Auguries by Clea Roberts London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2017 $20.00 / 9781771314510 Reviewed by David Stouck First published October 24, 2017 * Two-time Governor General’s Award winner Don McKay described Clea Roberts’ debut collection of poems, Here Is Where We Disembark (Freehand Books, 2010), as “exquisite frost-bitten brevities,” a phrase that aptly characterizes this Yukon-based…
Read more #188 Spooked horses in a storm
Blaise Cendrars Speaks… by Blaise Cendrars. Edited and with an introduction by Jim Christy, translated by David J. MacKinnon Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2016 $24.95 / 9781771711906 First published in Paris by Denoël, 1952 and 2016 Reviewed by Serge Alternês Review first published Oct. 16, 2017 * This upcoming Remembrance Day we might recall and commemorate…
Read more #183 Modernist poet Blaise Cendrars
ESSAY: Kipling on Vancouver Island by John F. Bosher First published October 11, 2017 * Rudyard Kipling’s first visit to the Pacific coast of British Columbia was in 1889 in the course of his journey from India via Japan and the U.S.A. to London with every intention of making a literary name for himself. He…
Read more #178 Kipling on Vancouver Island
Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine by Meghan Bell (editor) and curated by the Growing Room Collective: Meghan Bell, Terri Brandmueller, Candace Fertile, Taryn Hubbard, Chelene Knight, Lindsay Glauser Kwan, Cara Lang, Alissa McArthur, Navneet Nagra, Bonnie Nish, Rachel Thompson, Kayi Wong, and Lisa Xing Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017 $24.95 / 9781987915402 Reviewed…
Read more #168 Forty years of making room
Jim Wong-Chu (1949-2017) An obituary by Alan Twigg First published Aug. 15, 2017 * Chinese Canadians weren’t granted the federal vote in Canada until 1947 and they first voted provincially in 1949–the year Jim Wong-Chu was born in Hong Kong on January 28th. Jim Wong-Chu was brought to Canada, aged four, in 1953 where he…
Read more #154 Jim Wong-Chu (1949-2017)
The Way of Tanka by Naomi Beth Wakan Brunswick, Maine: Shanti Arts Publishing, 2017 $20.00 / 9781941830604 Reviewed by Phyllis Reeve First published June 8, 2017 * Born in England in 1931, Naomi Deutsch come to Canada in 1954 and worked as a psychotherapist in Toronto. She and her second husband Elias, who married in…
Read more #136 It takes one to tanka
Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine by Meghan Bell (editor) and curated by the Growing Room Collective: Meghan Bell, Terri Brandmueller, Candace Fertile, Taryn Hubbard, Chelene Knight, Lindsay Glauser Kwan, Cara Lang, Alissa McArthur, Navneet Nagra, Bonnie Nish, Rachel Thompson, Kayi Wong, and Lisa Xing Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017 $24.95 / 9781987915402 Reviewed…
Read more #130 The making of Making Room
First Published March 6, 2017 REVIEW: Oscar of Between: A Memory of Identity and Ideas by Betsy Warland Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2016. $21.95 / 978-1-987915-16-7 Reviewed by Catriona Sandilands * In 2007, Betsy Warland took a birthday trip to London for a range of plays and events, including an exhibition on military camouflage at…
Read more #99 Opening the Oscar envelope
Two of the unsung heroes of B.C. literature, Ernest Hekkanen and Margrith Schraner, began The New Orphic Review, a bi-annual journal of fiction, poetry, reviews and essays in 1998 when they had just turned fifty-one. “To create a product of no obvious practical value,” Hekkanen writes in the penultimate issue, “and for which there would be…
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