Dedicated to Barry Hannah (1942-2010).
I am happiest when I‘m working on a story. Over the years I’ve written a play, a slim volume of poetry, a hockey novel, a nonfiction travel memoir on Ireland, and done some freelance articles on skiing and canoeing. I’m currently working on a novel set in the Wild West and [...]
Current Issue
Tidings of Comfort and Joy
Mark Anthony JarmanThe Wheat of Sadness: Editing Out the Chaff from the 2009 Giller Shortlist
Ryan BiggeAs with ham radio aficionados, the anger and passion of Canadian literary discourse grows ever fiercer as the stakes dissolve. But without such megaphonic outbursts all that remains is tame, sanctioned commentary about manufactured non-controversy.
Carpetbaggers
Jeet HeerI’ll freely admit that prior to reading Leon Rooke’s The Last Shot, I was intensely prejudiced against pastiches.
Speculative Simultaneouel
Steven W. BeattieMargaret Atwood doesn’t like hearing her novels called science fiction. . . . [But] her brusque dismissal of the term science fiction to describe the results seems odd, especially when seen in light of her remarks about another, earlier book, one which was hugely influential on both Oryx and Crake and its follow-up, 2009’s The Year of the Flood: H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Web Exclusive: In Lieu of an Essay on Literary Matters and ‘Bad Back Baseball’
Norm Sibum– or a screed for Brian Fawcett
Sometimes, Fawcett, when I’m writing a piece, a long poem, for instance; and I come down with a case of claustrophobia as a consequence, in order to relieve myself of that unwelcome sensation, I start casting about for a larger backdrop, one that might better accommodate the [...]
The Green Woman vs A Little Spot of Grease
Catherine OwenRepose
Adam Getty
Nightwood Editions, 2008
88 pages, $16.95
The Mechanical Bird
Asa Boxer
Véhicule Press, 2007
78 pages, $16.00
Gwendolyn MacEwen famously wrote that “Poetry has got nothing to do with poetry. Poetry is how the air goes green before thunder, is the sound you make when you come and why you live and how you bleed and the sound you make [...]
Peeing Unrepentantly into Infinity: John Smith’s Fireflies in the Magnolia Grove
Zachariah WellsJohn Smith, Prince Edward Island’s inaugural poet laureate, has been publishing books of poetry since 1972. In spite of his on-Island acclaim, and despite the fact that a Google search of his name – in quotation marks! – turns up nearly six million hits, he remains, I think, very little known outside the cozy confines [...]
Norm Sibum on Tap
Evan JonesNorm Sibum was born in Oberammergau, Germany, in 1947, grew up in Alaska, Missouri, Utah and Washington, and moved to Vancouver, Canada, in 1968. He has published poetry with presses in the UK and Canada, the most recent of which are The Pangborn Defence (Biblioasis, 2008) and Smoke and Lilacs (Carcanet, 2009). His Girls and [...]
Highbrow Harlequin
Nathan WhitlockFebruary
Lisa Moore
House of Anansi Press, 2009
hardcover, 320 pages, $29.95
“Without the reflection of characters scarred by traumatic events, such as war, depression, natural disasters and genocide, to name a few, Canadian literature would lose its essence, not to mention its most celebrated authors.”
That is one of the more harsh and sweeping (not to mention deadly funny [...]