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...
by prfire | Jan 2, 2018 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction
The Burgess Shale is not a typical scholarly work, but instead a transcription of Margaret Atwood’s lecture to the University of Alberta as part of the CLC Kreisel Lecture Series in 2016. In her lecture, Atwood provided insight into the influences and impacts of the...
by prfire | Dec 15, 2017 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
#IndianLovePoems, a poetry collection by Tenille K. Campbell, provides evocative, truthful words about love without silencing her Indigenous perspective. The honesty throughout #IndianLovePoems is fresh and without hesitation. Her words flow like spoken word poetry,...
by prfire | Dec 7, 2017 | Book Reviews, Poetry
Canada is so haunted by the spectres of dead white men that they almost seem inescapable, a presence so persistent as to be definitive.This is, of course, the point. The fact that there seem to be innumerable buildings bearing the names of Sir John A. MacDonald...
by prfire | Nov 27, 2017 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Fiction
As Andy Williams once sang in his holiday standard, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”: There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago. So what ever happened to the ghost stories? When did the telling of spine-tingling...
by prfire | Nov 17, 2017 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
Common Place, Sarah Pinder’s second book of poetry, is a challenging read. This is partially due to the subject matter at hand—Common Place is concerned with structures and discourses of power at a human level, and necessarily presents the violence inherent in these...
