Nightstand: Leafing through a little darkness by Berdene Owen
Nightstand is a quirky chapbook, but one that works very well, The irreverence sheds light on the darkness Owen is exploring.
Poetry
Ox Lost, Snow Deep by Alice Burdick
Her latest collection of poems taps into the strange beauty of the unexpected, the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional. Burdick also dances with absurdism, not-so-gently mocking our earnest search for meaning and using dark humour to comment on the human condition.
Mining the Quiet: Twelve Poems by Tara G. Harris
Harris takes the bleakness of her landscape and makes it beautiful.
Blood Root by Jessica Hiemstra
Blood Root investigates the poet’s spiritual connection with home, and the importance of reparations and reconciliation as a settler descended from mostly Dutch heritage.
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.
Seventh Town of Ghosts by Faith Arkorful
These poems offer humour, irony, despair, anger, joy, persistence, and strength for the journey.
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.
Devotional Forensics by Joseph Kidney
A hallmark of Kidney’s already distinguished early career, Devotional Forensics shows exceptional range.
Out of the Ordinary: New Poems by Tom Wayman
Tom Wayman’s latest poetry collection is full of surprises.
The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose by Zehra Naqvi
The Knot of My Tongue: Prose and Poems is a complex and rewarding read that has drawn me back to the poems repeatedly.
G by Klara du Plessis and Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi
In G, Klara du Plessis and Khashayar “Kes” Mohammadi look at a single sound that connects two parts of the world that we rarely imagine in proximity, Iran and South Africa. They do so by exploring the voiceless uvular fricative and its close cousin, the voiced velar fricative, which are presented phonetically by the Greek letters chi (x) and gamma (ɣ) and are generally transposed into a roman alphabet as ch (e.g., loch) or kh (e.g., Khalil).
The Astonishing Room by Brian Bartlett
As an author of fifteen poetry collections and an editor of several more, one approaches the work of Brian Bartlett with no small degree of trepidation.
