Category: Book Reviews

Last Things

Field Requiem, Sheri Benning, Carcanet, 2022

Hiding (From) Ourselves

Polar Vortex, Shani Mootoo, Book*hug Press, 2020.

The forthcoming Spring 2022 issue of The Fiddlehead is now available for pre-order! 

The issue will feature the winning poem and short story from The Fiddlehead's 2021 poetry and fiction contests as well as work from authors such as Sylvie Simmons, John Barton and many more!

Remember the incapacitating “brain fog” that troubled so many of us during the COVD-19 lock-downs of 2020 and 2021? 

(Maybe you don’t, because…well, brain fog. Or maybe you do, because we’re still in the midst of a global pandemic and you’re still very much fogged up.) 

In her introduction to Best Canadian Stories 2021, editor Diane Schoemperlen describes her own experience of “brain fog” this way: 

"Although my love of reading had helped me through many crises in my life, now I found it too had mostly deserted me. [...] My concentration and attention span had dwindled to the point where I no longer had the bandwidth to read more than ten or twenty pages at a stretch. [...] I finally realized short stories could be the perfect antidote to this problem."

Dan O’Brien is a poet and playwright. His poetry collections include Our Cancers, War Reporter, New Life, and Scarsdale. O’Brien is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and two PEN America Awards for playwriting. His work has been published in several issue of The Fiddlehead, most recently in issue 283 (Spring 2020). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Enjoy this sneak peak inside the cover of the new Autumn issue, which will be available soon! 

Enjoy this sneak peak inside the cover of the new Autumn issue, which will be available soon! 

Back of the road a ways

Brighten the Corner Where You Are, Carol Bruneau. Vagrant Press, 2020.

Sometimes a gifted writer can convey a character by getting an absolute sense of that character’s voice. It is a peculiar kind of ventriloquism, some kind of almost hypnotic union, and when it works it is absolutely brilliant, as it is in Brighten the Corner Where You Are, by Carol Bruneau.

Asking the Impossible

Any God Will Do, Virginia Konchan. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020.

While reading Halifax-based poet Virginia Konchan’s second collection, I experienced my capacity for feeling — in the broadest, most contradictory sense — expand. In fact, Any God Will Do seems to me essentially about excess (of feeling, of stimulus, of being) and about the idea of divinity as an overwhelming localization of the too-much.

Hush, Hush, Sweet Secrets

The Hush Sisters, Gerard Collins, Breakwater Books, 2020