To kiss the hybrid future à travers un voile
Entre Rive and Shore, Dominique Bernier-Cormier. icehouse poetry, 2023.
Tout d’abord: wow. These were the first words that came to mind en mijotant sur how and where to begin a review of Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s multigenre, multi-temporal and dimensional, highly allusive, bilingual+ Entre Rive and Shore...
Nestle In Words Like An Animal: The Poetic G/Rasp of Tongue, Throat, and Mouth in G by Kirby
G, Klara du Plessis & Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi. Palimpsest Press, 2023.
First, let’s talk about the design/packaging of this book.
It’s exquisite. The colour palette, fonts, printed endpapers, on signature Coach House zephyr, readable text on the page. A book you want to pick up, hold, caress with the eyes and the touch. Congrats to in-house designer Ellie Hastings, editor Jim Johnstone, and publisher Aimee Parent Dunn. Finery.
Lyrical Authenticity by Klara du Plessis
The King of Terrors, Jim Johnstone. Coach House Books, 2023.
Cautious Praise by Lynn Davies
Lent, Kate Cayley, Book*hug Press, 2023.
In Lent, Kate Cayley’s voice is driven by doubt and occasional bouts of confidence. In “Falling,” she says matter-of-factly,
I can’t find time to repair.
“Junkyard Apocalypse”: Uneasy Ecopoems, Unhomely Homes by David Huebert
Kill Your Starlings, Tom Cull. Gaspereau Press, 2023.
In A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen, Erin Noteboom merges her background as a particle physicist with poetry. She excavates intangible and indescribable moments from scientific experiments to blur lines between worlds that otherwise seem separate.
“My parents peeled me like a fig. I was a different fruit each day.” Is the self the me, an object created, or the I, with self-knowledge and even agency over its own definition? In Métissée, ably rendered in English by translator and scholar Rebecca L. Thompson as Little Wet-Paint Girl, Québec poet Ouanessa Younsi brings multiple possible selves together in a collision complicated by mixed cultural heritage.
Daniel Sarah Karasik’s Plenitude is not only a cogent articulation of trans experience, identity and rights, but an incisive systemic reading — often a socialist or Marxist reading — with several side trips to consider Jewishness. By situating gender, queerness and identity within the larger context they bring a broader analysis of how culture can subsume and often commodify the personal. And because this is poetry, we’re aware that the tropes of lyric positionality (including the lyric “I”) are also implicated.
While considering my sprawl of notes from my reading, and re-reading, of Erin Robinsong’s second full-length book of poetry, Wet Dream, and wondering how to begin this review, I called to mind the following quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:
“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English), “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!”
