From our 37.2 issue: You may think that in the age of Twitter, poets would shun the outsized proportions of a long poem. Thank goodness some don’t. Calgary writer Vivian Hansen has chosen the ideal form for exploring the interconnectivity of generations and...
The poems in Dark Water Songs by Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes touch on the political, the natural, the concrete, and the abstract. From the streets of Toronto to tropical islands, “From Perth to Edinburgh by Rail” (21) Soutar-Hynes takes us through urban and rural landscapes...
Roomie Lorrie Miller reviews Mary Novik's second novel, Muse. Vancouver-based writer Mary Novik’s first novel, Conceit, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2007 and won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 2008. Muse is Novik’s second novel, and is set deep...
Roomie Jennifer Zilm reviews Marita Dachsel's Glossolalia. There are many versions of the story,”says Eliza Roxcy Snow at the end of B.C. poet Marita Dachsel’s second trade collection (several poems of which appeared in Room 32:3). Snow is one of thirty-four wives of...
Roomie Candace Fertile reviews Carole Chambers' fifth book of poetry, She Draws the Rain. The sense of place infuses Carole Chambers’ fifth book of poetry. The pages are full of the rain and trees of Hornby Island, off the west coast of B.C. Many of the poems are...
Roomie Carrie Schmidt reviews Women's Words: An Anthology. For the past twenty years, the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Extension has offered summer writing workshops for women. This anthology is an astonishingly apt representation of work produced through those...
Following the success of Maidenhead, which won The Believer Book Award in 2012, was short-listed for the Trillium Book Award in 2013, and was the most reviewed book of 2012 according to the Canadian Women in the Literary Arts Count, Coach House Books has released...
Reviewing a poetry book by a collective in a magazine created by a collective is a lovely fit, and Whisk by Yoko’s Dogs is an utter delight to read. Pedlar Press has produced a beautiful little book full of gems. The members of Yoko’s Dogs work together on all the...
The thing about Saleema Nawaz’s Bone & Bread is that I expected a book, (your typical book maybe?) about the larger sister and the anorexic sister. The tension between the two. How they navigated high school. How they were approached, or not, by boys. How they...
In Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” she writes “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” Such simple words, but the personal essay is an intimate form, full of reflection and creative misremembering, or as Didion calls it, when note...