Ten-ish years ago....have things changed?


 https://www.nataliezed.ca/2012/closing-the-gap-reviewing-canadian-books-of-poetry-written-by-women/


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Snow Flowers by Ling Ge (Anstruther Press chapbook, 2025)

Image
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...
Read more

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

Image
  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...
Read more

The Tinder Sonnets by Jennifer LoveGrove (Book*hug Press, 2026)

Image
 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...
Read more