Review by Sara Mang
Photo by Tom Cochrane
What is it about Writers at Woody Point that brings people back every year to a remote village on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? Continue reading The Joy of Woody Point – PRISM reviews Writers at Woody Point
Reviews of “Redemption” and “Big Sister”
Reviewed by Laura Anne Harris
Photos by Vancouver Fringe
“Redemption” by playwright James Walter Charleston is a solo show performed by Jim Sea. The piece focuses on three main characters: a prisoner who has been convicted of sexual assault, a southern lawyer who puts prisoners into reform therapy programs, and a therapist who works with prisoners to reform their behaviour. Continue reading “Shows so Fringe-y they deserve their own categories” – PRISM reviews the 2018 Vancouver Fringe
Klara Du Plessis
Ekke
Palimpsest Press
Review by Anna Geisler
Even our finite world is brimming with choices, possibilities, transformations—this struck me as the main tenet in Klara du Plessis’ debut collection, Ekke. Her resonant poems, influenced by landscape, place, the body, and art, explore the exciting and multitudinous influences that act upon us in this seemingly concrete world.
Continue reading Stones Skipping Across Water: On Klara du Plessis’ Ekke
Review by Will Preston
There’s a moment towards the end of Kudos, the final installment of Rachel Cusk’s groundbreaking Outline trilogy, when the whole work—hundreds of pages of characters and conversation—abruptly and elegantly folds in on itself, smaller and smaller until, like a magic trick, it fits inside a single, luminous image. On her way to dinner in an unnamed European country, our narrator, Faye, is pulled off on a detour by her companion. Their destination is an old church that was completely ravaged by fire some fifty years earlier: the paintings and statues destroyed, the stonework “split into two by the heat.” Instead of restoring the church, Faye’s companion explains, the damaged interior was left untouched and reopened for worship. On her first visit, she had found the blackened interior so distressing she had wanted to scream. But then she realized the scorched walls were covered with something like images, ghostly shapes and textures left by the flames:
Continue reading Where Statues Once Stood: On Rachel Cusk’s Kudos
Review by Mormei Zanke
Chelene Knight’s new memoir Dear Current Occupant, defies traditional genres of writing through its inherent hybridity and fragmentation. The book delves into Knight’s childhood past, exploring her experience of growing up while moving in and out of twenty homes in East Vancouver. Knight weaves poetry, essays, letters, and photographs together to create a work that is halting and profoundly moving. Knight’s fragmented approach succeeds in exploring the truths of her past more than any conventional, linear method could.
Continue reading Redefining Home: A Review of Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant
Reviews by Esther Chen Tell Everybody I Say Hi by Tess Liem Anstruther Press Tess Liem’s first chapbook opens with a short piece that sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Liem writes “I, a compartment & careful, ...
Raina von Waldenburg’s play 12 Minute Madness starts simply: a janitor sweeps the bare stage before the MC, one face of protagonist Marlena von Twattenburg, makes introductions. It’s a gentle introduction to a show that very quickly, and with...
Heart Berries
Terese Marie Mailhot
Doubleday Canada
Review by Cody Caetano
Often when I’m reading memoir, I’ll remember a quote from a misguided Neil Genzlinger, who penned “The Problem With Memoirs” for The New York Times in 2011: “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir… Sure, [Amazon] has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of” (italics mine). It is important to note that marginalized memoirists, especially early-career Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and queer folks, have fraught histories with Genzlinger-types, their “old rules” and antiquated tastes that mar the merit of writing, publishing, and participating in the predominantly white spaces of the literary world. And then along comes Terese Marie Mailhot, a Salish First Nation woman from Seabird Island Indian Reservation with the assertion that memoir “functions as something vulnerable in a sea of posturing” (137). And it is in vulnerability that Mailhot effectively rejects the moth-eaten straightjacket that would otherwise restrict the inventive, decolonial confession of Heart Berries.
Continue reading Decolonial Confession: A Review of Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries
The Boat People
Sharon Bala
Penguin Random House
Review by Anjalika Samarasekera
In the second half of The Boat People, a Sri Lankan immigrant—and former Tamil Tiger—poses a question to his Canadian-born niece: “What do you think happens when you terrorize a people, force them to flee, take away their options then put them in a cage all together?” (230).
The question is the ravaged heart of Sharon Bala’s remarkable debut novel, which chronicles the arrival of around 400 Tamil refugees on the coast of British Columbia in 2010. The refugees have fled persecution in Sri Lanka following the end of the twenty-six-year civil war and have come to Canada hoping for a warm welcome. These hopes are dashed when the Canadian government detains the refugees on the suspicion that some of them belong to the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers, a listed terrorist organization. Eventually, some refugees are released and deemed “admissible” to Canada while others are deported back to Sri Lanka.
Continue reading The Survival of Arrival: A Review of Sharon Bala’s The Boat People