In The Weather Lisa Robertson engages with the pastoral genre of poetry, in order to draw attention to its architecture. The pastoral in art refers to the romanticization of rural life — particularly the lives of farmers, shepherds, and other rural labourers — which results in unrealistic depictions of this life as extraordinarily idyllic. Pastoral […]
Tag: Canadian author
Cities of Refuge (Michael Helm)
Michael Helm’s Cities of Refuge is a novel of precise characterization, muscled metaphors, and intelligent complexity. After 28-year-old Kim Lystrander suffers a brutal assault in downtown Toronto, she remains haunted by the apparent senselessness of the event. To deal with the trauma, she begins to imagine her unknown attacker, reconstructing the night and crafting its history. […]
Float (Anne Carson)
Anne Carson’s Float consists of 22 chapbooks of varying lengths floating inside of a transparent slipcase. Little unites them, except perhaps the overall theme of a desire to refuse boundaries and “float” free from the constraints of convention. Loosely, the chapbooks could be grouped as poems, plays, and essays (of course, they blur between). The […]
Savage Love (Douglas Glover)
“What kind of story was this?” asks Lennart, one of Douglas Glover’s many conflicted characters, concerning his overcomplicated life. Lennart has just learned from his frenemy Nedlinger, the celebrity forensic archaeologist, that the skeleton Nedlinger built a career upon was not prehistoric at all, but the abandoned fetus of Lennart’s unknown brother. Lennart’s tentative conclusion […]
Downverse (Nikki Reimer)
The epigraph of Nikki Reimer’s sophomore collection (a follow-up to her debut [sic]) reads as follows: I hated your poem. Your poem was so boring. — inebriated audience member at a poetry reading It’s easy to dismiss this quote as an ironic joke, in place of the usual weighty epigraph borrowing […]
Emergency Hallelujah (Jason Heroux)
For pseudo-surrealism at its elegant best, see Emergency Hallelujah. Jason Heroux’s second collection is less raw and vivid than his first (Memoirs of an Alias, also published by Mansfield), but more accomplished and assured. Heroux does not always work in a pseudo- or quasi-surrealistic mode, but is best when he does, with a knack for […]
The Book Collector (Tim Bowling)
It happens now. As, the businessman in the café declares “It’s a new world,” blowing on his green tea to display his globalism, it begins, another salmon run to the Fraser River. (“It Happens Now” 7) These lines, the first lines of Tim Bowling’s The Book Collector, display the book’s overall project. Bowling attempts to […]
“Collecting Stamps Would Have Been More Fun” (Sinclair Ross)
Many books of letters are scattershot, unfocused affairs, but the letters of Sinclair Ross (as selected, arranged, and annotated by Jordan and David Stouck) are compelling and laid out like a story. They build to a jarring and poignant climax, so that the collection reads like a novel. A tragic novel. The Saskatchewan-born Ross (who […]