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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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The Time of the Great Singing by Elizabeth Philips (Freehand Books 2026)

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  Jan Zwicky , on the back of Elizabeth Philips ' exquisitely lyrical collection, states that this is a book "that does not distinguish between elegy and celebration ." Now, although I rarely appreciate the flawed art of blurbing, not only is this a beautiful sentence, but it is entirely accurate in its assessment of the subject matter and intent of Philips' poems. Whether the lyrics delve into the loss of parents or the loss of trees, the focal points interweave with each other, so that a mother's dementia is gentled by the soothing sight of a "freshet of green light" ( The Last June ) or a recognition of the "difficult last years" of her father are lifted by another memory, that of discovering a well together (right away, Heaney is echoed) and their faces being reflected in the watery "aspen-inflected sky" ( Just ). There is a magic here of consolations that rarely slip into easy-solution triteness.  Much of this transcendent effe...
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The Pollination Field by Kim Fahner (Turnstone Press, 2025)

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Books that are utterly entranced by a core subject, set of images or even a haunting word compel me. I consider Tim Bowling's oeuvre of salmon and the river, and also his Tenderman texts, and then too, his tiny homage to his great-aunt Gladys and her early 20th century bee-keeping, The Annotated Bee and Me (2010).  As for bee-keeping in Canada in contemporary times, I recently read Jenna Butler's Revery: A Year of Bees (2020), a factual (but still magical) account of the practice that prepared me for some of the knowledge required to fully appreciate The Pollination Field.  I must say that this book almost felt like it needed to be two texts: one bee-obsessed and the other a sequence of the additional lyrics for her dead parents found in the Cortege section (o how I love the image of her carrying her "father's metal knees" aloft as if "crystal balls"), as well as other pieces such as "An Elegy for Australia, Burning" or "A Note on the Ex...
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