Into the Continentby Emily McGiffinPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9780889779891 I wasn’t sure how to begin Emily McGiffin’s poetry collection, Into the Continent, with its similar but opposite-side-up covers, front and back, and a Page 1 at either end. On one cover, a bayonetted rifle on a creamy background. On the other, a “Big Old Axe” against the same. As I chose a side (the rifle) to start my reading, I hoped I’d find the answer to why the book—praised by Jan Zwicky and Tim Lilburn—was structured thus. What is McGiffin, author of Between Dusk and Night and Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics, metaphorically saying with this either way-ness and dramatic images? What I do know is that the University of Regina’s Oksana Poetry & Poetics book series, of which this book’s a part, concerns titles that “[probe] discussions of poetry’s cultural role”. I mined the internet and learned that the author/academic’s work “concerns the interplay of extractivism, empire, and expressive arts,” and she self-describes as “a multidisciplinary environmental humanities scholar researching arts, extraction, and environmental justice”. Currently a Research Fellow at University College London, she’s also studied and…

Back Home: A Poetry Collectionby Jesse A. MurrayPublished by Off the Field PublishingReview by Toby A. Welch  $14.99 ISBN 9781777591304 Poetry. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I want to love it as I value the idea and the beauty of it. The dance of the words on the page and in my mind is melodious. But I usually end up disliking it, getting bored before I get more than a dozen pages into a book of poetry. But that was not a problem with Back Home. I devoured each poem and was bummed out when I turned the last page. Poetry is challenging for me as it can be monotonous. Page after page of six or eight lines, all of them a similar length and tone. That did not happen in Back Home, which I found refreshing. Some poems were in paragraph format, some were just a line or two. Most were somewhere in between with almost all of them coming in at one page or less. The variety, length, and style of Murray’s poems kept things spicy. I tried to pick a favourite poem, but that was impossible to do. Two of the ones I loved best had similar titles…

Wrack Lineby M.W. JaegglePublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9780889779532 It’s a rare and wondrous thing when, while reading a poetry collection, I start conceiving poems in my own mind. Vancouver-born M.W. Jaeggle’s highly distilled first book of poetry, Wrack Line, has done that for me, and I feel indebted. This is a poet who looks and listens to the world around him at one already rare level, then amps his senses to an even higher plane. One cannot help but tumble under the spells he ingeniously casts with his poems about shorelines, wind, creatures, solitude, silence, loss, and guilt, and then you look away from the page, reflect upon his finely-crafted lines, and realize you’ve surfaced—as if from the sea—into gentle sunlight. M.W. (Michael) Jaeggle is presently a PhD student in the Department of English at SUNY Buffalo, but the book’s title, elegant cover (northern acorn barnacles set against a creamy background) and the poems within strongly suggest that his heart remains on Canada’s west coast: a “wrack line” refers to the ecologically-critical organic material (including seaweed and seagrasses) left on the shore by wind, waves and tides. It also includes less desirable debris,…

The Star Poems: A Cree Sky Narrative/acâhkos nikamowini-pîkiskwêwina: nêhiyawi-kîsik âcimowin”by Jesse Rae Archibald-BarberPublished by Your Nickel’s Worth PublishingReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$24.95 ISBN 9781778690174 It’s innovative, bilingual, and gives us another kind of Genesis. The Star Poems: A Cree Sky Narrative/acâhkos nikamowini-pîkiskwêwina: nêhiyawi-kîsik âcimowin is a Cree/English poetry collection by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, a Regina writer, editor and professor of Indigenous Literatures at the First Nations University of Canada. Archibald-Barber has ingeniously combined traditional Indigenous creation stories—The Star stories—with quantum physics, and the result is a star-studded collection of eye-opening poems. The author essentially contemporizes Cree oral tradition stories (that “teach us how we are all related to Creation through the same source of energy and spirit”) by spinning them into poems that merge with the “spiritual and scientific understandings of the cosmos and the quantum foundations of reality”. He cites Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear’s talk on quantum physics and Indigenous spirituality as a major inspiration, particularly Little Bear’s discussion on “how the quantum superstrings are what Indigenous cultures have traditionally called spirit”. He also laud’s Cree educator Wilfred Buck’s video, “Legend of the Star People,” which describes the “Hole-in-the-Sky—a ‘spatial anomaly’ or a ‘wormhole’ that leads to and…

2 Women 2 Generations 26 Poemsby Sheri HathawayWelcome Home PublishingReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$13.19 ISBN 9781738822348 I like to be surprised. Upon receiving the slim poetry collection 2 Women 2 Generations 26 Poems by Saskatoon’s Sheri Hathaway, I noted the book’s short, back cover description: “This is a mother-daughter project containing verse from two women of very different pasts,” and I fully expected that Hathaway—a grandmother of eight—had collaborated with a daughter on this collection of prairie-based poems. I was wrong. This book actually features the work of Hathaway and her mother, Louise (McLean) Hathaway, a former teacher who experienced the Great Depression and World War II. The elder poet died in 2009. Her daughter explains that she “didn’t know [her] mother wrote any poems,” but Sheri discovered them after her mother’s death “In her boxes of books, papers, photos and diaries”. Another surprise: both poets had published work in local publications. The book mostly features Sheri Hathaway’s work; eight poems were penned by her mother, one of which, “Heart Cry,” is a fine example of showing emotion, rather than stating it. It begins: “Snow covers all./The brown mound of cloggy earth,/Our spray of mums,/gold, russet, and bronze for October,/The…

Wounded Hearts Take a Chanceby Debbie QuigleyPublished by Endless Sky BooksReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$9.99 ISBN 9781989398722 Wounded Hearts Take A Chance is an attractive book with a positive message: women can recover from intense heartbreak and love again. Written by Debbie Quigley, a “retired healthcare worker” who writes “simple and real” poetry in what she calls her “whisper-art form,” this 28-page softcover is a poetic self-help read for those “whose wounded hearts have been shattered into pieces, those who are afraid to take a chance on loving another man”. Across pages topped with light floral graphics, Quigley unfolds the narrative of a woman who has been “Keeping walls around her heart” and “Drying her own tears,” but, she writes, “Gazing at the stars at night” and “Holding a warm hand” are what “We all want,” and she encourages the reader to “Let someone in [their] life!”. The thirteen free verse poems are ordered chronologically as a new relationship blossoms, beginning with a “first-glance attraction” that results in a dinner date. After this, “Exhilarated excitement enters her focus/Words of trust being built/Each word a brick of trust/Bringing her to the point of slowly tearing down the walls/around her heart”. Once…

The Foxholes at the Borders of Sofa Cushionsby Counce BramptonPublished by Your Nickel’s Worth PublishingReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9781988783994 They say it’s about the journey, not the reward. In the literary world, the reward might be considered the publication of a book. For Saskatoon poet Counce Brampton, a “quiet observer of life” who’s lived most of his adulthood in a group home (as a result of OCD and other mental health issues), my sense is that it’s always been about the journey, yet his first poetry collection, The Foxholes at the Borders of Sofa Cushions, has been published, and it opens with a generous introduction by his friend and mentor, internationally-revered writer Yann Martel. Martel began meeting with Brampton when the former was serving as writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library twenty years ago. The Life of Pi author quickly gleaned that Brampton wasn’t seeking “editorial guidance but affirmation and validation”. Martel continues to provide that today, and explains that “This book is the result of a wish to safeguard what is essentially Counce Brampton’s life work, the mark he will leave”. Interestingly, the poems appear next to images of their first incarnations, handprinted in Brampton’s coiled notebook….

The History Forestby Michael TrusslerPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9780889778948 Books by multi-genre writer and University of Regina professor of English Michael Trussler make a mark. Take The Sunday Book, a nonfiction title that garnered two awards in the 2023 Saskatchewan Book Awards. Take The History Forest, the poetry collection for which Trussler earned the Poetry Award in the same provincial competition. An admirable trifecta. I read the latter slowly, and twice: it’s dense, philosophical, apocalyptic, and often surreal, and I didn’t always know how to navigate it—something like walking through a forest under the cape of night. To read Trussler is to have one’s mind stretched; I even remembered things I’d forgotten, ie: The Twinkie Defence. This dexterous poet quotes myriad poets and writers; references artworks and philosophers; and had me regularly Googling (ie: Panpyschism; Ordovician; ekistics; hand-wrestler Candy Pain; Zen monk, Kenkō). Even the line and stanza breaks kept me guessing in this experimental book. In Trussler’s poetic universe, a strong sense of humanity’s vulnerability pervades—and the sturdy conviction that we’ve doomed ourselves. There’s a “gasoline haze/above the playground” and “peripatetic plastic straws/washed up on the sand,” will “last far longer than…

Phasesby Belinda BetkerPublished by Shadowpaw Press RepriseReview by Michelle Shaw$17.99 ISBN 9781989398449 Phases, a debut poetry collection by Saskatoon poet Belinda Betker, beautifully captures the stages and transformations of one woman’s life. It unravels like a journey that begins in childhood and culminates in the “triumphant release of coming out and the liberating power of drag.” Along the way Belinda reflects on stereotypes, conformity and society’s expectations. She captures distinct moments in time with an exquisite touch and an often-soul penetrating choice of words. And while one’s instinctive response is to read it as memoir, Belinda notes that not all the poems are strictly autobiographical. I marvelled at the accuracy of her descriptions and the accessibility and emotional intensity of her words. The book is divided into four sections, each describing a particular lunar phase. I was so fascinated by the terms: Saros Cycle, Grazing Occultation, Perigee Syzygy and Orbital Eccentricity, that of course I had to look them up. The explanations gave such an added dimension to the poems in each section, which I imagine was Belinda’s intent. As I’m sure each definition is open to interpretation, I encourage you to look them up yourself! I also learned a…

a beautiful rebellionby Rita BouvierPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9781771872348 I took an extended pause before opening a beautiful rebellion, the fourth poetry collection by Saskatoon’s Rita Bouvier. The Métis writer and educator grew up beside the Churchill River, and the cover photo of a forceful river flowing between forested banks before a backdrop of white sky is immensely effective. To me, the scene says: Yes, this is the answer to all that ails us. This is holy. Indeed, a sense of reverence permeates much of the work in this moving and intimate collection, with its odes to jack pine, bear, the moon, aunties and other relatives, and “feathery snowflakes/whirling down from the heavens above”. One of my favourite pieces, “holy, holy, holy,” ingeniously juxtaposes “waves crashing against the rocky shoreline” with “God/reaching in and then out again”. Bouvier’s narrator in “daylight thief at Amigos Café” watches the other patrons-including a dancing child-and considers herself “a thief … in broad daylight/stealing the sacred … all around me.” This careful poet continually turns to the natural world for restoration and peace as she considers colonialism, patriarchy, “the murky waters of truth and reconciliation,” climate change and the…