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
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
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
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
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
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