experimental review – CAROUSEL Magazine: Blog

USEREVIEW 042: Johanna Hedva’s Mad Epistemology

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

USEREVIEW 036: A Colossal Problem

There was supposed to be a review of Jeremy Colangelo’s debut short fiction collection Beneath the Statue (Now Or Never Publishing, 2020), but due to unforeseen circumstances, there will be none. To find out what led to this utter catastrophe, please read on. ISBN 978-1-98968-910-3 | 184 pp | $19.95 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Dear Jade Wallace, Reviews Editor for CAROUSEL, Thank you for sending me a review copy of Jeremy Colangelo’s debut short fiction collection, Beneath

USEREVIEW 031: Counting the Hours

Hollay Ghadery converts Gillian Wigmore’s trifecta of novellas Night Watch: The Vet Suite (Invisible Publishing, 2021) into (32) tercets, each comprising a prime number of syllables, in this mathematically perfect, verse-form experimental review. ISBN 978-1-988784588 | 152 pp | $19.95 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Heifer I don’t want to doit again — I want to doit in reverse: do what I couldn’t dothe first time. See with the slowgaze of cattle, their genuflect feyness,it’s in all

USEREVIEW 029: Me, You, Then Me Again

Boldly eschewing the literary convention of never reviewing one’s own work, Khashayar Mohammadi reflects on his newly-released, debut poetry collection, Me, You, Then Snow (Gordon Hill Press, 2021), and its place in Canadian literature, in this autoethnographic experimental review. ISBN 978-1-774220146| 96 pp | $20.00 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY In the depths of pandemic insomnia, there isn’t much I can read anymore; so I keep reading and rereading my debut, anticipating the pictures, reviews, award season; practising

USEREVIEW 027: Women Talking Absinthe

Lannie Stabile daydreams a strange and aureate bar-side interview with the eponymous woman of Katherine E. Young’s most recent poetry collection, Woman Drinking Absinthe (Alan Squire Publishing, 2021) in this conversational experimental review. ISBN 978-1-942892243 | 72 pp | $20.99 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Normally, when I interview authors, I like to meet them in a quiet cafe, treat them to their preferred coffee or tea. Drinks in a dark, local bar seemed more fitting, however, to

USEREVIEW 025: Swivel Sights

Karl Jirgens proceeds by paradox — with an outward-looking and self-reflexive gaze, with enthusiastically energetic aplomb — in this not-quite traditional review that echoes the stylistic elements of its subject: Ken Babstock’s poetry collection, Swivelmount (Coach House Books, 2020). ISBN 978-1-55245-4138 | 128 pp | $21.95 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY In preparing this review for CAROUSEL, I thought it’d be interesting if book reviews reacted rather than described or interpreted. After all, writing ought to open dialogues.

USEREVIEW 021: Grammar Poetics (An Experimental Review of Four Books)

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

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

USEREVIEW 012: Blistering Words for a Burning World

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

USEREVIEW 011: Where Words Touch

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

USEREVIEW 009: Classified & Personal

As readers and writers, we are often in a continual process of losing and finding the words we seek. In this experimental review, Emily Woodworth brings this metaphor to life by incisively reenvisioning Lidia Yuknavitch’s lyrical memoir The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books, 2011) as a series of classified ads, where the most deeply personal words are publicly sought and sold, lost and found. ISBN 978-0-9790188-3-1 | 310 pp | $18.95 USD #CAROUSELreviews

USEREVIEW 008: Reverse Juggling

In six stanzas as flat-topped and flavour-concentrated as the fruit from which Lily Wang’s Saturn Peach (Gordon Hill Press, 2020) takes its name, Erica McKeen juggles, tosses and pries open flesh to get to the stone heart of the book. ISBN 978-1774220115 | 86 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews “Droplet on a / green stalk—going up?” A line from Lily Wang’s poem, “Green.” A line from her book from Gordon Hill Press, Saturn Peach. This

USEREVIEW 006: Talking to Stones

Jade Wallace imagines what it would be like to interview Tanis Franco‘s poetry debut Quarry (University of Calgary Press 2019) in this experimental review. Asking questions in their own words and then borrowing and remixing lines from the book to craft ‘answers,’ Wallace literalizes what it means for a text to enter the literary conversation. ISBN 978-1-55238-981-2 | 80 pp | $17.99 CAD / USD #CAROUSELreviews Jade: Let’s begin with the human body. How would

USEREVIEW 003: Creation, Derivation, Exchange

Mark Laliberte"> Mark Laliberte
09, 2020
Book Review, Experimental Review
0

Though he has crafted what feels like a slick trailer, Mark Laliberte‘s animated experimental review of Dani Spinosa‘s OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020) ultimately performs not only its prescribed analytic function, but also a meta-discursive one, bringing to the fore questions about what it even means to review a book. Laliberte’s review is thus a fitting response to Spinosa’s text, which challenges its readers to reconsider the limits of its own chosen genre of

USEREVIEW 002: Impossible Language for the Unnavigable Self

Khashayar Mohammadi gives us a review in the form of a poem — adding a new harmony to the polyvocal chorus of Canisia Lubrin‘s exploratory, book-length poem The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland & Stewart, 2020). In doing so, Mohammadi focalizes crucial concepts in the text and reveals the expanse of its spheres of inquiry. ISBN 978-0-771048-69-2 | 176pp | $21.00 #CAROUSELreviews I the Dyzgraphxst is oceanicthe Dyzgraphxst is directionally blended into the Ithe Dyzgraphxst is the cursor