Invisible Publishing – CAROUSEL Magazine: Blog

USEREVIEW 108 (Capsule): Tear

Erica McKeenTear (Invisible Publishing, 2022)ISBN | 978-1-77843-006-0 | 304 pp | $22.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY The latest addition to the ‘monstrous feminine‘ literary canon is Erica McKeen‘s debut novel Tear. Aptly described by its synopsis as a “horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman,” Tear shadows its protagonist, Frances, from her childhood with a deadbeat father, an ambivalent mother and her only friend Jasper, to her early adulthood as a reticent and isolated young woman on the

USEREVIEW 093: Critical Pictures

John Nyman"> John Nyman
09, 2022
Book Review, Experimental Review
0

How can a critic respond to Zane Koss‘ debut collection, Harbour Grids (Invisible Publishing, 2022), which, despite being “a long poem in four parts” is textually, and even visually, sparse, defined as much by absence as by presence? In this experimental review, John Nyman mirrors Koss’ terse and spatial form, in an attempt to approach the text on its own terms — to chart a route for readers through the breakwater and steer us clearly

USEREVIEW 077 (Capsule): Be Scared of Everything: Horror Essays

Peter CounterBe Scared of Everything: Horror Essays (Invisible Publishing, 2020)ISBN 978-1-98878-456-4 | 200 pp | $20.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY In his 2020 debut essay collection, Be Scared of Everything: Horror Essays, Peter Counter turns sharp, thoughtful attention to one of literature and film’s most critically under-appreciated genres: horror. The collection, published by Invisible Publishing, is based on Counter’s horror blog, Everything is Scary, and the essays in the book retain a breezy pace

USEREVIEW 058: The Death Card

Samantha Garner’s debut novel The Quiet Is Loud (Invisible Publishing, 2021) has a paradox in its very title, so you can expect to find more of the same within. Through the medium of a tarot-savvy traditional review, Deirdre Danklin reaches her hands in to pull out the paradoxes, and the paradextrous characters, that lie at the heart of the text. ISBN 978-1-98878-471-7 | 336 pp | $23.95 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY I always get

USEREVIEW 047: Dreams to Have

In this traditional review, Ursula Pflug identifies Jessi MacEachern’s debut poetry collection, A Number of Stunning Attacks (Invisible Publishing, 2021), as a force that carries forward a legacy of feminist poetry. ISBN 978-1-98878-465-6 | 120 pp | $18.95 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY A few pages into the first section, ‘The Moat Around Her Home,’ Jessi MacEachern writes that she keeps a notebook labelled dreams to have. This is the sort of thing I would

USEREVIEW 040 (Capsule): Gold Rush

Claire CaldwellGold Rush (Invisible Publishing, 2020)ISBN 978-1-988784-46-5 | 80 pp | $17.95 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Writing about pioneers and summer camp risks a confrontation with banal, or even dangerous, sentimentalism. However, in her sophomore poetry collection, Gold Rush, Claire Caldwell is circumspect, scrutinizing and assessing her subjects with the critical eye they deserve — and she never mistakes pyrite for gold. See, for instance, her poem ‘After the Gold Rush,’ in which the speaker declares, “We

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 015 (Capsule): Swimmers in Winter

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,

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