by prfire | Jan 26, 2015 | Book Reviews, Drama
Carolyn Gray looks back some 350 years to the French playwright Molière and his play The Miser or L’Avare to find the subject for The Miser of Middlegate, the latest in her series of plays set in Winnipeg. Her version, like the original, places a rich miser at the...
by prfire | Dec 18, 2014 | Book Reviews, Poetry
The first as well as the most lasting impression of Laisha Rosnau’s third book of poetry can best be summed up as “young-maternal.” Rosnau writes from an internal reckoning based in the centre of her body. Her pursuit of themes is uterine grounded. Not that most of...
by prfire | Jul 16, 2014 | Book Reviews, Poetry
What an odd title for a book of poems. I conjure up a beast, or a fantastic creature like the shadow in Robert Munsch’s children’s story The Dark. The title poem concerns a woman with an eating disorder that has afflicted her throughout her life. Young focuses on our...
by prfire | Jun 10, 2014 | Book Reviews, Drama
Reading plays in book form is always a different process from seeing them on stage. They become literature and need to engage without the visual and oral elements of a stage production. The book form should work well for this collection, since much of the material...
by prfire | Apr 22, 2014 | Book Reviews, Drama
Playwright Carolyn Gray’s North Main Gothic follows the story of Ian Trelkovsky, a Winnipeg bureaucrat and slum landlord, who takes a nightmarish journey into the underground life of his city. His journey begins one night with a car accident on Winnipeg’s Main Street...
by prfire | Mar 20, 2014 | Book Reviews, Drama
In his introduction to The Exile Book of Native Canadian Fiction and Drama, editor Daniel David Moses expresses the hope that the work of First Nations writers in Canada today has reached the point where it can be read on its own terms simply as literature, without...
