Category: Book Reviews

. . . she opened the door of a star quietly

Poems — Selected Books Volume II, Yannis Ritsos Trans. Manolis Aligizakis. Ekstasis Editions, 2020

Conversations between writers who self-identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Colour about craft, creativity, vision and tradition can be a means of celebration and resistance. Yet venues for these exchanges have seen far too few writers of colour engaging in reviews, interviews and literary criticism. We invite BIPOC writers to submit reviews of recently published books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by other racialized and underrepresented writers. How might we map out a space for discourse that is by us and for us?

From soprano to whistling warbler

Why Birds Sing, Nina Berkhout. ECW Press, 2020. 

The Long and the Short of It

Charity, Keath Fraser. Biblioasis, 2021.

There must be a term — something Latin and ornate — for the evolutionary process of when a species of such primacy devours its habitat until everywhere it looks it sees only itself. Whatever this word is, the novel has done exactly that in the literary landscape. The novel’s conquering of the bookshelves is so total that the bookstore’s only other surviving genres seem to be Disaster Nonfiction, Retired Hockey Player Memoir, and Scented Candle.

What It All Meant

My Camino, Patrick Warner. Biblioasis, 2019. 

Lo Que Sera, Ya Pasó

Itzel I: A Tlatelolco Awakening and Itzel II: A Three Knives Tale, Sarah Xerar Murphy. Guernica Editions 2019 & 2020. 

Stumble, Spin, Settle

Here the Dark, David Bergen. Biblioasis, 2020. 

Battered and Bruised, but Not Down and Out

Boy With a Problem: Short Stories, Chris Benjamin. Pottersfield Press, 2020. 

Little Disrupters

This is Not a Hoax, Heather Jessup. WLUP, 2020. 

What is your Emergency?

The Waiting Hours, Shandi Mitchell. Viking, 2019. 

This very accomplished novel is by a Maritime writer I had never run into before, although she has written another, Under This Unbroken Sky, which I intend to read now.

The Waiting Hours is about emergency workers, and the “waiting hours” of the title, is the period during the depths of the night when, if anything happens, it is usually terrible.