John Nyman parts the clouds and parses the pareidolia in this traditional review of ryan fitzpatrick’s latest poetry collection Sunny Ways (Invisible Publishing, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-77843-018-3 |104 pp | $21.95 CAD / $16.95 USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY ‘Field Guide,’ the long poem that makes up the majority of ryan fitzpatrick’s most recent collection, Sunny Ways, begins: If I promised you a guideto life in the twenty-first centuryI’m sorry I failed you And, oh boy,
Aaron TuckerSoldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys (Coach House Books, 2023)ISBN: 978-1-55245-462-6 | 160 pp | $23.95 CAD / $18.95 USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Published this spring by Coach House Books, Aaron Tucker’s Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys is a novel divided in two. The book’s first half, formatted as a dialogue between an unnamed male protagonist and his ex-girlfriend Melanie, presents an extended synopsis and commentary on the 1956 John Wayne western The Searchers — both
Concetta PrincipeDiscipline n.v. (Palimpsest Press, 2023)ISBN: 978-1-99029-349-8 | 216 pp | $19.95 CAD / $18.95 USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Recounting Concetta Principe’s struggle to complete her PhD in interdisciplinary humanities as a middle-aged woman, Discipline n.v. is a lyric memoir whose page-or-less-long sections often resemble prose poetry. At its most essayistic, the book explores the disreputable origins of modern social science and humanities disciplines alongside their development by postmodern theorists (Derrida, Lacan, Blanchot, etc.)
Introducing our July 2023 Reviewer-in-Residence: John Nyman is a poet, critic and book artist from Tkaronto / Toronto. He is the author of A Devil Every Day (Palimpsest Press, 2023), plus book works including an erasure of words and images from the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books (Your Very Own) and a classic text of Lacanian psycho-analysis reprinted in a nearly illegible typeface (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis: A Selection). Otherwise,
Becca Lawlor, editorial intern at The Ampersand Review, reflects on the loneliness between all of us, and specifically The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life, in this traditional review of Rune Christiansen’s latest novel translated by Kari Dickson (Book*hug Press, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-77166-834-7 | 264 pp | $23 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY In its title, The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life by Rune Christiansen, translated by Kari Dickson, speaks of loneliness as if it were
Catriona WrightContinuity Errors (Coach House Books, 2023)ISBN: 978-1-55245-459-6 | 80 pp | $23.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Capitalism, climate change, feminism and the gender binary — Catriona Wright’s Continuity Errors responds to these topics with dry humour and a vivid parade of aliens, robots, fae, and more though is still incredibly serious in its message. In this, her second poetry collection, Wright plays with the absurdity of the world we live in, having written
Anita Lahey (writer) & Pauline Conley (illustrator)Fire Monster (Palimpsest Press, 2023)ISBN 978-1-99029-337-5 | 220 pp | $29.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Fire Monster is an incredible blend of art forms — in this graphic novel, writer Anita Lahey and illustrator Pauline Conley collaborate to blend poetry with illustration and sometimes music to create a fictional retelling of the 1976 Main-a-Dieu, Nova Scotia wildfires. It details the generational effect the natural disaster had on the
Introducing our June 2023 Reviewers-in-Residence: June 2023 is a special month here at USEREVIEW, as we’re partnering with The Ampersand Review to bring you some exciting crossover content! Every Wednesday, CAROUSEL will be featuring reviews by Ampersand interns Shaylyn Schwieg and Becca Lawlor. Meanwhile, Ampersand’s June issue will feature a rare full-length external review by CAROUSEL Reviews Editor Jade Wallace, who normally only reviews for CAROUSEL. Without further ado, we introduce this month’s reviewers …
Kōtuku Titihuia NuttallTauhou (House of Anansi Press, 2023)ISBN | 978-1-48701-169-7 | 224 pp | $24.99 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Tauhou, the debut full-length offering of Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, is billed as a novel and at first blush I could not really understand why. The forms that make up this book are eclectic. Some ‘chapters’ are poems, others are fables, though most can be read like self-contained works of short fiction. Characters who are central
Executing an experimental premise in a traditional style, Leah Bobet offers a ‘narrative review’ of Kan Gao’s writing for the video game series that culminates in Impostor Factory (2021) from Canadian developer and publisher Freebird Games. ISBN N/A | n.p. | $12.99 each CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Memory isn’t static — or even past — in Freebird Games’ award-winning interactive fiction series To the Moon, Finding Paradise and Impostor Factory. It dips, loops and
Meghan Kemp-GeeThe Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023)ISBN: 978-1-55245-460-2 | 80 pp | $23.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Meghan Kemp-Gee‘s debut poetry collection is billed as “a little bestiary” centred around deer, wolves and the spectral voices of extinct lizards and soon-to-be extinct whales. It’s a description that underplays the sheer structural acrobatics she uses to create — and then resolve — a tense, biting and agile conversation about euphemism, superimposed experience
Rebecca CampbellArboreality (Stelliform Press, 2022)ISBN: 978-1-77768-232-3 | 117 pp | $18.99 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Built upon her Sturgeon Award-winning novelette ‘An Important Failure,’ Rebecca Campbell‘s Canticle for Liebowitz-style novella, Arboreality, uses the intimate losses and incremental gains of a post-climate collapse Cowichan Valley community to create a compassionate, masterfully executed book about rewilding our ecology of ideas. When Vancouver Island’s climate destabilizes, a few academics break up McPherson Library’s collection to save it
Introducing our May 2023 Reviewer-in-Residence: Novelist, editor and critic Leah Bobet’s novels have won the Sunburst, Copper Cylinder and Aurora Awards, been selected for the Ontario Library Association’s Best Bets program and been shortlisted for the Cybils and the Andre Norton Award. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple Year’s Best anthologies and has been taught in high school and university classrooms in Canada, Australia and the US; her poetry has been multiply shortlisted for
Hollay Ghadery has a fine ear for the complex orchestration of dualities in Sing, Nightingale, the latest novel by Marie Hélène Poitras, translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins (Coach House Books, 2023). ISBN 978-1-55245-448-0 | 176 pp | $22.95 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Arguably, all books aim to transport readers to another world, but not all books can do this as self-reflexively and immersively as Sing, Nightingale by Marie Hélène Poitras (translated from
Wayne NgThe Family Code (Guernica Editions, 2023)ISBN 978-1-77183-793-4 | 316 pp | $25 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY The Family Code by Wayne Ng is a riveting and heart-wrenching story of inter-generational trauma that pivots around Hannah and her young son, Axel. Hannah and Axel live in poverty and are both victims of abuse: Hannah, at the hands of her father and partners; Axel, at the hands of his mother. Interestingly, the novel is narrated
Khashayar MohammadiWJD (Gordon Hill Press, 2022)ISBN 978-1-77422-070-2 | 68 of 138 pp* | $20 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Khashayar Mohammadi’s second full-length collection of poetry, WJD, is an absorbing phenomenological exploration of language, culture, country and spirit. While rangy, roaming different literal and figurative landscapes from Iran to “pre-cosmic” nothingness, the poems are singular in their bubbling richness; an intensity that punches as it delights, plucks at the darkness but also, proffers a hard-won
Introducing our April 2023 Reviewer-in-Residence: Hollay Ghadery is a writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have been published in various literary journals, including Grain, Room, The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review. Her memoir on mixed-race identity and mental health, Fuse, came out with Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in spring 2021. Her debut collection
Joanna Acevedo reveals the ghosts and the guts beneath the “deceptively simple” surface of R.F. Kuang’s latest novel Yellowface (Harper Collins, 2023). Note: the last paragraph of the review contains potential spoilers. ISBN 978-0-06325-083-3 | 336 pp | $37.00 CAD / 30.00 USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY R.F. Kuang’s forthcoming novel, Yellowface, brings up complex and nuanced concepts of race and appropriation in the literary world, through a close examination of the publishing industry. Failed
Chen ChenExplodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023)ISBN 978-1-7327347-8-4 | 48 pp | $10 USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY In Chen Chen’s latest chapbook, Explodingly Yours, which came out in January 2023 from Ghost City Press, Chen explores similar themes from his previous two books, but with a more explicit touch. The chapbook is erotic, ephemeral and formally innovative for Chen. As seen in his most recent release, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (BOA
Gabrielle BatesJudas Goat (Tin House, 2023)ISBN 978-1-95353-464-4 | 104 pp | $16.95 USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Gabrielle Bates’ debut collection of poems, Judas Goat, surprises and shocks with its candor and specificity about being a young woman in the beckoning Deep South. Violence permeates this collection, as does religion — images of Judas, his organs spilling out of his body, make appearances, as do the Virgin Mary and other eclectic figures. They are woven