Sneha Subramanian KantaGhost Tracks (Louisiana Literature Press, 2020)ISBN 978-0-94508-351-1 | 30 pp | $8.95 USD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY There are ghosts everywhere in Kanta’s chapbook of poetry. The ghosts “freckle silence” and “remove fishhooks from animal bodies” and are “carried on the wind” with “hands full of flowers.” We are told by the title to expect tracks, traces, as if the ghosts were deer disappearing into the woods, but instead the ghosts are moving about in front
American cartoonist Cole Closser has been called a master of “butchered quotes and borrowed styles” — a man whose ink-stained dreams tend to have a yellowed, nostalgic residue covering them, and whose drawing style is constantly in a state of technical re-examination and flux. Like the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock — who is said to have noticed a drip in the mouth of a horse in Picasso’s mural-sized oil painting Guernica, and from that
In this traditional review, A.G. Pasquella makes use of a wide range of tools — from linguistic theory to allusions to The Simpsons — in an effort to parse the meaning of The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021), the latest poetry collection from the Trillium Award winning author Roxanna Bennett. ISBN 978-1-77422-017-7 | 88 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Pain cannot be translated. We can never know how a person actually feels. In Roxanna
As gender and genre-bending as its subject, this experimental review by Sarah Cavar skips between theory, memoir, and experimental poetry in order to keep pace with Johanna Hedva’s hybrid literary collection, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (Sming Sming Books + Wolfman Books, 2020), which “incorporates plays, performances, an encyclopedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic and hypnapompic poems.” ISBN 978-1-953189-00-4 | 194 pp | $18 USD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY What I needed to make this review: Twitter. My Chemex. Crystal
JESSICA BROMLEY BARTRAM Skyscrapers When the city sleeps, it emerges, unfurling cloudlike from a ravine and stepping carefully over grumbling streets. Bleary-eyed drivers blink it away, their brains filled with thoughts of home or the next city, naming it Bridge Shadow or Passing Tree. Its missteps leave cars covered in stormy grey streaks that refuse to fade, drivers whose peripheral vision is now filled with flickering shadows, almost-forms almost visible if only they could turn
Jennifer HoseinA Map of Rain Days (Guernica Editions, 2020)ISBN 978-1-771834-41-4 | 128 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY “My mother’s toes are / crooked and curled / in a misguided, arthritic map / of rain days,” writes Jennifer Hosein in the eponymous poem of her debut collection, A Map of Rain Days. In these lines there is a conflation of body and world, but also of space and time. Time becomes an entity that is spatially