by Lindsey | May 13, 2024 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
In his debut collection, A brief relief from hunger, Spenser Smith explores the edges of longing, revealing the immense human capacity for cruelty and care. On his journey toward acceptance and fulfillment, Smith’s speaker injects drugs, binges fast food, goes through...
by Lindsey | Jul 28, 2023 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
The cover art for Neils Hav’s Moments of Happiness features a wall with wallpaper and paint partially peeled away, revealing layer after layer of understory. In keeping with this image, Hav opens the collection with the line: “The battered inside of the cupboard under...
by Lindsey | Apr 19, 2023 | Book Reviews, Poetry
After fifty-seven years in archival gestation, Milton Acorn and bill bissett’s I Want to Tell You Love has finally, like a letter lost and deferred in the mail, reached the ears of its public. The work first took shape as a manuscript in 1965 when Acorn and bissett...
by Lindsey | Feb 21, 2023 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
In Earle Street: Poems, Arleen Paré digs into the infrastructure of place. Unearths for us the very foundations of urban life. As if to say “Look! This is who we are”. Not simply people inside buildings. But storm drains and catch basins, trees and their...
by Lindsey | Jan 17, 2023 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
There’s a phrase in Jónína Kirton’s memoir, Standing in a River of Time, where she speaks of belonging. Of Metis and Icelandic extraction, the author and poet walked between two worlds, the white one and the Indigenous one. Shamed and scorned by both worlds, she has...
by Lindsey | Oct 13, 2022 | All Reviews, Book Reviews, Poetry
There is a telling line in Stephen Collis’s 2021 collection, A History of the Theories of Rain—in fact, there are many. But for me, the line that captures the book’s central concern, the daunting, infuriatingly impersonal disaster of climate change bearing down upon...
