by prfire | Mar 26, 2020 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction
In Lori Cayer’s fourth book of poetry, Mrs Romanov, she beautifully crafts an intimate and passionate interior life for Alexandra Feodorovna, the last tsarina of Imperial Russia. Perhaps because we are so familiar with her story–Feodorovna, her...
by prfire | Jul 10, 2019 | Book Reviews, Essays, Non-Fiction
Here’s two reviews that really belong together. Read on! Gush: Menstrual Manifestos for our Times: Eds. Rosanna Deerchild, Ariel Gordon and Tanis MacDonald “I’ll tell you frankly, it’s good to be a Crone, and to use my Crone-honed research abilities to...
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 | Mar 12, 2019 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction
When you watch a lot of movies, you likely start to recognize certain faces. Not the stars, who are familiar figures in the world outside of the screen—but the people in the background and around the edges of the story. Supporting players with maybe a line or two....
by prfire | Oct 29, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction
Heather O’Neill’s Wisdom in Nonsense: Invaluable Lessons from My Father begins with a piece of fatherly advice that must have sounded, to the young budding writer, as a challenge: “Lesson One, Never Keep a Diary”(3). O’Neill tells us that while chronicling the daily...
