Compelled by a strong identification with Major’s experience of marriage and motherhood and a familiarity with the power structures that discriminated against her – remembering the marginalisation I’d faced as a single woman raising a child on my own – I came to the gradual understanding that my interaction with her work was almost wholly personal. My instinctive response to The Asparagus Wars, Major’s powerful recounts of gendered inequality, made it undesirable that I interact with the book in any other way.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review of Knives on a Table by Peter Mladinic
This collection is a plethora of mixed emotions….Those of love, loss, living, and dying. Mladinic is a brilliant composer of the written word, of describing a feeling, an incident, a thought, and with the finesse of a fine master who cares deeply for his subjects. Add a bit of sensuality and desire, the frailty of the human mind and of human behavior, and the cruelty of death, and one has a window into the world of Mladinic’s psyche and his free verse poetry.
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A review of April on Paris Street by Anna Dowdall
April on Paris Street has several areas of interest: the charms of Paris and Montreal; the varied work of a private investigator; the dark, dangerous world in which we live, and above all, the importance of staying connected to our families, whether they be blood relatives or “intentional families” of friends.
A review of Lost, Hurt or in Transit Beautiful by Rohan Chhetri
No matter where you live, Lost, Hurt or In Transit Beautiful will stir your senses and grip your imagination. It will invoke in your mind’s eye, unseen images of the land simmering at the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. It will strike a chord of compassion for what human beings endure and for what they pass on to posterity. Chhetri’s poems are an act of courage, a baring of the soul, written from the depth of his experiences, some as enigmatic as the title of the book itself.
A review of Glass Bikini by Kristin Bock
In Bock’s alternate universe, the reader is immersed in a carnival ride that questions and interprets how our current reality could easily follow a much darker timeline. In this world of monsters and chaos, happening “after the extinction of whales”, in which trees as nourishers become murderous “flame trees”, the reader is instantly and viscerally reminded of the fires that have ravaged Australia, the Amazon, and much of the western United States.
A review of The Museum of Heartache by Paul Luikart
Luikart’s short stories are like glimpses of reality television episodes of the down-and-out and downtrodden. Each excerpt gives the reader a video clip in the mind, briefly immersing in the stories of bad parents, drug addicts, prostitutes, the suicidal, the desperately lonely, the neglected, the abandoned, the mentally ill, the grieving, and many more lost and despondent types. His writing puts one right into the desperate situations and into the brains of his characters.
A review of The Crumbling Mansion by Charles Freyberg
Some of the poems in The Crumbling Mansion are reprinted from Dining at the Edge, but in this new context the work picks up on the theme, highlighting the entropy that is always undoing: mansions crumble, trees fall, makeup runs, love dissolves, animals become extinct, and great poets and playwrights die, leaving us bereft and struggling for meaning. What The Crumbling Mansion shows is is how beautiful the struggle is.
A review Poly by Paul Dalgarno
There are two things I appreciate most about this brave novel by Dalgarno. The first is that it explores so candidly the inner world of the narrator—Chris – who is painted with such pathos, to provoke tenderness and vulnerability in the reader and cast toxic masculinity under scrutiny. Secondly, I appreciate how it aroused in me important conversations on love and ethics, coloured by story.
A review of The Collection Plate by Kendra Allen
The poem, “Let’s leave” is even more of a departure from conventional verse-on-the-page, with words literally overlapping other text (unfortunately, this cannot be reproduced here), presumably suggesting emotional complexity/density, but also for sheer aesthetic effect. “Solace by earl” is another example, and, significantly, this poem highlights another of Allen’s themes, the reverence with which she regards her female elders, womanhood in general.