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sometimes, forest by Elee Kraljii Gardiner (Talonbooks, 2026)

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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...
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The Death of Persephone: a murder by Yvonne Blomer (Caitlin Press, 2025)

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    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...
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Nighthawks by Lisa Martin (University of Alberta Press, 2026)

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       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...
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Lot 23 by Tonya Lailey (Gaspereau Press, 2024)

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         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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Say What? On the Culture of Book Reviewing in Canada (reposted from River Street Writing where I am the reviewer in residence!)

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  https://www.riverstreetwriting.com/blog/2026/3/27/bmf9nxak8k58lpuz3kampwdg7ekez0
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Lockers are for Bearcats Only by Mallory Tater (Palimpsest Press 2026)

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     The title of Mallory Tater's compelling collection at first seems surreal, but as one begins to read the first section it becomes clear that, rather than being an Ovidian fantasia, the title is merely a sign, declaring exclusionary zones in the swimming pool, places to store things that serve only set teams, not random individuals, who must, instead, use cumbersome and itinerant Rubbermaids. This twist underlies the tone of the three part book, one dealing with grief, both in the pool and out, along with the shaping formations of existence, from family to religion.      The fifteen-segment long poem in varying lineations that begins the collection takes place in and around chlorinated water. As part seven states: "I started swimming when my friend died/because it's hard to think in a line/underwater." Regular swims become a way to both honour and detach from mourning, while addressing the self whose "thighs are always kissing" and who doesn't belong...
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The Tinder Sonnets by Jennifer LoveGrove (Book*hug Press, 2026)

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 You must first see this strikingly disruptive cover collage created by Kate Sutherland. O my, ouch. The list of "Key Selling Features" that came with my review copy of The Tinder Sonnets by Jennifer LoveGrove suggests that this book is "ideal for readers of poetry, middle-aged women [and] feminists." Check, check and check. One wishes however that readers of non fiction, young men and those confused about what feminism means would also read this blast of a book.  The description of the collection in the press materials doesn't even mention LoveGrove's experimentation with the sonnet form, so I'll start there. These are unrhymed sonnets, all 14 lines, in titled triptychs that alternately offer up temporally elaborative content (as in "Orgasm is not the goal he said and I rolled my eyes" that narrates a series of dates with E - who fluctuates between online and offline, being possessive and detached, "minutes" becoming "mirrors...
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