USEREVIEW 016: An Echo of Crows

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

Read More

CAROUSEL 44 — our first online issue — out now!

CAROUSEL 44 — our first online issue — out now!

The winter 2020 issue of CAROUSEL is available to read for free at our website now! Fall 2020; released exclusively online Cover artwork by Chet Bell Design by Origin Obscure Art Portolio — Chet Bell Fiction — Anne Baldo— Timothy DeLizza— Síle Englert— Jennifer McAuley Poetry — Renee Agatep— Anne Barngrover— Despy Boutris— Amee Nassrene Broumand— Conyer Clayton— James Collier— Mikayla Fawcett— Layla Flowers— Sean Madden— Caroline Misner— Kevin Stebner— Sneha Subramanian Kanta— John Sibley

Read More

USEREVIEW 012: Blistering Words for a Burning World

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

Read More

USEREVIEW 011: Where Words Touch

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

Read More

USEREVIEW 010: Engaging the Emporium

USEREVIEW 010: Engaging the Emporium

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

Read More

USEREVIEW 009: Classified & Personal

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

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

Read More

USEREVIEW 007: Do You Want to Dream Without Falling Asleep?

USEREVIEW 007: Do You Want to Dream Without Falling Asleep?

Bodies are ever-shifting in Lily Wang’s Saturn Peach (Gordon Hill Press, 2020). At times they assume forms sweet as peaches, at others they take shapes treacherous as caves. In this traditional review, Manahil Bandukwala acts as skillful psychopomp, guiding the uninitiated through the blurry waters of reality and dreams that make up Wang’s debut poetry collection. ISBN 978-1774220115 | 86 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews There are certain Tweets by Lily Wang that I think

Read More

USEREVIEW 006: Talking to Stones

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

Read More

USEREVIEW 005: Writers as Psychics

USEREVIEW 005: Writers as Psychics

Books are prophetic in Deirdre Danklin‘s fiction-form experimental review set in a psychic convention, but the books’ predictions reveal more about themselves than they do about their customer coming to have her fortune told. You don’t want to miss this strange little powerhouse review of 8 entire books. #CAROUSELreviews Remember conventions? Lily Dale is full of psychics. Held in an old Victorian mansion, this convention has no humming fluorescent lights, no inky brochures, no laminated

Read More

USEREVIEW 004: Living Violence

USEREVIEW 004: Living Violence

John Nyman follows the mine shafts of Klara du Plessis‘ book of poetry Hell Light Flesh (Palimpsest Press, Sep 2020) and reports back on the glistening subterranean horrors he finds there. This traditional review examines the unsettling juxtaposition of artistry and rationalism with the terrifying triad of patriarchy, violence and trauma. ISBN 978-1-989287521 | 130 pp | $18.95 CDN / $17.95 USD #CAROUSELreviews Enormous in scope yet sharply-defined in subject, Klara Du Plessis’ second full-length

Read More

USEREVIEW 003: Creation, Derivation, Exchange

USEREVIEW 003: Creation, Derivation, Exchange

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

Read More

USEREVIEW 002: Impossible Language for the Unnavigable Self

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

Read More

USEREVIEW 001: Quaking, It’s Morning

USEREVIEW 001: Quaking, It’s Morning

K.B. Thors revels in the historic breadth and folkloric depth of Factory Girls (Action Books, Nov 2019), which is the third book of poetry by the award-winning Japanese author, editor and professor Takako Arai. ISBN 978-0-900575-84-6 | 99pp |$18 USD #CAROUSELreviews         It is the night shift in an abandoned spinning factory         There is only a single light bulb here         The spools of thread turn by themselves … This is what happens “When the Moon Rises”

Read More