The contradictory images reflect themes throughout Stiefel’s verse, which oscillates between nihilism and contentment – or at least resignation and a sensual appreciation of the ephemera of the world. As he writes in the opening poem, “Lest”: “I devour everything I can, the mind defaced, a tattered gown, strawberry leaf, a statue, half-submerged.”
A review of thresholds by Philip Radmall
This ability to make us, as readers, ‘opener and unfamiliar’ is one the poet exploits deftly, peeling away any preconceptions we may have until we, too, see and feel his world anew. In part, this is down to his style. A novelist as well as a poet, Radmall’s poetry has many prose-like traits, in particular a freedom from rhyme or metre, heavily enjambed lines, and the hovering arc of a narrative.
A review of Tide Should Be Able to Rise Despite Its Moon by Jessica Bell
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: