Podcasts have become so ubiquitous it’s easy to forget they are relative newcomers to the digital broadcast scene. For this reason, a recently released academic work - Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory- is an important read for podcast listeners, podcast content creators and those who promote and curate this rapidly evolving medium.

Though not an “easy read,” among other things, the book’s eighteen essays outline podcasters’ take on the journey from radio broadcasting into audio and visual productions, noting increasing engagement via YouTube, with graphics and other special effects. Nowadays podcasting has grown from being a niche technology into a mainstream source of information. 

In the past twenty years since podcasting technology evolved to let users easily get new episodes and subscribe to podcast feeds all major digital players have adopted the format as a lucrative content. Between 2008 and 2015, listener numbers nearly doubled in the U.S. with podcast fans consuming more audio than users of other formats.

The paperback version of the book appears at a time where some fear podcasts’ legitimacy may become a victim of the digital medium’s unbridled success and extreme growth and popularity. Of the collection released in paperback by Wilfrid Laurier University Press last month (November 2025), editor Dario Llinares said in an email interview he hopes the book counters “two unhelpful poles,” that he says dominate public perception of the communications format.

One is, “the naive enthusiasm that treats podcasting as a frictionless solution to impact and engagement,” while the other is, “the dismissive view that sees it as inherently lightweight or ‘dumbing down’.”  “We’re in a moment where . . .podcasting looks like the perfect tool: a medium that can take complex ideas and make them publicly accessible without dumbing them down,” says Llinares, an academic, author and podcast expert of the book he compiled with co-editor Lori Backstead. 

“In my experience—as a teacher and a listener—podcasts and audiobooks can complement rather than replace reading. They offer a different kind of cognitive and affective engagement: ideas carried by tone, rhythm, emphasis, dialogue.

“So, I don’t buy the simple “dumbing down” narrative. The real question is how we design and use podcasts: are we making work that invites depth, curiosity, and critical reflection, or just repackaging everything into easily digestible soundbites.”

Though substantially an academic and instructional work, the book offers considerable insight into why podcasts have succeeded. Its essays by creators and contributors, like Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGregor, Katherine McLeod, Tanya Bell, Sheila LaRoque, and Kayla Lar-Son, are proof of that. 

Yet things are changing so fast, it is hard to keep pace with the evolution of podcasting, Llinares says.“The landscape has already shifted radically in the time between conceiving the book and its publication: YouTube has become the dominant space where people “listen” to podcasts, and that migration towards visualized podcasting fundamentally alters how shows are made, how they’re consumed, and the kinds of labour and resources involved.”

Llinares says, “there’s a danger that the low-barrier, audio-first ethos that made podcasting such a democratic and experimental medium gets squeezed by platform logics, branding pressures, and video production demands. So, one key future I’m invested in is preserving and defending the relative “purity” and accessibility of audio podcasting as a space of creative, critical, and independent practice—inside and outside the university.”

Llinares calls podcasts “reflexive thinking in progress” and far from dumbing down content they give participants and listeners a chance to work “through ideas live,” . . . where “the conversation, rather than the . . . authority of the journal article or lecture, becomes the form.”

He says podcasts allow, “for serendipity, anecdote, uncertainty, emotion, and situated experience to play an explicit role in how ideas emerge and connect.” The book’s editors tried to get a range of diverse voices to highlight “one of the strengths of podcasting to capture and express authentic diverse voices ,” Llinares says.

“Diversity was central, but not in a narrow, box-ticking sense. We wanted a range of subjectivities and positions, not only across familiar markers such as gender, geography, and discipline, but also in terms of institutional role, professional experience, and modes of practice.

That meant bringing together established academics, early-career researchers, practitioners working inside and outside the university, and people whose work moves between research, teaching, activism, independent production, and public engagement. Llinares says a positive development is that the tools to create podcasts, “are more accessible than ever. 

It’s easier to record, edit, and distribute audio; people are used to having podcasts woven into their daily routines. . .” Another trend affecting podcasts is advancements in AI, (which Llinares says is already offering improvements). “Tools for cleaning audio, leveling, noise reduction, transcription, translation, and search can be transformative - especially for independent producers or academics without institutional resources.”

Still, he does not see a world with fully synthetic podcasting and fears the potential for “AI slop.”

Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory

Wilfrid Laurier University Press, editors Lori Beckstead and Dario Llinareas

The Midnight Project, by Christy Climenhage, published by Poplar Press, 292 pages, $24.

Skilled satire, adroit wit and whimsy combine with engaging

prose and intriguing characters to make Canadian author

Christy Climenhage’s debut novel, The Midnight Project, an

often-exceptional read.

Climenhage, like a surfeit of authors from Huxley to Atwood,

tackles the weighty themes of the impact of genetic engineering

and biotechnology on a future world.

Like Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake, Climenhage blunts

the darkness inherent in her debut dystopian cli-fi novel with

irony and an over-the-top tone yet still forges a plausible

backdrop for this eco-disaster thriller.

The plot kicks off when business tycoon Burton Sykes contacts

protagonists Raina and Cedric (genetic engineers with a

checkered past) to save humanity.

He asks the team to create a new lifeform that will embody the

best of humanity and still survive the impending environmental

holocaust.

The planet in this near-fantastical future faces its dying days.

Food is scarce, coastal waters flood cities, and many insects

(bees, for example), are extinct.

Billionaire Sykes dangles a near unlimited budget before the

protagonists’ firm Re-Gene-eration. The protagonists bite

without questioning their benefactor’s true motives.

To succeed they must flout yet technically follow global laws

regarding reproductive technology, enacted after a series of

genetic engineering disasters. Such catastrophes have created

a world where violent mutants (like the part-frog part-human

Hoppers) encroach on populated areas, among bloodthirsty

killers and grisly gangs plaguing society.

“. . . dressed in ragged pants but no shirts, and they looked

wrong, their limbs too long, their heads too large,” Climenhage

writes of the Hoppers, describing a near-deadly encounter early

in the book.

The answer is The Midnight Project, where the engineers edit

the human genome and combine it with smallish cephalopods

to enable the new species to form a subaquatic society deep

within the ocean.

 After multiple attempts, the Re-Gene-eration team succeeds

with a human/octopus hybrid that is sentient and highly

empathetic. Over many clones and generations, the creatures

(called Cephs) evolve to create their own language, culture and

society. Eventually, the question becomes can the Cephs avert

the apocalypse in time to overcome evil capitalists, intent on

warping science for profit as the world degrades around them.

The author’s deft descriptive writing and sense of whimsy are

apparent in her description of one of the first successful births.

“There was a sharp gasp as the little creature took his first

breath. He smiled . . . his single row of teeth sharpened to fine

points and a fin sprouting randomly from the middle of his head.

His tentacles writhed . . . “’Well hello, Sunshine! I said.’”

Her playful imagination sparkles when describing the evolution

of the new species and Ethel, its leader. 

“In the interest of seeing how they would react to cultural things,

I started to play a wider variety of FlickFilms. Ethel and two

others loved period dramas from the old United Kingdom,

another was obsessed with Chinese opera.

They would balance on the edge of the tank while they

watched, fascinated, or pull themselves onto the observation

deck beside the tank. Soon, they each discovered favourites

and would request them.”

The author’s protagonists, Cedric and Raina, are strong and

believable, given the fantastic circumstances they endure. The

author’s prose sings as she gradually develops the new

species’ leader Ethel, and the kind creature gains sentience.

“Warm water, filtered light and soft voices. Feelings of peace

and sensations of floating. A face with funny double eyes,

slurred sounds without meaning but reassuring. A growing

awareness, of life, of a world. All fuzzy still. Floating – and it fills

me with joy. I watch them and listen, understanding nothing.

Warm affinity. Love? I feel surrounded and buoyed, safe. I keep

listening. Soothing sounds, notes rising and falling. Soft

background music and low, confident voices. Then the air, cold

and shocking. I’m being handled. I flinch,” Chapter 14 begins.

Ethel becomes more fearful and complex as she tries to lead

her species to freedom, yet her simple wisdom is a good

contrast to her corrupt foes.

Climenhage’s strong descriptive writing is evidenced by

describing the silhouette over Long Harbour.

“To the east we could see the coastline ocean, encroaching on

the streets along the old coastline. . . Buildings that had been

shiny multistory offices poked out from the waves, emerging at

low tide to reveal how much they leaned and crumbled. Some

were still inhabited by people, who clung to their real estate and

used boats and sometimes even rope bridges to live on the

upper floors. . . The world was trying to adapt . . .”

The book’s structure also moves the story and sets tone.

Chapters about Cedric are formatted as video scripts, while

Raina is relayed through a traditional narrative view. As well, the

book’s punchy chapters are punctuated throughout with news

headlines like, “Coup in France threatens EU unity Pollinator

crisis deepens as bee die-off accelerates UN Secretary-General

appoints Special Envoy for Bees Species Termination Notice:

Arctic poppy.”

 Climenhage was born in Southern-Ontario but has lived all over

the world. She holds many academic degrees including a

master’s from Carleton University and a PhD from Cambridge.

The Midnight Project, by Christy Climenhage, published by Poplar Press, 292 pages, $24.

Four dynamic poetic voices— each with distinct perspectives on spiritual enlightenment, trauma, pastoral beauty and the joys of the physical body— were highlighted at McClelland & Stewart’s 2025 spring poetry night held earlier this month.

Sponsored by the publisher and Another Story Bookshop, the event drew an overflow crowd to College Street’s Society Club, where the poetry of Aisha Sasha John, Chris Bailey, Rebecca Salazar, and Tolu Oloruntoba (above) kept the crowd engrossed.  Oloruntoba, A Nigerian Canadian physician and poet who won the 2021 Governor General’s Award for English language poetry for his debut collection “The Junta of Happenstance,” as well as the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, presented his new work entitled “Unravel.” 

Like his previous works, much of Unravel reflects the author’s intellect and passion, exploring mythical, religious, and historical symbolism. However, this new volume contains more humour and whimsy, as in the playful “Pygmalion”– a lament that employs repetitive structure to explore the constraints and delusions inherent in romantic and platonic love. 

“I love you

but I do not know you.

I love you

because I do not know you.

I love you

because I made you.

If I knew you

I would not know you.

If I knew you

I might not love you

or I might shatter.”

Compared to his previous work, Oloruntoba’s new book favours the personal and direct more than the cerebral, as in “Still Life with Bananas” - a poem that tries to make sense of love among close relatives. He writes of, “You, who are three fifths of me, by DNA” . . . “reluctant immigrant” and loved one who inflicts “crimes of opportunity” both as self harm and directed attack. 

Salazar’s book, “antibody” (a follow-up to the author’s Governor General’s Literary Award shortlisted sulphurtongue) relates the impact of sexual abuse using soul-crushing imagery to express the torment of a skewered heart, as in the elegantly composed, “FIVE OF RINGS.”

“we are protectors binding

harms we cannot name

with any ligament we find.

madre’s witch finger: cut-

taut tendon holds the crook,

a spring wound up with history.

my time travel: brain coiled

in trauma loops, repeating

cycles in the dark to reach

before the (w)elder’s death,

return his breath, invert our loss.”  

In some poems, Salazar employs concrete poetry and manipulates the text as imagery on the page, in some instances redacting words for effect. While this works to break up what can at times seem to be relentless, raw renderings about the damage from abuse, the technique can also come across as inadequate and gimmicky when placed in the context of the pain expressed. 

Bailey’s work from his book, “FORECAST: PRETTY BLEAK” - a bucolic and, at times, ironic collection, has a pointed mission reflecting the author’s love of his life in rural PEI amid his fears for the impact of climate change.

Dancer, poet and author, John relates her love of music and rhythm in the elements throughout her latest book “total.”

Robin Harvey (robinharvey@live.com) worked on staff for The Toronto Star for more than 20 years. There she wrote book and theatre reviews. She was a reporter, editor and columnist as well as a News Editor, Assistant City Editor and Public Editor. As Deputy Sunday Editor she was supervisor of the books page. For a time, she ran The Sunday Star short story contest. She's been published in Sun Media, The Toronto Sunday Sun, the Southam news chain and the National Post. Ms. Harvey studied journalism at Metropolitan University, Fine Arts at York University, and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers.

Dotted Lines, by Stephanie Cesca, reviewed by Robin L. Harvey

Stephanie Cesca’s debut novel, Dotted Lines, is a sweet, unpretentious story about how love and patience can redeem a fractured family. Her poignant narrative tells how one good person can, over time, mend the scars from a damaging childhood.

We meet her protagonist, Melanie Forsythe, a precocious seven-year-old at the book’s outset. Melanie lives with her fragile and erratic single mom, a server at a local greasy spoon. When the book begins in 1983 most of Melanie’s world is arduous and bleak. She’s a latch-key kid who is already fending for herself. She spends her days alone or hanging out at the diner where her mother works.

It is her job to meet her mother’s needs. She wakes her up for early morning shifts. She must keep track of if there’s enough take-home leftovers from the diner to keep the family fed. Melanie is suspicious of adults and men. Her male role models have been the revolving door of boyfriends in her damaged mother’s life.

That is until a new man, a regular at her mom’s work who Melanie has nicknamed mister, “Hold the Bacon,” enters the picture. “He had warm and friendly eyes and, though he didn’t say much, he liked to smile a lot,” the child has already observed before her introduction to the man who will become her step-father.

“I looked up and saw him standing there, a tall guy with light brown hair wearing a jean jacket and a Blue Jays cap … I figured he’d be gone in a few weeks like the rest of Mom’s boyfriends.” But Dave stays. And Melanie’s life is forever changed by a man who owed her nothing but gave her everything.

Dave is a regular guy who has two frisky, funny dogs named Dougie and Luke Skywalker. He watches sports and works with airplanes. His standout attribute is his loyalty and sense off responsibility. He starts to walk Melanie to school each day. He helps her achieve childhood milestones like riding a bike. He encourages her to make friends at school. His kindness is the first stability, love and support Melanie has ever experienced.

Then on Mother’s Day, a week before Melanie turns eight, her sister Jesse is born. Their mother falls into a deep, postpartum depression. And the stitches of Melanie’s nascent enriched family life begin to unravel.

Within a few years, Melanie’s mother quits the family, leaving Dave to care for the two young girls. As events from the late 1980s through 2009 unfold, the three family members experience more than their share of setbacks and losses. In time, some of Melanie’s most trusted betray her. Yet Dave, a  simple resourceful man,  remains a loving lynchpin in her often-troubled life.

Cesca is a strong and capable storyteller. Her passion for detail and vivid imagination creates an authentic fictional world. Readers can see her characters in their mind’s eye. They can relate to their pain. Cesca’s characters have enough depth to let readers become attached to them, though Dave may seem a tad too saintly and Jesse a bit the stereotypical selfish foil.

It is in Melanie where Cesca shows off her ample writer’s chops. Her portrait of a woman’s successful journey from fearful, abandoned child to a loving, (if at times spiteful) young woman rings true. Her struggle to live up to the values instilled by her stepdad is believable. Cesca’s prose is clear, unadorned and direct. Her characters offer uncanny insight. 

As in Melanie’s tweenaged take on Dave’s breakup with his girlfriend Rona.

“Rona was the type of person who liked to colour inside the lines. But we were the type of family that only knew how to scribble.” Another touching scene plays out when Melanie creates a family tree for a school assignment.She must draw lines to connect her sparse genealogy and frets at how few real relatives she has.

Then Dave suggests she use dotted lines to illustrate their family’s special connections. “Dave made a dotted line, diagonally linking himself to me,” Melanie says. Dave tells her it “shows that while we’re not biologically related, we’re still a family.” At the launch of her book in early October, Cesca read from the end of Chapter Eleven, the book’s half way mark, when a feisty adolescent Melanie stakes her claim for independence.

“I’m going to have another family,” Melanie rails in a fight with Dave shortly before she leaves home for university. “And this family will be real, not like the pretend version that’s full of shit and good for nothing.” The section reflects the simple and honest dialogue at which the author excels.

However, there are few criticisms for this sweet, folksy-toned novel. A chronology of passing years, set as dated headlines at the start of each chapter organizes the plot. However, this seems contrived for a book of less than four hundred pages, with few settings. And though Melanie is obviously a gifted child, some of her vocabulary and observations at age seven seem out of place. 

For example, when Dave tells her she will get a new home with her own room Melanie relates that his “promise took my imagination to a faraway place” unlikely words for a child that young. Melanie describes their new home as “a rectangular box that looked like a school portable. It was small but adequate, plain but practical.” Again, she uses thoughts and observations that seem too advanced for such a young child.

The book’s core optimism is reflected in these words from Melanie as an adult. “Dave taught me forgiveness. He taught me sacrifice. But above everything, he showed me what the true meaning of family really is.” This message will touch the hearts of many readers. It may also seem too corny for others in our modern, jaded zeitgeist.

But these flaws are minor. Dotted Lines, published by Guernica Editions, is a strong debut novel, proven by the fact that its first print run sold out within days and its second is already underway.

Dotted Lines, by Stephanie Cesca, published by Guernica Editions, 329 pages, $24.95

Robin Harvey (robinharvey@live.com) worked on staff for The Toronto Star for more than 20 years. There she wrote book and theatre reviews. She was a reporter, editor and columnist as well as a News Editor, Assistant City Editor and Public Editor. As Deputy Sunday Editor she was supervisor of the books page. For a time, she ran The Sunday Star short story contest. She's been published in Sun Media, The Toronto Sunday Sun, the Southam news chain and the National Post. Ms. Harvey studied journalism at Metropolitan University, Fine Arts at York University, and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers.

Norman Cristofoli’s  well-crafted and compelling crime thriller Novembers smoothly sucks readers into a nightmarish vision of Toronto the-no-longer-good. At the get-go, readers are gripped by the book’s opening - a five-page, disturbing visceral depiction of a horrific murder. The author shows his imaginative skills in the exacting, relentless blow-by-bloodyportrayal of the crime. He believably opens a chilling portal into the mind of a soulless killer.

Months go by, leads are checked and double-checked, yet the case stalls. Chapter by carefully constructed chapter, the dance between the psychopathic murderer and the exacting, dedicated sleuth charged with catching him plays out. It takes more than a year to solve the  “November” murders – named for the month the killer scores his brutal kills.

Throughout the book’s 384 pages, readers are kept guessing as to the killer’s motives. Could such rampaging violence be  a professional hit or a random act of madness? Or was the victim bludgeoned out of existence due to his shady business dealings and abusive, violent past?

Author Cristofoli unabashedly references his love of Raymond Chandler in his acknowledgements and within the book’s pages. From his protagonists’ introduction at the start of Chapter two, Detective Aristotle Boyle intrigues as a brainy member of the Metro police who quotes Greek mythology. Boyle comes across as a high brow analytical variation on  Philip Marlowe who, instead of cracking wise or chasing dames, doubles down on procedural work.

The character has contradictions. He despises the police force’s politics yet tries to be a team player. In his fifties, he hopes to change years of “deplorable eating and drinking habits” - habits that evolved as coping mechanisms for the job’s violence and the stress. However, he finds change hard. When he’s tasked with solving the sadistic and methodical baseball-bat murder of real-estate agent  Ivan Malinkov, scratches and cracks appear in his thin veneer of stability. 

The book has many solid characters. Boyle’s boss and foil, Dylan Stanforth, presses him to wrap up the case, worrying about budget restraints and how the stalled investigation plays out in the press. Pathologist Surat Singh, an immigrant from India who brings air fresheners to crime scenes, expertly uncovers forensic clues. 

Boyle’s ballsy, emotional underling and love interest Detective Gina Baldoni is refreshing if a bit stereotypical.  At times the author’s methodical approach slows the plot’s pace and readers may wish that Cristofoli focused more on action and conflict and less on detail and procedure. 

Even the book’s kinky BDSM sex scenes seem more matter-of-fact than titillating. But in this debut novel Cristofori – long known as a successful  Canadian poet –pens  imagery that paints authentic, believable realities and creates solid, authentic dialogue. His skill as a wordsmith carries the book, holding readers interest when plot points sag. Though Novembers may be a tad too cerebral for some mystery lovers, the author’s detailed research and intriguing protagonist make for a great read.

Overall, Novembers is compelling and artfully penned, despite any of its flaws.

Book Review of  Novembers by Norman Cristofoli – Austin Macauley Publishers – 384 pages - $32.95

Rosemary Clewes’ collection, Rain on My Skin, shows the poet’s accomplished and evocative voice – wise, yet fresh and childlike, especially when expressing her love for and fascination with landscapes and the natural elements. The author maps her connection to nature over a lifetime with pastoral imagery amid universal themes.

 Examples of some of the work's best are Song for Stamm Woodlot, Beaver Pond and Caught Out, which expresses the frustration and powerlessness many felt during the Covid pandemic.

“Clouds, over-massing the blue and I already deep in the woods, where the tepee of stripped logs leans into its smoke hole,” she writes in Caught Out. “A pattering quivers the leaves  yes I knew the rain  and before the bridge I hoofed it up the hill to the highwood, where from a great distance a drumroll, ever louder, closed fast. I stood there under the trees letting all of it, the downpour, the canopy’s load in the shiny dim keep douse my head. 

Waiting for Covid to tire of our flesh does nothing for my pen. Rain is what I have been waiting for, to be caught out, to be reminded of rain on my skin.”

Clewes’ work often touches on endings, in the personal sense and within nature, tinged with sorrow and nostalgia. A great example is the poem Braille about the end of one summer.

“No inkling after sunshine and swimming. No time to adjust to this new season’s watery voice – the same wind-slapped shore, boat-house heave and happy slurp between the piles, yet not at all the song of summer’s idyll. Recognizing its chromatic tone, I read another kind of braille - veins rewriting the back of my hands in rivers of blue, my ripened skin.”

The poem Heart Attack after Edward Carson, bursts urgent with emotion which is made more intense by the concrete poem’s  fragmented structure. “I am eight feet burning up the noontime road .  Heart ripples still but moving as memory remembers and dis remembers its shape. . . . Blurring sight throat ache melancholy so deep my father’s life hovering between a knock and a delivery.”

Clewes is a sensory, effusive poet. Her lyrical words reflect a deep musical sense. In the third section, Calle Obispo, the poem of the same title, references Nobel Prize-winning poet and Polish-Lithuanian  author Czeslaw Milosz. The first stanza turns a plane trip into a spiritual experience.

 “Snowy Jasmine and Clivia cups of sunset bloom in their leafy shirts on my studio floor. Stasis, bundling the leaded light most days, closes round trees wired to sky in bare verse.

I buckle my seat. A band of turquoise streaks in the dawn sky, dividing the plane’s window. Heading south. This much I can get right, the adjectives I’m used to, the feeling of closure that frames a season.”

The poem The Ice Is Going was composed from the deck of a Russian icebreaker streaming north to a fiord  near Ellesmere Island. The two-verse poem is composed in staggered lines that look much like a ship’s silhouette. 

Once again, the poet uses powerful, yet lyrical language to describe her natural surroundings, where “ Devon’s coastline gathers the flat-topped mountains in, their monasteried massifs of stone growing skirts of scree. Here is the heart of magma’s forty-eight-million-year boil – continental collisions birthing mountains, Ordovician clay, in a blink, spinning new tales. Kyrie, kyrie sighs the dry wind. The relic landscape.”

 The poem, In Spite of Limits, employs whimsy to elevate a childhood lesson to the universal. “I was tall for my age. Legs skinny, ankles weak. It was decided I should figure skate. For years I scored my edges deep, gathering speed until the wind whistled in my ears. I longed to leave my body, arrow into the air’s weak arms. Discovering that split jumps have their limits never stopped those cosmic leaps.”

The book is both a history and memoir, Clewes writes in her notes, where “Memories of my athletic  exploits interweave with family love and loss.”

Rain on My Skin, published by Aeolus House, is her fifth book of poetry and prose. It is a treat for the heart packed with subject matter that engages.

Xanax Cowboy is a long-form poem about two of modern life’s overwhelming anxieties: the pain of addiction and the trauma of mental illness.

Governor General’s Literary Award winner Hannah Green’s edgy, gritty title is apt, evoking the title of the unflinching 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy. Her content lives up to that film’s relentless and chaotic themes. Much of the Xanax Cowboy is presented as variations of the screenplay format. The work reflects many distinct character voices; the aimless junkie, the social poseur, the sad women confused by sexual roles and mores and her comforting mother.

The voice of the cowboy XC is paramount and the touchstone for the many Western images and tropes throughout like lassoes, nooses, pickled eggs and dung. Atop each page where a new entry begins a symbol of a horseshoe hangs. Green writes of the Xanax Cowboy whose cactuses can whisper and “live a long time without water but not blood.” 

She employs an array of literary and experimental styles and forms, referencing icons like Patsy Cline, Leonardo DiCaprio and Willie Nelson, among others. One of strongest literary references is to Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems. The author quotes from the book directly: “In Boot Hill there are only two graves that belong to women / and they are the only known suicides in that graveyard.”

Like Ondaatje, Green embraces poetic prose while bending form and content— yet is still essentially literary. The core voices: the addict, the Xanax cowboy, the sad woman and her mother speak in heartfelt reflection presenting biting social commentary through their musings.

We hear the passion of the fervent social justice warrior, the sneer of the jaded cynical junkie and the tenderness of a devoted mother.. Though dark, the confessional poems are never bleak. “Trauma lives in the body like a cowboy lives in the television,” an addict voice relays. “I am a grease trap that requires hourly cleaning.”

Another “howls on the side of the highway like a coyote in heat . . . shivering like a room without a thermostat.” In keeping with the play on a screenplay, many pages are presented as or with director’s notes.  Some combine commentary with concrete poetry as in DIRECTOR’S NOTE, a ten-line  poem with a right margin that creates the curve of a woman's breast.

“Tarantino film. . . women are vicious in vinyl booths . . .  with jawlines so jagged we forget they don’t have autonomy_”  its longest line reads to form the peak of the curve.Much concrete poetry is presented in the outline of a square, anchored to the page by punchy bottom note lines, as in XC on Instagram 3. “Who needs friends when you can have whiskey,” its anchor line sneers.

Green employs her biting humour to draw the reader through the heavier subject matter as in The Xanax Cowboy Installs a Meditation App, which pokes fun at society’s wandering attention span. She shows her wit in another entry that starts with the weighty phrase, “I am told that we live without choices " then hits the reader with unexpected levity of, “Mine is a terrible roommate,” 

The page entry about a childhood vacation at a rustic cabin, “a nest of goose eggs in the reeds crowing the lake,” again punches with the unexpected when a grandfather comes outside to chastise his grandkids with, “what the fuck are you doing?”

Two eight-line stanzas where all the lines begin with Re: make up an intriguing conversation in An Email Exchange between a Thesis Advisor and a Xanax Cowboy. “Google attention-seeking behaviour in women,” an italicized lament about how too often women share too much information on social media keeps the cyber world theme alive.

Green’s complex, colloquial whimsy is grounded in a strong academic backbone and a broad knowledge base that references Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath. And how she loves wordplay and puns, like “reelist” and film “reals.”  Her mix of  stream-of-consciousness prose, conversational poems, snippets of emails, multiple hashtags and slang can be a bit confounding but is not gimmicky.

The surprise and whimsy contrast with the darker subject matter in this edgy, bold book. It’s well worth the romp through her at times confusing pages to buck the complexities of this dazzling ride.

Xanax Cowboy by Hannah Greene, House of Anansi, ten pages, $19.19.

After Sarah Bernstein won the 2023 Giller Award for her novel Study for Obedience, the book’s sales increased, and it soon ranked third on the  top 10 Canadian fiction list - just in time to cash in on the holiday sales bump. Predictable, according to BookNet Canada, the non-profit organization that develops technology, standards, and education to serve the Canadian book industry. BookNet regularly tracks the impact of awards on markets.

“Literary prizes have a significant impact on the Canadian book industry, which means we pay close attention to who gets nominated, who wins, and how it all impacts sales.”

Winning a literary award hikes a book’s profile, as the books are put on course curriculums, book club reading lists, and are listed as library best staff picks. This creates more profits for publishers, which is a boon for authors because it increases a book’s promotions budget.

Still, an award nomination or win can be a double-edged sword. A 2013 study linked to the University of Chicago found books that are nominated for, or win, awards actually get lower ratings from readers.  “The causal effects of winning a literary prize: awards in this setting lead to increased popularity,” the authors write. The drop in ratings is because of a “lower predicted fit with audience members’ tastes,” study authors explain. 

In other words, people buy the book due to the buzz, but it’s less likely to meet their expectations. However, an award win or nomination nowadays means social media will sit up and take notice and that does have an impact. In 2018, a Cornell University study found influencers with publishing links and social media cred had more impact on book rankings than book reviews.

It found social media highly effective at driving a book to Amazon’s best seller lists. In his seminal 2008 book The Economy of Prestige, James F English writes that the impact of award nominations and wins are more complex than people realize. Nowadays Western society’s proliferation of awards means we are awash in an awards culture, he writes. 

This has watered down much of the value of literary awards as society tries unsuccessfully to create an arbitrary measure for taste. This is not an objective cultural value, he writes. There is no longer any way in the modern world to commodify taste, he writes, and as a result, literary prizes are both revered and reviled.

 Some say they “systematically neglect excellence, reward mediocrity … and provide a closed, elitist forum where cultural insiders engage in influence peddling and mutual back-scratching.”  Others contend they “reward excellence,” bring publicity to ‘quality’ art,” and give struggling artists much needed financial security.

Both views are correct, English says. “It would be a  great mistake to imagine that prize judges are cynical. But this does not mean that their work is free of self interest or beyond any economic reckoning. “ In 2019, Writer’s Digest wrote of a long list of benefits for award winners and nominees, pointing out one of the most important was how they boosted author links to literary networks and readers' access to authors.

Whatever the long-term impact of Bernstein’s award win, readers have had much to say about the recent Giller winner, reflected in the following social media and Goodreads comments. “A wonderful book. Had to read it three times to properly grasp it, but so well written. A book should make you think.” 

“Although I consumed this book in the span of 24 hours, I felt like I didn’t understand a lick of a word. Dense prose and several ten-dollar words left my brain feeling as if it was kicked repeatedly.

 “The sentences were fine, but I failed at understanding their meaning. I’m sure Bernstein has a truly deep meaning hidden within the loquacious plot, but I missed it.” 

·   

  “I found it a deeply compelling but equally dense and elliptical, a novel I will definitely need to revisit.” 

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  “I often found myself going in circles, the narrator’s thoughts coming back to the same points repeatedly (as is naturally the case when in someone’s head), and wanting to take frequent breaks from this.  I came to understand the author’s intent, but I have to say I didn’t have a whole lot of fun getting there.”

·   

  “Catnip for a certain type of esoteric reader - but I am NOT that person.”

Robin Harvey (robinharvey@live.com) worked on staff for The Toronto Star for more than 20 years. There she wrote book and theatre reviews. She was a reporter, editor and columnist as well as a News Editor, Assistant City Editor and Public Editor. As Deputy Sunday Editor she was supervisor of the books page. For a time, she ran The Sunday Star short story contest. She's been published in Sun Media, The Toronto Sunday Sun, the Southam news chain and the National Post. Ms. Harvey studied journalism at Metropolitan University, Fine Arts at York University, and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers.

Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is a bold experiment that quickly becomes a maddening read.

Her elegant use of language and unique style throughout the book shows Bernstein’s talent as a wordsmith. However, her chosen literary genre— literary expressionism— is taxing for the best of writers. And despite the author’s literary skill, this book needs a significant rewrite if readers are to comprehend it.

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is one of the best examples of the genre, in which context and detail rank lower than a characters' subjective experience. James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is another great example. I think books in this genre require a bright label along the spine: Beware. A second reading may be required to fully comprehend this book.

With literary sights and expectations of readers high, Bernstein's opening intrigues. “It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time. One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy. Things were leaving one place and showing up in another.”

Sadly, the novel soon starts to unravel. It tells the story of a Jewish woman who moves overseas for six months to help her eldest brother after his wife leaves him. The sister (the main character and a first-person, unreliable narrator) maintains she’s always been an enthusiastic martyr to her sibling’s needs. However, her seething resentment soon becomes palpable. Almost as soon as she arrives, her brother abandons her for out-of-town business.

While the brother is gone, a series of freakish events (alluded to in the opening lines) involving local farm animals, crops, objects and the weather, ensue. The narrator concludes her neighbours blame her for the sinister happenings. She feigns bafflement over their rejection. Yet she sees no malice in creeping into the town, its church and gardens, to leave talisman figures of woven weeds and sticks on her neighbours’ doorsteps saying, “One never knew how one’s gifts might be received”.

Eventually, the terrified townsfolk bury her gifts. Her brother returns, engages with the locals, then quickly falls ill. Soon he is his sister’s prisoner, subjected every half hour to cleansings from dry brushings. To follow these events, readers must struggle through the narrator’s repetitive, stream-of-consciousness ramblings and reminiscences.

And Bernstein doesn’t make it easy. She includes no character names, except for her dog, Bert. There is no dialogue to bring the tale to life. As for setting? No specifics either. This, combined with the narrator’s looping/ disjointed timeline, make for an elusive storyline.

Readers have only one access point to the narrative; the inner monologue and ruminations of an unreliable narrator who has multiple perspectives on mutable events. Though stingy with specifics, the author is more than generous in her microscopic attention to detail. This soon makes for a repetitious read. She favors the multisyllabic word over the simple or direct.

Her sentences are long-winded, almost always more than ten words long and oddly punctuated. Many are more than  100 words long. As an example, a 131-word sentence with a raft of sub clauses has eleven commas. Another ninety-one-word sentence containing the ironic qualifier, to make a long story short, has seventeen commas.

If the reader feels ungrounded and uneasy, a charitable explanation is that’s what the author intended. I doubt it. For Bernstein, a Montreal native who lives in Scotland, has published some excellent works of prose poetry. Her poetic voice is elegant, cerebral and innovative. And, in many ways Study for Obedience reads much like poetry. But it’s not, leaving readers to drown in obtuse fragments of story that loop nowhere.

The book is topical and important in that it’s an allegory for antisemitism, even if teasing this out takes work, too. For example, many readers may not get obscure references to a baseball player who found a higher calling. (It refers to Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg’s refusal to play on Yom Kippur.)

"I was always an incomer, an offlander, sometimes a usurper, more rarely a conniver, it was something in my blood that made others feel this too . . . that I was not to be trusted," the narrator says of her experience of discrimination. People assumed her "ethnic background" gave her "the utmost interest in . . . small economies, the saving of pennies, the charging of interest," so they made her treasurer of clubs and committees.

Antisemitism is most apparent when her neighbours quickly cross themselves then cover their children's eyes or turn their baby strollers away when the sister comes near. This refers to a long-standing antisemitic trope, blood libel. However, it’s fair to ask, for such an important topic, is this the right book, stylistically as constructed, to address it?

Perhaps most disquieting is how when reading Study for Obedience, one gets the nagging sense the author writes down to her readers. Perhaps this embedded pretension may be why such an overwritten, poorly structured book has been shortlisted  for the Giller and Booker awards. Such awards often favour elitist, convoluted works. If a book is inaccessible and hard to follow, it must be award-worthy, right?

Her publisher, of course, lauds the book, calling it a horror story and comparing it to the works of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and Claire-Louise Bennett. I agree that the book is unsettling, disquieting and difficult -  and as written, a horror story for all the wrong reasons.

Sarah Bernstein Study for Obedience, , Knopf Canada, 189 pages, $24

Poet Kate Marshall Flaherty’s latest collection, Titch, resonates with the themes and stylistic excellence seen in her previous work. Most of the poems in the book are upbeat and some are joyous. Its tone is reflective, and its imagery is precise and evocative.

The collection’s title Titch – which means a small somebody – is a clever take on the moniker for Little Tich, a famous music hall performer from the turn of the twentieth Century, and a word derived from Australian and British slang. Flaherty’s poems inspire and entertain, however down-to-earth the poet’s subject matter.

The poem, Just a Titch, explains this perspective in tangible, intimate images - “the inch of wine left in the bottle … the amount of chili flakes needed for heat … and when I dip into the credit line, charge extra on the card, skim a bit from bills for treats.” By focusing on the basics and life’s minutiae, the poet uses the small to evoke the big picture. Seen through the author’s magnified lens, even small observations become profound.

Many of the poems show Flaherty’s strong bonds to her family. In Aubade, Flaherty depicts the simple warmth evoked by the scent of her mother’s cup of morning coffee, made “earlier than sun most mornings” by a woman “in the kitchen in her chenille bathrobe.” The poem reflects a daughter’s sweet nostalgia for childhood days when she’d stay home from school with her mother drinking café au lait, “just for today.”

Cap is a moving tribute to the poet’s father that mixes a wealth of small, specific and tender details. “Back to his babies he goes, the peapods and the carrot nubbins, ‘til the lunch he makes for her at one.” Equally tender is Commiserating with Cows, a reflection on timeless connection that wraps up with one of her mother’s down-to-earth truisms, “you know rain is on the way when the cows lie down.”

The imagery in the poem Sel is simple and passionate. “I learned the salt content of tears is the same as blood and the sea—” The book also spotlights the author’s reverence for nature, expressed in the poem Promise, about the beauty of a hidden spring and nature’s enduring cycles of rebirth. “Snap a piece of frozen bulrush and you will see a bit of fluff, sinew stalk but also glistening moisture — a sign.… this sap in stalk, this nest in soggy snow, the unseen ring around the cuticle moon – Nature is leaving traces.”

A few poems express social commentary, including and the danger ended— an allegorical poem inspired by pandemic fears, “in the spine-hair of fear that we might be caught, be tagged, be the next IT and some of us grabbed a youngster by the hand to stuff them safe in a leaf pile.” The strikingly descriptive poem Sword Dance explodes with sentiment over the moves of a dancer who reminds the author of a beloved child.

Titch by Kate Marshall Flaherty, 144 pages, Piquant Press, $20.00

Book review: A Story For Sadie by Donna Langevin, Piquant Press, 156 pages, $20

In A Story for Sadie, Donna Langevin courageously sheds light on a long-hidden family  secret. Her latest collection is a selection of poems, prose and interviews that tell the imagined story of her paternal grandmother, Sarah Ellen Page King.

Known to her family as Sadie, Langevin’s paternal grandmother was locked away in a Montreal Asylum for 24 years until her death in 1946. Sadie King fell apart when her infant son, George, died of SIDS and she was banished to live the rest of her life in the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Asylum in Montreal.

 No one in Langevin’s family ever spoke of her. Her children, the author’s father and aunt, grew up knowing nothing about their mother’s disappearance and assumed she had died.

Then, in 1994 after Langevin’s father died, her mother revealed what she knew of the mysterious family secret. This sparked the author’s research, which continued for decades and culminated in the book.

The result is a gripping fictoire – heart-wrenching poems about the imagined life of a forgotten woman. Langevin syntax is direct and personal, reflecting a simple woman’s voice, but a voice of bewilderment and pain.

 The poems are bare and stripped down, like the world in which Sadie was condemned to live and die. Their tense, emotional threads reflect a roller coaster of emotion that starts with hope and ends with resignation and despair.

The book consists of two parts. Part One is entirely a product of Langevin’s imagination. Though Langevin never met her grandmother, her poems create a woman who feels real – a woman with an indominable spirit who was trapped and shuttled into a harrowing life.

 “I dare not curse, scream or cry,” Sadie says in the poem, Second Thoughts. “The mouth of the port hole slams shut when I raise my voice. I’ll have to prove that I am not hysterical before these beasts will free me.”

 Hells Bells stuns with its bleak imagery.

 “In my belfry brain, echoing my dreams, I turn the bells on their crowns, tear out clapper tongues from brazen mouths.”

The last stanza of Cuckoo reflects the agony of a mother’s grief.

“I’m here because I pulled out my plumage and clawed myself after my fledging died.”

Poems, such as Shock and The Bed relate the tortuous treatments of the times.

  The fragmented syntax in Aftershock captures the confusion and memory loss due to electro-convulsive therapy.

“Sky me sunshot me windblown me, me who now?”  

The first section of the book wraps up with hope in the narrative poem Announcement. Here Langevin imagines her grandmother learned of her birth from a newspaper announcement that she used as toiler paper in the asylum’s out house.

“This is no dream. It’s there in black and white on a square cut from past month’s newspaper I almost used in the latrine . . . I have a granddaughter!”

Langevin exorcized some of her own personal demons authoring the book. For all her life, Langevin’s self-image had been tainted by her father’s fear that her resemblance to his mother meant she would become mentally ill as well.

Part Two is a more factual collection of research and interviews, some expressed in poems and prose. They fill in many of the missing facts Langevin eventually learned about her grandmother’s life.

 Langevin’s work in A Story For Sadie is brave and compassionate. It aptly expresses her righteous fury at the price generations in a family paid due to one member’s unjust imprisonment.

Award-winning Canadian author Miriam Toews’ topical novel about sex abuse within a religious sect got a well-deserved profile bump this year when the screen adaptation of Women Talking won an Oscar. The book is arguably Toews’ most literary, complicated and accomplished work. The award sparked the release of a new edition, increasing the book’s sales and popularity. As well, the book, initially released in 2018, became seen as less of a commentary on the #MeToo movement.

The novel is based on a true story. In 2009, a group of Bolivian Mennonite men raped and sexually assaulted 151 women and girls - including small children as young as three - within the Christian sect’s colony.  The attackers broke into homes, sprayed their sleeping victims with cow tranquillizer, then assaulted them. Confused victims woke up bruised and bleeding atop soiled sheets.

At first, members of the conservative, patriarchal community blamed the “wild female imagination,” ghosts or demons for the signs of abuse. However, eventually the men were tried and convicted. Toews set her story in a fictional Mennonite community called Molotschna. It starts after the abuse is uncovered, when the community’s women including the victims are asked to forgive the assailants. The women gather in a hayloft over two days to decide what to do: stay, leave or to do nothing.

Though the book’s subject matter is harrowing, Toews has created an inspiring platform that examines the impact of sexual violence against women. She also touches on themes like pacifism verses violence, free will versus individual rights and obligations, and the role of collective action in addressing evil. The characters take part in a Socratic dialogue to weigh their options, explore their role in the community and define their faith’s concept of true forgiveness. 

Throughout her more than 25-year career as a writer, Toews often uses a first-person narrator to tell her stories. Some may say Toews’ chosen point of view plays it safe. The first-person narrative is considered the simplest and easiest way to write fictional prose. Though this point of view may seem rudimentary, in Toews’ deft hands it works. Her writing is elegant and precise, and her stories are crafted through many layers, including humour, pathos, and intellectual discourse. This creates vivid characters even though their voice is indirect.

For example, in All My Puny Sorrows (a work inspired by the author’s real-life tragedies and released the spring before Women Talking) the first-person narrative creates a distance to process the emotions of the characters, yet still allows for an intimate connection.

Another example is the voice of Swiv, the nine-year-old narrator of Fight Night, released in August 1996. Swiv’s voice creates comic relief and acts as a foil to set up and play out the book’s “gotcha” plotlines. The adolescent flippancy infused in the voice of teenager Nomi Nickel (narrator in A Complicated Kindness, released in 2004) offers a balance for the book’s at times dim and repressive storyline.

Toews again uses a narrator in Women Talking and chose a man to tell the story. This character, August, was previously excommunicated then allowed to return to the community. Toews came under fire for this choice. Given the sensitive nature of the book’s subject matter, many felt she had robbed women of their voice. Domestic violence, child abuse and sex assault should not be presented through man’s point of view, some critics believed.

 The choice of a man is based on some logic. Since the women cannot read or write, they ask an outcast male member of the sect to take minutes of their deliberations. In their world, only a man could craft a permanent record of the gathering. The women wanted a permanent record to document and honour their decision.

 August is more than a simple first-person narrator, unlike Swiv in Fight Night. He acts as a central narrator when he tells his thoughts and reactions to the women, especially Ona, with whom he is passionately in love. However, August acts as an adept peripheral narrator, easily stepping into the thoughts and intent of the women as he related their backstory and describes their actions.

A male narrator works well for other reasons. It is an excellent tool to show the characters’ repression for the women’s lives and worth have always been defined by men. A male narrator presents the women’s essential conflicts through the eyes of the social strictures responsible for it, as well as their abuse and oppression. It also shows domestic, sexual and child abuse are universal.

In her Oscar-winning film adaption of Women Talking, director and writer Sarah Polley stayed true most of the book’s plot, themes and characters. However, after including August as narrator in early drafts of the screenplay, Polley changed her mind, settling instead on a teenaged girl who addresses an assault victim’s unborn child as the film’s narrator. 

“I think just because of the medium itself, there needed to be more of an immediacy and a more direct connection with the experience that the women had gone through,” Polley told Entertainment Weekly in December 2022.

No doubt a female narrator was the right choice for the film. As well, no doubt the compelling choice of a man as narrator of the book did nothing to diminish the passion, the pain and the voices of the women talking.

Robin Harvey is a Toronto-based poet, author and editor. Her most recent book is Poems To Slay Dragons. Her work appears regularly on Do Andriods Dream?

Review: Starter Dog - My Path to Joy, Belonging and Loving This World by Rona Maynard

 Starter Dog - My Path to Joy, Belonging and Loving This World is a heartfelt, well-crafted love story about finding purpose and fulfilment with a rescue dog. However, the book’s subtitle says more about the journey author Rona Maynard relates in her second book. And it’s not one of sappy, sentimental pet anecdotes, (though there are more than enough to satisfy the pet-obsessed.)  

For within its 274 pages, Maynard tells how she felt lost in retirement after her stint as editor-in-chief at Chatelaine Magazine ended and she’d faded from the publishing spotlight. The woman who for a decade helped three million Canadian women redefine their voice at the end of feminism’s second wave had become a project person, engaged in work that satisfied neither her intellect, nor boundless curiosity. Leaving the magazine, “stripped me naked” Maynard wrote in an online journal about her return to freelance writing, workshops and touring the lecture circuit. She craved a special project, one that would kick-start her soul. “I longed for the Project the way, in my teens, I had longed to fall in love, with a hunger for completion that beat against my ribcage.”

Never in a million years did she imagine that project would be falling in love with a dog. Still, the surprising devotion she felt for the new family pet helped her break out of the doldrums imposed by ageist attitudes. Soon, her bond with her ginger Mut Lab Pug, Casey, would bring a renewed connection to life and transform how she saw herself and her world.

“Every story I tell, including this one, is to some degree about time and what it carries off — people I loved or used to be, animals who found the sunniest corners of places I called home,” she writes. “Every beginning holds the seed of an ending.”

Initially, when Maynard’s husband of more than five decades suggested they get a dog, she’d scoffed. It took two years of research into everything doggie for Maynard to finally warm to the idea. By then, the couple had bought an SUV and rented a dog-friendly vacation home to prepare. Once Casey (named after a previously owned beloved pet cat) was on the scene her skepticism faded. Maynard found she saw world through new eyes, much like after her baby boy was born. 

“The last time I touched a living creature with such devotional attention, I was powdering my newborn,” she writes of examining Casey when he first arrived. Life with Casey became filled with new firsts that slowly redefined her relationship to almost everything. Before Casey, she’d dash outside on a quick errand dressed down with no makeup. After Casey, their first walks sparked a new morning routine that demanded, “lipstick, eyebrow pencil and presentable attire. . .  poop bags and liver treats for Casey.”

Casey changed almost all her perceptions and relationships. She became kinder to her husband after she nearly slipped in a puddle of Casey’s drool and lost her temper. Quickly she realized the dog had done no wrong and said she was sorry. Then she reflected on how rarely that word was spoken in her home. This, “opened a space in which I could imagine being as considerate to my husband as I am to our dog,” she writes of how Casey changed her marriage.

At the dog park, she made friends with fellow dog owners, people she’d never have reached out to before. One day Casey’s play interfered with an “exceptional” dog named Molly. Molly’s riled owner spouted a stream of harsh profanity at Maynard and her pet, forever after dubbed “F-bomb,” man.

 “He seethed, he spat, he trembled,” Maynard writes of the “furious overgrown toddler who could speak barely more than one word. . .. Language all but dwindled to the single word that he aimed, like a hammer against a skull, at my dog and me.”  Yet once she calmed down, Maynard felt compassion for the abusive man.  “Casey had softened me,” she realized.

The book is written in the intimate, confessional style that was Maynard’s hallmark when she wrote her columns as Chatelaine’s editor and shows her to be an excellent wordsmith. “… things kept morphing into other things,” she writes, elegantly, of her neighbourhood “post-Casey.... The saplings at Corktown Common into trees, a vacant lot into empty townhouses, the builder’s newly finished white boxes into homes where TVs flickered through windows and geraniums bloomed on patios. Down a laneway five minutes from home, a forgotten brick wall became a mural of a giant golden lynx. as well.”

Amid Maynard’s unique insight, there may be a few too many details about the nature of doggie bathroom habits for some readers, (especially a cat lover like this reviewer.)  Overall, however, it’s an intriguing, poignant and entertaining book by a talented, engaging writer.

Starter Dog - My Path to Joy, Belonging and Loving This World by Rona Maynard, 274 pages, ECW Press, $24.95

To Grace Bridges by Thomas Gannon Hamilton

Learning to Leave by Ariane Blackman

The Many Faces by Felicity Sidnell Reid

Timed Radiance by Donna Langevin

Thomas Gannon Hamilton’s latest book, To Grace Bridges, is a collection to stir the heart and challenge the mind. “The art of the word is key to keeping humanity– the hearts of humans – sustainable,” he said in an interview at the book launch held this spring at Toronto’s Hirut Café.

“All artists must keep their eyes open . . . and know the aesthetics of language is essential to keeping communication alive and thriving.” Hamilton’s latest collection is indeed awash in passion, with muscular prose touched with a colloquialism that makes the work accessible and sustainable. Readers will findelements of “beauty, truth and love,” as promised in the foreword.

One of the book’s best poems is Sleep Cycling, a rhythmic and rousing first - person journey though dream imaginings across an urban nightscape. “My mind’s needle covers the grid, graphs in real time our city’s heavily trodden heart, monitors her congestive condition, by passes construction-obscured artery, clotted . . . until I am the sole traffic in the town,” Hamilton writes elegantly in the last stanza of part one of the poem.

The poem, Euclid, Pythagoras and Me, employs wit and intellect in a series of jocular musings on personal relationships and their patterns and shapes across a lifetime. “It’s been good working with Pythagoras; mood-valleys, yes, but such expressive peaks,” the poet writes, wrapping up with the conclusion that nonetheless “our scalene, isosceles and equilateral relations” share one plane. The aptly titled Flood reads as part epic/part and ballad.

The poem is pegged to a Biblical passage from Luke about the strength of faith where Hamilton links the prose lines to specific years that the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers overflowed to craft an analogy for the growth of charismatic Protestant dogma.

In Bi-Millennial each line begins numeric dates from the 21st Century, starting with the year 2000 in synchronic progression until 2022. The words in the lines that follow each date use whimsical word play to punctuate the author’s aphoristic commentary on the changing times.

Hamilton’s broad intellect and education draws on traditional poetic form to ground this contemporary work. But he is also an irreverent poet, full of surprises, who will take risks and embrace the new. The book is the third in a trilogy published through Aeolus House. Other Aeolus poets who read at the launch included Ariane Blackman, Felicity Sidnell Reid, and Donna Langevin.

Blackman read from Learning to Leave, a book she dedicated to her parents— both members of the Polish resistance and Holocaust survivors. The book reflects, with honest clarity and measured tenderness, how such family origins affect future generations. In Home “a place I thought I could leave,” she uses a mix of observational and conversational lines to relay traumatic content.

“I’ve thought about it and tried to understand what war-torn country means, what murdered family means, why every dirty secret and every dirty lie becomes the truth it never was. My mother fled that country, my father died.”

Other poems like the more abstract Sea Creature, charm with dream-like imagery. “… the dense stalks I hide in remake me a creature of night and light from where I reach and outreach . . . taking the hook that baits what I desire— a lure of dark towards bright.”

In Scent the poet’s crisp language evokes a sharp sense of existential isolation. “This fertile scent of melon – filling space in mouth-ripe circles with every step we took into the room that Black Sea Georgian summer.” Blackman’s favourite poem is the title work, Learning to Leave - a story of courage, the courage to face new beginnings, in a life that has endured much loss. 

“My mother held up her hands . . . like the city of rubble she left, the world had become too big to swallow. Her index finger never wavered.”

Sidnell read from The Many Faces, a collection of direct narratives, punctuated with imagery that compels the readers’ focus. A good example is The Long Embrace, a sweet, delicate childhood memory of Christmas in a home air raid shelter during the Second World War. The poem’s words rush fast with fear as the doorbell rings, then ease for a welcome relief of tension to rejoice in the unexpected visitor - a father who gives his girls a puppy before he inhales the fleeting safety, holding his wife a long embrace.

The Broken Bubble well expresses the careful containment mothers use to hold children fast and safe - until the world breaks through, as in the assassination of JFK. “Assassination turned obsession; the parade, the car turned bloody chariot, the fallen body, an image incised upon the memories of millions.”

Langevin read from Timed Radiance, a powerfully written brave collection that tackles taboos of age, death, and violence. The book also relates contemporary events, some from the recent pandemic.

The gripping poem Gratitude reflects on a real-world event during the pandemic where a cement mixer killed a Toronto woman. “… death is a shape shifter that might come with a stroke, slip of a scalpel, heart that forgets its rhythm or a fall in the bathtub … I do not say… past the bloodstains on the road, that gratitude smells like the cement mixer I didn’t get hit by today.”

The author often balances dark content with humour, well expressed in the poem, To the Anti-Vaxxers (after Dr. Seuss) — creating a parody of magical thinking using the children’s author’s simple beat, rhyme and rhythm. Aeolus House publisher Allan Briesmaster has winnowed back his slate of authors over the years.

However, he says as a publisher he tries to fill, “a gap in the poetry landscape by producing books of excellent literary quality that might otherwise be overlooked by more mainstream publishers who are constrained by the grant system and by current cultural trends.” Briesmaster expressed concern over how fragmented poetry’s readership has become.

“Poetry ought to be able to be enjoyed by everyone, not just other poets. I resist the idea that being difficult to understand is an indicator of superior merit.”

To Grace Bridges by Thomas Gannon Hamilton, 131 pages, Aeolus House $20

Learning to Leave by Ariane Blackman, 88 pages, Aeolus House, $20

The Many Faces by Felicity Sidnell Reid, 94 pages, Aeolus House $20

Timed Radiance by Donna Langevin, 50 pages, Aeolus House $20

Book Review: Tiny Lights for Travellers by Naomi K. Lewis

Tiny Lights for Travellers is an offbeat, uneven memoir about a divorced, middle-aged woman’s thirst for cultural identity. Naomi K. Lewis’s most recent book, a finalist for the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, offers a unique take on a complex subject.

After she discovers a secret diary her grandfather wrote about his 30-day trek across Europe to flee Nazi persecution in the Second World War, Lewis decides to retrace his steps and write about them.  The resulting memoir is part journal, part travelogue and part rambling inner monologue about an eclectic range of subjects. She found the diary a year after her husband had asked for a divorce. 

Lewis writes she was then overcome by “the fierce longing . . . to get as far from Calgary and the condo as I could, to take Opa’s journal and his map, and to follow it.” The book includes excerpts from her grandfather’s diary juxtaposed with the author’s reflections gleaned as she covered the same terrain. It also contains a map of the journey from Amsterdam to Belgium into France.

However, readers won’t find the words of a woman overwhelmed and shaken by retracing her grandfather’s frightening trip, for Holocaust reflections do not dominate the book, though Lewis considers herself a third-generation Holocaust survivor. In fact, much of the memoir’s content seems out of step with the journey’s harrowing history.

The book includes excerpts from her grandfather’s diary juxtaposed with the author’s reflections gleaned as she covered the same terrain. For example, arriving in Amsterdam, where her grandfather began his trip, Lewis became obsessed with her “giant green backpack.” “Already I regretted the backpack,” she writes. “I’d read online to avoid suitcases if you’re walking, especially on cobblestones; a pack is the way to go. But the green monstrosity doubled my size so that I feared turning and knocking down any child or elderly person in the vicinity.”

The author writes of her many fears. Fears that she’ll get lost because she suffers from DTD (developmental topographical disorientation) , a brain condition where the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex can’t form cognitive maps. Fears about an upcoming meeting with her lover in Brussels. Fears about getting bedbugs, about getting herpes from a public toilet, or getting sick from travel food.

She writes of a European cousin’s friend whom she fears because he offers to escort her though part of the journey, then sends his detailed family tree and suggests she pack a bikini for her visit, signing his correspondence with “Love.” Many parts of the book, including reflections on a friend's suicide, past boyfriends, her strained ex-marriage and musing about a lost scarf, seem only peripherally related to her grandfather’s ordeal.

Yet Lewis writes with such breezy, unaffected honesty and humour, it’s hard not to connect with her and find her endearing. And that’s more than half the battle when writing a memoir.

Lewis does grapple with a conflicted cultural and religious identity, for she feels a strong connection to Judaism despite her secular upbringing and the fact her mother was not Jewish. She only began to explore Jewish traditions when she married a conservative Jewish man. Their impending divorce has left her wondering if, despite herfeelings, is she Jewish at all, or Jewish enough?

Toward the book’s end, she includes a large excerpt from her grandfather’s diary about the final leg of his trek, when he had to cross the Cher river. He nearly drowned because he tried to save some women and a boy who grabbed onto him because they could not navigate the strong current.

“Here was the place it happened. He got out. He went on. And on and on,” Lewis writes, detailing how she ate a meal in France and drank a toast to her grandfather’s success when she hit that milestone. “He would live; he had fifty-nine years still to live. Cheers to that.”

Soon after, Lewis threw her wedding band into the river. She had figured out as much as she could at that point fin the journey. In all, the book is a worth the read, despite the author’s eccentricities, or perhaps because of them. It’s poignant, comical depiction of an insecure woman who hopes if she finds a connection to her roots she will find personal growth is interesting and compelling.

Tiny Lights for Travellers by Naomi K. Lewis, 278 pages, University of

Alberta Press, $29.99

Reviewed by Robin L. Harvey: Award-winning author Donna Morrissey makes a quick and compelling connection with readers in the prologue to her book Pluck: A Memoir of a Newfoundland Childhood. “If you were a bird flying over the most easterly fringe of Canada you’d see a great island broiling out of the Atlantic, its granite shores rollicking with fishing boats and flakes and fishermen,” the award-winning author writes, setting the stage for her life story.

“A sweep of coloured houses face the wind, smoke whirling from their chimneys, youngsters scrabbling after sheep and hens and grandmothers scrabbling after youngsters, hiding now within swaths of sheets billowing around them from clotheslines.” The book’s heart, like Morrissey’s, is firmly set in Newfoundland. It begins in Morrissey’s childhood and wraps up when she has become a published author. The author employs her hallmark mix of poetic prose and the lyrical dialect of Newfoundlanders in the 1950s and 1960s throughout the memoir.

It provides a great historical narrative of the harsh circumstances most working-class Newfoundlanders faced in the years after they chose to become Canada’s tenth province. Morrissey grew up in The Beaches outport, a tiny community of 12 houses near the water’s edge, isolated from much of the modern world, without electricity, telephones, or plumbing and far from supports like medical care.

Before her birth, Morrissey’s parents had already lost two babies - a boy and a girl. So she was deemed the lucky baby, even though she was born on Friday the 13th. The author launches Chapter One with the story of her baby brother Paul’s death when she was eight years old. Like many Newfoundland men, her father worked seasonally as a logger and fisherman, barely earning enough to feed his family. 

When his baby’s fever spiked, he begged the welfare officer for a $30 loan to pay the cab fare to hospital. The welfare officer refused, so later, the outport’s new doctor stepped up with the money.  But it was too late to save the child, who died of diphtheria.

As the eldest child in a boisterous, close-knit family, Morrissey was expected to be the responsible one, a role she resented, especially when it took her away from her flights of fancy into the world of books. “The fictive worlds grew bigger inside me than the world outside,” she writes. “I took to hiding and reading. Under beds, in closets, in the bathtub . . .”

When she turned sixteen, Morrissey, who had failed Grade 11, learned her family expected her to work in Corner Brook to help support the household. But the “saucy girl” had a rebel streak. Soon she was drawn into a life of drugs, drinking and petty crime. “Thus began two years of never-ending camp for big kids, and with no supervision or rules or bedtime,” she writes.“ Pot, pills, psychedelics and Mick Jagger was the heady mix dragging me through.”  

She chose another rebel misfit Dave Morrissey, to become her partner. The couple outgrew their wild living when Morrissey became pregnant. Eventually, they moved to Grand Prairie, Alberta when her partner found a job working on an oil rig. Before they left Newfoundland, Morrissey promised her favourite brother, Ford, if their parents agreed, she would send him a ticket to join her. 

It was a promise that would change her life. Shortly after her brother came to join them and started working with her husband, he was killed in a gruesome accident on an oil rig. He was just nineteen.  Morrissey had had a prophetic dream shortly before the accident.

“I was holding three white head lice in the palm of my hand,” she writes. “They were big and sluggish. Grandfather lice, I remembered Grandmother calling them. A sign of death.” Guilt over her brother’s death became unbearable and Morrissey started to drink heavily each night.

“Guilt, you see, doesn’t perch on one’s shoulder like a turkey vulture, proclaiming itself,” she writes. “ It doesn’t bloom in the night so that one can see its blight rotting like a winter’s spud within the dark cellar of one’s sleeping mind.  It creeps beneath reason, quietly feeding itself on the language of blame and ignorance.”

When another tragic accident killed a good friend’s husband, Morrissey started showing signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. She describes living with trauma as like living with, “a violent upheaval of the soul. It changes how you see the world. It changes something within your DNA and puts you on permanent alert forevermore.”

By 1986, Morrissey had divorced her husband and was supporting their two children working at a fish plant back in Newfoundland. When a local quack misdiagnosed her saying she’d die within months from tetanus after she handled some bad fish, her world came crashing down.

“I now knew madness.… It was as though hole had been busted through  the side of my world and I was staring into a whole new realm of being I hadn’t known existed,” she writes of the paralysing fear and dread that crippled her life for years.

Many writers, for example, William Styron in Darkness Visible and Stephen King in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, have given riveting accounts of battles with mental illness and addiction. Morrissey’s story is equally honest. When she writes about her fears her PTSD will damage her children, she bares her soul. “It (mental illness) smothered my patience, blinded me, injected a rage inside my head that projected itself outwards,” she writes of fears she had burdened and lashed out at her children.

Eventually Morrissey found support in a group of strong women friends. Writing became the therapy that helped her tackle her fear and anxiety. Eventually she uncovered her storyteller’s voice. After that, there was no looking back. Those familiar with Morrissey’s work will enjoy learning the real-life origins of many of her remarkable characters. 

“Kit” in her first book Kit’s Law was inspired by a lonely and reclusive\neighbour who took in stray cats. The woman, Mae, had lost her mother at age five or six. When her father remarried, her step-mother drowned her beloved pet cat. Mae lived the rest of her life trapped in that early loss.

Fortunately, Morrissey found freedom from the “two ugly sisters, guilt and shame,” by finding the strength to forgive herself. “Oh, the paradoxes,” Morrissey writes. “Of having to leave home to find  it. Of having to go mad

to find a sane thought. Of becoming impoverished to find one’s riches. Of playing the devil’s game to find the angel at the table.”

There are few flaws in this work that covers almost six decades in a full and complex life. When Morrissey writes of her wild days of drinking and drugging, her desire to protect reputations is understandable. However, her author’s note reports some names in the memoir have already been changed. 

Readers may wish she had worked harder to flesh out this early section on her wild years. As well, though there is logic in ending the book after Morrissey’s first book is published, readers may want more insight into how her life changed after the awards and accolades came rolling in.

Pluck: A Memoir of a Newfoundland Childhood and the Raucous, Terrible, Amazing Journey to Becoming a Novelist - by Donna Morrissey, publisher: Viking, $24.95, 305 pages

Robin Harvey (robinharvey@live.com) worked on staff for The Toronto Star for more than 20 years. There she wrote book and theatre reviews. She was a reporter, editor and columnist as well as a News Editor, Assistant City Editor and Public Editor. As Deputy Sunday Editor she was supervisor of the books page. For a time, she ran The Sunday Star short story contest. She's been published in Sun Media, The Toronto Sunday Sun, the Southam news chain and the National Post. Ms. Harvey studied journalism at Metropolitan University, Fine Arts at York University, and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers.

Book review: 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada by Aaron W. Hughes, University of Alberta Press, 216 pages.

Any book touting it has reviewed 50 years of the history that forged and shaped a nation would be ill-served if formatted as an extended listicle. Yet, essentially, that’s how 10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada by Aaron Hughes is structured. Clickbait may lure eyeballs to read about celebrity faux pas, one’s horoscope traits or top trends in Tik-Tok videos. 

However, shoehorning the stories behind five decades of a nation’s evolving historic, social and cultural events into a listicle of “monumental” dates can only confuse and confound readers. “Not all days are created equal,” Hughes writes in his introduction, noting how some dates will become turning points in history. His plan? To focus on one date per chapter and its subsequent “reverberations” to create “interlocking vignettes” that tell the story of how modern Canada evolved.

“A certain vision of Canada,” Hughes writes, “ . . . shared by a majority of Canadians, connects the chapters. “This vision is largely liberal, progressive, anglophone and centralist.” He mitigates this by adding he’s given “some attention” to voices that differ from this vision. Despite his detailed research and obvious academic knowledge, the book’s structure denies the author a unifying theme. Most chapters elaborate on history students should have learned by the end of high school. 

In ways, the book reads like a course textbook so perhaps the listicle theme was employed to jazz it up. Each of the book’s 10 chapters, parsed into similar word counts, hovers around 20 pages long. Hughes launches the book with the date October 13, 1970, the October Crisis, when the country had its first brush with domestic terrorism after members of the separatist FLQ kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebec’s Labour Minister Pierre Laporte, who was subsequently murdered. 

The authors threads history back to the 1700s to explain the crisis. The chapter’s snappy title, “Just Watch Me,” is based on a frustrated retort from then-prime-minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau to a CBC reporter on the steps of Parliament. Reporter Tim Ralfe persisted in asking the prime minister how far he’d go to end to crisis, which had gripped the nation for more than a week and had already resulted in patrols by armed soldiers, until he got the snarky answer that became the chapter’s title.

Three days later, Trudeau proclaimed The War Measures Act across the country, a peacetime first. People were detained then jailed without due process and news outlets were censored. And for a little over three months, “enemy aliens” made the home of peace, order and goodgovernment seem as if it was  morphing into a banana republic.

Hughes next picks September 28, 1972, for the chapter entitled “Team Canada’s Most Famous Goal,” to subsequently romanticize the drama of the Summit hockey series and exaggerate its role as foreign policy during the existing Cold War. “It is in this larger context of Cold War mistrust . . . that we must situate what would become the most famous game in the history of Canadian hockey,” he writes.

Alan Eagleson, later disgraced, disbarred, and jailed for fraud during his time as a hockey kingpin, was a major player in staging the series. Yet even with this hindsight, Hughes downplays the actions of series officials, organizers and sponsors as well as their meddling, the power politics and grandstanding throughout the games. He also ignores the bad sportsmanship and bickering between the Soviets and Canadians during the series, wrapping up the chapter with the treacle and sentiment that’s mythologized it to this day.

“For that one defining moment on the afternoon of September 28, 1972, Canadians came together in a way they never had before and perhaps never will again.” The next two chapters, “The Patriation of the Constitution,” on April 17, 1982, and “The Multiculturalism Act,” on July 21, 1988, are disjointed and confusing, largely because Hughes must cram hundreds of years of history into just under 42 pages for both. 

Hughes’ next chapter tackles the December 6, 1989, Montreal Massacre in what is arguably the book’s best work. For in 17 pages, Hughes paints a vivid picture of the day Marc Lépine fumbled his way into École Polytechnique to find his targets and brutally murder 14 female engineering students, all detested for being “feminists.” This chapter does focus on the events of one notorious day in Canadian history unlike most of the others. Hughes draws on a wide range of resources and numerous sources, including the coroner’s report and witness statements, to show how the massacre sparked a national outcry for tighter gun control and better treatment for women.

Hughes’s choice of May 25, 1995 as a day most important for gay rights is odd. His focus on a Supreme Court ruling that defeated a same-sex couple’s bid for spousal pension benefits baffles, given the range of significant dates that created more quality for gay Canadians. The legal foundation for the chapter results in jargon and hard-to-follow, obscure legal arguments, far from dramatic reading.

The next two chapters, pegged to October 30, 1995, “The Quebec Referendum,” and June 2, 2015, “The Release of the Executive Summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” suffer the same flaws as some earlier chapters. Though Hughes tackles important, long-standing events and treaties, he does not give French Canadians or Indigenous people their due when he crams hundreds of years of historical, social and cultural change into a scant 42 pages.

Hughes’s next date, “The Tragically Hip’s Final Concert,” on August 20, 2016, was hardly historic or epic within the Canadian psyche. Though fans who watched the nationally broadcast performance were justifiable grief stricken over lead singer Gord Downie’s losing battle with brain cancer, the author’s choice fails significantly when stacked up against other events that year. They include: the death of Toronto’s internationally notorious mayor, Rob Ford, multiple charges laid against a former nurse who allegedly used insulin in serial killings, or sex-abuse allegations against one of Quebec and Canada’s most influential film directors.

One of the author’s most questionable choices was made in the book’s final chapter, where he notes March 8, 2018, the day Canada released a new $10 bill depicting a black woman in honour of Viola Desmond as a victory for racial discrimination. Canada granted Desmond its first posthumous pardon for her mistreatment by the judicial system sixty-four years earlier. But Hughes does not call the move for what it was, a cynical bit of two-for-one tokenism aimed to show the government as sensitive to racial and sexual inequality.

Many have since questioned why Canada simply did not choose two separate currency denominations, one honouring a black person to recognize racial discrimination and another honouring a woman to recognize sexism.

Since the book was conceived just before the COVID pandemic began and written during it, the sea changes that ensued created a logistical problem beyond the author’s control, which he briefly acknowledges it in the last few chapters. However, Hughes can be slammed for paying little more than lip service to one of, if not the most important, factors that has shaped Canada’s history, namely being the northern neighbour to an increasingly unstable superpower. 

He barely discusses the subject and its impact on Canada’s development, omitting the NAFTA Free Trade agreement. These flaws rest squarely at his feet.

10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada by Aaron W. Hughes, University of Alberta Press, 216 pages.

Ghost Walk by Anton Pooles, Mansfield Press, 63 pages, $18.00

Ghost Walk, the first  full-length collection of poems by Toronto’s Anton Pooles, is written in a minimalist, free-verse style, with tight structure and disciplined form. The Siberian-born graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Toronto employs dark, concrete imagery that never strays near the ethereal. Despite his visceral style, the content behind his prose is abstract, making for a jarring contrast. As well, deep passion seeps through his work’s intellectual grounding. 

Fairy tales, fantasy and horror, as well as film and visual art, are Pooles’s stated inspirations, though his work is coloured by a darkness the reader may suspect to be more personal. His poems often start out distanced by intellect. As his imagery intensifies the reader is enveloped in the poem’s uncanny and discomfiting impact. 

Poems such as “Dove,” though framed by a first and last line that is exactly the same— “in the middle of the road”— offer no resolution to soothe the impact of the disturbing words in between. “The Way Down to the Lake,” packs enough substance in three tight lines to push the reader’s imagination down paths it might not wish to dwell.

In “Santi’s Poem - after The Devil’s Backbone (2001)” Pooles creates a chilling take on the fate of an orphaned boy, its title reflecting the film’s ghostly horror at the “low, dark edge of life.”  Equally haunting is “A Cry Through Nature,” referencing the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch. The poem imagines that the cries of the birds in the Dutch painter’s Wheatfield Crows carry to create the voice of angst depicted in the Norwegian artist’s The Scream.

“Van Gogh made the cries of crows eternal like his own cry . . . Edvard Munch heard it . . .  like a swift black bird . . ., Van Gogh stole the red from Munch’s face, brushed it across the clouds.”

In “Goya After Dinner” the gruesome dominates Pooles’s depiction of the artist contemplating his most famous painting, Saturn Eating His Son. Goya hears “teeth grinding against bone, the drip of blood falling to the floor.” With the poem’s repeated cry, “I don’t want to die!” the reader wonders who issued the refrain? The eaten, or the artist who conjured up the troubled image on canvas. 

“The Old Blind Guitarist,” relates the feelings of the subject of Picasso’s famous blue-period painting, The Old Guitarist. Pooles’ words resound with palpable agony, building tension through to the last stanza, “Each string feels like barbed wire, each note a thunderstorm far out at sea. He plays through the evening, through the stinging pain of his fingers and back.” 

Yet, as is common in many of his poems, Pooles’ last line, “He plays as he drifts off to sleep,” reads unexpectedly open-ended. “Wishing Wells” shows the poet’s whimsy. “I am trying to wrap my head around why anyone would sit at the bottom of a well. Deities are down there with pails to catch pennies imbued with wishes,” he writes, ending with, “The worst sensation in the world is having wet sneakers.”

A few poems, like “Father, Ghost, Monkey,” are more personal and bridge the distance between the poems and the poet. “You bamboozled me into thinking I was born animal. No one I know now knew me then and so cannot tell if this is true or false.”  This is a collection of intriguing work from an intriguing soul. Perhaps in his next collection, Pooles will let the passion that fuels his dark imagery create content that will brave the light.

Debra Black, Love, Lust, Existence and other Ephemeral Things, self-published

and printed by Blurb, https://www.blurb.ca/bookstore , 82 pages, $25.19.

Debra Black released her first collection of more than sixty well-crafted poems through Blurb. Her work reflects an extensive knowledge of literature, but is presented in direct, straightforward prose that never overreaches or contrives. The author’s notes say the collection can be read in any order like a “jigsaw puzzle” with each poem self-contained, yet part of a story reflecting the arc of a woman’s life.

A former journalist who is now an expert in yoga and meditation, Black writes poetry that blends the observational with the existential. Most poems are a page long. A few are tantalizing snippets and others more lengthy reflections. Though her work often uses the first-person perspective, it is far from confessional. Her free-verse conversational style is pierced by bursts of powerful imagery and phrasing, and she often effectively uses repetition and rhythm. 

Some of Black’s poems embrace erotica, though they are not overtly graphic.  “headless barbie” reveals Black’s razor-sharp wit in a poem that seems written for every woman. “childhood rivalries and jealousies, one seething moment of anger, head, legs, arms ripped apart from the torso, the blonde haired, blue-eyed head and her ridiculously proportioned body parts flushed down the toilet, creating headless barbie” In the poem, “untitled #1”, 

Black’s words paint in all senses “the tectonic plates of my heart shift, split, splinter, quiver, quake, crack, the turquoise-green, green sea, the arid blue hillside, the dove white sky. and suddenly there is silence.” Many of her poems reflect on love but are not traditional love poems. Consider this excerpt from the bittersweet, “we could have.”

“i could have taken that turn, that one over there - where the road tweaks to the left -   there in the distance I am with you still, after all these years our love deepening, maturing, never-ending. our love could have stayed true, not eviscerating, not piercing, not haunted by ourselves or others. we could have been happy . . .  we could have been more.”

An excerpt from the poem “a ménage a trois with death and pablo neruda” reveals Black’s sensuality. “. . . i stare down death, each and every night. as i close my eyes, battling for sleep; for peace; for rest. deep, dark, darkly death’s shadows cross my soul, her hot breath against my breasts, her tears on my cheeks, her fingers grazing my face and then I finally sleep dreaming of you and pablo neruda.”

“in the busyness of your hands” will grip anyone who has lost a marriage. “in the busyness of your hands, i see the distant past, memories i swim up to and dissect. here - between your thumb and forefinger - is where you loved me; there - by your ring finger - is where you stopped; over there - at the centre of your palm - is where our son was born; here at your wrist is where you left.” This book introduces a talented new poetic voice, one that is powerful, yet heartfelt, and intricate without being overly complex. 

LOVE. Atticus - Poems, Epigrams and Aphorisms. 

200 pages by a purported anonymous Instagram poet, Simon & Schuster, $19.80

Most of the writing in this book (a best-seller) is not poetry. Its pages consist of three or four lines, mixed with dollops of scrawled illustrations, and a handful of longer, full-page-length works of prose. However, Atticus is a marketing sensation with a carefully crafted “anonymity” adding allure to his image. The book is created for a target market, a popular, lucrative one. In the same way people find comfort in French fries and junk food, they find comfort in Atticus. 

At least the book’s marketers are upfront in its title, for it consists largely of epigrams and aphorisms, many of which use the rhetorical device chiasmus (think JFK’s “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”) - a staple in much Instagram poetry. It seems inverting syntax, mirrored simplistically, sounds profound to many. 

Atticus writes for the love-struck and longing, no matter their gender identity, but more specifically, for women. Women who love to read words from a motorcycle-riding, whiskey-drinking, macho man with a passionate-yet-tendheart. Some examples? “He was the one who healed her who made her scars feel beautiful.”

“A million years of evolution evolving you to look this way and evolving me to llove it so.” “Whatever seed you are, bloom.” All the lines are written in carefully crafted, macho-yet-sensitive, male handwriting. Speculation runs wild about Atticus’s true identity. Some say he’s a reality TV star, some say he’s silhouettes of many different good-looking actors who read his words in wooing voices.

A story in Medium reported that Atticus is a woman who walked into a publishing house and pitched a book of Instagram poems she said women would die for. No doubt, Atticus will last as long as his publisher can make big bucks with little effort. - with apologies to the two poets also included in this review set, and to the many talented, fresh voices who have found a home and following on Instagram.

—Robin L. Harvey

An existential shakedown is happening amid the purveyors of poetry, world-wide, and in this country. Some see it as a pugilistic free-for-all with multiple genres, platforms and delivery methods duking it out for eyeballs. Others see it as a Darwinian evolution of expression that has extended poetry’s popularity.

Many, like Ian Williams, the award-winning author of six books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, have mixed thoughts, but agree the rise of self-publishing and social-media platforms is driving the change. “The recent poetry landscape is similar to the splintering of the entertainment industry,” Williams says. 

“Publishing houses were like network TV. But now there are so many other places for people to get their content . . . that we now get to hear many more voices and people don’t have to be professional poets to write poetry . . . There’s never been more choice for readers and writers. But as with all decentralization, there’s never been more noise.”

Denis De Klerck, publisher and editor at Mansfield Press, an independent Canadian press with a 22-year history of publishing Canadian poets and developing new talent, is open to the change, which means accepting work published in online journals as more legitimate. However, he believes new poets must show they have a track record. 

“Having publication credits shows the writer has submitted their work for editorial feedback,” he says. “Also, if the writer has no credits and is completely unknown in the literary world it is very hard to sell a first book. I like to see that the writer is trying to build some kind of audience. I don’t want to launch books into the void.”

New poets like Anton Pooles see the changes, especially the rise of online poetry journals, as largely positive. “Poetry, like all things, changes with the times. It takes on new and unfamiliar forms. It’s growth. . .  More doors open, more voices are heard.

Debra Black has just self-published her first poetry collection and thinks the change gives poets more opportunity.

“Publishing houses are becoming more narrow and sharply focused in what they publish, particularly when it comes to poetry,” she says. She also thinks self-publishing bucks the trend to mass marketing for big bucks. “No marketing to the whim or trend of the moment. Just art for art’s sake.” 

So how does the poetry market shake down? The oldest players, the large publishers, firms that, in your grandparents’ day, only printed books and in recent years have been gobbling each other up, keep an eye on their bottom line. Poetry has rarely meant profit, and big publishers have little incentive to foster new talent. In fact, some have stopped publishing poetry entirely. 

Next are mid-sized, specialty or independent publishers, like Mansfield Press, which is dedicated to keeping poetry a large part of its business. Then there are poets who self-publish, using online apps to design and produce their books, who print them themselves or hire online companies to print them and deliver them through the mail or online as E-books.

Hybrid publishers have also sprouted, offering to publish, produce, distribute and market would-be poets for a hefty fee. Reviews of their offerings are mixed. Some deliver, while others produce poor-quality product with spotty follow through. Then there are poets who publish through social media and sell through links to their websites. The variations here include Instagram poets, poets who promote and sell through Meta/Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even dancing and reading on Tik Tok. 

Mix in Patreon, Substack, Medium and LinkTree accounts along with email list servers and the choices for would-be poets are plenty. All these venues have flaws. Nepotism flourishes, especially among academia and publishing circles. 

How so? Higher education institutions and creative writing programs need students to make money. If they can show their students get published, they will, in turn, get more students. So they forge connections with

publishers and promote their best students and faculty into publication. This polishes their alma mater’s reputation. The educational institution or creative writing school can now tout its programs— a high number of published authors, which gets them more students.

These same educational institutions often publish or have strong faculty links to the “established” literary journals that can make a poet’s track record. In the process, they snag a huge chunk of available arts grants. They also influence which poets secure the few actual paying poet gigs, like becoming a poet or writer in residence or a poet laureate. 

The main problem with the indie poetry world, whether self-published or through other platforms, is finding the gems amid the garbage due to the disparate range in quality.

The role of awards and grants is crucial, but often unfair. Our country’s public broadcaster still must meet some of its mandate to educate and enlighten if it wants federal government tax dollars. So, it runs book clubs and contests for poetry and creative writing. Everyone can enter, and many do. 

The trend in recent years for winners to come from diverse backgrounds and have skirted the academia/nepotism trap is positive.  Arts grants are subject to the arbitrary guidelines and trends related to the politics of their funding sources. To many, the way they make their choices is indecipherable.

Add to all this the fact that getting a book of poetry reviewed nowadays is daunting and one might pity the poor poet. Few of the traditional review forums, daily newspapers and magazine have much space to offer for reviews, given their declining revenues. That means poets take on a good chunk of marketing and promoting their book, self-published or not.

Perhaps in past eras, creative types were more pragmatic, as many famous poets and authors routinely paid to get their work published. American poet Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855— a seminal work that still sells thousands of copies each year. 

Among other famous poets who paid to self-publish their first, and often subsequent books (some with the help of relatives or by selling their homes or possessions) are Alexander Pope, T.S. Eliot, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carl Sandburg, E. E. Cummings and Oscar Wilde.

“Let me drown her whispered lies in yellow blooms/ so at last I hear my children laugh in sunny rooms/ amid the scent of daffodils” Robin L. Harvey

Followers of Not The Public Broadcaster have no doubt noticed the recent addition of Robin L. Harvey to our author’s list. A former Toronto Star journalist/ editor and actor (she starred in our play Cheating at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre in 1978) she’s become our literary and theatre reviewer. 

But Robin is also an accomplished poet. Maybe we’re biased, but her collection Poems To Slay Demons (PTSD) is a mature, feminist voyage from surviving to thriving in a tumultuous world. Her struggles for love and sanity are portrayed with compassion, humour and empathy. 

The topic is not easy. For an artist to bare their soul after the exigencies of life is bracing, but she meets the challenge of one trauma survivor’s journey with mental illness, child abuse and addiction, through to rebirth, self-love, reconciliation and joy. Ranging from the punishing scourge of Covid-19 to love poems Poems To Slay Demons is a portrait of the modern woman in dangerous times. 

A mental health advocate, Robin helped found the Institute for Journalism Studies in Addiction and Mental Health and coordinated the Check-Up from the Neck Up anti-stigma campaign, for which she was honoured with CAMH's Courage to Come Back Award. Her credo is, “no matter how troubled our past may have been, it need not define who we are or how we live”.

You can see her outreach reflected in the poems which sear the soul and also bring about a smile. We are proud she’s chosen to grace our pages in concert with my own poems on the In Other Words site. http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com/dowbboy.

Robin has also done live readings from the book at Old Words Storytelling and ArtBar Poetry Series— both in her hometown of Toronto. The critical reception for Robin’s work has been enthusiastic. Here are but a few of the most prominent.

"...a fine wordsmith who senses a good story and cuts right through to what matters."

Best-selling author Linwood Barclay

"...a great, solid manuscript … that is ready to fly."

Humber faculty mentor, author and poet Richard Scarsbrook, selected Harvey for the Letter of Distinction.

“Courageous and relentlessly honest, these are poems to console readers battling their own demons. Robin Harvey has been there. She gets it.”— Rona Maynard’s review of PTSD Poems to Slay Demons | Goodreads

“The author’s employment of a range of literary techniques builds each poem confidently. Her carefully-chosen adjectives and accomplished extended metaphors pack a punch” .https://annabelharz.com/2022/10/22/ptsd/  by author and mental health advocate Annabel Harz.

"Harvey’s style is sharp and wonderfully rhythmic. These poems are a joy to read and to speak.”-- https://www.kristianareed.com/post/review-ptsd-poems-to-slay-demons by Kristiana Reed.

"Harvey melds symbols from ancient mythology and religion with modern day slang, rap music, and social media memes. Though she may rage against social injustice and the politics that divide and oppress us, Harvey’s unique voice can resound with whimsy as easily as it melts into tender expressions of passion and love.”-- https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/ptsd-poems-to-slay-demons-robin-l-harvey#review by scholar fatima aladdin

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4863644073?book_show_action=false by author and journalist Heather Archer

Pete Walker, psychotherapist, social worker, and counsellor and is the author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, said his reading of the book "reveals to me that you are an awesome poet!” To which we say, you bet.

Poems To Slay Dragons is available on Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble and Goodreads.