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.
Enjoy this sneak peak inside the cover of the new Autumn issue, which will be available soon!
Enjoy this sneak peak inside the cover of the new Autumn issue, which will be available soon!
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
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.
Hush, Hush, Sweet Secrets
The Hush Sisters, Gerard Collins, Breakwater Books, 2020
. . . she opened the door of a star quietly
Poems — Selected Books Volume II, Yannis Ritsos Trans. Manolis Aligizakis. Ekstasis Editions, 2020
Conversations between writers who self-identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Colour about craft, creativity, vision and tradition can be a means of celebration and resistance. Yet venues for these exchanges have seen far too few writers of colour engaging in reviews, interviews and literary criticism.
From soprano to whistling warbler
Why Birds Sing, Nina Berkhout. ECW Press, 2020.
The Long and the Short of It
Charity, Keath Fraser. Biblioasis, 2021.
There must be a term — something Latin and ornate — for the evolutionary process of when a species of such primacy devours its habitat until everywhere it looks it sees only itself. Whatever this word is, the novel has done exactly that in the literary landscape. The novel’s conquering of the bookshelves is so total that the bookstore’s only other surviving genres seem to be Disaster Nonfiction, Retired Hockey Player Memoir, and Scented Candle.
