I loved Jennifer Bowering Delisle's latest book, Micrographia, in which Delisle juxtaposes her experiences of infertility and motherhood with her own mother's declining health and medically-assisted death. These lyric essays are luminous and questioning, searching for meaning in everyday moments as well as times of intense emotion. Woven with history, etymology, mythology, medicine, and law, the ambitious structure of these essays elevates the artistry and compassion that shine through on every page.
I came to poetry through music: strange rhyming songs and lullabies as a kid, an absolute obsession with lyrics as a teenager, and now as an eclectic collector of songs that remind me of poems in some way. So I’m recommending music—interesting music that you may not have heard before, Joshua Burnside’s Ephrata. I happened upon it a few years ago, encouraged by an album write-up that mentioned the many hours he spent on his own in a small room, recording all sorts of different sounds, and then layering them together with melody and his poetic lyrics.
For more than a year now, I have not read a book of my choosing for myself.
Reading remains, in its many facets and prisms of accessibility, a privilege – and the freedom to read what one wishes continues to be a luxury.
During this time I have read poems, snatches of news articles, and fleeting glimpses of bus ads – but mostly I have spent the better part of the year reading things to my children. Board books with my now 14-month-old daughter, and larger, more substantial books with my soon to be six-year-old son.
Having devoured Catriona Wright’s first collection of poetry I was very excited to hear her second collection would be out in May 2023. True to her brilliance, Continuity Errors makes me thankful I have been so lucky to come across Wright’s work and thankful she continues to contribute her voice to Canadian poetry. Go Catriona Go!
Is a poet’s life the support for poetry, or is poetry a support for the poet’s life? As much as Santoka Tenada, a mendicant Zen priest and haiku poet of the twentieth century, tried to live a good life according to the Tao, his inveterate love of sake and general need to carouse left him with poetry as the only means of perfecting what he was unable to perfect in life: mainly, the thing in us that wants to be better, the thing which, for a host of competing reasons, we are usually unable to achieve in life.
I’ve read a lot of great and varied books this year so far, everything from queer romance noir fantasies to nonfiction about moss, but the work that has stuck with me the most is You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith.
This work, a memoir by a poet best known for her poem Good Bones, which has gone viral more than once, is the work that has most resonated with me in the last few months.
I learned of Lucky Lo’s album, Supercarry, by happy coincidence.
Needing a weeknight drink, I went to a friend’s café in Odense, Denmark, only to find the café already stuffed with guests–young and old, plain and flamboyant–hunched around the tables, a buzz of anticipation in the air.
The irony behind the “Doodling for Writers” catchphrase, “If you can write, you can draw” is that I was introduced to this book during a workshop I took because I was in a slump and could not write. My need to create pushed me to explore alternate means of expression, which led me to a comics workshop and this book.
Accompanied with the book’s introductory chapter is a cartoon of a cat laden with bags bearing the labels “Failure Fears,” “Success Fears,” and “Fear of the New,” and an eager-looking dog asking, “Were we supposed to bring our baggage?”
In the 25 years since it was given to me as a birthday present, I’ve recommended Time and the Art of Living more often than The Sixteen Pleasures or Mao’s Last Dancer.
As winter approaches, we should start to consider what music will accompany the gloom. Like central heating, stews, and mulled wine, Toronto musician Luka Kuplowsky’s, Capturing the Evening Song, is an essential comfort to get us through the cold. Released in the guts of winter 2022, Capturing the Evening Song is a meditation collection reminiscent of work by Beverly-Glenn Copeland and Hiroshi Yoshimura. It is a dreamy, synthy contemplation on simple, daily scenes.
