by prfire | Jun 20, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
The Air is Elastic, Ella Zeltserman’s second poetry collection, is a yearning journey through time and space. Perhaps her greatest accomplishment is her ability to vividly capture the essence of the collection’s many locales which include Cold War Soviet Russia...
by prfire | Jun 6, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Marriage. We make jokes about it. We have names for it such as jumping the broom, vows, a socially recognized union, a sanctioned contract. A match. But what does a marriage entail? Celebration. Despair. Or more. Early in Kathy Page’s novel, Dear Evelyn, David...
by prfire | May 14, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction
Shawna Lemay’s The flower can always be changing opens with an essay on the life and death and life of flowers filmed in time lapse photography. She writes, “The colours. The fading. The beauty of decline, the simplicity. All of the attendant moods arrive and pass in...
by prfire | Apr 29, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction
Bird-Bent Grass isn’t what I expected it would be. I thought: a memoir about a mother’s Alzheimer’s and a daughter’s three-year sojourn in Uganda in the mid-to-late-eighties—by a Canadian woman writer who is just my age and in the exact same professional role—now...
by prfire | Apr 16, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Graphic Novel
There is a tendency when thinking about the history of comic books to privilege the superhero, to reduce comics as a medium to the mystery men and women who fight crime in all their caped glory. There are both historic and cultural reasons that this happen—the birth...
by prfire | Mar 26, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
“Calligraphy”, the opening poem in Panicle, Gillian Sze’s most recent book of poetry, is a masterful distillation of the emotional work of poetry. In this poem, the art of calligraphy is deconstructed alongside the act of writing: the grinding down of the inkstick,...
