Lauren TurnerThe Only Card in a Deck of Knives (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020)ISBN 978-1-989496091 | 112 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY It is common enough to find a novel that clasps you by the hand, Nimue-like, draws you into its realm and will not let you leave; far rarer is the debut poetry collection that does this. Yet Lauren Turner’s The Only Card in a Deck of Knives (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) manages it. Looped
Los Angeles artist Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera is a wildly irreverent collage narrative that challenges at every turn. To create his dreamlike paper opera, Kraft worked directly over an issue of Kapitan Kloss — a Cold War comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis — superimposing a cast of strange new voices and characters on top of it. “A riot of images and words”, the resulting project is arbitrary, inventive and
Emily Skov-NielsenThe Knowing Animals (Brick Books, 2020)ISBN 978-1-771315333 | 104 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Emily Skov-Nielsen’s debut poetry collection, The Knowing Animals (Brick Books, 2020), integrates the small, prosaic dramas of mundanity (“I’m bent over the cutting board slicing tomatoes / with a serrated knife — deciding if I should leave you”) and luxuriously lyrical imagery (“coltsfoot clambers / from concrete clefts, groundlings of the groundsel tribe, / lovers of rifts and shambles, larvae
Melanie Power looks at, and beyond, the mesmerizing lyricism of Emily Skov-Nielsen’s debut poetry collection The Knowing Animals (Brick Books, 2020) in this traditional review. With a steady hand, Power unearths the ecological concerns, the philosophical preoccupations, and the sharp snark from beneath the stunning surface of these poems. ISBN 978-1-771315333 | 104 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY As cerebral as they are embodied, these poems marry the ecological and the personal. The book is
Grammar is often relegated to the status of pedantic concern, if it is noticed at all. Yet in this experimental review of 4 books — spanning 32 years of Canadian poetry — Klara du Plessis wields the twin powers of scholarly attentiveness and literary imagination to drag the study of grammar out of drudgery and into a new vitality. #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY 1 Grammar — a suspension of disbelief in which rules repeat themselves, and words enter
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
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
Taking a Line for a Walk — 2: Matt Davey Taking a Line for a Walk: Matt Daveyappeared in CAROUSEL 37 (2016) — buy it here
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
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
Taking a Line for a Walk — 1: Jon Vaughn Taking a Line for a Walk: Jon Vaughnappeared in CAROUSEL 37 (2016) — buy it here
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
Faye GuentherSwimmers in Winter (Invisible Publishing, 2020)ISBN 978-1-988784502 | 208 pp | $19.95 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Faye Guenther’s Swimmers in Winter (Invisible Publishing, 2020) has a title that accurately bespeaks its tone — there is a chill to these three sets of paired-off stories that is, by turns, invigorating and lulling. But there is also a clarity in the prose, like cold water free of rose-eyed summer. Though this is Guenther’s debut collection of short fiction,
MALLORY TATER The Last Nickel Geraldine’s black bather sticks to her chapped skin. Her thighs burn rogue with saltwater rashes. The water isn’t good to her but she loves it anyway. She walks her path to the seawall, one-at-a-times each stone step down to the shore. She feels a shifting in the land, but she isn’t afraid of it. Kelp and purple claw-weed accumulate in bundles, thick and dirty like doll’s hair. Geraldine wades until
Nicole Haldoupis Tiny Ruins (Radiant Press, 2020)ISBN 978-1-989274385 | 88 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY How many novels do you get to read that are composed entirely of linked flash fiction? That alone is reason enough to peruse Nicole Haldoupis’ debut, Tiny Ruins (Radiant Press, 2020). The action is largely commonplace — anecdotes of minor embarrassments that threaten to become neuroses, ambivalent infatuations, prickling familial conflicts — the sort of tales we tell only our
Conyer Clayton assembles the fragments of narrative in Nicole Haldoupis’ Tiny Ruins (Radiant Press, 2020) to construct and construe the themes of surrealism, memory and queerness in this traditional review of a debut flash fiction novella. ISBN 978-1-989274385 | 88 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Tiny Ruins, Nicole Haldoupis’ first book, is a novella built through flash-length (usually one page or less) stories; snapshots that create a somewhat jolting, and effective as such, sense of
Filmmaker Justin Stephenson took fifteen years to carefully create The Complete Works — a labour of love that creatively adapts the work of internationally acclaimed avant-garde poet bpNichol. From comic book detective stories & westerns to documentaries & magic realism, and from hand-drawn animation to computer-generated images, The Complete Works wrestles Nichol’s writing off the page and projects it onto the screen. It uses bpNichol’s poetic methods on Nichol himself to create a film that
Hollay Ghadery both employs and subverts the expected repetitions of a pantoum to confront the shifting recurrent patterns that characterize humankind’s ambivalent responses to environmental disaster in this experimental review of Blaze Island (Goose Lane Editions, 2020), the fifth novel of Catherine Bush. In both content and form, Ghadery’s review at once affirms the concerns at the crux of Bush’s work while also grappling with the daunting reality that words are not action, that text
Amanda Earl transforms prose poetry into visual poetry in this experimental review of Bahar Orang’s debut collection Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty (Book*Hug Press, 2020). By cutting open the text and twisting it to a new shape, Earl brings forth a rush of stunning blood that calls attention to the crucial elements of Orang’s essays on aesthetics. ISBN 978-1-77166-569-8 | 114 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews I chose an excerpt from a passage
The word emporium conventionally refers not only to a commercial centre, but also to the centre of the brain where nerves and sensations meet. These disparate connotations coalesce and transform in Sanchari Sur’s traditional review of Aditi Machado’s sophomore book of poetry Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020). Sur shows us how Machado envisions the poet as a radical barterer, plying her trade in the immaterial and invaluable realm of words and meaning. ISBN 978-1-64362-029-9 | 112