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Reviews
A collection of recent Reviews in EVENT
Issue 39-2
Poetry - Darren Bifford
Damian Rogers, Paper Radio, ECW Press, 2009
Matthew Tierney, The Hayflick Limit, Coach House Books, 2009
Billeh Nickerson, McPoems, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009
Damian Rogers’s debut poetry collection, Paper Radio, borrows its title from a poem written by John Sinclair, a Detroit-based activist writing in the mid-sixties: ‘stay tuned to the paper radio for more news as it happens.’ The line itself appears as an epigraph to Rogers’s own poem written, ostensibly, to the same police officer who had multiple run-ins with Sinclair and who eventually arrested him. This poem, ‘Another Poem for Warner Stringfellow,’ and the epigraph that precedes it, seem to me a good place to appreciate what’s characteristically best about this difficult collection.
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Poetry - Nick Thran
Erín Moure, O Resplandor, Anansi, 2010
Chris Hutchinson, Other People's Lives, Brick Books, 2009
Resplandor can mean 'brilliance' or 'radiance.' It can mean 'lustre' or 'glitter.' 'Glory' or 'glimpse.' Then there is the 'O.' 'O' as in 'Oh' as in 'Oh!' as in 'ô.' 'O' as in the fictional character O.A. or the real-life Oana Avasilichioaei. 'O' as in the open mouth, the pin on the map. O where the itch is. O where it hurts. O as in the little fence it makes around the vast, blue sky on the cover. 'O.,' the fictional E.M. writes toward the end (the beginning?) of O Resplandor, 'if only I could detain time.'
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Fiction - Michael Mirolla
David Derry, Sentimental Exorcisms, Coach House Books, 2009
Anik See, postcard and other stories, Freehand Books, 2009
Paul Headrick, The Doctrine of Affections, Freehand Books, 2010
There is something quite Victorian quaint and at the same time post-Freudian quirky in David Derry’s Sentimental Exorcisms collection. Perhaps it’s the denseness and meticulousness of the characters combined with their just-on-the-edge neurotic behaviour. Or it might be the combination of an underlying-but-undefined justice and a never-can-tell randomness that somehow manages to punish these characters not for doing the wrong thing but for daring to open themselves up, for daring to take chances based on those quasineuroses.
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Fiction - Hilary Turner
Antonia Banyard, Never Going Back, Thistledown Press, 2010
Lydia Kwa, Pulse, Key Porter Books, 2010
Possibly the most evocative opening to a novel ever penned is the first sentence of The Go-Between (1953) by L.P. Hartley: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ The strangeness of the past is fruitful territory for writers who are interested in how people can be shaped over time by specific events beyond their control; it is especially fruitful for novelists convinced that accurate memories well understood are the best bulwark against personal fragmentation. Like Hartley, both Antonia Banyard and Lydia Kwa create characters who are compelled to examine painful incidents in their pasts in light of their mature experiences.
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Issue 39-1
Fiction - Christine Dewar
Stuart Ross, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, Freehand Books, 2009
Amy Jones, What Boys Like and Other Stories, Biblioasis, 2009
Sometimes at an EVENT fiction board meeting, one of our team will put forward an inventive ultra-short manuscript as a 'sorbet piece,' a palate cleanser between other works lined up for publication in upcoming issues. The collected short-fiction works by Stuart Ross in Buying Cigarettes for the Dog are more like quick shots of tequila. Ross is a co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair; editor of the anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence; and a writer of six collections of poetry, two collaborative novels, a previous collection of short fiction and a collection of essays, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer.
There are 23 very short works in Buying Cigarettes for the Dog and each is a strange, self-contained world. Unifying the collection is a beguiling expansive feeling created through narrators who appear to relish the art of storytelling. Ross engineers a general loosening of temporal markers so that his characters seem suspended outside the world of the ticking clock. He also finds Beckett-inspired absurdity in the process of naming, cataloguing and defining terms.
Click here to read the full review!Fiction - Lisa Grekul
Margaret Sweatman, The Players, Goose Lane Editions, 2009
Rhea Tregebov, The Knife Sharpener's Bell, Coteau Books, 2009
In The Players and The Knife Sharpener’s Bell, readers are transported to other places and times—17th-century England, in the case of Sweatman’s novel, and Depression-era Winnipeg, in Tregebov’s. These settings, however, are only starting points for narratives as geographically wide-ranging as they are thematically broad in scope. And while The Players is arguably more challenging—in some ways less accessible than The Knife Sharpener’s Bell—readers will glean from both novels the kind of fraught satisfaction that defines memorably fine fiction.
Click here to read the full review!Non-Fiction - Michael Mirolla
Denise Roig, Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School, Signature Editions, 2008
Aislinn Hunter, A Peepshow with Views of the Interior: Paratexts, Palimpsest Press, 2009
Jim Oaten, Accelerated Paces: Travels Across Borders and Other Imaginary Boundaries, Anvil Press, 2008
Denise Roig’s Butter Cream proved to be a very pleasant (dare I say ‘tasty’) surprise. When it first rose out of the package, I had my doubts, saying to myself, ‘I hate butter and I’m not all that crazy about cream, so this book starts off with two strikes against it.’ But this is a case of literally not judging a book by its cover. Or perhaps a case of making sure to read the fine print in the subtitle: ‘A Year in a Montreal Pastry School.’ In fact, by the time I got to ‘fin’ 250 pages later, I realized I had undergone a thoroughly enjoyable (and educational) experience, not to mention a much greater appreciation of all those pastry-chefs-in-waiting who aspire to creating the crème caramel sans parallèle.
Click here to read the full review!Poetry - Nick Thran
Maleea Acker, The Reflecting Pool, Pedlar Press, 2009
Heather Cadsby, Could be, Brick Books, 2009
Carmine Starnino, This Way Out, Gaspereau Press, 2009
The poems in Maleea Acker’s debut, The Reflecting Pool, appear to set their sights on the condition described in the Zbigniew Herbert epigraph that opens the book: ‘At last the fidelity of things opens our eyes.’ That is, a thing entirely absorbed in its own being gives us an awareness of the thing as other than us; in this way it provides the clearest reflection of the human being as witness, language user, and actively conscious mind. A yearning to see things clearly permeates this book—to see how, as in ‘Spring Migration, in the Field,’ the birds ‘rise up’ but also ‘how not to coax them down.’ Concepts of yielding, placating and letting go are common themes, usually appearing in the service of moments of clarity that continue to perfect themselves upon further reading.
Click here to read the full review!DARREN BIFFORD currently lives in Toronto.
CHRISTINE DEWAR is the Fiction Editor for EVENT. She lives in New Westminster, BC, and teaches Theatre History and Arts & Culture courses in the Theatre and Stagecraft programs at Douglas College. She also has an ongoing gig as Diligence/Sloth in the performance artwork of Margaret Dragu.
LISA GREKUL is an Assistant Professor in Critical Studies at UBC-Okanagan in Kelowna, BC. She is the author of Kalyna’s Song (Coteau, 2003) and Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians (U of A Press, 2005). Her research and teaching focuses on Canadian literature, with emphasis on minoritized Canadian writers.
MICHAEL MIROLLA is the author of the novel Berlin and two short-story collections: The Formal Logic of Emotion and Hothouse Loves & Other Tales. Light and Time, a poetry collection, was released in 2009, and a novel, The Facility, is due out in Fall 2010. To keep busy, he and a partner have taken ownership of iconic Canadian publishing house, Guernica Editions.
NICK THRAN is the author of one poetry collection, Every Inadequate Name (Insomniac, 2006). A second collection, Earworm, will appear in 2011 with Nightwood Editions. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
HILARY TURNER teaches English at the University of the Fraser Valley.
