Whispers are words made gentler and Stiles whispers to her readers throughout Technelegy. As importantly, in Promethean fashion, her whispers are giving life to a new existence. Technelegy is the name of Stiles’ AI alter-ego. Built using a text generator called GPT-3, it draws on existing texts, borrows grammatical structures and vocabulary, and creates anew.
A review of Sapphic Touch edited by Suman Lahiry and Heidi Chappelow
Having edited three anthologies and coedited two others I know by experience what an intense and complicated job it is to compile and edit them. The editors have done a fantastic job, I really appreciated that they were ethnically inclusive and selected not only well-known poets but also emergent and new ones.
A review of Body Shell Girl by Rose Hunter
Told in vivid verse form, she recounts her reluctant initiation into the sex industry in Toronto, in response to her stark economic circumstance – always a means to an end – through the collapse of her dreams of film school and a career in filmmaking, her hardening into “the life,” to her resignation that sex work is all her life will ever amount to.
An interview with Maren Cooper
The author of Finding Grace talks about her new book, where the idea came from, characters, influences, target readers, and on starting writing later in life.
A review of What the River Told Me by Jane Skelton
Family memories, and what is said and not said, flow through the pages in poems with a tight narrative and strong sense of truth. Reading the poems, I felt like I was entering into a temple where images, sounds and thoughts intermingled in an exuberant and exotic dance of words.
A review of April at the Ruins by Lawrence Raab
This poem is so mysterious and so wonderful. Literally, it is made of wonder—some kind of dream quality that awakens spaces inside ourselves. I find myself talking to my grandfather (who I never met) whenever I smell cigarette smoke. This feels to be the material that this poem is made from.
A review of Revenants by Adam Aitken
Anyone who has read Adam Aitken’s wonderful memoir One Hundred Letters from Home will be familiar with Aitken’s particular style that encompasses artefact, the living and the dead, dream and waking, memory and loss. Aitken’s latest collection Revenants, picks up on many of those themes from One Hundred Letters Home, as well as the revisiting the setting and timeframes of Aitken’s memoir: his father travelling in the 1950s, writing letters to his mother from Singapore, or moving through Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand, weaving an absence in and out of the poems.
A review of The Strategic Poet edited by Diane Lockward
Aside from the illuminating value of the poetry, these modern poems are a pleasure to read. While specifically published as a teaching tool for writers of poetry, anyone who appreciates contemporary poetry should find The Strategic Poet to be a valuable addition to a personal library. On top of everything else, it’s both a challenging and a fun book to study with, filled with insight, imagination, rewarding tasks, and exceptionally fine writing.
An interview with Ben Ewell
The author of Sunday Afternoons and other Times Remembered: A Memoir talks about his new book, his influences, his target reader, the music that inspires him, his work in progress and more.
A review of A Little Bird by Wendy James
The stories told through these columns crosses over the other two stories until the three stories line up, weaving together like a helix, linking Jo with her mother in a way that is slightly mystical. Jo’s own reintegration into Arthurville is managed with just the right blend of nostalgia and irony, Jo’s intelligence providing a lens that is both loving and critical, allowing the town’s homey beauty and its decline to come through her perception.