A Tide Should be Able to Rise Despite Its Moon is Bell’s first book of poetry in over ten years, but regardless of where her extensive creative practice takes her, her work has always reflected a poetic sensibility, so it feels almost like this is her centrepoint.
A review of The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering by Linda Adair
Adair is not afraid to bring up difficult issues such as the cruelty of online chats, sacrificed ecosystems and the greed and entitlement of First World multinationals. The poet is also very skilled in narration, and tells stories with a voice that is poetic beautiful and deliberate.
How Light Comes Up Off the Lake: a review of Old Snow, White Sun by Caroline Goodwin
Not at all self conscious, these poems are quite deliberate, the made thing. Each has its note of authority, as in the first poem’s first image, “the common loon made a thumbprint on the lake.” Part elegy, part journal, part memoir, part love song, part accusation, part celebration, all in the voice a person with something to say, a poet with the ability to make a word—loon, cattails, meadow—all her own.
Grief and How It Shapes Identity: An Interview with Rachel Harper on The Other Mother
After reading and reviewing The Other Mother, I was given the fortunate opportunity to connect with Rachel through her agent, Anjali Singh (Pandeliterary). Due to busy schedules, we decided email was the best way to have a conversation about the novel, what inspired its story, and how it connects to her personal grief and challenges.
A review of The Other Mother by Rachel M. Harper
Harper’s novel will engage fans of generational sagas and family dramas where long-buried family histories and secrets are unearthed, and where past choices explicitly affect the present and future of others in a snowball effect. The novel excels at revealing motherhood—or parenting––truly: falling in love with a person you’ve helped to create, and, in doing so, loving yourself in ways you couldn’t imagine; knowing you will sacrifice absolutely everything for them.
To Want and To Want: Desire in Shilo Niziolek’s Memoir Fever
My reading experience of Fever was equivalent to gulping down water after a long run. I read it with haste and curiosity. I became fascinated by desire and the way Niziolek intellectualizes her vulnerability, placing her own story among the work of contemporary writers, like Sarah Manguso, Jay Ponteri, and Mary Oliver, among others.
A review of Sapphic Touch – Sappho – Poetry Forum for Queers 2021 Anthology
I was touched in heart and mind by the many serried stories included in this anthology, to me so crisp and with an everlasting contrast of lightness and darkness in your moments of LGBTIQA life and your ethical existence.
A review of Monster Field by Lucy Dougan
The work feels intimate and subtle, as if a curtain were being opened, little by little, inviting the reader to peak behind the immediate appearance to find something more, for example, the simple act of putting up wallpaper–child and father, revealing so much that is unspoken and understood with hindsight:
A review of Voices of Freedom: Contemporary Writing from Ukraine edited by Kateryna Kazimirova and Daryna Anastasieva
The collection, which is beautifully curated, includes twenty seven living authors from the Ukrainian community, whose work explores a wide range of topics from the many invasions of the country, from the War in Donbas in 2014 which led to the annexing of Crimea through to the major escalation in February 2022, but also poems, essays and stories about the desire to maintain a cultural identity, oppression, love, the climate, forest, feminism, friendship, and pleasure.
A reviews of Settler by Maggie Queeney
If I imagine these poems written on canvas, I think of them as “blood-anointed.” Queeney bears witness and makes frank the realities of these women, or the female experience that may read removed but isn’t always entirely separate from us today.