USEREVIEW 020 (Capsule): Cosmic Bowling

USEREVIEW 020 (Capsule): Cosmic Bowling

Cornelia Hoogland and Ted GooddenCosmic Bowling (Guernica Editions, 2020)ISBN 978-1-771835374 | 156 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Cornelia Hoogland and Ted Goodden’s Cosmic Bowling (Guernica Editions, 2020) pairs Hoogland’s brief, meditative poems with Goodden’s humanoid ceramic sculptures to form a collaborative, multidisciplinary ekphrastic response to the I Ching. This book is the product of two practised artists, and both poems and sculptures have an unassuming, quotidian, near-directness about them, a quality of commonsense wisdom rendered

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USEREVIEW 019: Playing with the Universe

USEREVIEW 019: Playing with the Universe

In this exuberant traditional review, Julie McIsaac traces the metaphysical, mythological and scientific lineage of Cosmic Bowling, a collaborative art and poetry collection by Cornelia Hoogland and Ted Goodden (Guernica Editions, 2020), while simultaneously imitating the spirit of playful wonder that animates the book.  ISBN 978-1771835374 | 156 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Cosmic Bowling by Cornelia Hoogland and Ted Goodden was released in 2020 as part of Guernica Editions’ Essential Poets Series. The collection

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USEREVIEW 018: Dwelling in the Organic

USEREVIEW 018: Dwelling in the Organic

Mark Laliberte transliterates visual poems into text in this traditional review of Sacha Archer’s third full-length collection, Mother’s Milk (Timglaset Editions, 2020). Balancing considerations of both the sensory impact of the works with their articulated thematic preoccupations, Laliberte brings his twin literary and artistic expertise to bear in a way that contextualizes and enlivens Archer’s book. ISBN 978-91-985539-0-1 | 84 pp | €16.00 #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Mother’s Milk is an essential collection of Canadian creator Sacha Archer’s

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USEREVIEW 017 (Capsule): Mythical Man

USEREVIEW 017 (Capsule): Mythical Man

David LyMythical Man (Palimpsest Press, 2020)ISBN 978-1-989287354 | 70 pp | $18.95 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Reading David Ly’s Mythical Man (Palimpsest Press, 2020) feels not unlike being on late-night Twitter, where text slips between gossip and discourse, where a quippy tone is an obvious filter for latent ennui. This debut collection is young and lustful, tech-savvy and oppression-aware. The poems in it that interested me most were the ones slightly removed from realism, that indulged a

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USEREVIEW 016: An Echo of Crows

USEREVIEW 016: An Echo of Crows

In this striking experimental review, Jessica Bromley Bartram uses the medium of illustration to couple personal essay with literary criticism, and to visually render the prominent motifs of Karen McBride’s debut novel, Crow Winter (Harper Avenue, 2019). Both the novel and the review meet at the crossroads of the human and the animal, the mundane and the transcendent. ISBN 978-1-443459679 | 352 pp | $22.99 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY “A crow croaks loudly on the power line

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