Once We Were Wildlife is a collection that explores the human/natural world connection, moving beyond the standard character arc into metamorphosis. The characters are not so much in nature as they are discovering their essential selves as nature. Simpson handles the transformation subtly but the writing is so resonant that the reader cannot help but rethink their own sense of self.
Author:
Thin Reed Throat by Damien Becker
Suffice to say, Damien does not shy away from difficult topics. But what I appreciated was that he doesn’t get cloying or guilt-trippy about the relentlessness of living with a chronic condition, the suffering, the endurance, or the witnessing of his friends suffering too. He lets the imagery do the heavy lifting. And it’s the very simplicity of statement, the lack of adornment in the stark truth, that hits even harder.
A review of The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir
Elkin’s translation reads exceptionally well as English prose. It conveys the frazzled state of Beauvoir’s hero, a young wife and mother, barely in her thirties, as well as Beauvoir’s attitude toward narrative literature, opposed to the experimental forms of the 50s and 60s, and in favor of fiction that was socially motivated, shamelessly didactic, and set clarity of social vision as its practical task. But that does not entail a retread of mimetic naturalism.
A review of The Fifth Year by Marlen Haushofer
The Fifth Year is brilliant in its descriptions, alive and pulsing with energy. It’s not precious, precocious, or irritatingly coy. Haushofer captures “the shimmering of the sun” and the darkness that falls beyond the beams, the comfort and strength of love, and the peculiarities of character, including that of Marili, in a world where “The birds seemed to have dozed off in the yellow trees, and sometimes a leaf dropped silently and landed on the water.”
Intimacy, Perception and the Body: On Lauren Camp’s Took House
Many of Camp’s poems resist conventional punctuation, allowing sentences to extend across lines in a continuous flow. This produces a reading experience that is both immersive and destabilizing: one is carried forward without pause, yet never fully grounded. The effect recalls what White describes as poetry that is not merely like interior life but is interior life—language as the direct articulation of thought and sensation before they cohere into narrative.
A review of Alight on all things precious by Sarah Rice
The way Rice combines the images with the poetry creates a two-way ekphrastic, where language not only takes its cue from the images but also creates resonances that change the way the image is viewed, adding in sonic elements, breath, and exploring light in different ways.
A Review of Therapon by Dan Beachy-Quick and Bruce Bond
Composed of sequences of near-sonnets—thirteen-line forms that gesture toward closure but refuse to resolve—the book unfolds as an extended dialogue, each poem answering, refracting, or unsettling the one beside it. What emerges is not simply collaboration, but a transformative mode of relation: a poetics grounded in exchange, where the self is neither prior to nor independent from the other, but continuously shaped in the very act of poetic exchange.
A review of Antediluvian by Kameryn Alexa Carter
Clearly seeing herself in the tradition of western poetry, in addition to John Berryman, Carter alludes to Sir Thomas Wyatt, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Bob Kaufman, Lucie Brock-Broido, Henry Dumas, and Reginald Shepherd. Moreover, there seem to be several references to another mystical poet, Walt Whitman. In “Devil-May-Care” she writes, “I cannot contain / my spirit. Neither multitudes, in fact.”
A review of Ground to Stand On by Sandra Djwa
Sandra Djwa’s autobiography, Ground to Stand On: A Canadian Literary Life, is like an in-depth conversation with a brilliant, accomplished new friend.) Women like myself who entered higher education in the 1960s and 1970s will identify with her struggles in male-dominated academia, and her experiences with American professors who viewed Canada as second-rate.
A review of Stories: The Collected Short Fiction by Helen Garner
Some ideologies have little use for such sentiments, but Garner’s new collection hearkens back to themes that came across even more powerfully in the work of Australia’s first Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick White, who contrasted the sedate, not to say dysfunctional, existence of wealthy suburban Sydneysiders with the bold, tough character of explorers who set off into the Outback to grapple with life on the most elemental level, without concern for fashionable dogmas, changing mores, or social acceptance.