaces between life and death, and wealth and work.
Unwashed gives us poetry where a green “2000 Chrysler Neon”, “Dragon Ball Z” and “grainy 240-pixel videos” have the same poetic value as “the kings of old Egypt”, the lives of Dr. King. and Malcolm X, or the hagiographies of Buddha and Krishna.
© 2024 | THE Miramichi Reader
Nicholas Selig, Editor-in-Chief
