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“Fringe is the truest, rawest and most intimate form of theatre” – PRISM reviews the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival

Review of “Banned in the USA” and “Unscriptured”

Review by Laura Anne Harris

Photos by Vancouver Fringe

As soon as I entered the space of Gerard Harris’ “Banned in the USA”,  I was immediately disarmed by the charm of the performer improvising a tune on the piano. The show didn’t start traditionally with lights down or music swelling, rather, Harris (no relation!) began with some light chit chat as we waited for the show to officially start. Continue reading “Fringe is the truest, rawest and most intimate form of theatre” – PRISM reviews the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival

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“Dear Elizabeth starts deliberately slow, gathering momentum for a powerful finish” – PRISM reviews the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival

Review of “Dear Elizabeth”
Review by Issie Patterson
Photo by Wunderdog Theatre

Sarah Ruhl’s carefully-crafted and poignant “Dear Elizabeth” is an intimate piece for any audience with even a passing appreciation for poetry. Directed by Shelby Bushell, the show is constructed around a back-and-forth of real letters read aloud by Alexis Kellum-Creer as the witty, self-deprecating Elizabeth Bishop and Anthony Santiago as the sometimes arrogant, often intoxicatingly enthusiastic Robert Lowell.
Continue reading “Dear Elizabeth starts deliberately slow, gathering momentum for a powerful finish” – PRISM reviews the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival

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Love and All Its Vulnerabilities: A Review of Jasmina Odor’s You Can’t Stay Here

 

You Can’t Stay Here
Jasmina Odor
Thistledown Press

Review by Sarah Richards

Jasmina Odor’s short story collection You Can’t Stay Here is about relationships. Shaky ones. They flicker between lovers and friends, but also between old homes and new ones — most of Odor’s protagonists emigrated to Canada from Croatia during the Bosnian war. Even temporal relationships are disrupted. The war, whether lodged in one’s lived or living memory, is a wedge, “a chasm between past and future.” (119)
Continue reading Love and All Its Vulnerabilities: A Review of Jasmina Odor’s You Can’t Stay Here

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An interview with Cole Nowicki, the creator and host of fine.

Interview by Jasmine Sealy

Photo by Olivier Barjolle

Last month I attended a free, hilarious, thoughtful, well-organized literary event at The Lido in Vancouver. I got there an hour early and the place was already almost packed, by showtime, people were being turned away at the door. The event was fine., an evening of “storytelling and otherwise”–a magical combination of stand-up, poetry, storytelling and music. The result is a show as unique and quirky as its creator and host, local writer Cole Nowicki. Here we chat to Cole about how fine. came to be and about the future of the show. Continue reading An interview with Cole Nowicki, the creator and host of fine.

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Stones Skipping Across Water: On Klara du Plessis’ Ekke

 

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

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“Letter to My Former Selves” by Lydia Kwa Wins the Earle Birney Poetry Prize

PRISM international is proud to announce the winner of the 2017 Earle Birney Poetry Prize is Lydia Kwa for her poem “Letter to My Former Selves” published in PRISM 56.1: Liminal, available now!

Earle Birney established UBC’s MFA program in Creative Writing in 1965–the first university program in Canada. The Earle Birney Poetry Prize, awarded annually and worth $500, is PRISM‘s only in-house prize. A very special thanks to Mme. Justice Wailan Low for her generous and ongoing support.

Continue reading “Letter to My Former Selves” by Lydia Kwa Wins the Earle Birney Poetry Prize

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Where Statues Once Stood: On Rachel Cusk’s Kudos

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

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