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Review of "Best Canadian Stories 2021" by Meghan Kemp-Gee

Remember the incapacitating “brain fog” that troubled so many of us during the COVD-19 lock-downs of 2020 and 2021? 

(Maybe you don’t, because…well, brain fog. Or maybe you do, because we’re still in the midst of a global pandemic and you’re still very much fogged up.) 

In her introduction to Best Canadian Stories 2021, editor Diane Schoemperlen describes her own experience of “brain fog” this way: 

"Although my love of reading had helped me through many crises in my life, now I found it too had mostly deserted me. [...] My concentration and attention span had dwindled to the point where I no longer had the bandwidth to read more than ten or twenty pages at a stretch. [...] I finally realized short stories could be the perfect antidote to this problem."

Review of Dan O'Brien's "Our Cancers" by Megan Kuklis

Dan O’Brien is a poet and playwright. His poetry collections include Our Cancers, War Reporter, New Life, and Scarsdale. O’Brien is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and two PEN America Awards for playwriting. His work has been published in several issue of The Fiddlehead, most recently in issue 283 (Spring 2020). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Back of the road a ways: A Review by Susan Haley of Carol Bruneau's "Brighten the Corner Where You Are"

 

Back of the road a ways

Brighten the Corner Where You Are, Carol Bruneau. Vagrant Press, 2020.

 

Sometimes a gifted writer can convey a character by getting an absolute sense of that character’s voice. It is a peculiar kind of ventriloquism, some kind of almost hypnotic union, and when it works it is absolutely brilliant, as it is in Brighten the Corner Where You Are, by Carol Bruneau.

Asking the Impossible: A Review by Dominique Béchard of Virginia Konchan's "Any God Will Do"

Asking the Impossible

Any God Will Do, Virginia Konchan. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020.

 

While reading Halifax-based poet Virginia Konchan’s second collection, I experienced my capacity for feeling — in the broadest, most contradictory sense — expand. In fact, Any God Will Do seems to me essentially about excess (of feeling, of stimulus, of being) and about the idea of divinity as an overwhelming localization of the too-much.

. . . she opened the door of a star quietly: A Review by M. Travis Lane of Yannis Ritsos' "Poems — Selected Books Volume II." Trans. Manolis Aligizakis

. . . she opened the door of a star quietly

Poems — Selected Books Volume II, Yannis Ritsos Trans. Manolis Aligizakis. Ekstasis Editions, 2020

 

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