Reviews by Esther Chen This Love Is Mad Reciprocal – Liam Coady Glass Buffalo On the cover of Liam Coady’s chapbook This Love Is Mad Reciprocal, the blossoming branch of a cherry blossom tree bears fruit in the form...
Orange Christine Herzer Ugly Duckling Presse Review by Abby Paige “Poets are containers,” Christine Herzer asserts and further, “containers deserve respect.” The image of the container is central in her new chapbook, Orange. A container may be a...
By Robert Colman Books discussed: Complete Physical by Shane Neilson (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2010) On Shaving Off His Face by Shane Neilson (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2015) Dysphoria by Shane Neilson (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2017) According to Deadly Force, a...
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, ...
Nix Jessie Jones Desert Pets Press Review by Andy Verboom In poetry, myth is usually deployed either as allusion or as conceit. The distinction between allusion and conceit is analogous to how one might treat a very old hammer:...
Review by Annick MacAskill
Last October, my friend David Alexander (Modern Warfare, Anstruther Press, 2016) and I went to an Anstruther Press and Baseline Press chapbook launch to see a few poets we knew. When I heard Aidan Chafe read from his debut chapbook, Sharpest Tooth (Anstruther Press, 2016), I immediately wanted to buy his collection. I was drawn by Chafe’s strong imagery and measured, almost laconic consideration of the destructive ferocity and violence of the natural and human worlds.
When I saw that Chafe had released a second chapbook, Right Hand Hymns (Frog Hollow Press, 2017), I was eager to read his new work. The theme of violence continues in this collection, but instead of exploring this theme in poems about hunting, woods, and wolves, Right Hand Hymns evokes a similar wildness and chaos in poems about family, religion, and mental health.
Continue reading Hot-Tempered Divinity: A Review of Aidan Chafe’s Right Hand Hymns
Compiled and introduced by Rob Taylor Poet and editor Elise Partridge passed away in early 2015, months shy of seeing the publication of her third poetry collection, The Exile’s Gallery (Anansi, 2015), and soon after poems from that book appeared in...
The News
Rob Taylor
Gaspereau Press, 2016
Review by Steven Brown
It’s a brave thing to do, forging a plan to write a poem a week during your wife’s pregnancy when the subject of these poems will be your wife’s pregnancy. The poet can’t guarantee what’s going to happen because anything might happen. Life is fragile. And a bit of a gamble.
Continue reading Giving Birth to Poems: A Review of Rob Taylor’s The News
Review by Robert Colman The Witch of the Inner Wood M. Travis Lane Goose Lane Editions, 2016 M. Travis Lane has had a long and distinguished poetry career in Canada. Hers may not be quite the household name as...