Category: Books

In the acknowledgements section of Tolu Oloruntoba’s celebrated collection, The Junta of Happenstance (Palimpsest Press, 2021), he thanks American poet Kimiko Hahn for two profound words of advice: “risk clarity.” He says (rather modestly) that he knows he

I have to be careful as a reader of poetry to allow enough room for the diversity of voices and approaches. For instance, very early on I was struck, convinced, intoxicated with Jack Gilbert's work.

During the second summer of the pandemic, I made my way from my apartment in Vancouver to my parents’ home in Saint John for an extended visit. I was thirty-six and burnt out: a high-intensity job, months of social isolation, the loss of a grandmother, and a year and a half on the other side of the country from family had taken their toll. 

I took Cormac McCarthy camping with me: five nights together on Lake Superior’s rugged north shore. That is, I took McCarthy’s The Road with me.

Sure enough, contemporary philosophies of posthumanism and ecophenomenology, challenging human-centered frameworks and exploring the embodied reciprocity between humans and the more-than-human world, circulate—if at all— in the back eddies of popular consciousness.

There should be a word for books that show up in your life when you need them. Books which obliterate fears or seemingly by magic connect some of the disparate dots of a lifetime. Dots that you maybe didn’t even realize existed, let alone had an awareness that they could use an alignment, call for a needle and thread.