Zehra Naqvi’s debut collection The Knot of My Tongue explores personal and generational calamities: domestic violence, a family’s displacement during the Partition, the Battle of Karbala. Writing about or within unspeakable violence is no simple task for a poet.
Read MoreThyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction collects fourteen stories by new and established writers from the Palestinian diaspora. Edited by Sonia Sulaiman, these stories imagine new worlds and confront the reality of our own. Individually, these stories are thought-provoking and sincere. Together, they beautifully explore Palestinian identity and resistance, and offer readers a chance to reflect upon the present moment and what we want the future to look like.
Read MoreThe Coin follows a wealthy Palestinian woman who takes on a position as a teacher at an all-boys school in New York City. She is tastefully extravagant, chaotically in crisis, not a particularly good or moral person, and one of the most fascinating characters to emerge in contemporary fiction.
Read MoreEllen Chang-Richardson’s debut poetry collection Blood Belies is a tender and probing examination of how history can be traced through memory, mapping the orientation of the Asian-Canadian experience against the unyielding landscapes of “permafrost and / rust and dirty snow slush.”
Read MoreThe Last to the Party (Gooselane Editions, icehouse, 2024) is an honest and moving debut trade poetry collection by bpNichol Chapbook Award recipient, Chuqiao Yang. Yang navigates the complicated terrains of family, heritage, ancestry, identity, racism, belonging, friendship, grief, love, tenderness, heart, and ferocity, as the book moves from childhood to adulthood.
Read MoreStories are often an amalgamation of perspectives and a person’s unique connection to them, resulting from all the stories they’ve lived; Bird Suit navigates multiple perspectives and multiple stories, slowly stitching together a central story that many people hold a piece of.
Read MoreThe texture of faith in Theophanies soothes me, as it understands faith as flawed, ruptured, unruly and riotous. The cover begins our understanding of this faith, present in titles. I understand Theophanies as the combined Greek theos from θεός • (theós), meaning “god” or “divine”, and φαίνω (phaínō), concerning manifestation and appearance.
Read MoreWith its Lisa-Frank-esque, unicorn-bedecked cover, Sadie McCarney’s second poetry collection promises fun, irreverence, and whimsy. In that aspect, it certainly delivers, but behind the cotton-candy design also lies a deep dive into mental health, personal experience, and history that you might not expect.
Read MoreThe power of McLaren’s wanting draws me in, confronting me with the necessity for a surgery that leads to (otherwise taken for granted) everyday freedoms, including commonplace acts like wearing loose fitting t-shirts and baring skin at the beach or pool, in what I imagine as normative public places.
Read MoreEmily Osborne’s Safety Razor displays an assured poetic voice, more so than one might expect in a debut. This is quite possibly reflective of Osborne’s scholarly background, which includes a Masters (MPhil) in Old English and a PhD in Old Norse, both from Cambridge.
Read MoreHazel Jane Plante’s second novel Any Other City circumvents this tired narrative to paint a more complete picture of a trans woman musician becoming an artist, having lots of hot sex and healing from trauma.
Read MoreCurrin’s is a poetics with roots in the New York school, and which, Currin has transferred to the streets of Vancouver. Currin’s is a “local” poetry, local to this writer’s social, political, and artistic life in the City of Glass, variously described in the poems as rainy, foggy, mildewy, and musty.
Read Morehanna’s use of rich language to capture the inner narrative of her lived experience and matrilineal inquiry as a child of a single mother forced to migrate to Canada from Egypt in the 1970s evokes a visceral sense in the reader.
Read MoreIn her latest poetry collection Flyway, Sarah Ens creates a narrative about what we do to survive—what our instincts are to carry forward, amidst war, violence, oppression, displacement, loss, and grief.
Read MoreIn the fall of last year, Baseline press debuted a new poetry line-up of four chapbooks, including Laboni Islam’s Light Years and Jodi Chan’s militant. I am lucky enough to sit down with these two works and explore their intermingled threads.
Read MoreFor readers looking for some literary smut, they will find it. However, they’ll also find so much more. For Lucy, the protagonist of Good Girl, this is her odyssey for real intimacy and what it means to be ‘good’: whether in bed, as a writer, as a daughter, or as a friend.
Read MoreA powerful writing tactic Purcell excels at is offering layered and multiple meanings in a central or single muse of a poem. In “Earring,” Purcell uses the image on an earring to anchor the poem; however, the reader can understand that the poem is about much more than an ornamental piercing. Consider the line, “Your child coming home pierced, your voice / all the way through the wound / that never grows over.” (24). Purcell sets the scene so that we may understand the depth to this piercing: its relationality to family, coming out, and queerness and its visibility.
Read MoreStanding in a River of Time by Jónína Kirton is an unrelenting memoir. Each chapter is comprised of a narrative section and a set of poems, focalized through a character, theme, time frame, or a series of events. It is also a heavy text, holding stories of death, abuse, violence, intergenerational trauma, and poverty.
Read MoreIn her debut poetry collection Orion Sweeping, Anne Marie Todkill attends to the consequences of human experiments and what we humans have made of our lives on Earth. Sectioned into fifths titled “Earth,” “Air,” “Familia,” “Loss Lessons,” and “Assisi Variations," respectively, the poems mostly fit to those themes, though the connections are sometimes indirect, even elusive.
Read MoreClayton collages these dream details together into something like meaning, something like a riddle, something like an escape room, in what becomes a compelling through-line linking each poem to the next. Dreams, after all, are a kind of serial publication, and so too does each poem in this collection feel like a new episode in a whirling, surreal narrative. What will the next episode bring—danger, or catharsis? Survival, or pain? The answer to the riddle, or only more riddles?
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