Mining the Quiet: Twelve Poems by Tara G. Harris
Harris takes the bleakness of her landscape and makes it beautiful.
Harris takes the bleakness of her landscape and makes it beautiful.
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.
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.
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.
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 is a high energy chapbook of the urban depressed and stressed. It is fresh and punchy as well as comic at times.
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).
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.
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.
I was delighted to receive Carla’s latest, Warp and Weft, a beautifully stitched chapbook of poems and paintings.
This brief collection offers some captivating images.
A shimmer of vulnerability permeates the poems in Montreal poet Morris Bailey’s debut chapbook I Imagine My Brother as an Island.
Running through many of the poems is a longing for connection with our “wild kin” of the title . . . At the same time, there is acknowledgement of a certain distance between humans and the fauna and flora surrounding us.