Category: Stop! Look! Listen!

I am a slow reader and I am currently ambling through The Death and Life of Great American Cities

A mostly instrumental form of music like jazz isn’t the most immediate artistic vehicle for political engagement.

Roadrunner Roadrunner / going faster miles an hour 

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

Ask me about my favourite record and I’ll tell you it’s The Nightfly

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. 

Ripples in air, soft and immense. Bells curl round a hillside to be cradled in an ear. Small animals worry their paws. A dazzle of piano, a glittery sheet of salt water. A cart lopes along a country road. Ghosts play ping-pong. Cascades from outer space. Some strange vessel encircles us in a scalded wood.