In Ghazal Games, Iranian-American poet Roger Sedarat approaches the ghazal, an ancient Arabic form with its roots in Persia and dominance in Urdu-speaking countries, not with the usual solemnity but as a site of playfulness and invention. Gone is the nostalgic melancholy of Agha Shahid Ali, or the usual moroseness of the Urdu masters, and we aren’t quite yet in the silted, sublime world of Canadian ghazal-poets like John Thompson or Phyllis Webb.
While staying in rural Saskatchewan at the oldest monastery in Canada I read Karen Russell’s latest book The Antidote. So, perhaps it was not a wonder that the first thing that grabbed me about it were its descriptions of the Nebraska prairies.
Carol Off’s At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage (2024), highly recommended, begins with a preamble about Robert MacFarlane’s The Lost Words: A Spell Book.
Yes, a 1,000-page biography may look daunting, but I found myself unable to put down Pessoa by Richard Zenith, which examines the short life of the Portuguese poet, critic, translator and publisher Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935).
Coffee shop writers amaze me. I fear I’m too distractible to concentrate in a setting with clinking spoons, bursts of laughter, a growling espresso machine, and chair legs scraping the floor. Give me silence.
Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma came out in 2023, a year before Alice Munro devotees had to reckon with the book’s central question: what do we do when an artist’s reprehensible behaviour curdles our appreciation of their work?
I’ll admit it: I often feel ground down by the world. Climate. Politics. The economy. Patriarchy. Fascism. I try not to doomscroll—but then end up simply toggling between doom and puppies. My latest solution? Art-scrolling.
