gallery of heartache by Michael Russell
Gallery of Heartache is also about trying to find healing, however that can look on any particular day, often ugly and unappealing, or messy, but still, trying to make sense.
Chapbook
we astronauts by Pearl Pirie
More observational than confessional, Pirie writes not from the margins, but from the centre of her own life. This is a radical act—to narrate one’s interiority and place it before the world without apology.
Birdology by Carolyne Van Der Meer
Birdology, Carolyne Van Der Meer’s most recent chapbook, offers an unflinching meditation on mortality and how our relationships with our parents evolve as we age, become more vulnerable, and eventually leave one another. This beautifully sequenced collection of tender poems and slender essays moves through what the author calls a “spell of grief,” accompanied by …
Mining the Quiet: Twelve Poems by Tara G. Harris
Harris takes the bleakness of her landscape and makes it beautiful.
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.
Poems for Burning by Spencer Folkins
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.
Girl Dinner by Jamie Kitts
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.
Busy Secret by Micah Ballard
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.
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.
Fifty-Two Lines About Henry by Cary Fagan
Although Henry contemplates dancing to calm an enraged bear, orders enough sardines to fill two bedrooms – I hope they’re canned – and writes an 861-page chapter to a novel, his unlikely battles remain rooted in a world well-recognized where neighbours are suspicious, dinner parties are taxing, and things learned at school are revealed to be alternately fateful (the sousaphone, surprisingly) and superfluous (trigonometry).
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.
Warp and Weft by Carla Stein
I was delighted to receive Carla’s latest, Warp and Weft, a beautifully stitched chapbook of poems and paintings.
