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dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Anson Ching
the universal human

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

Michael Hayward
Getting past the past

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

Daniel Francis
writing from an early grave

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

Eimear Laffan
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

Michael Hayward
The peripatetic poet

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

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

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Sailing the roaring forties

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

rob mclennan
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Michael Hayward
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Peggy Thompson
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

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

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

Michael Hayward
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
The messy back of history

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

Christine Lai
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

Sara de Waal
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Peggy Thompson
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Championing Trees

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

Patty Osborne
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Ian Roy
My Body Is a Wonderland

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

Peggy Thompson
A moment with holden

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

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.

MARY MEIGS
Off- and On-Camera

Out on the set, except for the fact that there is always someone to catch us if we stumble, or someone to set up folding chairs for us between scenes, we are beneficiaries of the semi that denies the passing of clock-time. There is nothing to remind

MARY MEIGS
Being in the Company of Strangers

Our film is a semi-documentary. We are ourselves, up to a point; beyond this point is the "semi," a region with boundaries that become more or less imprecise, according to our view of them. In one sense, it is semi from beginning to end, for we would

Patty Osborne
Beyond Recall

Patty Osborne reviews a collection of journal entries, correspondence and other writings produced by Mary Meigs during the last years of her life.

J. Jill Robinson
One Night at the Oceanview

Did that really happen? J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.

Life in Language

For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen helped to revive forgotten languages for many Aboriginal groups along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Read their story here.

Daniel Francis
Red Scare

The Bolshevists are coming! The Bolshevists are coming! Daniel Francis recounts Canada's close call with a revolution.

Stephen Henighan
Third World Canada

Stephen Henighan compares the chaotic sprawl of "Third World" societies to the degradation of Canada's political, social and physical landscape.

Daniel Francis
Double Life

The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.

Michał Kozłowski
Boomtown

L.B. Foote fled Newfoundland to avoid life as a cod fisherman and became Winnipeg's best-known photographer, chronicling Boomtown's growth, energy and struggles.

Sarah Leavitt
3 Girls

Sarah Leavitt is more than just a clever cartoonist; she also paints pictures with her colourful prose.

M.A.C. Farrant
Notes on the Wedding

The mother of the groom measures the distance between two weddings: twenty-six years, six thousand miles, and a donkey covered with flowers. It’s outtasight.

Robert Everett-Green
The Main

Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.

Bill MacDonald
An Ounce of Civet

Dinner with James Reaney—poet, playwright, professor—who is mistaken by a pair of Irish ladies for “that decadent writer Mordecai Richler.”

DAVID COLLIER
Happy Hearts

A series of lucky events seemed to conspire to bring me to Stettler, Alberta, one day in June 1998. Jennifer, the woman who was in between being my roommate and my girlfriend, was at the Banff Centre and I was on my way there from Saskatoon, where we lived. She had left me fifty dollars for gas so I could pick her up after her workshop, and I had accepted, hoping that when the time came I wouldn’t need it and I could give it back. I did need it, of course. I had been waiting for a cheque to come from the Globe and Mail for one of a series of drawings I was doing for them, and when it was time to leave, the cheque still hadn’t arrived. So I set out from Saskatoon with just a tank of gas and the fifty dollars.

Patrick Lane
Natural History

It started with a note I found tucked into an anthology of poems edited by Selden Rodman, a book I opened rarely, though there was a time when I was young I had read it so closely and so many times I had most of the poems memorized. The note lay in the spine of the book against a poem of Arthur Rimbaud's titled, I think, "The Twelve-Year-Old Poet." On it are four names printed out in my sure and youthful twenty-one-year-old hand: Baghdad, Koweit, Sakakah, Jaffa.

M.A.C. Farrant
Attila the Bookseller

I answered the ad: SWM likes to dance. Called him up (said his name was Jay), suggested we meet at the local cafe Tuesday night, something different, a performance poet performing. Free coffee and cookies, the place rocking with middle-aged angst.

Bart Campbell
The Real Woman

And then I remembered an important event. It happened at a funeral in St. Paul’s chapel for a twenty-four-year-old prostitute who had overdosed in her Gastown hotel room. The small chapel was half full, and very quiet. There were a couple of fresh flower arrangements in front of the cheap, closed coffin. Most of the congregation were other prostitutes dressed in their working clothes, and a few pimps. One woman apologized to Brother Tim for having nothing black to wear, except for lingerie and a leather miniskirt.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Burma Media Event

Once while living in Burma (now Myanmar), Goran Simic and his brother, whose father was the Serbian ambassador, were stopped by rebels on their way to the international school in Yangon. They were hauled out of their diplomatic Mercedes limousine and forced at gunpoint to witness the beheading, at the side of the road, of a uniformed Myanmar government official.

Edith Iglauer
Sitting on Water

During my thirty years living on the waterfront of British Columbia, I have always had some sort of container in which to sit on the water. My first boat was a ten-foot dinghy that my late husband John Daly, a commercial salmon troller, equipped with a small electric motor to surprise me. He had the bizarre idea that I, a sometime canoeist from Ohio, could manoeuvre a boat on my own around our capacious Pacific coast harbour. The electric engine would be ideal for me, he thought. No rope to pull to start it up! No gasoline tank on board!

MARY MEIGS
Freewriting

Mary Meigs and her friend Lise Weil, editor of Beyond Recall, met regularly to do freewriting together. For each exercise they chose a line or phrase from the work of a poet they both admired; then, inspired by that "prompt," both women wrote for five or ten minutes, recording whatever came to mind (and hand).

Daniel Francis
Re-hanging the National Wallpaper

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

Robert Hunter
Launching Greenpeace

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

Stephen Osborne
How Insensitive

Prurience or Voyeurism? One of the other anyway (more thematic convergence): this time it was How Insensitive, Russell Smith’s first novel (Porcupine’s Quill) the cover of which is emblazoned with black and white photographs of three young women in v

Carra Noelle Simpson
How to Save the World in Your Spare Time

Both nature and nurture must have inspired Elizabeth May in her book How to Save the World in Your Spare Time (Key Porter). May is the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada; she is also the daughter of Stephanie Middleton May, an activist w

Geist Staff
How Stories Mean

How Stories Mean (Porcupine's Quill), a collection of essays on Canadian fiction edited by John Metcalf and Tim Struthers, is a good example of the blue box approach to book-making: almost everything in it is recycled. At least 39 of the 47 essays co

Patty Osborne
How to Become a Monster

How does an ordinary guy who loves to cook, and who goes out of his way to produce meals using locally grown organic meat and vegetables for the loggers he is cooking for, become a war criminal? In Jean Barbes How to Become a Monster, translated by P

Sam Macklin
I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity

Attention-grabbing fact: ninety-nine percent of “serious” writing about “popular” music is one hundred percent useless. One reason for this is an ingrained belief that the social significance of the entertainment industry is more interesting than any

Rose Burkoff
How to Ruin a Summer Vacation

Amy Nelson is a privileged Chicago teen who doesn’t know anything about Israel or about being Jewish. Simone Elkeles’s young adult novel, How to Ruin a Summer Vacation (Flux), describes what happens when Amy’s Israeli father, who has stayed out of he

Patty Osborne
How to Tell Your Children About the Holocaust

I wish Ruth Mandel’s book How to Tell Your Children About the Holocaust (McGilligan) had a more lyrical title to match the poetry of the short pieces in this beautiful book because I almost didn’t read it.

JILL MANDRAKE
I, Shithead: A Life in Punk

I, Shithead: A Life in Punk (Arsenal Pulp Press), Joey Keithley’s rock memoir, shows how an apparently destructive restlessness, amidst the musical malaise of the ’70s, can be turned into something for the greater good. “We’re not looking for a riot,

Shannon Emmerson
Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media

During a heated CBC Radio discussion about one of these trends—chronic fatigue syndrome, and whether it is a "real" or psychogenic illness—both callers and panelists were emotional and argumentative, straining the usually fair, thoughtful CBC Radio s

Kris Rothstein
How the Blessed Live

In Susannah M. Smith’s How the Blessed Live (Coach House), Lucy and Levi are twins who grow up motherless on an island in Lake Ontario.

Kris Rothstein
I, Curmudgeon

I found an answer at another film, Alan Zweig’s I, Curmudgeon. Zweig, a Canadian director, is known for his documentary Vinyl, which delved into the strange world of obsessive record collectors.

Rose Burkoff
I'll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers

In her memoir I’ll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers (McClelland & Stewart), Anne Coleman examines the trajectory of her life as a young woman in the 1950s.

Mandelbrot
Iceman Is Website

In March 2006, on CBC Radio, As It Happens interviewed a man in Sweden who composes music to be performed on instruments made of ice. Then they played some of the music, which was indeed icy and tinkly, and the strings (was that a harp?) were vibrato

Stephen Osborne
Icefields

Two books full of ice and snow: Icefields (NeWest) by Thomas Wharton, and Smilla's Sense of Snow (Doubleday) by Peter Hoeg. Peter Hoeg's sense of snow is utterly convincing: his book had me shivering in August (I actually took to reading it under the

Geist Staff
I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions

Wendy Kaminer's I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (Random House-Vintage) took a lot of heat when it first came out. No wonder!

Kris Rothstein
I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity

In between films I read Hal Niedzviecki’s new book, Hello I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity (Penguin). It was inspired by the author’s crisis of faith in underground culture, precipitated by a Hallmark card reading “Happy Birth

Patty Osborne
In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States

In Her Own Words: Women's Memoirs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada & the United States (Vintage), edited by Jill Ker Conway, is a book that invites browsing. All twelve of the memoirs here are excerpts of longer works, so many of the paragraphs en

Geist Staff
In a Glass House

The critics have not been kind to Nino Ricci's new novel, In A Glass House (M&S), and we had hoped to be in disagreement with them. But generally the critics are right: there is a flatness in this book not to be found in The Lives of the Saints, desp

Sewid-Smith Daisy
In Beautiful Disguises

A few weeks ago when I was knocked flat with the flu and afflicted with squinty, puffy eyes and a foggy brain, I looked for light, fun books that wouldn’t put too much of a strain on my system, and I found them in a far-east drama, a tale of reincarn

Daniel Francis
In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

David Reynolds, a historian, explains how Churchill did it in his own book, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Allen Lane).

Kris Rothstein
In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

Carl Honoré isn’t the first author to investigate the phenomenon of slow living, but his book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed (Vintage Canada) is the most comprehensive explanation of recent attention to s

Patty Osborne
In Season

When a friend gave me a copy of the CD In Season by Freddie Stone (Unity Records) she warned me that it was a bit odd. The main instrument on this CD is a flugelhorn—which looks to be what you would get if you heated up a trumpet, stretched it out, a

Patty Osborne
In Search of Paradise

I took one look at the cover of In Search of Paradise by Susan Gabori (McGill-Queen's) and put it right back on the shelf. The abstract landscape on the cover looks static and barren so I thought this would be a book without people.

Stephen Osborne
In My Brother’s Shadow

Timm was two years old when his big brother Karl-Heinz, who was eighteen, joined the Death’s Head Division and went to the front in Ukraine. His only memory of Karl-Heinz appears on the first page of In My Brother’s Shadow, translated by Anthea Bell

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

Stephen Henighan
Not Reading

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

Stephen Henighan
Plague

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far

On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.

George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

Helen Godolphin
Field Guide to North America

You could take the Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America (Pedlar Press) into the woods, but this guidebook, written by Rangers Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, is just as suitable for reading in bed. In fact, under the cove

Shannon Emmerson
Ferry Woman's History of the World

I wish I could say that I finished Ferry Woman's History of the World (Coteau) by Susan Andrews Grace on the ferry ride home, but I didn't. This is a wonderful book, full of Celtic history, the speaker's childhood, her confrontations with Jesus, and

Lily Gontard
Finish Me

Lily Gontard reviews One Day (Hodder & Staughton), David Nicholls's novel about a decades-long friendship.

Lily Gontard
Finding Farley

Lily Gontard reviews the Farley Mowat-inspired film, Finding Farley (National Film Board).

Sarah Leavitt
Fingersmith

Sarah Waters’s novel pulls the reader into the gritty, dangerous world of mid-nineteenth-century London, where the petty thieves are known as fingersmiths.

Ann Diamond
Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House

Barbara Olson, author of The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House (Regnery), died aboard Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, therefore, she does not have to account for the no

Mandelbrot
Flesh and Bone

Flesh and Bone (with Meg Ryan, James Caan and that handsome guy whose name I keep forgetting) had been sitting for months in New Arrivals at the local video purveyor's and no one ever seemed to pick it up. Feeling more than usually desperate last wee

Blaine Kyllo
Firefly

Now that Buffy is over, Whedon has but one TV program to work on: Angel. Which is all the more sad because he had created the best thing to hit television in years: Firefly. That show starred Nathan Fillion (born in Edmonton) as Captain Malcolm Reyno

Floating Voice

Two recent books nicely illustrate, for me, the disturbing state of contemporary publishing. The first book, Hemingway: The Toronto Years (Doubleday) by William Burrill, a Toronto journalist, is a handsome example of the book-making art.... The secon

Geist Staff
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down

When Thoreau remarked that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, he must have been reading David Adams Richards. For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (McClelland & Stewart) is Richards' latest novel, continuing his examination of life as it is l

Geist Staff
For Men Who Dream of Lolita

For Men Who Dream of Lolita (Coteau Books) is Kim Morrissey's retelling of Nabokov's story from Lolita's point of view in a series of linked poems.

Kris Rothstein
Forbidden Lie$

Forbidden Lie$ tells the story of Norma Khouri, who shot to fame when her book, Forbidden Love, became a bestseller. The book claimed to tell the story of Khouri’s best friend, who was murdered by her own family because she dated a man of a different

Kris Rothstein
It Is Bliss Here: Letters Home 1939

For Myles Hildyard, a British aristocrat, the Second World War was an adventure like no other. He joined a local military unit in the late 1930s and saw action throughout the entire war, stationed in the Middle East, North Africa, Crete and western E

Stephen Osborne
Istanbul: Memories and the City

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City, translated by Maureen Freely (Knopf), presents Istanbul as a palimpsest in which can be read the fading traces of empires Christian and Muslim, of childhood, and of a European gaze that once contemplated

Eve Corbel
Issue 2 Endnotes

In Geist No. 1, I reviewed a handful of Canadian publishers’ catalogues.

Kris Rothstein
Forever

Forever is a Dutch film made by the experienced documentarian Heddy Honigmann. Its subject is Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris but its scope includes life and death, history and memory, art and beauty.

Shannon Emmerson
jacks: a gothic gospel

In the note accompanying Geist's copy of jacks: a gothic gospel (Livres DC Books), the book's author Anne Stone recommends it for review, or for "hanging out on a coffee table as an orange object." And, although it is a lovely orange object, jacks is

Patty Osborne
Jeannie and the Gentle Giants

In Jeannie and the Gentle Giants by Luanne Armstrong (Ronsdale), Jeannie is a young city girl who ends up in a foster home in the countryside near Kelowna, B.C., and the gentle giants are two enormous work horses named Sally and Sebastien who help Je

Carrie Villeneuve
Jesus Christ: The Lost Years

The two actors shared the portrayal of Jesus as well as playing the other characters, including Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, Elvis and the three wise men—with a versatility and energy that contributed to a unique and very funny show.

Mandelbrot
Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition

Mandelbrot reviews Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition (Phaidon).

Carra Noelle Simpson
Josh Ritter

On February 22, 2007, the folk singer-songwriter Josh Ritter stepped on stage at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, played three songs and said little more than “I’m excited to be here.” Uh-oh, I thought. After a few songs he absorbed the warm glow

Patricia Holmes
Karenin Sings the Blues

Many of the poems in Sharon McCartney’s second book, Karenin Sings the Blues, have won national competitions and been published in literary magazines, and so set the standard and tone for the rest of this fine collection. The book is presented in thr

Michael Hayward
Just Kids

Long before Patti Smith became “the Godmother of Punk” she was a not- atypical teenager of the 1960s, living with her parents in suburban New Jersey.

Patty Osborne
Justa

Justa by Bridget Moran is another great book—this time I'm typesetting it, and I almost never read books that I typeset But I found myself reading sections while waiting for other sections to print, and I could tell it was going to be a good one. Jus

Eve Corbel
Kafka

Mairowitz and Crumb’s Kafka, meanwhile, opens with a horrifying drawing of one of Franz K’s many grisly fantasies of his own death—a pork butcher’s cleaver hacking off neat slices from his head.