by prfire | Feb 9, 2016 | Book Reviews, Drama
When I first encountered Canadian theatre, I was told a specific difficulty local practitioners faced was the lack of an “established” status for local playwrights to aspire to. It was explained that “lack of history” was to blame for the permanent condition of the...
by prfire | Jan 11, 2016 | Book Reviews, Poetry
Though Laurie Kruk’s latest book of poems, My Mother Did Not Tell Stories, possesses an ambivalent title – storytelling either as a way of transferring lore around a kitchen table, or as a euphemism for lying – her poetry steers clear of added or extended meanings....
by prfire | Oct 15, 2015 | Book Reviews, Poetry
It is fortuitous that I began reading a book on quantum theory while reviewing this book. A poet like Don Domanski bears his words well enough, yet he steers us in the direction of the primordial soup. Not that his soup of words and physics isn’t glorious and radiant,...
by prfire | Sep 2, 2015 | Book Reviews, Fiction
Margaret Sweatman’s fifth novel, Mr. Jones, is an atmospheric tour-de-force. The winner of the most recent Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, Mr. Jones employs the conventions of a Cold War spy novel, engaging the big questions characteristic of the genre: loyalty,...
by prfire | Jun 30, 2015 | Book Reviews, Poetry
There is such density in Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry, and such a wide range of images and concerns. It may be best to focus on several representative selections from different poems in this fine collection of his poetry and prose from 1954 to 2004, a half century of...
by prfire | May 6, 2015 | Book Reviews, Fiction
As I read Reading by Lightning, Joan Thomas’s first novel, I felt grateful to my parents’ generation for breaking ties with religious fundamentalism. As I read her second novel, Curiosity, I thought about feminist historians and the novelist’s gift for detail – that...
