Stop! Look! Listen! is your one-stop destination for The Fiddlehead's cultural engagement.
Hannah Green’s Xanax Cowboy is a long poem—a total of 128 pages—that interrogates
This is my year of reading short story collections, and this book exploded my understanding of what you could do with the “novel in short stories” form. The dust jacket describes it as a novel, and it follows a single protagonist, named Nina. But many of the stories that comprise it were published separately and several made it into collections like The Journey Prize anthology, and that’s because they make such powerful use of the condensed tension of the short story.
When I arrived at my designated campsite on my first camping trip, I encountered a black bear. It was bent over a picnic table two camp sites over, its snout riffling through crumbs and crusts on abandoned paper plates. My childhood friend, a bear expert who was working at Algonquin Park that summer, was shocked. She said she hadn’t seen bears roaming this close to the campsites all summer. She assured me that the likelihood of it coming back was slim, but I wasn’t convinced.
Nucleus, a poetry collection by Svetlana Ischenko, published by Ronsdale Press.
Nucleus takes readers through a journey that traverses space (Ukraine to Canada) and language (Ukrainian to English) to arrive at an arresting and beautiful synthesis.
I've had Jeremie Albino's record Tears You Hide playing in fairly steady rotation at our place since seeing him at the StanFest musical festival in Canso, Nova Scotia in 2023. Albino wowed me with his strong, disarming voice and confident stage presence, and he's even better in the studio. I find the jaunty second track on this album, "Angeline," perfect for shaking off the day's stresses while I'm cooking supper in the evening. "Across the Hall" is easily the best pandemic-themed tune I've come across.
A Coffin full of Books
Bohumil Hrabal’s ninety-eight page novel Too Loud a Solitude opens with the following two sentences: “For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper and books…”
At the end of January, a much younger friend told me how much she enjoyed Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. My friend loves to paint and found inspiration to keep painting even if her life feels overwhelmed with grad school and a full-time job. It doesn’t matter how good she is, or what may come of it. All that matters is that she paints.
Listening: Explosions in the Sky – The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place
Reading: Becky Chambers – A Psalm for the Wild-Built
There isn't enough Jim Harrison in this world. One of the few truly original writers of the last 20 years, he belongs to no school, and sits in a category and style uniquely his own. While he is sometimes compared, favourably and unfavourably, to Ernest Hemingway because they both write about Michigan and, sometimes, fishing, the comparison makes as much sense as linking Hemingway with Cervantes because they both write about Spain.
A book I find myself returning to is Maggie Burton’s poetry collection, Chores. Captivating from the opening lines, with uncomplicated language and vivid, visceral images, Burton revisits the day-to-day events of domestic life and women’s labour that are often overlooked. Bringing tenderness to the struggles of survival, these poems stir up nostalgia for home and beloved grandmothers.
