Brilliant Women Inc

Long poems aren't common in Canada. I think of Sharon Thesen, Dave McFadden, Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt. There are more of course but not a whole whack of them really. Perhaps the book length poem is viewed as less likely to be published? Certainly as harder to submit to periodicals or competitions than shorter lyrics.  Jaime Forsythe's third publication doesn't care about this irrelevancy. Yield's musical couplets enact a fusion, slanted towards the gentle surreal, of the land and the body as it mothers and struggles with postpartum discombobulations in which all she can "offer is song." I read this book by the ocean off Bowen Island and again in my Edmonton garden. The way Forsythe sees the world reminded me of how Sharon Olds transformed metaphors of divorce in Stag's Leap . She defamiliarizes the common experience of motherhood, the less acknowledged one of postpartum depression and alienation. Connections are rampantly made between the Maritimes co...

My first reading of sometimes, forest  by Vancouver poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner, established a primal, earthy layer composed of mulchy fragments, forgotten roots, mycorrhizal detritus within me. I read it partially outside in my prairie garden, one overlain by my coastal knowledge and thus intent on tree-ing all. These pieces, which feel like sketches of entrance that I almost wished were bereft of titles and either flowed in one long poem, indistinguishable, or featured dates or seasons flowing between them, scatter in the manner of pinecones or poplar seeds and the reader must enact their own forms of organic titration to comprehend equivalence points (or refuse this ache for interpretability).  A preamble connects the shard-poems to pandemic fallout and the 2021 heat dome and relates how Gardiner walked through the woods almost every day, pondering "how trans-species and more-than-human networks relate." Given that there is an extensive (and imaginative and even funny) glo...

    Fusing  Greek myth with the contemporary tropes of crime fiction hasn't been attempted in Canadian poetry before. And it's a challenging and essential exploration. As an aficionado, and sometimes a cringingly reluctant one, of cop dramas often featuring female corpses, I was compelled by Yvonne Blomer's The Death of Persephone: a murder (though why not, I wondered, The Murder of Persephone or a "murder mystery." and why also "Poems" and not "a long poem in parts" or a "novel in verse." Naming anything in a way that makes sense to everyone. So tough).     At first, being unused to multiple personae in a book of poems (but where is Alfred/Alphonsine on the Dramatis list?), the reader may take a while to feel connected to DI Boca, his "loose shapeless suit," his "ten years" in homicide, or even Stephanie (a young woman, the daughter of Demeter of course, kidnapped by the abusive Uncle H or Hades, who takes her tr...

       When I read books of poems I am always listening. I want to know the poet has an ear. If they don't seem to, then I become perplexed. I wonder why they write poetry, that ancient oral/aural art form, that word music. Lisa Martin has an ear. Listen to some lines from "Bare Posts, Barbed Wire" that some may consider old-fashioned in their resonances: "Why riff so low, so long/ over slow/land and the horses'/hung heads?...why dote on the closed old road?" The preponderance of O sounds and the predominance of one-syllable words create a mournfulness, an energy essentially muted as it is in grieving. This is a tone that rings through many of the poems in Nighthawks, lyrics that confront the suffusing moods, rather than the instances of rupture, that emerge from divorce, deaths, moments children detach, recognitions of fissures between oneself and the natural world. The titular poem, a longish one in parts of varying lengths, closes out the book, an anxious...

         Yet another gorgeous Gaspereau book with textured cover stock, a stark lithograph, an exquisite font. All that Tonya Lailey's moving poems deserve as they seek to enter the memory of a farm, a vineyard, a time of parental labour, immigrant workers, the rise and fall of crops over the course of decades in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I don't, as a rule, review first books of poetry here on Brilliant Women Inc, but I am making an exception for Lot 23 as I have now read it twice with much pleasure and have invited Lailey to read at my Impromptu series for traveling poets this June.       Lot 23 is divided into four segments like plowed fields: "Concessions," an introduction of the book's themes, "Lines," attending more to farming and including several descriptive listing pieces on owned vehicles and familiar roads, "End Posts," which enlarges this subject matter, reaching back to her grandparents and to a list of creatures who died on an...

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