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
The Home Stretch: A Father, A Son, and All the Things They Never Talk About by George K. Ilsley Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020 $19.95 / 9781551527956 Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic * Considered by title alone, The Home Stretch might encourage a vision — a celebratory one — of completion: finishing a taxing race…
Read more #813 Mordant men of Nova Scotia
Horseplay: My Time Undercover on the Granville Strip by Norm Boucher Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2020 $21.95 / 9781988732985 Note: this book will not be available until November 15, 2020. Order it in advance at your local bookstore. Reviewed by Ron Verzuh * We’re on the toughest section of Granville Street in downtown Vancouver. The hookers…
Read more #812 Vancouver junkie hunter, 1983
Bounce House by Jennica Harper Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2019 $18.00 / 9781772141405 Reviewed by John Pass * There’s a lot to like in Jennica Harper’s new book of poems. I was struck first with how seamlessly she stitches straightforward colloquial language into fairly rigorous, but pleasingly transparent, form. My wife suggests the book-length sequence of…
Read more #811 Care, craft … couplets!
Secrets in the Shadows by Heige S. Boehm Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2019 $14.95 / 9781553805724 Reviewed by Valerie Green * Secrets in The Shadows is the story of two boyhood friends, Michael and Wolfgang (Wolfie), growing up in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. But it is also so much more. Author Heige S. Boehm has…
Read more #810 Pawns in the Hitler Youth
Nanaimo Girl: A Memoir by Prudence Emery Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2020 $24.95 / 9781770865273 Reviewed by Randolph Eustace-Walden Unless noted otherwise, all images reproduced here are from Nanaimo Girl: A Memoir, by Prudence Emery * Prudence Emery is the eponymous “Nanaimo Girl.” Now in her early 80s and living on her native Vancouver Island just…
Read more #809 From Nanaimo to the Royal Ascot
The Foundations of Kindness by Richard Vission Montreal: Guernica Editions, 2020 $25.00 / 9781771834735 Reviewed by Luanne Armstrong * When I finished Richard Vission’s new book, The Foundations of Kindness, I went for a long walk, letting the book and stories and the history of what he has depicted wash through me. (The title comes…
Read more #808 Refugee in the Slocan Valley
The Birdcages: British Columbia’s First Legislative Buildings, 1859-1957 by Robert Ratcliffe Taylor Victoria: FriesenPress, 2020 $16.99 / 9781525547041 Reviewed by Martin Segger * This handsome, generously illustrated volume is essentially the biography of a building. Building biographies, multi-disciplinary by nature and ranging across the architectural, social , and cultural historical genres, are all too rare…
Read more #807 North Pacific Imperial Gothic
Perseverance: The Life of William Fernie, the Man Who Caught Billy Miner by Ron Hatch Kamloops: Thompson Rivers History and Historical Society, 2019 $24.95 / 9780991689910 Available by email from trhhs2012@gmail.com, from Kamloops Chapters, and from Amazon.ca Reviewed by Wayne Norton * Bill Miner attracts a remarkable amount of interest from students of Kamloops history….
Read more #806 The Empire strikes back
Popular Day Hikes: Northern Okanagan, Vernon Shuswap Lumby by Gerry Shea Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2019 (revised and updated; first published 2013) $20.00 / 9781771602457 * Popular Day Hikes: South-Central Okanagan, Kelowna Penticton Oliver by Gerry Shea Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2019 (revised and updated; first published 2015) $20.00 / 9781771602778 Both books reviewed by…
Read more #805 Hiking the Okanagan Valley
How She Read by Chantal Gibson Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2019 $20.00 / 9781987915969 Reviewed by Renée Sarojini Saklikar * On March 12, 2020, Chantal Gibson’s How She Read was shortlisted for both the 2020 Dorothy Livesay and Jim Deva prizes of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes. Winners will be announced on September 19th. As…
Read more #804 Gibson’s poetic pyrotechnics
Re-Origin of Species by Alessandra Naccarato Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2019 $18.00 / 9781771665421 Reviewed by John Swanson * What does poetry do to work its magic? It relates knowledge of the world as we acquire it from science and by other means, with ancient knowing of a more mysterious kind: the forces at work in…
Read more #803 Species survival and adaptation
Lowering Simon Fraser by Maddie Leach (concept and editing) and Michael Kluckner (drawings and interpretation) Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2019 [catalogue; no price] / 9781989503027 Lowering Simon Fraser (the catalogue) is available from the shop at the Contemporary Art Gallery Reviewed by Forrest Pass * 1908 should have been a bumper year for commemorations in…
Read more #802 Cutting Simon Fraser down to size
Welcome to Ormsby Street by Richard Somerset Mackie * In September 2016, in his Welcome to the Ormsby Review, Richard Mackie provided his memories of Margaret Ormsby (1909-1996), the B.C. historian after whom The Ormsby Review is named. He referenced their conversations in two fine old living rooms in the Coldstream Valley, near Vernon, where…
Read more #801 Welcome to Ormsby Street