Brilliant Women Inc

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...