Like
Reviews
A collection of recent Reviews in EVENT
Issue 39-3
Non-Fiction - Heather Birrell
Naomi Beth Wakan, Book Ends: A Year Between the Covers, Poplar Press, 2010
Betsy Warland, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing, Cormorant Books, 2010
Clem Martini and Olivier Martini, Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness, Freehand Books, 2010
Although very different in approach, all three of these non-fiction works investigate the ways we shape ourselves through narrative, and explore the means by which the very act of storytelling can save us.
Click here to read the full review!
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 itstitle from a poem written by John Sinclair, a Detroit-based activistwriting in the mid-sixties: ‘stay tuned to the paper radio for morenews as it happens.’ The line itself appears as an epigraph to Rogers’sown poem written, ostensibly, to the same police officer who hadmultiple run-ins with Sinclair and who eventually arrested him. Thispoem, ‘Another Poem for Warner Stringfellow,’ and the epigraph thatprecedes it, seem to me a good place to appreciate what’s characteristicallybest about this difficult collection.
Click here to read the full review!
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 OanaAvasilichioaei. 'O' as in the open mouth, the pin on the map. O wherethe itch is. O where it hurts. O as in the little fence it makes aroundthe vast, blue sky on the cover. 'O.,' the fictional E.M. writes toward theend (the beginning?) of O Resplandor, 'if only I could detain time.'
Click here to read the full review!
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 timepost-Freudian quirky in David Derry’s Sentimental Exorcisms collection.Perhaps it’s the denseness and meticulousness of the characterscombined with their just-on-the-edge neurotic behaviour. Orit might be the combination of an underlying-but-undefined justiceand a never-can-tell randomness that somehow manages to punishthese characters not for doing the wrong thing but for daring to openthemselves up, for daring to take chances based on those quasineuroses.
Click here to read the full review!
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 firstsentence of The Go-Between (1953) by L.P. Hartley: ‘The past is a foreigncountry: they do things differently there.’ The strangeness of thepast is fruitful territory for writers who are interested in how peoplecan be shaped over time by specific events beyond their control; itis especially fruitful for novelists convinced that accurate memorieswell understood are the best bulwark against personal fragmentation.Like Hartley, both Antonia Banyard and Lydia Kwa create characterswho are compelled to examine painful incidents in their pastsin light of their mature experiences.
Click here to read the full review!
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 willput forward an inventive ultra-short manuscript as a 'sorbet piece,'a palate cleanser between other works lined up for publication inupcoming issues. The collected short-fiction works by Stuart Rossin 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 ofthe anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence;and a writer of six collections of poetry, two collaborative novels, aprevious collection of short fiction and a collection of essays, Confessionsof a Small Press Racketeer.
There are 23 very short works in Buying Cigarettes for the Dog andeach is a strange, self-contained world. Unifying the collection is abeguiling expansive feeling created through narrators who appearto relish the art of storytelling. Ross engineers a general looseningof temporal markers so that his characters seem suspended outsidethe world of the ticking clock. He also finds Beckett-inspired absurdityin 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 transportedto other places and times—17th-century England, in the caseof Sweatman’s novel, and Depression-era Winnipeg, in Tregebov’s.These settings, however, are only starting points for narratives asgeographically wide-ranging as they are thematically broad in scope.And while The Players is arguably more challenging—in some waysless accessible than The Knife Sharpener’s Bell—readers will gleanfrom both novels the kind of fraught satisfaction that defines memorablyfine 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 mydoubts, saying to myself, ‘I hate butter and I’m not all that crazyabout cream, so this book starts off with two strikes against it.’ Butthis is a case of literally not judging a book by its cover. Or perhapsa case of making sure to read the fine print in the subtitle: ‘A Yearin a Montreal Pastry School.’ In fact, by the time I got to ‘fin’ 250pages later, I realized I had undergone a thoroughly enjoyable (andeducational) experience, not to mention a much greater appreciationof all those pastry-chefs-in-waiting who aspire to creating the crèmecaramel 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 toset their sights on the condition described in the Zbigniew Herbertepigraph that opens the book: ‘At last the fidelity of things opens oureyes.’ That is, a thing entirely absorbed in its own being gives us anawareness of the thing as other than us; in this way it provides theclearest reflection of the human being as witness, language user, andactively conscious mind. A yearning to see things clearly permeatesthis 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 inthe service of moments of clarity that continue to perfect themselvesupon further reading.
Click here to read the full review!DARREN BIFFORD currently lives in Toronto.
HEATHER BIRRELL is the author of two story collections, I know you are but what am I? and Mad Hope. Her work has been honoured with the Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction and has been shortlisted for both National and Western Magazine Awards.
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 Professorin Critical Studies at UBC-Okanaganin Kelowna, BC. She is the authorof Kalyna’s Song (Coteau, 2003) andLeaving Shadows: Literature in Englishby Canada’s Ukrainians (U of APress, 2005). Her research and teachingfocuses on Canadian literature,with emphasis on minoritized Canadianwriters.
MICHAEL MIROLLA is the author of thenovel Berlin and two short-story collections:The Formal Logic of Emotionand 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 havetaken ownership of iconic Canadianpublishing house, Guernica Editions.
NICK THRAN is the author of onepoetry collection, Every InadequateName (Insomniac, 2006). A secondcollection, Earworm, will appear in2011 with Nightwood Editions. Hecurrently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
HILARY TURNER teaches English atthe University of the Fraser Valley.
