by prfire | Mar 13, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
Rhonda Ganz’s day-by-day structure for Frequent, Small Loads of Laundry makes the reader think Wednesday’s child is full of woe. She is, but much more beside. As a first book, the voice, the care, and the self-reflection are remarkable. Unrelentingly personal...
by prfire | Mar 2, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
When I open a new book of poetry, I always have the sense that I am stepping into unknown territory. There’s a feeling of jittery excitement, of hesitation too—should I even be entering this place? What happens when you step inside a poem anyway? In this instance, the...
by prfire | Feb 20, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
Like a demon wearing a porcelain mask that sits on your shoulder, whispering sweet crypticisms in your ear, Camilla Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet captures the alluring texture of nightmares. Though neither horror nor fantasy in any traditional sense, the stories that...
by prfire | Feb 5, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
These are northern poems—scraps from the end of winter, out of a landscape of hard snow and mud, where “sewers plume,” tulips—and other hopeful, bright things—are “nipped by frost,” and sidewalks are still “gravelly” with road sand in spring. In Claire Kelly’s debut...
by prfire | Jan 26, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
This summer I ate a lot of grapefruit. One day on a whim I bought a whole bag and for the next week and a half I consumed one grapefruit daily, marvelling over the sound of the pieces peeling apart, the luminescent pink flesh, the piquant feel of it on my tongue, its...
by prfire | Jan 16, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
Ever since I read her poem, “Rubber Boots” (1989), which I found in an anthology that would let me teach classic Canadian poetry to first-year university students, I have been enchanted with Roo Borson’s work. The chance to review her latest collection, in which...
