Riot Lung by Leah Horlick Published by Thistledown Press (New Leaf Series) Review by Justin Dittrick $9.95 ISBN 978-1-927068-08-3 Leah Horlick’s debut collection of poems, Riot Lung, offers its readers an inspired celebration of urban and small town experience that will perplex, transfix, enlighten, but also move, those coming of age in a radical time. Most of the poems (except one) are written in the confessional mode, that is, in the second-person. The poems are highly evocative, written with a keen eye for imagery and with a rhythm and free stanza structure that the poet has made her own. The range of subjects varies widely, from sex education in a Saskatchewan town to what the lights in St. Louis reveal in a transient moment of wishing. The poems in this collection demonstrate the complexity of feeling that the confessional poem can bring to those with a longing for life in their poetry. The poems blossom with the senses, with breaks that seldom truncate their line, but rather, extend an image’s duration and resonance. This causes the poems to flow without breath, without an inclination to pause or withhold. Yet, the poetic is somehow controlled. The images are free to arise…

Bone Sense by Laurie Lynn Muirhead Published by Thistledown Press Review by Catherine Fuchs $9.95 ISBN 978-1-927068-07-6 Bone Sense grabs the reader right from the start. Laurie Lynn Muirhead’s poetry is voiced in a rich texture of metaphors in an up-close and frank look at life on a cattle ranch. Laurie Lynn Muirhead tells her story through poetry as she weaves words with an unvarnished truth about the hard life of a rancher’s wife. She rolls out of her “warm dry bed” and takes you along on her early morning walks to the dugout as she begins a long day of daily chores and obligations. Ms. Muirhead’s poetry has the ability to touch all the senses. You can feel the frost on your skin and hear the coyotes howl in the dark as they wait to steal new life from the weak. Author Laurie Lynn Muirhead ranches in Shellbrook, Saskatchewan and she writes her poetry between the calving, the slaughtering, the 4H Fund Raiders and auctions. You will follow her story in poetry as it unfolds through the seasons. Ranching life is certainly not a life for the faint-hearted, but the poetic telling of the tale is for everyone who…

Grid by Brenda Schmidt Published by Hagios Press Review by Justin Dittrick $17.95 ISBN 978-192671013-6 There is a moment in Brenda Schmidt’s latest collection of poems, in which the speaker invokes the melodious sing-along of nursery rhyme: Cinderella dressed in white Went downstairs to say goodnight. Made a blunder. Too far under. How many shovels make it right? “None”, the speaker interjects, “The going is slow, conditions poor, traffic/steady. There’s a shovel in every trunk.” In this poem, called “Too Far”, acute observation is combined with commentary that is, at times, humorous and, at other times, distressing. The verses are fragmented, while the images mutate from the wild into the mundane, as though the poem stands interrupted in the collection, as an abandoned nature documentary. Yet, still, it belongs, with a marvelous image of a window onto the world of the poem: “Where in hell/is the scraper? I use my nails./Through the scratch marks/the forest resembles a bit of parsley/left on the cutting board.” That poem feels like a digression, and a telling one. In Grid, moments are approached in their apparent stability only to be swept away in song rife with interruption and fresh stimuli, lending a new perspective….

Glacial Erratics by Peter Sarsfield and Kim Mann Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Sandy Bonny $ 19.95 ISBN 378-1-894431-72-9 A current of migration compels this partnership of poems and pictures from writer Peter Sarsfield and photographer Kim Mann — the book captures animals in movement, seasons in change, and landscapes etched by shadows that, with the lift of a page, allude to lengthening and contraction. Between photographs, poetic offerings travel between the Canadian North and southern prairies, tracing avenues of time and maturity, circling anchor-stones of hope and regret. The collection’s title, ‘Glacial Erratics’, refers to boulders deposited by the ice sheets that once covered our prairie landscape. These provide evidence of our geographical heritage, offering themselves as touchstones to a history of dramatic change. And yet they are accidental legacies, monuments borne of glacial fatigue, of failure and release. These poems echo their title. Read separately, it would be difficult to thread them to a theme. But linked and grounded by Mann’s photographs, they plot a journey. A raft of incidents, a life’s hopes and lessons. There is a risk in this trust of fate to organize the poems, which Sarsfield alludes to in ‘message found’:…

The History of Naming Cows by Mitch Spray Published by Hagios Press Reviewed by Brinnameade Smith $17.95 ISBN 978-1-926710-15-0 The History of Naming Cows is one of the quirkiest titles for a poetry book that I’ve come across, but it’s a natural fit. It speaks to the tradition as well as the personal connection of farming and raising cattle on the prairies as found in the poetry. Many of the poems begin in childhood and describe the curiosity, wonder and contentment with farm life as well as bringing new life and brightness to seemingly mundane tasks. The objects and experiences that fascinate a child growing up on a farm aren’t the same as a city kid would have and the seemingly obvious points of interest are only touched on in this collection of poems, while hidden treasures and overlooked curiosities are brought to the forefront, showing a new perspective on prairie life. Some stories are also revisited in other poems placed at a different time where the cares and concerns of childhood are set parallel to those of adult life. The curiosity behind simple everyday tasks has been replaced with a calmness as they become routine. But with age also…

Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry by Lorri Neilsen Glenn Published by Hagios Press Review by Kris Brandhagen $18.95 CAD 978-1-926710-11-2 Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry, is simmered to perfection; reading it wasn’t enough, I wanted to chew it, comprised as it is mostly of tender, slow-cooked self-reflexive prose, seasoned with poetry as earthy and rich as rosemary. A morsel of this work spends a moment in the mouth, red wine reduction keeps one licking the lips, and wanting another bite. This book presents to me, again, that we, in the prairies are our own flavour of people. Though our seat may seem insignificant, we are not; our lives are just as heated as those anywhere else. And we have visceral challenges. And we feel deeply. Neilsen Glenn’s writing, originally from the prairies, is browned by world experience and a fork-tender perspective. “A decade flies by. Children on bicycles… Jeffrey has kicked the dog and she isn’t moving… Allan collapses from a stroke in front of the stove, mumbling incoherently; paramedics and a babysitter are in the driveway. The next semester, and the next and next and next. Screams in the emergency room as…

The Cellophane Sky: jazz poems by Jeff Park Published by Hagios Press Review by Chris Ewing-Weisz $17.95 978-1-926710-09-9 In the same way a jazz musician feels into the heart of a melody to improvise a free expression of its soul, Jeff Park in this collection of poems imagines the inner lives of the jazz greats, spinning onto the page their physical worlds, the emotional meanings of events in their lives, and the stories they told themselves about their place in the scheme of things. Meet Jelly Roll Morton as God, Billie Holiday as unwilling accomplice in her grandmother’s death, and Lester “Prez” Young as a lad on the streets of a New Orleans suburb, absorbing jazz along with the boat whistles and neighborhood arguments. Stay up all night in Paris with Duke Ellington. Get inside the skin of Mingus as he challenges racism. See, feel, taste, and smell their world. Many of these musicians experienced poverty, abuse, and racism. Music became a way to push back, to imagine and indeed to create a world “rising like a dream/from all that is broken” where, as Park writes of Mingus, “all would change, anything was possible.” Jazz aficionados and general readers alike…

A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski Published by Coteau Books Review by Kris Brandhagen $16.95 CAD 978155050478 The name Anne Szumigalski has long been ubiquitous in Saskatchewan’s writing community. According to A Woman Clothed in Words editor Mark Abley, “[t]he depth and breadth of her involvement in the Saskatchewan literary community are hard to overestimate. Anne was a founding member of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, a founding editor of Grain, and the first writer-in-residence at the Saskatoon Public Library”. She was a complex writer, who refused to be nailed down to a specific poetics, by herself, by anyone else, or even by her poems, preferring to always push boundaries, in terms of writing in all genres, and writing in-between genres, as well as collaborating with all sorts of other arts media and professionals. It is noted by Abley that, “the interplay between language and the female body shapes much of her work.” We find out where the title of this book comes from in an excerpt from the “Thin Pale Man”: …here’s the river again and the ice and Anna giving herself to love all garments fall from her but the garment of words and what could be…

The Ditch Was Lit Like This by Sean Johnston Published by Thistledown Press Review by Kris Brandhagen $17.95 CAD 978-1-897235-94-2 Right from the beginning, I could glean that The Ditch Was Lit Like This by Sean Johnston is about those in-between times when we are focused on getting wherever it is we are going, and about what we leave behind, as well as what we lose altogether. The first poem ends with the apt question, “Are you ready?” Figuring that I was, I eagerly turned the page. This poet associates night with travel; even when at home, stationary, the night is a journey. What I really like about this book is that there seem to be poems within poems. And what is refreshing is that Johnston addresses the problem of language. These pages are complex and beautiful, exploring binary concepts like joy/discomfort. The strongest point of this body of poems is how Johnston includes the reader on the journey, exploring the more delicate and philosophical points of family, and romance: “…the response is either love returned or love withheld—that is, of course, if something has been risked, and the real invitation is this: birth, eyes that behold beauty, hearts that…

Rock Creek Blues by Thelma Poirier Published by Coteau Books Review by Kris Brandhagen $16.95 CAD ISBN 13: 9781550504552 While reading Rock Creek Blues a narrative began to unfold, during which I couldn’t count the number of times I felt my eyebrows raise. I was impressed by the sheer subtle courage of Poirier. This book is an exploration of death, providing the spectrum of the food chain and thickly sauced with the tart flavor of human acceptance and/or conflict about it; a study of harmony and discord spanning Rock Creek, Saskatchewan and New Orleans, Louisiana. Poirier’s writing is versatile and organic, in a way that is neither arrogant nor assuming-A poet and storyteller in a truly dramatic way. There was suspense that I didn’t even know was building at first. To expand on that, it is like the story developed a wider and wider range as it went along like someone I didn’t even know was a minstrel walked up to me: “Want to hear a joke?” And here I am forty-five minutes later, I’m still listening, rapt, to the dynamic voice changes, and can’t wait for the end, in the very best way, because I feel a desire to…