Introducing Brilliant Women Inc.

A site on which I will review poetry books by Canadian women! Ask me at catherineowenwriter@gmail.com :) 




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All of Us Hidden by Joanna Streetly (Caitlin Press 2025)

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It might come as little surprise that I adore lyric poetry, real lyrics grounded in actual experience that produce their own wild and accurate sonorities. I can usually sense a faker, a Mary Oliver-type poem that strains within its own imagery, desperate to produce a responsive "ooooo ahhhhh" in the reader, rather than one that flows organically with a depth of awareness of line breaks and assonantal bridges and an emotion that emerges from its origins, not one generated superficially via the placement of "feeling words" on the page.  All of Us Hidden is that kind of book, a deep winding through familial loss and environmental torment, indigenous awarenesses and parental yearnings. The poems surge in five parts, of which only the final one "Too Fast" felt like it could have been re-shaped and the remaining pieces inserted into the prior four sections. Streetly uses the simplest of diction (salmon, rock, spruce tree) but interweaves these pure signifiers w...
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Snow Flowers by Ling Ge (Anstruther Press chapbook, 2025)

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Snow Flowers, an under-20 page but solidly stapled and exquisitely-designed debut chapbook by previously unknown-to-me writer Ling Ge, is a perfect argument for the need for chapbooks in today's poetic landscape. As both tasters for the poet's longer collections (past or future) and encapsulations of a particular vision, sequence or nexus, the chapbooks emerging from Anstruther Press (only 10 bucks!) feel as solid in the hand and the mind as trade books, but with far greater portability. Ge's experimentations with sestina-style repetitions and Tang Dynasty forms, along with her precise haikus, ghazals and a pantoum offer a generous introduction to her tangible craft. A longer piece, "The Time Tunnel," presents a lunging syntax, featuring a "canola" landscape where "Red Guards" beat "goslings to death" and then the speaker, labelled "Capitalist" is eventually able to flee within the interstices of italicized questions concer...
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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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