Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds by Yvonne Blomer (editor) Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2020 $22.95 / 9781773860220 Reviewed by John Swanson * Sweet Water is an important and timely book, about fresh water in all its many forms — lakes, ponds, rivers, creeks and streams, wetlands, marshes, and ground water, the water under the…
Read more #833 A fresh water poetry anthology
Itineraries: An Intellectual Odyssey by Philip Resnick Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2020 $21.95 / 9781553806028 Reviewed by Sheldon Goldfarb * Philip Resnick is an old-fashioned Canadian nationalist. I don’t mean harking back to the National Policy of Sir John A. Not that old-fashioned. More the nationalism of the 1970s, the Waffle Movement in the NDP, the…
Read more #832 Marx, Malthus, and Meech Lake
Robert Service: The True Adventures of Yukon’s Favourite Bard by Elle Andra-Warner Victoria: Heritage House, 2020 (first published as Robert Service: A Great Canadian Poet’s Romance with the North, Altitude Publishing, 2004) $9.95 / 9781772033311 Reviewed by William R. Morrison * As an experiment in the lasting influence of poetry in this country, I thought…
Read more #831 Don’t mention the Yukon Poet
Girls Like Me by Kristin Butcher Victoria: Orca Books, 2019 $9.95 / 9781459820555 Reviewed by Carol Anne Shaw Trigger warning: rape, sexual coercion, miscarriage * Kristin Butcher of Campbell River has written more than twenty books for young people, and has been shortlisted for a variety of Canadian literary awards during her career. She writes…
Read more #830 Sweeping rape under the rug
Footprints of a Foodie by Tanya dePape Victoria: FriesenPress Publishers, 2019 $30.99 / 9781525548307 Reviewed by Natalie Lang * Have you ever felt the need to uproot your life, visit a far off place, and reboot your perspective? Vancouver Island clinical counsellor Tanya dePape, in the wake of a divorce and several failed attempts at…
Read more #829 A pre-Covid foodie flyabout
The Cure for Hate: A Former White Supremacist’s Journey from Violent Extremism to Radical Compassion by Tony McAleer, with a foreword by Daisy Khan Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019 $22.95 / 9781551527697 Reviewed by Ron Verzuh * Fighting Hatred: How a Vancouver Skinhead Reinvented Himself As a Canadian living in the United States, I am…
Read more #828 Compassion in a dangerous time
Conversations in a mountain cave by Havi Neeman * We are pleased to present a literary mashup by Havi Neeman, a former student in the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Simon Fraser University. A mashup is a creative work, such as a short story, novel, or song, that combines or blends pre-existing text or music…
Read more #827 Conversations in a mountain cave
Inside View: The Eye Behind the Lens by Michael G. Varga and Roxanne Davies Victoria: Island Blue (Printorum), 2018 $20.00 / 9781790697366 Reviewed by Timothy Lewis This book is available through Amazon.ca * The perception one gets through the lens of a television camera often allows the viewer to gain perspective on something they would…
Read more #826 Lights, action, Michael Varga
Moments of Glad Grace: A Memoir by Alison Wearing Toronto: ECW Press, 2020 $16.99 / 9781770415133 Reviewed by Graeme Wynn * This splendid memoir recalls the week that Alison Wearing spent researching family history with her father in Dublin. It is, on the face of it, a beautifully-crafted, bitter-sweet story of an excellent adventure. Anxious…
Read more #825 Alison’s excellent adventure
Turtle Island: The Story of North America’s First People by Eldon Yellowhorn and Kathy Lowinger Toronto: Annick Press, 2017 $16.95 / 9781554519439 * What the Eagle Sees: Indigenous Stories of Rebellion and Renewal by Eldon Yellowhorn and Kathy Lowinger Toronto: Annick Press, 2019 $16.95 / 9781773213286 Both books reviewed by Kristina Hannis * Congratulations to…
Read more #824 From Bonavista to Turtle Island
Civilian Internment in Canada: Histories & Legacies by Rhonda L. Hinther and Jim Mochoruk (editors) Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2020 $31.95 / 9780887558450 * The Stories Were Not Told: Canada’s First World War Internment Camps by Sandra Semchuk Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2019 $34.99 / 9781772123784 * Harry Livingstone’s Forgotten Men: Canadians and…
Read more #823 Canadian internment legacies
ESSAY: There’s no place like home: our connection to meaningful places by Joanne Crozier * We are pleased to present an essay by Joanne Crozier, There’s no place like home, as part of an ongoing collaboration between The Ormsby Review and Graduate Liberal Studies at Simon Fraser University, an interdisciplinary program that leads to the…
Read more #822 Home is where the memory is
Rain City: Vancouver Reflections by John Moore Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2020 $20.00 / 9781772141399 Reviewed by Grahame Ware * On the inside front pages of Rain City: Vancouver Reflections, John Moore brandishes a quote from Paul St. Pierre: “A journalist is a reporter who can’t hold a steady job.” The instability of journalism and feature…
Read more #821 The hidden pulse of Vancouver
Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time by Tom Wayman Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2020 $18.95 / 9781550179125 Reviewed by Emma Rhodes * Award-winning Canadian author Tom Wayman has returned with another poetry collection in Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time. His audience, he…
Read more #820 Calgary and the world awry
Epidemics and the Modern World by Mitchell L. Hammond Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020 $54.95 / 9781487593735 Reviewed by Jody Decker * This textbook by a history professor at the University of Victoria, Mitchell Hammond, focuses on epidemics of infectious diseases which, he argues, have left the greatest impact on the modern world, even…
Read more #819 Pandemics past and present
The War Widow by Tara Moss Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2020 $34.00 / 9781443461207 Reviewed by Valerie Green * Tara Moss has created another excellent piece of crime fiction with The War Widow. The style of this book, although perhaps a little far-fetched in places, is reminiscent of old movies set in the 1940s like Casablanca,…
Read more #818 Shoulder pads & red lipstick
Actress by Anne Enright Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2020 $29.95 / 9780771005916 Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski * There are not many more “Irish” novelists than Booker Prize winning novelist Anne Enright. Still, her connections to British Columbia, and Vancouver Island in particular, though slender, are abiding. In a recent talk at an event in Dublin,…
Read more #817 Bad corsets and the wrong shoes
Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests by Ariel Gordon Hamilton, ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2019 $20.00 / 9781928088752 Reviewed by Jaime Yard * It took me an inordinately long time to read Ariel Gordon’s Treed. This does not mean that it isn’t a good book. In truth, I think the pace may have been set…
Read more #816 Walking through the pandemic
The Weight of the Heart by Theresa Kishkan Windsor, ON: Palimpsest Press, 2020 $15.95 / 9781989287477 Reviewed by David Stouck * This newly published novella by one of BC’s most prolific and accomplished authors eludes easy categorization because it is part travel writing, part family tragedy, part literary history and part cartography. The young narrator,…
Read more #815 A confluence of passages
INTERVIEW: Curtis LeBlanc with Nathaniel G. Moore * Curtis LeBlanc’s second poetry book is fresh off the printing press and on bookshelves across the country, in the middle of a global pandemic. Birding In The Glass Age of Isolation (Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, April 2020) confronts mental illness, masculinity, and humanity’s relationship with the nature world….
Read more #814 Anxiety and clunky plastics