“The most interesting part of architecture is the non-functioning,” writes Cassidy McFadzean in “Pier Evil,” one of the poems in her third collection. In a later poem, McFadzean clarifies this observation: “Fluting’s the only feature ... Read More »
Dallas Hunt’s Teeth is a stirring follow-up to Creeland, his first book of poetry. In “Cree Dictionary,” from his debut collection, Hunt begins with a witty redefinition of terms: “the translation for joy / in ... Read More »
April 10, 2024 | Filed under: Indigenous Peoples, Poetry, Reviews
Faith Arkorful’s debut book, The Seventh Town of Ghosts, is a collection of lyric poems suffused with a heart-centred intelligence. These poems move through grief, memory, and joy with the insight of “a black girl ... Read More »
In his genre-bending debut novel, Dayspring, Toronto writer Anthony Oliveira has crafted a truly one-of-a-kind depiction of the life of Jesus Christ – reimagined from the perspective of the apostle John, described in the Bible ... Read More »
April 3, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
The Lantern and the Night Moths is an exceptional book of translations and literary criticism by poet-translator Yilin Wang. Wang’s original translations of five Chinese poets and her accompanying essays (one per poet) make for ... Read More »
To explain the plot of Elaine McCluskey’s The Gift Child is both to give everything away and to reveal nothing important. Although the novel does, in the words of its narrator Harriett Swim, take us ... Read More »
March 20, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews
Michael Ondaatje’s latest collection is impossibly good. It is the work of a mature poet at the zenith of his talent. T. S. Eliot wrote, “The mature poet, in the operations of his mind, works ... Read More »
Eynhallow, one of the smaller Orkney Islands, is a rugged, inhospitable place. Seventy-five hectares in size, it is a mere speck in the North Atlantic, now preserved as a bird sanctuary. As Toronto writer Tim ... Read More »
March 13, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels
Seven years after #MeToo rocked global consciousness and Time named Silence Breakers their Person of the Year, sexual violence survivors face a bleak landscape of rising femicide rates, online misogyny, and an increasingly unbelieving culture ... Read More »
March 6, 2024 | Filed under: Media, Politics & Current Affairs, Reference, Reviews, Social Sciences
Interesting Facts about Space, the sophomore novel from Emily Austin (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead), orbits Enid, an information architect at the Canadian Space Agency, who – true to the book’s title ... Read More »
February 28, 2024 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews