fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Lily Gontard
Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars

Since the Canadian withdrawal from the North American ballistic missile defence treaty, you might think you don’t need to read Mel Hurtig’s ominously titled Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars (McCle

Mandelbrot
Sacred Places in North America: A Journey into the Medicine Wheel

Notman's department store approach to photography is carried on in this century in the work of Courtney Milne, whose recent Sacred Places in North America, subtitled A Journey into the Medicine Wheel (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), represents the fruit of

Stephen Osborne
Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women

The photographs in Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (McGill-Queens), are plentiful but wretchedly printed, which is a sadness because this book of stories is so good that you want to return to the photographs again and again to se

Lara Jenny
Salt: A World History

Thanks to an educational record I had as a kid, I’ve always known that salt was once traded for gold. What I didn’t know about salt, though, is a heck of a lot, and it’s all covered in Mark Kurlansky’s 400-plus-page book Salt: A World History (Knopf

Alana Mairs
Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory

Near the beginning of his book, Ricou states that his intention in writing about this ubiquitous plant was to answer the question: “Could a regional culture be found by focusing on a single, native, uncharismatic species?” More simply, he wanted to f

Patty Osborne
Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights

When the Bosnian peace agreement was announced in Dayton, Ohio, I wanted to ask Elma Softic what she thought of it all. I had just finished reading her book Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights (Key Porter: translation by Nada Conic), and I wanted her to c

Leah Rae
Sartre for Beginners

What I remember most vividly from Existentialism 101 was nausea—not Sartre’s famous novel, but a classmate of mine who spontaneously vomited during a discussion of Nietzsche.

Kris Rothstein
Screaming at a Wall

Drugs and disillusionment also figure in Greg Everett’s memoir Screaming at a Wall (Grundle Ink), featuring a main character named Greg and events and dialogue that are too convincing to be made up. The charm of this book is its unflinching portrayal

Stephen Osborne
Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

Stephen R. Bown’s Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (Thomas Allen) is an excellent account of life and lingering death on the high seas during the age of empires and oceanic voyag

Lara Jenny
School Shmool

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

Carrie Villeneuve
Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle

Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle (Simon Miller), is the first Gaelic-language movie at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Seachd ( “seven”) is the age Aonghas is when he and his siblings are orphaned and sent to their grandparents; seachd is

Geist Staff
Selected Poems

In Leonard Gasparini's Selected Poems (Hounslow Press), the themes range from urban night-life lyricism to wry, formally structured meditations on humanity, travel and the natural world. Gasparini's vision of life is often dark but never obscure.

Michael Hayward
Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar

October 21, 2005, marked the 200th anniversary of the great naval battle of Trafalgar, an engagement in which Admiral Nelson and the British fleet ended Napoleon’s dream of invading England by crushing the French and Spanish fleets off the southwest

Joelle Hann
Self

Yann Martel's novel Self (Knopf), seems aptly titled for a book that depicts a character growing from childhood into adulthood. Martel's first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, kept me on my couch for chapter after chapter with tears i

Mindy Abramowitz
A Philosophical Investigation

Last time I went to the mystery bookstore looking for something hard-boiled, I came out with A Philosophical Investigation (Doubleday) tucked under my arm. I have since returned to seek out author Philip Kerr's previous novels, the Berlin Noir trilog

Patty Osborne
Confessions of a Shopaholic

In my reading life I’ve been locked in YA (young adult) land ever since I found myself surrounded by a gaggle of teenage nieces at a family party. I tried the usual icebreakers about school and friends, but the conversation really got going when I as

Eve Corbel
Alter Ego Comics

A review of Michel Rabagliati's semi-autobiographical graphic novels, featuring tales of his boyhood in Quebec.

Michael Hayward
Divisadero

“Everything is collage,” a character observes in Divisadero (McClelland & Stewart), Michael Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years.

Stephen Osborne
Enchantment & Other Demons

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

Norbert Ruebsaat
Eros the Bittersweet

Ann Carson has written a sensual and thought-provoking book about desire and called it Eros the Bittersweet (Dalkey Archive Press). My friends tell me you can't theorize about desire, and my lovers tell me (when I begin to theorize about desire) that

Jon Burrows
eye-Dentical Twins

When eye-Dentical Twins (eye press) arrived in the office, everyone crowded around. The book is a collection of photographs from the newspaper eye weekly, in which two unlikely celebrities are paired and the resemblance is described in a witty cutlin

Michael Hayward
Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems

This recent collection compiles the very best of the poet's oeuvre.

Patty Osborne
Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the Klondike

In Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the Klondike by Jennifer Duncan (Anchor Canada), we meet women who escaped the prison of propriety and domesticity by joining the Gold Rush to the Yukon.

Geist Staff
Friends I Never Knew

Friends I Never Knew by Tanya Lester (gynergy) is an ambitious but less successful first work of fiction. The premise is challenging: a burnt-out feminist organizer, recuperating abroad, pays homage to four women friends and colleagues by trying to w

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Sara Graefe
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

CB Campbell
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Mazzy Sleep
Heart Medicine

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

Jennilee Austria
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

David M. Wallace
Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

CONNIE KUHNS
Marriage on the Download

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Debra Rooney
Comics
Weird Jobs

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Stephen Osborne
Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Grant Buday
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Natasha Greenblatt
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Tara McGuire
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Jill Boettger
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Stephen Smith
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please

The secret is in the velvet.

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.

Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher

Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."

BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Anson Ching
Fact
the universal human

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Michael Hayward
Fact
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
Fact
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

Stephen Henighan
Bad Spellers

Mordecai Richler, in a withering put-down, once dismissed the novelist Hugh Garner as “a good speller.” In the summer of 2003, grinding through 160 Canadian books as a jury member for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English, I learned that for many contemporary Canadian writers, Garner’s level of dubious distinction remains out of reach.

Stephen Henighan
Reading the City

A city is an atmosphere defined by a history. A great city's streets may reflect its past, but only art makes a city's history, like its distinctive mood, present to the world.

Stephen Henighan
Lost Nationalities

It is not only the children of British mothers who have lost one of their nationalities; Great Britain, too, has lost a part of itself

Stephen Henighan
Witch Hunt

In a letter of 350 words, published in Geist 65, Michael Redhill calls me a racist once and implies that I am a racist on at least four other occasions. Redhill’s repetition of the ultimate insult of the postmodern era offers a fascinating, if depressing, window into how certain Canadian writers betray their responsibility to the society they live in.

Alberto Manguel
Idiot’s Fare

Dear George Szanto, I write in answer to your letter describing your difficulties in finding a publisher for your new novel.

Alberto Manguel
Reading Beyond the Grave

"There are people," Chateaubriand comments, "who, in the midst of the collapse of empires, visit fountains and gardens"

Alberto Manguel
In Praise of the Enemy

The epic genre suffers from disregard. To the Iliad, our new century has preferred the Odyssey: the encumbered return of the warrior matters more to us than his laborious swordplay.

Ira Wagman
The Self-Destruction of the CBC

The federal government recently announced it is reviewing the CBC’s mandate. This review is the latest chapter in a long story of questioning the value of the CBC since its inception seventy years ago. Clearly there are politics involved here; the CBC is an easy target for attack by parties of all stripes.

Alberto Manguel
Van Gogh’s Final Vision

Auvers-sur-Oise is a town of ghosts. Among the summer tourists and art-loving pilgrims who visit Auvers from all over the world, drift flocks of long-dead artists with folding easels and boxes of paints, who a century ago would disembark every week at the small railway station.

Alberto Manguel
Letter from France

For reasons I can't make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.

Alberto Manguel
Light and Dark

There are two big trees in my garden under which, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk, sometimes during the day, but usually at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhibited, wider-ranging, strangely more stimulating.

Alberto Manguel
Closing Time in the Gardens of the West

Cyril Connolly’s writings have been republished, as The Selected Works (Picador, 2002). I remember reading his work in my late adolescence and wondering how someone could write like that, in fragments and half-formed ideas, allowing his thoughts (and the reader’s) to go in a thousand directions at the same time, and yet lend his texts an overwhelming feeling of cohesiveness.

Alberto Manguel
Detective Samuel de Champlain

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

Alberto Manguel
Europeans

When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.

Alberto Manguel
Reading Up on War

Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was "to celebrate the genius of Mars." Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.

Alberto Manguel
Reading at a Time of Catastrophes

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

Stephen Henighan
Traitor’s Dirge

“Get it right,” Rob Allen told me. “You have no idea how few novels you will actually write in your life”

Alberto Manguel
Images of Work

Six days before the Passover festival in Bethany, the sisters Martha and Mary gave a dinner in honour of Jesus who (the gospels tell us) had raised their brother from the dead. Martha worked in the kitchen while Mary sat herself down at the feet of their guest, to listen to his words. Overwhelmed by the many tasks to be done, Martha asked her sister to come and help her. “Martha, Martha,” said Jesus. “You fret and fuss about many things, but only one thing is necessary. The part Mary has chosen is the best, and it will not be taken from her.”

James Baker
Get Your War On

In late May 2003 the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) hosted a discussion forum called Hell No: Designers and the War, featuring the design historian Steven Heller, the design icon Milton Glaser (perhaps most known for the “I Love NY” symbol

JILL MANDRAKE
Ghosts: True Tales of Eerie Encounters

The question that pops to mind as you read Ghosts: True Tales of Eerie Encounters (TouchWood) is, “Why does British Columbia house so many spooks?” Robert Belyk does not provide a specific answer, but he does say that ghosts are likelier to manifest

Daniel Francis
Gettysburg

I enjoyed Killer Angels so much that I pursued my Civil War studies by renting a video of Gettysburg, the made-for-TV movie based on the book. The movie clocks in at somewhere close to four hours, and you have to put up with a lot of famous American

Norbert Ruebsaat
Gentle Northern Summer

Recently I was thinking about the difference between Brecht's poetics and Rilke's. Brecht seems to be entirely ironic.... This conundrum came back to me when I read George Stanley's Gentle Northern Summer (New Star), which is a beautiful and powerful

Patty Osborne
Ghost Hotel

Ghost Hotel is the new mystery by Jackie Manthorne (gynergy books), first of what will be a series, and it features "Harriet Hubbley: down-to-earth dyke from Montreal." This story is a great window into the lesbian lifestyle, but not a really satisfy

Kris Rothstein
Girl Culture

Girl Culture (Chronicle/Raincoast) is a coffee table book that is both attractive and disturbing. Lauren Greenfield’s photographs document how American girls relate to fashion, culture and their bodies as they grow up in the most superficial society

Lara Jenny
Fuzzy Heads are Better

Fuzzy Heads are Better (106 Press) is a small, thick zine with a lovely woodblock print on the cover. Patti Young Kim subscribes to the punk DIY ethic of zine making, including found photos, recipes, receipts.

Derek Fairbridge
Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures

What is there to say about Glenn Gould that hasn’t already been said? Anyone who is interested in the subject is already familiar with the many mythologies surrounding this gangly, pill-popping agoraphobe who wore winter coats year-round and played t

Stephen Osborne
Gold Fools

Is it true that Gilbert Sorrentino has written a brilliant novel called Gold Fools (Green Integer), a story of grizzly prospectors and leathery cowpokes, entirely in questions?

Stephen Osborne
Going Ashore

Newly collected stories and memoirs from the great Mavis Gallant.

Stephen Osborne
Goin' Down the Road

The great Canadian road movie is finally on DVD. If you missed Goin’ Down the Road when it came out in 1970 and then disappeared, apparently forever, you can see it now for the first time, having heard about it all your life from friends who are more

Glenn Broughton
Girl's Guide to Giving Head

Re-entering the fray is a true original, Sheri-D Wilson, "action poet extraordinaire," whose work lurks on a jazzy playground of sex, glamour and intrigue—the frenzied visions of a James Bond girl. Her latest poetry collection cheekily entitled Girl'

Anna Trutch
Golden Goa

People who travel in India and return always sound amazed in retrospect at what they survived. In Golden Goa (ECW Press), Grant Buday makes the trip three times, cranky at what he has to endure on buses and trains—one of which is wrecked—but impresse

Kevin Barefoot
Graham Greene's Library

One of the April New Yorkers contains a wonderful piece by Robert McCrum on Graham Greene's library, an archive to be coveted not for its size (a mere 3000 volumes) or its variety (from Planet of the Apes to Sanctum Jesu Christi Evangelium, a gift fr

Eve Corbel
Grace Hartman: A Woman for Her Time

Grace Hartman: A Woman for Her Time by Susan Crean (New Star) is a biography, a political history and a page-turner of a story all in one. Hartman (1918-I993) went to work as a secretary for the Township of North York in the 1950s to help support her

Stephen Osborne
Gospel, A Poem

Stephen Scobie's Gospel, A Poem had the invigorating effect of making me want to read poetry again: the book is a beautiful object and not at all precious, and the poetry, a visitation of the Gospels, is simply wonderful. You want to read it out loud

Patty Osborne
Goodbye Buffalo Bay

A memoir of Loyie's youth spent at a Native residential school and his struggle to find a community.

Kris Rothstein
Great Granny Webster

In Caroline Blackwood’s slim novel Great Granny Webster (NYRB), set in Britain in the 1940s, a teenage girl is sent to live with her great-grandmother in a lifeless Victorian mansion near Brighton. Sea air has been recommended for her anemia, but the

Jill Boettger
Habitat

Sue Wheeler’s new book of poems, Habitat (Brick Books), which I read on the brink of winter in Alberta, took me back to a time I lived on the west coast of B.C., where winter was listless and wet, none of this chinook then snow, chinook then snow I’v

Michael Hayward
Guernica Editions’ Writers Series

Guernica Editions’ Writers Series was started in the year 2000, and to date twenty-two Canadian writers have been profiled, P.K. Page, Alistair MacLeod and Don McKay among them.

Sarah Leavitt
Grey

When Judy MacDonald spoke about her writing recently in Vancouver, she fascinated her audience with glimpses into how her mind works and the weird angle from which she observes the world. She describes herself as a magpie, someone who collects her ma

Mandelbrot
Greg Curnoe: Life and Stuff

The Greg Curnoe show at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Greg Curnoe: Life and Stuff), which ran from March until June 2001, was a wonderful chance to see the work of an artist committed to finding out everything about everything. Curnoe continues to be a

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Hanna's Daughters

My grandmother's picture stares down from the wall. She is very young and newly sexual. After reading Hanna’s Daughters (Orion), I thought this woman might exist in me.

Daniel Francis
Haida Monumental Art

Without any doubt the most important event of the 1994 publishing year is the re-appearance of George F. MacDonald's definitive study, Haida Monumental Art (UBC Press).

Geist Staff
Hard Core Logo

Hard Core Logo, by Michael Turner (Arsenal Pulp), is first a rock 'n' roll book, second an irrepressibly Canadian rock 'n' roll book, and third a book about how the present turns irrevocably into the past. Reading it I am much reminded of—of all thin