Poetry

Bittersweet

Indo-Guyanese Canadian Natasha Ramoutar’s debut collection of poems charts paths through diasporas and ends in a celebratory uplifting of Toronto suburb Scarborough, the final destination on this journey. With an especially skilled use of internal ... Read More »

January 25, 2021 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

Dearly

By Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood captures the tone of her latest collection in the title poem, when she writes, “Don’t think this is morbid. / It’s just reality.” “Dearly” best encapsulates the poet’s musings on time as an ... Read More »

January 18, 2021 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

Word Problems

By Ian Williams

January 18, 2021 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

knot body

By Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a queer mixed Arab poet working out of Montreal. Their work to date has sought to open up explorations of queerness, family, culture, and diaspora, and of the strange process ... Read More »

December 7, 2020 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

★ Black Matters

By Afua Cooper; Wilfried Raussert (photog.)

The world of Burning Sugar – the intimately powerful debut from Vancouver poet and activist Cicely Belle Blain – is, above all else, dynamic, always moving, tracing arcs and trajectories, modes of learning and loving. ... Read More »

November 16, 2020 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

★ Burning Sugar

By Cicely Belle Blain

November 16, 2020 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

Cult Life

By Kyeren Regehr

In her second book of poetry, Kingston, Ontario, writer Sadiqa de Meijer crafts pieces that examine maternity. The Outer Wards disputes conventional notions of maternal instinct, instead conceiving of motherhood as a self one consciously ... Read More »

June 11, 2020 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

The Outer Wards

By Sadiqa de Meijer

June 11, 2020 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews

★ Roguelike

By Mathew Henderson

The best poetry combines robust language use and meaning, not one at the expense of the other. Roguelike, the sophomore collection from Toronto poet Mathew Henderson, delivers both. According to the book’s publisher, Roguelike combines ... Read More »

April 27, 2020 | Filed under: Poetry, Reviews