\nHer Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects
\n<\/i>by Catherine Graham and Richard Greene
\nHamilton, ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2013
\n$17<\/p>\n
The surnames of poets Catherine Graham and Richard Greene align to produce the name of the British author of \u201centertainments,\u201d namely Graham Greene, an author of interest to Newfoundland-born poet Rick Greene. But I start with Graham, whose inspirations are Irish poet Dorothy Molloy as well as Canada\u2019s own P.K. Page.<\/p>\n
Graham\u2019s fifth poetry collection, Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects<\/i>, began as a deliberate experiment that turned Gothic and magical. First writing \u201cglosas,\u201d a poetry form that borrows the first four lines of another poet\u2019s work to serve as the last line of each of four new, ten-line stanzas, Graham broke away from this structure, to begin crafting poems, lyrical but \u201cwith a sinister edge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, save for a few poems, Graham retains in most a few lines or phrases taken\u2014with acknowledgement\u2014from Molloy. The result is a book showcasing macabre images. For all the debt to Molloy, there\u2019s Poe in this poetry\u2014and Plath. The first poem quotes no Molloy, but floats an air of dread: the shock of accidental death occasioned by innocent encounter. A \u201cdrunk father\u201d slams his car into a \u201cwhite-tailed beast,\u201d on its own \u201cnocturnal route,\u201d but coming \u201cto stand on the road for some (cursed) reason.\u201d<\/p>\n
The poem, \u201cFlies Gather,\u201d reverses itself, so that it ends, \u201cGather flies.\u201d Its beginning is also its end: \u201cThere is much agony in the entrails of love.\u201d Graham shows us despair, not paradise. We can know love only until\u2014to quote Molloy, \u201cthe sickle moon cuts.\u201d To \u201cget\u201d these poems, imagine Dr. Seuss rewriting the Marquis de Sade.<\/p>\n
A poem of seeming whimsy\u2014\u201cThe Queen Is Not Welcome Here\u201d\u2014is likely the raving of a mad person: \u201cShe won\u2019t leave, the Queen. She is hogging \/ my room, my living room\u2026. \/ And Bobby Orr \/ keeps waiting by the door, tapping his \/ hockey stick [\u2026]\u201d It might seem like good fun, but we that hockey stick mimics Death\u2019s scythe […]<\/p>\n
Graham is a fine poet: \u201cThe way the sun peeks out from a continent \/ of cloud, a geyser of light that rams the sea \/ and breaks all meaning into knuckling diamonds [\u2026]\u201d Does she need to chase her lines with Molloy\u2019s line, \u201che gave me full instructions (re) weather\u201d?<\/p>\n
Is she a better poet than Molloy? Maybe. Surely, she is better off\u2014to speak for herself.<\/p>\n
Rick Greene\u2019s newest book of poetry, Dante\u2019s House<\/i> (Signal, $18), gives us, consummately, his skill at measured verse, likely a result of good schooling in the old Newfoundland, religious-based system, which accented discipline and craft as being the basis for art and engineering.<\/p>\n
Greene pens rhyme, blank verse, vers lib\u00e9r\u00e9<\/i>, terza rima<\/i>, all with the lyric ease that hides the prosaic work of diligence and mastery.<\/p>\n
But despite the subtle honing that touches each line, the miracle of clarity and the charity of meaning, or, simply, the classicism that haunts each poem (most tenderly), Greene is very much a man of the moment, alive to our modernity, our dreams and humdrum sorrows.<\/p>\n
Given Greene\u2019s Newfoundland childhood, I want to align him with E.J. Pratt, the great Modernist poet of the Rock. But, really, Greene reads, in places, more like Derek Walcott, the master poet of the Caribbean, who also greets modernism with classical grace.<\/p>\n
Dante\u2019s House<\/i> holds only a dozen poems\u2014like Stations of the Cross or the division of the classic epic.<\/p>\n
But the terminal and titular poem is a masterpiece. The second-last poem, \u201cCrooked Eclipses,\u201d yields lines that should last: \u201cJust pain and sleep: chemo becomes morphine \/ and seventy years of being have been; \/ I substitute have seen you for will see. \/ Tenses shift and I prepare for memory.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDante\u2019s House\u201d employs the eponymous poet\u2019s transcendent rhyme scheme (also adapted by Walcott for his Omeros<\/i>)\u2014terza rima<\/i>\u2014to tell of a summer teaching-and-tourism trip to Italy and also of a mother\u2019s passing.<\/p>\n
The poem is rich with puns, witty rhymes, stunning images, and moving moments. It is a deft, definite achievement.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll quote lines now: \u201cI am glad of an art where nothing fits\u201d; \u201cremembered corpses \/ made a graveyard of the mind\u201d; \u201cI am again \/ made silent by a form that\u2019s extreme \/\/ in its simplicity: A Christ \u2026 \/ whose four snapped off toes stand now for pain\u201d; \u201cThe press of bodies moves us on.\u201d Amen.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief
\n<\/i>by Tim Bowling
\nKentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2014
\n80 pp, $20
\n<\/i><\/p>\n
Skinny-Dipping with the Muse
\n<\/i>by Ellen S. Jaffe
\nMontreal, QC: Guernica Editions, 2014
\n115 pp, $20<\/p>\n
Nova Scotia\u2019s Gaspereau Press and Toronto\u2019s Guernica Editions have issued, respectively, new works by poets Tim Bowling and Ellen S. Jaffe. Though Gaspereau has published my work, and Guernica plans to do so, I admit no conflict-of-interest in reviewing these poets.<\/p>\n
Bowling\u2019s Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief<\/i> is his twelfth verse outing. His patient art attains a simplicity that seems superficial, but only at first glance or a single reading.<\/p>\n
Now 50, he\u2019s entering the age of grace, when childhood is no longer \u201clost,\u201d but rather is recognized anew as having never been abandoned, only repressed: \u201cI wake everyday in disbelief that I am not ten years old\u2026. \/ When I laugh, I laugh just as if I were ten years old. \/ When I cry, I cry just as if I were ten years old\u2026. \/\/ Ten years old is hating church but loving stained glass.\u201d<\/p>\n
The first poem makes the point: \u201cChildhood \/ I want it back. It is unseemly \/ to admit so.\u201d<\/p>\n
If youth is about discovery, it is also about establishing\u2014the \u201cself\u201d we will later reveal: \u201cThe first guy I ever punched \/ became a cop who beat \/ his kids. I empty this cartridge \/ of the blood he shed \/ when I busted his nose.\u201d<\/p>\n
Along with subtly profound thought about the odyssey of life, time passing and things changing (not always for the better), et cetera<\/i>, Bowling presents imagery that\u2019s nature-oriented (as in most Canadian verse), but also exact: \u201cDusk. Rain. \/ The freshly-painted skiff\u2019s \/ a sloppy clown\u2019s grin \/ along the slough bank\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
These lyrics analyze generations (not history, really) and foreground the nature that is backdrop: \u201cMy father walked to work, and his work was on the water. \/ His journey through blossom, cat-shadow, and rain.\u201d<\/p>\n
The plain observations open up to plangent questions: \u201cWhat would it mean to look \/ at the world as if each look \/ freed a child from pain?\u201d<\/p>\n
Bowling praises Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, and suitably so, for there\u2019s an echo of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in Bowling\u2019s organic imagery. But, Bowling has a discipline\u2014maybe wrought by R.S. Thomas\u2014that Dylan Thomas shows little desire to practice.<\/p>\n
Bowling offers neatly, suavely constructed meditations on life that ask us to think, then think again, on what we think we have learned, or what we claim \u201cnow\u201d to know\u2026.<\/p>\n
Ellen S. Jaffe is decidedly \u201clighter\u201d than is Bowling, and the fact is suggested by her title, Skinny-Dipping with the Muse<\/i> (Guernica, $20). Yet, like Bowling, she thinks about time past and its metaphysical import, and also about mortality.<\/p>\n
In particular, Jaffe struggles to reconcile the inhuman tragedy of The Holocaust with a North American family history that is civilized, liberal, and middle-class.<\/p>\n
Some of the poems juxtapose that original horror with domestic or workaday life: \u201cHow to explain to Grade Three students \/ about cremating my cat, \/ instead of burying her in the garden? How to say \/ we do this to people, too?\u201d<\/p>\n
Another poem states, \u201cI do not know the name of the ship you sailed in\u2026, \/ across oceans the colour of pogroms, \/ bayonets, and the icy breath of horses\u2026.\u201d History is a haunting, even if the new day in the new land is sun-lit and promising.<\/p>\n
Still, Jaffe\u2019s dominant tone is jaunty. A doctor-father is remembered as \u201cbringing home plaster models (of the heart) \/ instead of valentines.\u201d<\/p>\n
A love poem that must win smiles is \u201cFay Wray Writes to King Kong,\u201d in which the now-aged actress writes, tongue-in-cheek to the movie monster whose own fame has sustained hers: \u201cMarriage wouldn\u2019t have worked out\u2014 \/ you couldn\u2019t be house-broken, \/ and, of course, we were an inter-racial couple\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRuby Slippers\u201d imagines Dorothy keeping the special shoes once she awakes in Kansas following her dream-journey to Oz.<\/p>\n
Jaffe\u2019s models are Canadian, feminist, political but funky, women poets like Lorna Crozier, Anne Michaels, and Bronwen Wallace.<\/p>\n
Thus, \u201cMammograms,\u201d merges the erotic imagery of The Song of Songs with the medical language of breast cancer, all to mourn a missing lover: \u201ceven now \u2026 \/ my breasts grow rosy \/ with remembered song \/ sweet as Solomon\u2019s \/\/ as I document \/ your absence \/\/ my grief metastasizes [\u2026], \/ fills my breasts with dark and desperate longing [\u2026]\u201d. Try Jaffe for wry wit, Bowling for sharp insight.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Peeling Rambutan
\n<\/i>by Gillian Sze
\nKentville, NS: Gaspereau Press
\n$20<\/p>\n
Simple Simony
\n<\/i>by Jono Borden
\n$20<\/p>\n
Disclosure: I\u2019ve published several titles with Nova Scotia\u2019s Gaspereau Press. Yet, I remain objective in my critiques.<\/p>\n
An acclaimed small press, Gaspereau is becoming more \u201cdiverse,\u201d expanding beyond the eco-poetry it has long championed.<\/p>\n
This season\u2019s poetry titles include, thus, debut works by African-Nova Scotian Sylvia Hamilton and Shalan Joudry, a Mi\u2019kmaw.<\/p>\n
Add now Gillian Sze, a Sino-Canadian poet outta Winnipeg, now a Montr\u00e9alaise. Her third collection is Peeling Rambutan<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Mixing \u201cproems\u201d and free verse, Sze meditates on her Chinese heritage\u2014familial and cultural, and orients this individualized and intellectualized sensibility to teasing out nuances in travel, migration, and belonging.<\/p>\n
Peeling Rambutan<\/i> is cast as \u201ca poetic travelogue.\u201d True: It conjures up Japanese poet Matsuo Basho\u2019s 17th<\/sup>-century masterpiece, A Narrow Road to the Deep North<\/i>. For Sze, the travel is also psychological, and so her book may echo Roo Borson\u2019s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida<\/i> (2004).<\/p>\n A prize-winning poet, Sze displays consummate artistry. She traces Aristotle\u2019s teaching: The job of the poet is to make metaphors.<\/p>\n \u201cNearby, a woman\u2019s scarf billows like a shout, losing sound at the tasseled fringes\u201d; \u201cShe\u2019s collected scores of summer in her basket\u201d; \u201cA brothel of lilacs. \/ Four bushes of heavy-chested women\u2026. \/ They jostle you between them, \/ their perfume solid as solder.\u201d<\/p>\n Sze has fun with puns: \u201cThere are nights when the tomatoes growing below my window \/ freeze to death and no morning is enough to save them.\u201d<\/p>\n Often prose poems degenerate into preciosity. Sze tries to hone her prose, to highlight radiant thought: \u201cThe light would fall to her hands like a slippery newborn\u201d; \u201cSentences sit unused and, like forgotten fruit in a bowl, they catch light and shrivel\u2026. Mostly we learn to keep our brilliant rot to ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Sze\u2019s inventive images recall Anne Carson\u2019s style, right down to the classical Greek fetish. Her prose mirrors Michael Ondaatje\u2019s penchant for the eccentric: To locate the \u201cforeign\u201d in the local and the \u201cstranger\u201d in the comrade.<\/p>\n Yet, her prose can decay into tourism. The lyric poems, often employing Chinese epigrams or folklore, are strongest: \u201cAt dusk, the shadows fall east. \/ They break over the disjointed fence \/ and tumble to the other side.\u201d<\/p>\n Succulent in its excellence, Sze\u2019s poetry insists that cultural \u201cdifference\u201d is what can make a beautiful difference in our apprehension of the \u201cbeautiful\u201d: \u201cThe Chinese verb used to describe \/ \u2018becoming \/ a Buddha\u2019 \/\/ is the same verb used \/ to describe \u2018the producing of sweat\u2019 \/\/ the same verb used \/ to describe \u2018the publishing of a book.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Halifax\u2019s Jono Borden is a defiant, do-it-yourselfer poet, whose graphic Muse is a deliberate throwback to 70s Punk and 80s New Wave.<\/p>\n His debut book, Simple Simony<\/i>, proudly self-published, is a stark contrast to Sze, eschewing mainstream poetic beauty, to come up raucous. So, Borden invokes Lord\u2014incestuous and insurrectionist\u2014Byron as well as the \u201cprophetic\u201d Blake and the ironic Laforgue: \u201cPillage and decipher (this memoir)\u2014\u2018my Life\u2019\u2014if you dare think you can bare it\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n That pun\u2014\u201cbare\u201d\/\u201dbear\u201d\u2014speaks volumes about this book. Borden wants to shake us, to slap us cross the face (metaphorically), to arouse us from our drowsy browsing of comfy Canuck verse.<\/p>\n He wants to start a ruckus, bring the noise: \u201cCatastrophe catasterised me. \/ Now, I\u2019m a big black \u2018kunstellation\u2019 \/ Up here, hanging like f(r)amed misery \/ Glowing, toeing strife and elation.\u201d<\/p>\n His quatrains and triplets fuse apocalyptic, scatological, Dark Romantic lingo via an intellect both encyclopedic and irreverent: \u201cHow do I pen my Heart? \/ I\u2019d open him if the shovel \/ Didn\u2019t heap him with dark.\u201d<\/p>\n His chutzpah is bracing, brazen. He dast imagine himself supreme, that his \u201cArt\u201d is \u201cGoing where the great went.\u201d<\/p>\n If Borden is unclear, so what? It\u2019s the same obscurity that one finds in Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, and the words of other great, Rock songsmiths: \u201cShe went to Los Angeles and got lost \/ Among the angels; along the way, tossed, \/ And, in the end, well, she recouped the cost.\u201d<\/p>\n Admirable is (t)his (s)pouting! Dude\u2019s got guts\u2014big lungs\u2014(sh)outing Truth!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And I Alone Escaped To Tell You Generations Re-Merging I open by being open: 1) Gaspereau Press has published much of my poetry; 2) Sylvia Hamilton is a relative, friend, and mentor. Now, it\u2019s on to the reviews.<\/p>\n Prize-winning filmmaker, historian, and educator, Sylvia D. Hamilton, is now a published poet. And I Alone Escaped To Tell You<\/i> marks her long-awaited debut.<\/p>\n A Black Nova Scotian, Beechville native, and a teacher and journalist before applying her research skills to making documentaries, Hamilton is an artist and intellectual with a socio-political focus.<\/p>\n Following Ezra Pound\u2019s dictum, that poetry be as well written as prose, Hamilton drafts prose poems and found poems, often culled from archives, to resurrect lost voices of African-Nova Scotian history.<\/p>\n A Black Loyalist woman, in Shelburne, NS, in 1784, tells her sister about how her son attempted to stop her receipt of 200 lashes, but \u201cthey jump him force him to the ground. He just a boy but they make him lie in that wet cold jail. Rats wait in every corner.\u201d<\/p>\n At Cape Negro, NS, in 1827, Ambrose Smart is prevented from murdering the man who owns his wife, Hannah, because \u201cShe took my knife from its secret pocket in my boot. \/\/ I fix my left hand round his throat, \/ I reach for my blade\u2014it gone.\u201d<\/p>\n Hamilton renames runaway slaves as \u201cFreedom Runners.\u201d One such woman, Flora, ripped \u201cHer petticoat \u2026 into strips to wrap her cracked, bloody feet.\u201d<\/p>\n In her poem, \u201cCrazy Black Luce,\u201d Hamilton even channels the late Maxine Tynes.<\/p>\n Hamilton also pens lyric and imagist poems; some expressing poignantly the struggle of a black girl and young woman (herself perhaps) to forge a positive self-image, in spite of the casual Negrophobia and misogyny of Canuck culture, \u201cback in the day.\u201d<\/p>\n Hamilton is most affecting in her personal, familial poems.<\/p>\n In \u201cParade,\u201d she tells of a girl who dreams of being a sparkling majorette, but who must make do with \u201cOnly tight braids \/ bound with small ribbons\u2026. \/ Knees and legs, dry and ashy \/ from the wild sun. Cotton madras shorts, a short-sleeve \/ blouse, a rip or two mended again for the umpteenth time.\u201d<\/p>\n And I Alone Escaped To Tell You<\/i> yields a panorama of Africadian experience and smart introspection.<\/p>\n Shalan Joudry is a Mi\u2019kmaw writer, performance artist, and storyteller, and also a cultural interpreter and community ecologist at Bear River First Nation, NS. Her title, Generations Re-Merging<\/i>, is her first poetry collection.<\/p>\n Like Hamilton, Joudry is interested in foregrounding lost histories; but she also needs to \u201cre-merge\u201d the Mi\u2019kmaw tongue: \u201ctomorrow i will struggle to learn \/ one more word L\u2019nueiei \/ teach my tongue to soften at the back of my throat \/ and make scaffolding out of language \/ to hold up a nation once beaten into submission\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n The task of restoration expressed in an immediate epigram: \u201chow can something known \/ become unknown \/ in so little time.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s repeated\u2014partly\u2014later in a poem that deplores the application of the word \u201cwild\u201d to forests, for such denies the presence of Indigenous civilization.<\/p>\n Joudrey seeks to recover generational wisdom, the lore of folk, but erasure is a constant threat: \u201cevery moment \/ is the loss of something.\u201d<\/p>\n Joudrey\u2019s free verse seems confessional. She uses her experience as girl, then wife, and mother to elucidate the challenges of living as a Mi\u2019kmaw woman in an era of conflict between Indigenous thought and (past) practice and the global, consumerist ethos that cannibalizes the \u201cexotic\u201d and poisons the environment.<\/p>\n If her poetry is autobiographical, life-long has been Joudrey\u2019s struggle to forge a hybrid, Mi\u2019kmaw identity.<\/p>\n In \u201cYellow Pond,\u201d she tells of a girl whom other kids stone and beat with baseball bats, so that her escape is to climb trees or to play piano, \u201cconducting eighty-eight keys \/making love to music \/ then begin wishing I had more notes to play \/ more dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n An adult reverie works similarly: \u201cI want my children to smell of forest\u2026 \/ spruce boughs scattered on their floors \/ instead of carpet\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus, righteous rage surfaces in \u201cMenace to Your House\u201d: \u201cI\u2019ve learned the careful art of silence \/ and retreat\u2026.\u201d But: \u201cI will shake this house \/ and rattle you blood-deep.\u201d<\/p>\n Joudry may be the late Rita Joe \u201cre-merged.\u201d X: Poems & Anti-Poems The Fleece Era Shane Rhodes\u2019s sixth book is X: Poems & Anti-Poems<\/i>. The title is exact: The poems project Malcolm X-like, anti-racist rage to protest the \u201cX\u201d-ing out of Indigenous Peoples\u2019 rights to culture and prosperity in Canada; they do so in unapologetic, experimental style.<\/p>\n Ottawa-based, Rhodes was the 2013 Queensland (Australia) Poet In Residence, and so he has had a front-row-seat, so to speak, both nationally and internationally, in observing Native struggles for equality.<\/p>\n X <\/i>suits our times; it documents Canadian reactions (some supportive, most not) to the Idle No More movement. This past spring, the United Nations received a new report slamming Canada\u2019s treatment of First Nations and our theft of their resources.<\/p>\n But back to the poems: It seems Rhodes has studied the Oulipo movement and read closely one of its best, Canadian adherents, namely, M. NourbeSe Philip. The look and style of his book recall her epic poem, Zong!<\/i> (2007). Like Zong!<\/i>, X is also playfully difficult.<\/p>\n Rhodes\u2019 poems riff on treaty legalisms; the \u201canti\u201d\u2014or unreadable\u2014poems are either concrete poems or pattern pieces based on repetition of terms, overprinting of phrases or sentences one atop the other, upside-down page arrangements, or deliberate omissions and\/or ink blotches and\/or white (out) spaces.<\/p>\n The energy of these poems reminds one of Wilfred Owen\u2019s Great War sonnets, where \u201cThe Poetry is,\u201d said Owens, \u201cin the pity.\u201d In Rhodes\u2019s case, the poetry is in the unflinching rage.<\/p>\n \u201cWarning: this book is not about distant lands, Greek and Roman philosophers, Japanese haiku masters, and Elizabethan poets will not be discussed \/ This book is about desire \/ the desire to look elsewhere \/ This book is about where I live\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus, Rhodes dismisses the entire academic class of Canuck bards who look to Europe or Asia for their tutelage rather than face our \u201cnative\u201d heritage of oppression.<\/p>\n I admire the radical sport of Rhodes\u2019 lyrics and I admit my total support of his politics.<\/p>\n Yet, I prefer his lyrical movements to his brash, harsh, avant-gardism<\/i>: \u201cgod save the Queen \/ god save the barely planted late in spring wheat \/ god save the chickens from the mink\u2026 \/ god save the cured and salted meat\u2026 \/ god save me from the church and from the poor\u2026 \/ god save this rifle so I can put a bullet \/ through the life god has saved me for.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s a Poundian quality in this lyricism: \u201cthese women \/ stone faced stone backed \/ stone hands\u2026 \/ they had so little need for men \/ who get them with child \/ and parted from work and drink \/ only by death \/\/ each woman, unto herself, \/ a country\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Rhodes takes us down twisty, dangerous roads\u2014of conscience and consciousness, forcing us to recognize the sins of our Confederation\u2026.<\/p>\n Joanna Lilley\u2019s first collection, The Fleece Era<\/i> (Brick, $20), is as introspective as Rhodes is outr\u00e9<\/i>. Her concerns are traditional: to see the self in all its psychological subtlety and geographical domesticity.<\/p>\n A Briton from Suffolk, but once also of Wales and Scotland, Lilley is now settled in Whitehorse, Yukon. Her poems conjure the genealogical (\u201cSpliced by sisters, \/ pinched between parents\u201d) and the local: \u201cLeaving the post office, \/ I bend to a tub of pansies \/ on the sidewalk and sniff \/ the blood-thin petals \/ already covered in ice crystals.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m reminded of Emily Dickinson\u2019s semi-mystical, epigrammatic lyrics, but also Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s pointillist portraiture\u2014the exquisite image and restrained emotion.<\/p>\n \u201cFor my mother, conversation. \/ A thin wrist reaching for \/ a hand in a lap\u2026. \/\/ For me, home-child, a riddle \/\/ she didn\u2019t answer before she died: \/ whether there is more suffering \/ in having children \/ than in bearing none.\u201d<\/p>\n Lilley allows a lite feminism: \u201cHe knows his way around your body \/ better than you do. \/ After a snooze in your spleen, he tickles \/ your hippocampus\u2026 \/ He slides down your intestines \/ as you sleep\u2026.\/ It\u2019s the orifice your sister warned you about \/ whenever you both lay on grass, \/ except she only told you \/ spiders would get in.\u201d<\/p>\n Lilley is as precise as Rhodes is passionate: \u201cShe doesn\u2019t regret not having \/ children; she regrets \/ not wanting them.\u201d Her insights are visionary: \u201ccows \/ are the shape of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Rose of Toulouse Report from Planet Midnight <\/p>\n Born in England, raised in Guyana, degreed in England, and now a prof in the United States, Fred D\u2019Aguiar is a most gifted poet, both in English\u2014and also as a transatlantic, \u201cBlack\u201d bard.<\/p>\n Also well travelled is African-Canadian novelist and short-story writer Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaica native, raised in Canada, and now a prof in the U.S.A.<\/p>\n Both D\u2019Aguiar and Hopkinson are writers of accomplishment, fine style, and international publication and audience.<\/p>\n I also like D\u2019Aguiar simply because he was, like me, born in 1960, a transitional, generational year making us too young to adore The Beatles (except as cartoons) and too old to worship Nirvana.<\/p>\n D\u2019Aguiar\u2019s sixth book of poetry, The Rose of Toulouse<\/i>, treats politics and geography as aspects of autobiography. Also, the poet wants to canvass America. Strong, British influences\u2014Auden, Hughes, Walcott\u2014are ever-audible.<\/p>\n So, slavery is personal. \u201cI wash with soap \/ History\u2019s soap\u201d and \u201cOnion skin \/ crackles off me.\u201d Under \u201clayers \/ Of black,\u201d there is \u201cwhite,\u201d and then \u201craw red\u201d\u2014the colour of blood, of course, but also the skin tone of Malcolm X (1925-65). D\u2019Aguiar may refer to both. The poem ends with the speaker now, \u201cTin-whistle-clean,\u201d ready for us to \u201cPlay something.\u201d<\/p>\n In \u201cDreamboat,\u201d the poet imagines that his very body has been occupied by a slave ship: \u201cI tried to steer \/ the ship back \/ to the slave coast.\u201d In the end, \u201cI sank in clouded deep. \/ The ship sailed on.\u201d The poem warns one to not get stuck in history\u2019s sorrows.<\/p>\n \u201cWish\u201d works similarly: If the speaker could \u201cturn the (slave) ships \/<\/p>\n Around, not a single bullet, whip, or cutlass \/\/ Sound (would) deafen our ears for centuries.\u201d Then, there\u2019d be \u201cNo Atlantic road of bones from people \/ Dumped into the sea to form a wake.\u201d<\/p>\n The title poem proves D\u2019Aguiar touched with greatness: \u201cThe anti-terrorist knife just about splits \/ Crumbly, boomerang-shaped bread and sends \/ Legions marching to Paris in Roman formation \/\/ Patterns of the dominated\u2026.\u201d It\u2019s a bravura style, reminiscent of Walcott.<\/p>\n But D\u2019Aguiar is sharpest when his voice is most clearly his own: \u201c(This) country realigns your sorry backbone. \/ The country is the place your spine calls home. \/ You come to the country when you dead and gone, \/ Only then history content to leave you alone.\u201d<\/p>\n D\u2019Aguiar also presents several, \u201cvulture\u201d poems. The vulture displaces the eagle as a symbol for America, and, thus the poems remind one of Ted Hughes\u2019 \u201ccrow\u201d poems.<\/p>\n D\u2019Aguiar is a master of verse\u2014and a fine novelist. Seek out his work.<\/p>\n Nalo Hopkinson is an irrepressible author Canadian publishers once ignored: Her mix of Caribbean folklore and sci-fi\/fantasy writing seemed too \u201cexotic.\u201d But then she won a New York-based, first-novel prize, and got acclaimed\u2014finally\u2014in Maclean\u2019s<\/i>.<\/p>\n That was 20 years ago. Her admirers are now legion, and she is a recognized queen in a genre ruled (if not defined) by white male \u201cgeeks.\u201d<\/p>\n Her 2012 book, Report from Planet Midnight<\/i>, is a mix of items: A splendidly weird short story about a quasi-time-travelling, ingenious, truly precocious girl (with a mature brain in a pre-teen body); a speech about race and racism in the sci-fi\/fantasy world; another tale that combines mermaids with a prose revision of Shakespeare\u2019s play, The Tempest; a feisty, engaging interview (with Terry Bisson); and a bibliography of Hopkinson\u2019s works.<\/p>\n Report from Planet Midnight<\/i> is the kind of book a writer gets to publish when the publisher knows there will be an audience even for a grab-bag collection. And it is worthy.<\/p>\n The first story tells of Kamla, a big-head child, implanted as an embryo in a \u201cWomb-donor.\u201d She is actually \u201cfrom the future,\u201d and her DNA has been altered to slow down aging. She looks 10, but her age is 23. She tells her story to a family friend, who, at first, believes that she needs help, and then realizes that she represents everything he doesn\u2019t like about children, even a fake one.<\/p>\n Hopkinson\u2019s prose is anti-racist with provocation to spare. Her logic is breathtakingly moral. For instance, for those who attack \u201cemployment equity\u201d as \u201creverse racism,\u201d she has this correction: Such programs are about \u201creversing racism.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Science Fiction Edge Effects <\/p>\n Joe Ollmann\u2019s new graphic novel is titled Science Fiction<\/i>, but it is about the tension between \u201cfaith\u201d and \u201cfact\u201d: Faith accepts as fact what scientists consider incredible.<\/p>\n Ollmann\u2019s implicit argument is that all religious belief is a form of science fiction, but his deliberately unresolved narrative also suggests that such belief can still be \u201ctrue,\u201d though impossible to communicate to non-believers.<\/p>\n The Montreal author draws, scripts, the story of Mark Sett (\u201cGo\u201d should be added), a mildly depressed, middle-aged, non-fiction-reading, science teacher, who likes his job, but finds his teen pupils difficult to reach, but who enjoys pleasant domesticity with his common-law spouse, Susan Cale, head cashier at a Montreal supermarket.<\/p>\n Mark and Sue seem to love each other, only arguing over the usual issues\u2014different duties, schedules, and entertainment choices.<\/p>\n Trouble arrives when the no-nonsense Mark comes to realize\u2014no, violently believe and insist\u2014that he has been the victim of an alien abduction, years before in university, and begins to press Sue to accept his belief as \u201ctrue,\u201d while also resigning his usual responsibilities so that he can share his recovered memory with Internet allies who recall similar jaunts with aliens.<\/p>\n As Mark slides into a slough of chat rooms, neglecting himself, his home, his job, and Sue, she becomes a nag and a scold, and then so depressed as to fall prey to her boss\u2019s lecherous attentions.<\/p>\n Ollmann doesn\u2019t illustrate Mark\u2019s story of U.F.O. \u201cuploading\u201d (so to speak). The artist-writer is, instead, scrupulous in detailing the domestic drama of a household falling into dysfunction and a relationship falling into disrepair.<\/p>\n We see Mark become bearded, reclusive, and virulently defensive about his \u201cbelief,\u201d while Sue becomes desperate and despairing in her efforts to convince Mark that he is delusional and requires psychiatric intervention.<\/p>\n This tale of \u201cscience fiction\u201d is a soap opera. That Mark is black and Sue is white is, at first, merely evidence of Canadian multiculturalism. However, the couple\u2019s interracial background also mirrors that of Barney and Betty Hill, who were famously\u2014allegedly\u2014kidnapped by spaceship-piloting aliens in September 1961 while returning to their U.S. home after a visit to Montreal.<\/p>\n Ollmann might have the Hill story in mind, but he focuses on the breakdown of the relationship between Mark and Sue, the distress they both feel, plus the disruption of Sue\u2019s employ and the looming loss, for Mark, of his career.<\/p>\n Behind this narrative is the story of every evangelizing, religious convert: When they know what they believe is true, and abandon their former lives to pursue and proclaim their truth, family and friends alike become alienated. Perhaps every \u201ctrue belief,\u201d held with conviction, represents an \u201calien\u201d abduction\u2026.<\/p>\n Ollmann\u2019s previous graphic text, This Will All End in Tears<\/i>, won the Doug Wright Award for Best Book. He is a savvy artist who drafts a compelling story. Also impressive is that his publisher is Conundrum Press of Greenwich, Nova Scotia.<\/p>\n Jan Conn is a native Qu\u00e9b\u00e9coise, an entomologist, and a poet, always interested in linking science, travel, art, history, and self. These concerns animate her eighth collection, Edge Effects<\/i>.<\/p>\n A Conn poem, like a Zen k<\/i>\u014d<\/i>an<\/i>, relies on imaginative metaphor that induces meditation. Try these lines: \u201cThe sky clouds up, the stars are invisible. \/ It feels like infinity \/ could take up residence in me, some rough place \/ like my liver that won\u2019t see daylight. \/ Where are the sources of the self? I need to find mine \/ and give them a good shaking.\u201d<\/p>\n The jazzy shifts between moments of description and announcement verge on surrealism: \u201cA solitary bee \/ zigzags toward a redbud on the hilltop. \/\/ My point of view? Harmless and aimless, \/ sexual fantasy\u2019s \u2018voluptuous\u2019 is disappointing in the flesh\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n For all of her scientific\u2014I mean, accurate\u2014observation, Conn arrives, surprisingly, at mysticism, regularly: \u201cTo become more buoyant, \/ I eat breakfast\u2014duckweed and water hyacinth. \/\/ Into the dead of night the errant blue of the river \/ carries the Milky Way and me, glimmering and wavering.\u201d Conn is a poet for thinkers who dream. Take it on faith. Intimacy 101: Rooms & Suites The Loneliness Machine <\/p>\n Montreal native, Barbados-based Robert Edison Sandiford is a prize-winning writer, boasting laurels such as the Barbadian Governor-General\u2019s Award for Literary Excellence and the Lionel Shapiro Award, plus due critical esteem for his exquisite stories.<\/p>\n But Sandiford explores a\u2014let us say\u2014playful genre, scripting adult comics, and short fiction that indulges the fleshy pleasures of relationships. One could be tempted to dismiss such works as exploitive \u201centertainment.\u201d But they possess the amply redemptive virtue of simply being good writing.<\/p>\n Sandiford\u2019s story set, Intimacy 101: Rooms & Suites<\/i>, assembles the postcard-sized pieces upon which his graphic (in both senses) texts\/\u201dnovels\u201d are based, but includes longer stories too. Couples\u2019 encounters score blushing prose, but their feelings find poetry.<\/p>\n The first story admits this inspiration: \u201cThe physical is a way to the spiritual, I think\u2014a means of transcending.\u201d That insight applies to carnal love, but also to food and clothing and weather.<\/p>\n So, a man wakes \u201cto the smell of fresh bread and fish spiced with wine\u201d; another man invents a \u201cGastronomic Theory\u201d for interpreting lovers, believing that diet informs passion; he terms an actual poetess \u201can Omnivore Woman,\u201d with \u201cgrouper green eyes and a sibilant smile,\u201d who is \u201cHot with Vincy Carib blood, sensual as sea moss, so poet-like in her lounging beach pose.\u201d<\/p>\n A poignant story opens, \u201cWhat is love now that he lies dying?\u201d An older woman, visiting her dying husband in a hospital, both fears their separation, and lovingly recalls their nuptials, the sense that their honeymoon never waned.<\/p>\n She says as much: \u201cThe loving never stopped, did it, Ernesto? \u2026 Each night was like that very first night, only better?\u201d<\/p>\n At story\u2019s end, the wife-almost-a-widow crawls onto her husband \u201clike a child.\u201d She rests her head on his chest, listening \u201cto a sound like thunder, his still beating heart.\u201d<\/p>\n In another tale, a playboy beds a siren: \u201cHer hair and neck smelled of oranges and icing sugar.\u201d But she\u2019s demonic. Soon, he feels, \u201ca hot flash in his gut, \u2026 hot liquid pain buzzing in his blood like bees on fire, fraying his nerves like flesh-eating termites.\u201d<\/p>\n One argues for these stories as fine writing because one must: \u201cYou were rare \u2026 a hard knot of human nature wound tightly in a loose, little body\u2014and maybe an ounce of love.\u201d<\/p>\n This book is one for Valentine\u2019s Day\u2014and night\u2014and the other holidays too.<\/p>\n Aaron Giovannone\u2019s debut collection, The Loneliness Machine<\/i>, arrives with a blurb from Pop-Epic, TV-Lyric poet David McGimpsey, admitted influence from working-class poet Tom Wayman, experimental poet Christian B\u00f6k<\/em>,<\/i> and Italo-modernist poet Sandro Penna, as well as editing by the inventive Sachiko Murakami.<\/p>\n But this combo of avant-garde approaches reminds one of the deadpan, anti-poetry style of the U.S. Hippy poet Richard Brautigan, who might be both the most underrated poet of his generation and, curiously, the most influential.<\/p>\n Following Brautigan (if quite innocently), Giovannone inks insouciant poems that emphasize irony and absurdity: \u201cHey, did you hear that Iran \/ is designing its own internet? \/\/ This poem is our own internet, \/ and one of the rules of our internet is: \/ You must take a shot of (alcohol) \/ when you read the word \u2018poem\u2019 in this poem.\u201d The poem ends with \u201cpoem\u201d repeated thrice.<\/p>\n Addressing a \u201cFacebook Friend,\u201d the speaker says, \u201cIn my memories, there are always \/ lots of people, \/ and you are one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n Giovannone scribes sitcom verses: \u201cThe quote, unquote real world \/ isn\u2019t funny, it\u2019s horrible. \/ There\u2019s capitalism out there.\u201d It\u2019s not comical; it\u2019s wry.<\/p>\n His metaphors seem bland, and then, on second-thought, insightful: \u201cA night in early summer. \/ The window brims \/ with a family\u2019s image. \/ My silence on the sidewalk.\u201d<\/p>\n Some lines could easily suit a greeting card: \u201cMy heart pounds harder, \/ and I\u2019m not doing anything. \/ I\u2019m just leaning against you.\u201d<\/p>\n Or try: \u201cA poem is a way of being alone. \/ But I\u2019d rather \/ have my hand on your thigh.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s strange how some \u201cexperimental\u201d verse ends up being surprisingly sentimental. Still, these are nice, likeable poems. Just like Brautigan\u2019s.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Iconography of Malcolm X <\/p>\n Some 50 years ago, a TV ad proclaimed, \u201cX marks the spot,\u201d referring triumphantly to the close-up shot of a clothes stain now erased by detergent. This idiomatic slogan likely doesn\u2019t refer to African-American orator Malcolm X (1925-65), assassinated by shotgun 50 years ago, come February 21, 2015.<\/p>\n However, many other pop culture works do refer to X consciously (if not conscientiously) to suggest their own investment(s) in 1) black authenticity, or 2) progressive (socialist) politics, or 3) (Islamic) anti-imperialism, or 4) a \u201cmodel\u201d masculinity, or 5) (black) community pride, or 6) a sense of \u201ccool\u201d style, a photogenic, sound-byte pose or poise.<\/p>\n In his The Iconography of Malcolm X<\/i>, British Columbia-based scholar Graeme Abernethy studies the multiple uses to which the \u201cmartyred\u201d Black Empowerment tribune\u2019s life and works can be put.<\/p>\n Make no mistake: This work is academic; in fact, it reads just like the dissertation it likely was once-upon-a-time.<\/p>\n Even so, this hardcover book is accessible\u2014and thorough in its canvassing of the incarnations that X has sustained in African-American, Black Diasporic, and even generic, mainstream (Euro-Caucasian) cultures since his death (which itself made possible his Christ-like diffusion into identities and ideas, fashions and fads).<\/p>\n Abernethy\u2019s study appears alongside other works analyzing the imagery of half-century-anniversary celebrities or culture heroes and the ways in which they actively\u2014if discreetly\u2014sought to direct contemporary journalists and audiences, and future historians and biographers, to interpret their substance and style.<\/p>\n (See, for instance, Thurston Clarke\u2019s 2013 bio of the 35th<\/sup> U.S. President, JFK\u2019s Last Hundred Days<\/i>; or Bob Dylan in America<\/i>, a 2010 analysis by historian Sean Wilentz.)<\/p>\n Abernethy notes that two crucial aspects of Malcolm X made him available for wide re-interpretation.<\/p>\n X\u2019s Autobiography<\/i> (1965), appearing posthumously, suggested that his own life had been a chronology of \u201cchanges\u201d: Malcolm Little, a na\u00efve dropout, becomes Detroit Red, a fast-livin\u2019, jive-talkin\u2019 hood; becomes Satan, a superbad jailbird; becomes Malcolm X, the fiery, truth-rappin\u2019 Islamist; becomes Omowale, the Pan-African sojourner; becomes El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz, an orthodox Sunni Muslim.<\/p>\n Different readers could latch onto different aspects of the man, though his Detroit Red and Malcolm X personae have proven most attractive. X\u2019s story also suggested that addicts and thugs could be redeemed, but by becoming revolutionaries, not<\/i> saints.<\/p>\n Secondly, X was himself quite savvy in trying to shape his public self, a process he understood as engaging \u201cthe science of imagery.\u201d He not only knew the best angles of any debate argument; he knew the best camera angles for any pose.<\/p>\n Abernethy studies the evolution of X-ian imagery over the decades. From 1957-65, the media typecast him as an evangelist of \u201chate.\u201d X answered these stereotypes by stressing his \u201ccool grin\u201d; the Amway-chic of eyeglasses, suitcase, and wristwatch; \u201cthe understated stylishness of his [suit-and-tie] Nation of Islam period.\u201d Sartorially, X looked like JFK and even James Bond.<\/p>\n In 1965, the Autobiography<\/i> became a touchstone for African-American and other radicals and leftists. Dead, X could be cited and deployed without limit. But his memoir was complicated by Alex Haley\u2019s commercializing and hagiographic edits.<\/p>\n From 1965-80, X was mimicked by everyone from Black Panthers to pimps, and so his \u201cmeaning\u201d became disembodied from his actual life, times, and context.<\/p>\n Since 1980, with the arrival of neoconservative\/neoliberal (bankrupt) economics and supposedly \u201cpost-racial\u201d societies, X has been a signal figure in Hip-Hop, though the success and popularity of President Barack Obama has perhaps made him less essential as a figure of (black) struggles for equality.<\/p>\n Abernethy concludes, X\u2019s \u201ccontinued resonance emerges from his life\u2019s example of the refusal to be \u2018fixed in one position for very long.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But the real, underrated appeal of X is that he made it \u201ccool\u201d to sport glasses; to be scholarly; and to be charismatic, not nerdy. He was the first \u201cglamorous\u201d black intellectual, and Angela Davis was next.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Twin Tongues Scribble & Grin: 53 Rhymes for Inspiring Times Having grown up partly on Halifax\u2019s Maynard Street, I\u2019m admittedly partial to Invisible Publishing, which is based there, and also to its poetry publication, Twin Tongues<\/i>, by Claire Lacey, an Alberta-based poet.<\/p>\n Lacey\u2019s subject is the collision between English\u2014the tongue of ye olde Empire\u2014and so-called pidgin English, i.e. the mishmash of words that a \u201clocal\u201d people develop to connect their native tongue to the conqueror-settler speech.<\/p>\n In Twin Tongues<\/i> (Invisible Publishing, $15), Lacey narrates the self-conscious anxiety of a white woman (Canuck?) ESL teacher engaged to help raise the 50% literacy rate in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where the lingua franca, is Tok Pisin, a tongue supposedly inferior to Queen\u2019s English, but which helps PNG folks parley beyond the comprehension of come-from-aways.<\/p>\n Tok Pisin sounds a lot like \u201cTalk Pidgin,\u201d and \u201cpidgin\u201d sounds exactly like \u201cpigeon.\u201d So, Lacey employs a talking pigeon that soon\u2014like other PNG natives\u2014bids her \u201cEnglish\u201d character eat crow.<\/p>\n Puns and jests are essential to Twin Tongues<\/i>, itself influenced clearly by M. NourbeSe Philip\u2019s great work of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks<\/i> (1989), which ponders the violence wrought upon African languages by the imposition of English, but also the havoc African speakers wreaked upon English as they molded the language to suit their needs.<\/p>\n Lacey argues similarly in a two-line poem: \u201cA Short History of English: d v n c,\u201d or, \u201cdeviancy.\u201d Wherever the exported language settled, it deviated from the \u201cStandard,\u201d whether one thinks of Amurka, Astraylya, or Jamayka (as Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has recently demonstrated).<\/p>\n So, \u201cEnglish,\u201d the teacher-heroine, \u201ckeeps a crow,\u201d and\/or a \u201cNew Guinea Pigeon,\u201d which \u201ccannot be taught to talk,\u201d but which does find a way to say \u201cf\u201d \u201cu,\u201d the lesson that \u201cEnglish\u201d gets taught by Tok Pisin.<\/p>\n That the crow\/pigeon (pidgin) is named Jasper thickens the tongue (if not the plot), given that Jasper Language refers to the ability of non-native English speakers to comprehend the language.<\/p>\n The most harrowing moment for the white Anglo heroine occurs when she encounters a machine-gun toting man (presumably \u201cof colour\u201d) whose \u201cvoice sweats\u201d and whose \u201csyllables won\u2019t resolve themselves into familiarity.\u201d Her incomprehension of his tongue, but fear of his potential menace, repeats the encounter, centuries ago, between gunboat Europeans and aboriginal peoples globally.<\/p>\n Lacey won the 2013 Robert Kroetsch Award for Experimental Poetry, presumably for the manuscript for Twin Tongues<\/i>. It is definitely a work that twists and torques and contorts English, to illustrate its position as an interloper within the 200 languages of PNG.<\/p>\n Her \u201cplayful\u201d effort makes the prose poems and verse lyrics difficult. Invisible Publishing claims the book is \u201cconcrete, conceptual, but readily readable.\u201d No, it\u2019s not. But that is precisely Lacey\u2019s point.<\/p>\n Twin Tongues<\/i> should be read after viewing Nicholas Roeg\u2019s film, Walkabout<\/i> (1971), which also explores the clash between Euro-imperialist materialism and the philosophies of indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n Next up for review is Scribble & Grin: 53 Rhymes for Inspiring Times<\/i>, a hardcover, illustrated children\u2019s book.<\/p>\n Authored by Ontarians Mary Giuffre and Paul L. Clark, with art by Hollywood-based Troy Sullivan, these poems\u2014rollicking limericks and cute rhymes\u2014ask kids (and parents too) to \u201cthink with the heart,\u201d accept themselves as they are, be kind to others, and enjoy life.<\/p>\n Ex-children\u2019s tv producers, Giuffre and Clark write playground-friendly lyrics about toenail clipping-garnished desserts and nose slime that leaves green stains on sleeves. There are also a set of poems about musical instruments and their idiosyncracies.<\/p>\n The opening poems are a bit preachy, urging the benefits of play, and warning about dangerous adults, etc. But this drawback is offset by illustrations that show kids of all abilities having gleeful fun.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a poem: \u201cI know that I\u2019m taking a chance, \/ When I\u2019m so close to wetting my pants! \/ I just wiggle and jiggle\u2014 \/ And my siblings they giggle, \/ \u2018Just look at that fancy pants dance!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Inversed Birds Flock Fish School <\/p>\n Jason Holt is a trained philosopher, now teaching at Acadia University. His sixth book of poetry is Inversed.<\/i><\/p>\n Edward Carson\u2019s third book of poetry is Birds Flock Fish School<\/i>. Notably, 30 years passed between the Torontonian\u2019s first book (1977) and his second (2008). He deliberates painstakingly his craft\/art.<\/p>\n But this observation is also true of Holt. Though he has published twice as many books as Carson in almost half the time (over 20 years in contrast to Carson\u2019s nearly 40), he is concerned to produce what he terms, \u201cexperience as poetry, poetry as experience,\u201d and to do so while remaining faithful to existentialism via<\/i> Leonard Cohen, eschewal of majuscules (as in ee cummings), and repression of punctuation (chez <\/i>Gertrude Stein).<\/p>\n Holt\u2019s scholarly approach to verse sees him advise, \u201cpoetry \/ is language \/ masquerading \/ as itself.\u201d In other words, his poetry doesn\u2019t look like old-school POETRY\u2014but more like whimsical parades of terms and phrases.<\/p>\n Read: \u201chow in this \/ benumbing \/ this slickpenned \/ state \/ I walk \/ in april snow \/ when you abandon \/ best my counsel \/ lash and \/ then \/ the rain \/ to all your \/ sunning hopes \/ an answer.\u201d<\/p>\n Such a poem may not appeal to the faint of heart or the weak of mind. But its tease\u2014so to speak\u2014is to ask us to make sense of what seems a jumble. To that end, I find myself guessing Holt\u2019s narrator feels benumbed\u2014both my spring chill and a friend\u2019s or lover\u2019s disavowal of his best advice. However, he has revenge, for rain answers the other person\u2019s \u201csunning hopes.\u201d<\/p>\n I can\u2019t say my interpretation is correct, only that Holt expects me to puzzle my way through these verses that seem like a Rubik\u2019s Cube. Difficult, they verge on the occult.<\/p>\n Yet, some poems are more open than opaque: \u201cthe other \/not the one \/ just proud \/ of her heart \/ betimes \/ and oh the shape \/ such undeserved \/ happiness \/ trembled \/ much as on \/ sharp appetite\u2019s \/ glass \/ a wetted finger.\u201d<\/p>\n Again, I must be indecisive in my deciphering, but it appears to be, a poem about the delicious perils of\u2014well\u2014loving (someone).<\/p>\n Clearly, Holt has little interest in plain speech that is not, simultaneously, slippery. One thinks one has the meaning, the image, of the verse, and then it is gone\u2014as fleeting as the moment of reading.<\/p>\n One might ask, \u201cWhat is going on?\u201d But, at that instant, the poem is gone. It\u2019s best to savour the linguistic \u201cmasquerade.\u201d<\/p>\n Carson is a less insular\u2014or, rather, a less open-ended\u2014poet than is Holt. In other words, he is more traditionally \u201caccessible,\u201d if just as given to a sense of the mysterious.<\/p>\n So, observing birds, the poet states, \u201cWe are held in the crisp heyday \/ of their coming and going.\u201d \u201cCrisp heyday\u201d: Is it autumn? Or are the birds vividly \u201cfrisky\u201d?<\/p>\n One also reads, \u201cThey are everything we fear \/ is ours, and cannot say no \/ to their coming.\u201d But this statement also refuses clarity.<\/p>\n The poem does end well: \u201cHow can (the birds) all but disappear \/ into the ancient widening sky \/\/ with only their raucous calling \/ calling us to witness their vanishing?\u201d<\/p>\n The title poem is more satisfying. Carson recognizes that birds and fish, wrap \u201cthe compact cloud\u201d of their movement \u201cin a wave \/ of their own making.\u201d Indeed, \u201cThey move quickly to pass \/ along to each other a new thought, knowing \/\/ nothing of where each random turn will take them.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, the poet argues, we are similar, in detecting \u201cwithin ourselves, \u2026 this bold outline of another \/ world emerging.\u201d However, despite our topsy-turvy actions, \u201clooking to reclaim an old refrain of \/ escape,\u201d we still end up, \u201conly to be found out where finding rests.\u201d The more we think we change, the less we do.<\/p>\n Reading Carson\u2019s rhymeless couplets, I\u2019m reminded of the Welsh-New Brunswick poet John Thompson\u2019s ghazals. But the prevailing sensibility is more like Wallace Stevens: What seems obvious at first becomes imponderably strange: \u201cThis material light \/ is an old mystery, remote as conjuring, installing an invocation, \/ collimated, urgently infinite as the morning sun emptying itself.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s fine to be somber and scholarly; to be dour and dry; to reject visceral ecstasy as a viable mood. But, poets, it\u2019s also okay to shimmer and shimmy and shout!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Under My Skin<\/i><\/p>\n by Orville Douglas What Does a House Want? <\/p>\n Two male poets: One black, raw, insurgent; one white, senior, established.<\/p>\n Both iconoclasts.<\/p>\n Ontarian Orville Lloyd Douglas\u2019s second collection, Under My Skin<\/i>, is raging, visceral, ejaculatory (yes), and rightly so.<\/p>\n The fiery, African-American, political poet Amiri Baraka is dead? No. His spirit could drive Douglas\u2019s howls against the glib appeal of multiculturalism, so silent about anti-black and anti-native racism. But Douglas is also sick of hypocritical cries for \u201cracial unity\u201d that exclude gay black men.<\/p>\n Recently, Douglas triggered a transatlantic spasm of nausea when, in an op-ed piece for the London Guardian<\/i> (Teddy Snowden\u2019s favourite paper), he admitted he wishes he weren\u2019t black, for he\u2019s tired of his looks being rejected or feared or loathed.<\/p>\n That same fierce, passionate honesty powers Under My Skin<\/i>. See Africville: \u201cCleared, uprooted, shipped off\/Bulldozed for a pittance\/Less than a —king grand. \u2026\/\/Soil once so rich you could eat it\/Now buried six feet\/But not forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n Douglas\u2019s poetry can be undercut by his indulgence of mixed metaphor: \u201cYet the sewer system of red tape plowed through\/Gouging out destruction.\u201d Is this what happened to Africville? Douglas\u2019s imagery is confusing.<\/p>\n In Canada Is (Flushable), the speaker is constipated by \u201cNewspapers littered with (white) supremacy and lies\u201d and \u201cThe rich prestige of diversity and the sewage of contempt.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCockroaches, rodents and ants receive better treatment\/than us (black Canadians),\u201d opines the poet, protesting the nation\u2019s \u201cdeleterious filth.\u201d<\/p>\n The scatological is logical for Douglas: \u201cI am so beautiful, so shallow and superficial\/So pretty my soul is filth.\u201d<\/p>\n Douglas\u2019s shock effects are non-stop. I Kissed Adolf Hitler on the Lips compares genocidal Nazism to Canuck abuse of First Nations\u2019 peoples.<\/p>\n Douglas is an \u201cessential\u201d poet \u2014 just as his publisher\u2019s logo exclaims, for he\u2019s able to wrangle pure anger into pure poetry: \u201cI won\u2019t wait another moment to be politically correct\/My thoughts will be a sledgehammer to smash the doctrines of my oppressors\/I would murder millions if my words could kill\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Whew.<\/p>\n Gary Geddes is also proudly a political poet, though one whose honed lyrics ask for introspection and contemplation, rather than j\u2019accuse<\/i>-style denunciation. He doesn\u2019t point fingers; he makes points.<\/p>\n The B.C. poet\u2019s new Selected Poems, What Does a House Want?<\/i> is a handsomely designed collection of the humane, insightful musings of a writer who has won a dozen national and international literary prizes.<\/p>\n (Geddes also edits the successful anthology series, 15 Canadian Poets<\/i>, begun in 1971; the new edition includes 70 Canadian poets.)<\/p>\n Reading Geddes, one is aware of the subtle impress of celebrated politico-poets like Pablo Neruda and (despite himself) W.H. Auden, but there is also a meditative tone, akin to the plangent stoicism of Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost.<\/p>\n The poems are fine as stained glass, but cut sharp as broken glass. In Tower, a sniper gunning down students, recalls, \u201cI never lost my cool, but took them\/one by one, like a cat collecting kittens.\u201d<\/p>\n In another poem, conquistadors, adrift at sea, drown 50 horses. The imagery is Yeatsian \u2014much terrible beauty: \u201c(The horses) drink long draughts,\/muzzles submerged\/to the eyes, set out like spokes\/in all directions.\/The salt does its work.\/First scream, proud head\/thrown back, nostrils flared,\/flesh tight\/over teeth\/and gums\/(yellow teeth,\/bloody gums).\u201d<\/p>\n An elegy for the impolitic, crypto-fascist Ezra Pound stresses the poet\u2019s (alleged) contrition at his end: \u201cI have spoken too much of usury,\/or not enough.\/Even the air we breathe\/is rented for a price.\u201d Generous is his thought, \u201cI have found poems\/to be wiser and more honest\/than poets.\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe Geddes\u2019 most spectacular achievement is his sequence, The Terracotta Army (from 1984): It\u2019s so fine, it regularly accompanies the actual exhibition of the Chinese antiquity. He imagines beautifully the lives of the original models of the now \u201cpotted\u201d soldiers.<\/p>\n This short review is unjust to Geddes\u2019s sheer, understated mastery. He is superb. Read Geddes for wisdom, Douglas for wrath.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Enigma of the Piano<\/i> and The Ghost on the Mezzanine The Days You\u2019ve Spent <\/p>\n A couple of times over the past decade or so, John Devlin, has sent me his strange verses for me to puzzle through\u2014and enjoy, and the last occasion was in 2012.<\/p>\n A Dartmouthian with strong appreciation for the Minas Basin mudflats and the area\u2019s peculiarly, painterly light, Devlin\u2019s last package included two slim booklets\u2014both \u201clong poems\u201d: Enigma of the Piano<\/i> and The Ghost on the Mezzanine<\/i>, both published by Gegenshein Books, and both also featuring Devlin\u2019s architectural drawings, which are actually more like cranky but illuminated doodles.<\/p>\n Finally, I\u2019ve cracked them, and I am compelled to report their compelling oddity.<\/p>\n The booklets are curiosities, and Devlin\u2019s narrative poetry joins autobiographical rumination, obsession over a more-or-less dissatisfying time abroad at Cambridge (University), half-medievalist Holy Grail-seeking and half-Greco-Roman mythology reconstituted, and the stunningly brilliant poetic line, image, or phrase, which appears gleaming amid the inscrutable crucible of his unorthodox alchemy.<\/p>\n In a word, Devlin\u2019s poetry is \u201cmystical.\u201d No: It\u2019s not in the same league as that of William Blake (see America: A Prophecy<\/i>), or \u201cKit\u201d Smart (see Jubilate Agno<\/i>), or G\u00e9rard de Nerval (see Aur\u00e9lia<\/i>).<\/p>\n However, it is arresting in terms of its visions of Nova Scotia (Devlin names it \u201cold Latin Scotland\u201d) as a mash-up of Cavalier romance, Gothic goings-on, Roman nymphs and Greek gods, as a collision\u2014really\u2014between the \u201cHigh Art\u201d of Europe and the earthy, salty realities of Maritime life.<\/p>\n Thus, inexplicable lines about a night of \u201clunacy full swollen with the influenza and other forms of astrological fever\u201d give way to the plain, potent observation that \u201cthe bay is swollen and heavy with fall mackerel.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, a vague complaint about England segues into the homely recognition, \u201cI am too poor to go south: so I shovel the drive again and again, bring the food in on the dog-sled, split wood, carry water.\u201d Then, \u201cThe snow is too deep even to walk out and get the mail from England.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite my quotation of nice, solid lines, there is no denying that Devlin delves in weird narratives that resemble Monty Python<\/i> or Dr. Who<\/i> scenarios, or read like Alice-in-Wonderland by-the-Sea. It\u2019s as if Thomas Raddall and J.R. Tolkein had traded cradles at birth.<\/p>\n Yet, superb beauty occurs. Check this description: \u201cThe flowers fall and fall and linden pollen collects upon \/ the surface of the oily harbour down where the old docks are rotting\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of the mystical lines are also striking: \u201cPaper money worthless: except for the experience of God which is \/ the sensation of the Ratio imprinted in your anatomy.\u201d I\u2019m not 100% sure of Devlin\u2019s meaning, but his speaker seems to count God\u2014and Reason\u2014as superior to the vulgar satisfactions that money enables.<\/p>\n Also valuable is Devlin\u2019s uncommon hint, in these unique booklets, that Canada is better than Europe: \u201cGo for a walk upon \/ the barren beaches of Minas. Cool down your brain in the wintry blasts. Do not lose grip of the superiority of Canada.\u201d (Ian Fleming\u2019s heroine in The Spy Who Loved Me<\/i> voices a similar opinion.)<\/p>\n If you are interested in viewing Nova Scotia and its citizens through the very misty veil of mysticism, there\u2019s no better place to start than by reading Devlin.<\/p>\n Suzanne (Sue) Bowness seems to be every bit a realist, though she allows traces of sentimentality.<\/p>\n Her first book, The Days You\u2019ve Spent<\/i>, was published in 2010, but only now is my reading. Yet, the wait has not been harmful to the book, for its pleasures remain.<\/p>\n She is a bard of whimsical domesticity, very much in the style of Molly Peacock, whose endorsement graces the back cover.<\/p>\n So, we learn that \u201cSocks are really quite under-celebrated\u201d and that rotting tomatoes sprout \u201ca clean white mould \/ delicate like whipped cream \/ and hard to deem a colour of \/ decay.\u201d<\/p>\n Neat ideas, nice lines, percolate up, here and there. But, there are showstoppers like \u201cSight Lines\u201d and \u201cApril\u201d: \u201cApril wallows in her own \/ breathtaking abilities\u2026. \/\/ Her exit is appropriately dramatic too \/ as she lets each small flower tumble away \/ into delicate pink clouds.\u201d<\/p>\n The purpose of poetry? To distill snow into blossoms.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy<\/i><\/p>\n by Prof. Larry J. Sabato<\/p>\n Bloomsbury, 2013<\/p>\n 624 pp, $32<\/p>\n One of the 2013 works published to coincide with the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the November 1963 assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th<\/sup> president of the United States, was Prof. Larry J. Sabato\u2019s study, The Kennedy Half Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy<\/i>.<\/p>\n At 603 densely-printed pages, with another 32 pages of photos, the epic girth and heft of the volume contradicts one of Sabato\u2019s own conclusions, namely that \u201cThe Kennedy magic, which has entranced people for a half-century, will lose potency as his brief presidency ceases to have an outsized effect on personal memory and a nation\u2019s history.\u201d<\/p>\n As a political scientist, the founder and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, Sabato emphasizes rightly that Kennedy\u2019s Administration directly accomplished very little, and much of what it did do was neither memorable nor consequential: \u201cThe seventh-shortest presidency, JFK\u2019s time in the White House was too brief for a lengthy list of accomplishments.\u201d<\/p>\n Sabato is also correct to rate Kennedy \u201cstyle\u201d as the substance of his achievement, or, perhaps, \u201callure\u201d: Dreams and deeds arrived gift-wrapped with rhetoric, wit, and photo-ops, often involving glamorous First Lady and wholesome children or the extended Kennedy clan, plus Las Vegas Rat Pack entertainers and Hollywood starlets, to further burnish the charisma.<\/p>\n Thus, \u201cKennedy\u2019s place in the pantheon of presidencies should not be exaggerated.\u201d<\/p>\n True enough. But for all of his solid analysis and sifting of the record (especially of the assassination itself), Sabato overlooks a crucial\u2014if not the most vital\u2014reason for JFK\u2019s continued relevance, and that is, I think, his appeal to artists of all types\u2014poets, musicians, singers, actors, novelists, filmmakers, etc.<\/p>\n Whether or not that appeal\u2014or lustre\u2014is based on anything more than rhetoric or image, it will sustain Kennedy\u2019s vitality as a cultural icon and even as a political touchstone.<\/p>\n Indeed, it is only in the artistic imagination that JFK\u2019s terrible contradictions can be reconciled: A serial, sleazy womanizer and the leader who inspired humanity to aspire to reach the moon; a hot cold-warrior and the first promoter of what would later be labeled d\u00e9tente<\/i>; a cold-blooded plotter of assassinations and a cool, level-headed negotiator of the Cuban Missile Crisis; a hesitant supporter of black equality and the inventor of the Peace Corps, etc.<\/p>\n Sabato insists, \u201cIn the sweep of history, nothing JFK attained will matter more than his daring bet on NASA and a moon landing\u2026.\u201d Or perhaps also his savvy and courageous diplomacy in facing the threat of nuclear war.<\/p>\n Yet, British author Jed Mercurio, in American Adulterer<\/i> (2009), brackets all of JFK\u2019s most notable doings with medically accurate accounts of his diseases and addictions, plus true and fictionalized accounts of his pathological philandering. As a subject for art, JFK is beautifully ambiguous: Dashing and dirty; inspiring and perspiring.<\/p>\n So attractively does JFK combine both the candid and the sordid, the gross and the ingenious, it is unlikely that any other presidents have generated as many novels, histories, poems, biographies, documentaries and dramas, memorials and testimonials (from astronauts to mistresses, coroners to mobsters), even sculptures and paintings.<\/p>\n Sabato records the salient truth that every successor president, from Lyndon Baines Johnson to Barack Obama, has had to live with \u201cthe larger-than-life monument that is John Kennedy,\u201d and all have tried to mirror some aspect of his style or legislation.<\/p>\n Of course, his assassination also elevated Kennedy from simple murder victim to secular saint, a \u201cmartyr.\u201d Yet, one is hard-pressed to say for what it was he supposedly gave his life: Idealism? No: He himself presided over brutal, covert actions. Nor did he die for \u201cCivil Rights.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet, in mourning the loss of a dynamic, ideals-spouting Chief Executive, the U.S. finally did pass measures to mandate black equality. The bloodshed of Dallas dissolved the logjams in Congress.<\/p>\n Disputing Sabato\u2019s ultimately unscholarly conclusion, it is very likely JFK will still loom large in American\u2014and artists\u2019\u2014minds well throughout the next 50 years.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Lynching of Peter Wheeler<\/i> (Goose Lane, $20)<\/p>\n By Debra Komar<\/p>\n Frederiction, NB: Goose Lane, 2014<\/p>\n 325 pp, $20<\/p>\n The Lynching of Peter Wheeler<\/i> is Debra Komar\u2019s second non-fiction study of a historical crime. In this case, Wheeler, convicted of\u2014and executed for\u2014the 1896 rape and murder of 14-year-old Annie Kempton in Bear River, NS, is shown to have been the innocent victim of popular prejudice, police persecution, and yellow-press Negrophobia.<\/p>\n A globetrotting, forensic anthropologist and now an Annapolis Royal, NS-based author, Komar follows in the footsteps of American forensic scientist, Kathy Reichs, in popularizing grisly, true-crime cases.<\/p>\n Komar reconstructs well the facts: Kempton was found kneeling, face down, in a bloody puddle, her underclothes disarrayed, her throat slashed, her head bashed.<\/p>\n Wheeler, who found Kempton\u2019s body, was shortly fingered as the prime\u2014and then sole\u2014suspect, for the then-incriminating reasons that he was swarthy, a foreigner, and may have engaged in chitchat with the victim or bantered about her with drinking pals.<\/p>\n Komar makes clear that a kind of local, civil Ku Klux Klan\u2014in judicial black robes, police uniforms, and press badges\u2014conducted the trial-by-media and conviction-by-racism that resulted in Wheeler\u2019s hanging\u2014or legal lynching\u2014in Digby, NS, in September 1896.<\/p>\n Although Komar registers racism as a primary reason for Wheeler\u2019s execution, her analysis is superficial. She registers that, \u201cIn 1896 Canada was unfathomably, unrecognizably racist\u201d; she also describes racism as \u201can artifact of the times.\u201d<\/p>\n Thus, she obscures the ways in which Canada is still unfair to First Nations peoples as well as \u201cvisible minorities.\u201d<\/p>\n But Komar\u2019s comment is also poor in its historical application. She allows, \u201cClashes verging on race wars were inevitable,\u201d but omits the Riel rebellions of the Prairies and, much closer to home, the 1885 race riot in Bridgetown, NS, that put a white man in the grave and a black man on Death Row.<\/p>\n The Bridgetown history is germane to the Wheeler case for the 1885 riot was touched off by white males upset by interracial dating, and popular cries for Wheeler\u2019s death were compelled in part by the fancy that a \u201cColoured\u201d man had \u201coutraged\u201d a white woman.<\/p>\n Komar is also uncertain about Wheeler\u2019s \u201crace.\u201d He was, she says, \u201ca dark-skinned man of ambiguous ancestry and indeterminate parentage,\u201d who claimed to be Australian, of parents born in England, but was termed \u201cSpaniard\u201d or \u201cPortuguese\u201d by the press.<\/p>\n Yet, knowing that Wheeler was a native of Mauritius, Komar could have researched the Creoles\u2014or M\u00e9tis\u2014of that nation, the result of unions, usually between Africans and French, but also sometimes between English and Indian and\/or Chinese. (Mauritius flies a \u201crainbow flag\u201d for this very reason.)<\/p>\n Seldom does Komar recognize the actual, multiracial nature of Southwest Nova, even in 1896. She describes the region as \u201cinsular\u201d and the residents as \u201chomogeneous.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet, Bear River was (and is) home to Mi\u2019kmaw; plus there were notable Africadian communities in Lequille and Delaps Cove (both near Annapolis Royal), Bridgetown (Inglewood Road), and in Jordantown and Acaciaville (both near Digby).<\/p>\n No Nova Scotian could have thought the province \u201cwhites-only\u201d in 1896. All anyone had to do was read Thomas Chandler Haliburton\u2014or take a train to Yarmouth or Halifax or Sydney.<\/p>\n Thus, the \u201clynching\u201d of Wheeler, as a tactic in a \u201crace war,\u201d warned native Africadians\u2014some also part-white and\/or part-Mi\u2019kmaw\u2014to \u201cstay poor and powerless, or else.\u201d<\/p>\n (Indeed, the only other person to meet suspicion\u2014briefly\u2014for Kempton\u2019s death was Joseph Pictou, a Mi\u2019kmaq.)<\/p>\n Komar shows that a Halifax detective, Nicholas Power, abetted by the press, led the drive to convict and hang Wheeler, which he achieved by demonizing Wheeler and obfuscating the time-line of Kempton\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n Power deserves disgrace; Wheeler deserves a pardon; and Mauritius deserves an apology from Canada.<\/p>\n Komar\u2019s work could have been stronger had she consulted scholars like Carol Aylward, Afua Cooper, David Steeves, and Barrington Walker, who have pioneered the study of racial injustice meted out in Canadian courts.<\/p>\n She should also restrain her penchant for mixed metaphors: \u201ca sleight-of-hand \u2026 worn at the heel\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Nor is peddling \u201cpedalling\u201d; nor is one \u201chung\u201d: one is hanged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Poetry, Fiction, Historical Crime, Comics and Scholarly Reviews Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects by Catherine Graham and Richard Greene Hamilton, ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2013 $17 The surnames of poets Catherine Graham and Richard Greene align to produce the name of the British author of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2327,"parent":93,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-672","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2214,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/672\/revisions\/2214"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/i>by Sylvia D. Hamilton
\nKentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2014
\n96 pp, $20<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Shalan Joudry
\nKentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2014
\n64 pp. $19<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Shane Rhodes
\nGibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2013
\n126 pp, $19<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Joanna Lilley
\nLondon, ON: Brick Books, 2014
\n105 pp, $20<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Fred D\u2019Aguiar
\nCarcanet Press, 2013
\n80 pp, $18<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Nalo Hopkinson
\nOakland, CA: PM Press, 2012
\n128 pp, $12<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Joe Ollmann
\nMontreal, QC: Conundrum Press, 2014
\n128 pp, $18<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Jan Conn
\nVancouver, BC: Brick, 2012
\n96 pp, $19<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Robert Sandiford
\nThe Independent Press, 2012
\n88 pp, $15<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Aaron Giovannone
\nLondon, ON: Insomniac Press, 2013
\n96 pp, $17<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Graeme Abernethy
\nLawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2013
\n328 pp, $35 US<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Claire Lacey
\nInvisible Publishing, 2013
\n80 pp, $15<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Mary Giuffre and Paul L. Clark
\nInspirtainment Ink, 2013
\n142 pp, $30<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Jason Holt
\nStone Mountain, GA: Anaphora
\n22 pp, $16<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Edward Carson
\nDetroit, MI: Signal Press, 2013
\n72 pp, $16<\/p>\n
\nMontreal, ON: Guernica, 2014
\n80 pp, $15<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Gary Geddes
\nPasadena, CA: Red Hen, 2014
\n240 pp, $2o<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by John Devlin
\nGegenshein Books, 2014<\/p>\n
\n<\/i>by Suzanne Bowness
\n<\/em><\/em><\/em>Toronto, ON: Tightrope, 2010
\n<\/em>80 pp, $15<\/em><\/p>\n