Reviews

The point of contact they create

A review of 'Three Novels'

Elizabeth’s Robinson new book Three Novels engages with an archaic form, in this case the Victorian novel. In particular, Eve’s Ransom by George Gissing, and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Woman in White, the latter two read to her as a child by her father, the former a book they shared as adult readers.

The way we tend to compose, or hear, poetry these days

A review of 'The Odicy'

David Hadbawnik

The title of Cyrus Console’s book THE ODICY is a pun that references Homer’s epic and Leibniz’s 1710 book Théodicée, which coined the term “theodicy,” a defense or vindication of God in respect to the existence of evil. As such, it immediately calls into play related, but disparate texts (and indeed, modes of discourse), as well as different cultural-historical moments. And it hints at what is perhaps a fatal overdetermination of elements at work in this book of poems. The poems are written in pentameter.

'another personal narrative burns to a heap of citations'

A review of 'Bharat jiva'

Cara Benson

In the contemporary mythology that is rendered, critiqued, created and reflected in language. In the shape-shifting sand-sifting stance that is gerunds, malleable and didactic pronouns, economic prose-code syntactic snakeskin shed and swallowed whole adjectival smackdown. In foraging late-human detritus vocabularies is kari edwards and nowhere in the sentences and fragments and planets of bank deposit syllabics is everywhere. What we have is words and words fail

Notes on a phenomenological poetics

A review of Kevin Varrone's g-point almanacs

Leah Souffrant

Kevin Varrone has written a series of works entitled g-point almanac. An early installment was g-point almanac (9.22–10.19), available as a Duration Press e-book. Others include the 2007 g-point almanac: id est (9.22–12.21) published by Instance Press and 2010 g-point almanac: passyunk lost issued by Ugly Duckling Presse. The almanacs echo, record, build an encounter with language that is based first in an encounter with a shifting world, quite real in its slippery emotional geography.

To get you out walking

A review of 'Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto'

Taien Ng-Chan

I have been going for walks since 1994 when I first moved to Montreal, long perambulatory explorations of back alleys, train yards, industrial wastelands and whatever neighborhood I found myself living in.