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.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
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.
Yesterday and Today: a review of Pyre by Chris Dean
Slavery exists, and this poet knows it. “Throw-away lives” is the very thing Chris Dean is combatting to eradicate. Right now, there are North Korean women in a Chinese fish factory who are, in fact, slaves. They are the many making a profit for the few, and any means justify the ends. This is the deplorable thing this poet is fighting against, this and other oppressions elsewhere.
A review of How to Read a City by Elizabeth Walton
The poems in How to Read a City feel urgent to me, speaking as they do of ecological destruction and complicity. The elegiac feel is so delicately contrasted with the many musical resonances and the inherent call to take note of the beauty and joy that is still with us, however endangered. Everything “is a work of art”, and the final poem in the collection, “Soil Punk City”, makes clear, there is always a hope of renewal in urban regeneration in soil, planing, leaning to work together.
The Alchemist: A Journey of Personal Legend
It is blindingly clear that what makes The Alchemist one of Paulo Coelho’s most epic and memorable novels is his ability to spin a simple story with a deep message. He evokes something human and universal that haunts everyone, everywhere: the pursuit of dreams. This pursuit is what keeps people alive, hopeful, and strong.
A review of Prayer to the Invisible by Diane Frank
The invisible is a key concept in Diane Frank’s poetry and thought. It recurs in “Some Days You Wake Up Singing” (“ocean birds / continue their migration / to an invisible world”), “Quintara Street,” which is an elegy for her dead friend Mickey, who’d been a slave in a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia during World War Two (“When it’s my time / to walk through the door to the invisible, / I know that Mickey will be waiting…”), and in “The Last Sunset,” a poem whose tone is similarly elegiac: “everything you know / merging into an invisible world….”