kireji: partial portraits & biofictionsby christian favreauPublished by JackPine PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$30.00 ISBN 9781927035436 I have a special interest in reviewing “first” books, in part because it’s been thirty-one years since my own first book was published, and though I’ve followed up with another dozen titles, I still meet folks who claim they liked my first book best. Today I read Montreal writer christian favreau’s first book. Kireji: partial portraits & biofictions is an attractive, hand-sewn chapbook with a cover image of a bird. The book contains nine free verse poems, a business card-sized note to “Please be gentle while handling,” and four actual leaves. Leaves? Now that’s a new one for me, but JackPine Press is all about originality, and favreau’s work definitely fits the press’s mandate to “publish chapbooks whose form and content are both artistically integrated and unique”. What did I find? Firstly, like fellow Canadian poet bpNichol—whom favreau quotes in the opening poem, which is comprised solely of three epigraphs—this new poet also sometimes eschews punctuation. In his second poem, “the finch,” he writes “Id dreamt/Id screamed/all the while unheard,” and he includes a measure of treble clef notes, perhaps to emulate the finch’s…

The Zombie Stance of the Technological Idiotby s. mintzPublished by JackPine PressReview by Elena Bentley$20.00 ISBN 9781927035412 I imagine you’re reading this review on your phone. You were likely scrolling through Twitter or Facebook, then you clicked the link, and now you’re here. Most of us spend hours staring down these days, existing in a state of “‘psychic rigor mortis’”—sluggish and numb from the “‘effects of new media.’” “Wavering between shock and stupor,” s. mintz’s debut poetry chapbook, The Zombie Stance of the Technological Idiot, “is a lyrical probe on media in the contemporary moment given the inextricability of media from the contemporary.” JackPine Press specializes in beautifully handmade chapbooks, and The Zombie Stance of the Technological Idiot is no exception. Accompanied by a bookmark that doubles as a pair of 3D glasses (the red and blue film kind), this chapbook invites participation with the interior images using a nostalgic piece of technology. A few poems also include web addresses, further compelling the reader to search the internet and participate in exactly the type of questions the chapbook considers: “how [do] we know what we know on the internet [and] [w]here does [that] authority come from?” Right from the opening…

Never Found: A Poetry Collectionby Jesse A. MurrayPublished by Off the Field PublishingReview by Amanda Zimmerman$14.99 ISBN 9781775194668 Jesse A. Murray, a Saskatchewan poet and high school teacher, follows up his debut collection, I Will Never Break , with this second assortment of poems exploring different perspectives, thoughts, and ideas. Never Found is stuffed full of verses ranging from the raw to the soulful, the bittersweet to the bitter. The compositions evoke a variety of emotions—both dark and pure—and Murray even hazards to tackle some of the more heart wrenching, touchy subjects. Murray has the gift of knowing when to boldly declare the emotion he is desiring to provoke or gently nudge his readers into discovering it for themselves through his phrasing. Isn’t it always more gratifying, as a reader, when you can dip into your own experiences through someone else’s writing? That is the craft of a talented writer. Unfortunately, one of Mr. Murray’s greatest regrets is having kept his writing unpublished for so many years. He has done his best to course correct through the amount of works he has sent out into the world over the last few years and, as he finds his writer’s footing, the…

Pitchblendeby Elise Marcella GodfreyPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9-780889-778405 I didn’t know what pitchblende was before I read Elise Marcella Godfrey’s same-named poetry collection, but I certainly do now. To shortcut, merriam-webster.com describes pitchblende as “a brown to black mineral that consists of massive uraninite, has a distinctive luster, contains radium, and is the chief ore-mineral source of uranium”. It’s a measure of the poet how Godfrey takes this radioactive by-product of uranium ore—and the capitalist/colonialist/mostly male culture surrounding its extraction and usage—and transforms it into a finely-tuned collection of political, environmental, and investigative poetry. Godfrey writes from “the traditional and unceded land of the QayQayt First Nation” on Vancouver Island, and this well-researched, multi-voiced collection exhibits a deep caring for the earth and its peoples. Her cry is clear: “the neocolonial machine … promotes profit and industry at the expense of community and sustainability.” Pitchblende does not read like a first book. Godfrey’s a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan and her work’s appeared in journals and anthologies: she’s put in the literary leg work, and it shows. These poems are saturated with internal and…

Girl runningby Diana Hope TegenkampPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$24.95 ISBN 978-1-77187-214-0 When a veteran multi-disciplinary artist pens a poetry collection, it’s likely that the influence of her other art practices will seep into the pages and make for an original read. This is evidenced in the case of Diana Hope Tegenkamp, a Saskatoon-based poet who also works with film, photography, visual and performance art, sound and music. In her debut poetry book, Girl running, Tegenkamp’s 23-page poem incorporates various fonts, strike-outs, quotations, footnotes, and superimposed text across a “mountain-like shape” which is “an outline of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic,” and the entire long poem is a conversational response to an 1809 textbook (Letters on Ancient History, by Anne Wilson). So interesting, and so are the questions it poses about history and subjectivity. “History, a whirlpool,32/sucking in obscure circumstances/with a frightful noise.33” Tegenkamp also alludes to sculpture, novels, paintings and films, ie: director Jane Campion’s adaptation of “Portrait of a Lady,” and there’s a poetic close-up of a poignant scene from “Boys Don’t Cry,” the 1999 Academy Award-winning movie concerning the tragic, real-life story about murdered trans man Brandon Teena in Nebraska. The poems in this…

Landings: Poems from Icelandby Harold RhenischPublished by Burton House BooksReview by Toby A. Welch$20.00 ISBN 9780994866967 It is very clear from page one of Landings that a piece of the author, Harold Rhenisch, will always be in Iceland. He first travelled to the island in 2009. Four years later, he served a stint as a writer in residence there. Rhenisch has been to Iceland numerous times, including a trip in 2019 when he dealt with frigid 220 kph wind gusts and ate lamb shanks for Christmas dinner. This book is not the author’s first work about the island that he clearly has a passion for.  Landings contains 52 gorgeous poems that Rhenisch wrote as he toured around Iceland. The poems are divided into five sections: Loom, Warp, Weft, Cloth, and Shawl. As with any book of poetry, some pieces speak more to each reader than others. The Track touched me. While poets can intend a different meaning than readers interpret, I felt the poem explained how in a quest to find yourself, taking a well-travelled path may not be the ideal route. And in a similar vein, people shouldn’t follow your path to find out about themselves. Passage is another…

apart: a year of pandemic poetry and proseEdited by Courtney Bates-Hardy and Dave MargoshesPublished by Saskatchewan Writers’ GuildReview by Toby A. Welch$24.95 ISBN 9780968845172 I have a hunch that as our lives return to a more normalized state, this book will become even more powerful. When Covid is a distant memory, the stories will take us back to this time filled with chaos and uncertainty. What a great permanent record! This book will not collect dust as time passes.  I have never recommended a book as good for every member of the human race but this one I do. Every one of us has been touched by Covid, directly or indirectly. We are all dealing with the effects that the virus brought into our world. Having a book that chronicles the anxiety and emotions of this period in our lives is invaluable.  apart is made up of both poetry and essays (and one awesome screenplay tossed in to mix things up.) Some are short and some are lengthy. One of the most powerful pieces is on page two, a poem by Mary Maxwell made up of four words repeated over and over again: Covid, Trump, News, and Fear. That poem…

I Will Never Breakby Jesse A. MurrayPublished by Off the Field PublishingReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$14.99 ISBN 9-781775-194637 As a writing instructor, mentor, and literary contest judge, I’ve spent countless hours reading the introspective work of novice writers and have found there are a few common themes, ie: failed romance, uncertainty about one’s purpose in life, and alienation. Putting pen to page is an act of bravery in and of itself; sharing one’s personal thoughts, fears, and dreams with others in a self-published collection is top-shelf courageous, and – with a heavy concentration on the above themes – that’s exactly what writer and secondary school teacher Jesse A. Murray has done. In I Will Never Break, Murray’s debut poetry book – he previously published two baseball-themed novels – the Saskatchewan-based writer has collected poems written on “scraps of paper” and in journals between 2007 and 2010 and bound them in a book with a gorgeous cover: a winter tree in silhouette against a blue-grey sky. Note: Murray was between the ages of 18 and 22 when these poems were written, and this is not a typical, contemporary poetry collection. “This poetry collection was collected unchanged and displayed in chronological order,…

Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeTooEdited by Sue GoyettePublished by University of Regina PressReview by Elena Bentley$24.95 ISBN 9780889778016 “[E]very woman has these / stories / or worse / even if they don’t / realize / it yet.” Poems written in response to the 2016 Jian Ghomeshi verdict fill the pages of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo, edited by Griffin Poetry Prize nominee and current Halifax Regional Municipality Poet Laureate Sue Goyette. This anthology aims to be an act of artful activism, offering “relief from [the] silence” perpetuated by a legal system that “excus[es] or pardon[s] the perpetrator’s crime.” It is a place to speak and be heard. And, most importantly, it is a space where “a collective of people… have chosen poetry to process an experience of violence.” Of the four sections into which these masterclass poems are divided, the first, “Innocence/Exposure,” is the most difficult to read as the poems are highly affective and unsettling. Men collect, pull, play games with, crouch over, stare, poke, grab, paw, pin, grope, and pinch the young girls in these poems. The speaker in Marion Mutala’s poem says these experiences “chang[e] who you become.” But, luckily, this…

Red Obsidianby Stephan TorrePublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$19.95 ISBN 9-780889-777750 Effective poetry is difficult to write. That’s the bottomline, and it’s why I’m so excited about the polished and effectual work inside BC poet Stephan Torre’s Red Obsidian, a recent collection of “New and Selected Poems” (selected from Man Living on a Side Creek and Iron Fever). Perhaps it’s no small coincidence that this latest book was edited by Randy Lundy, who’s also published in the press’s Oksana Poetry & Poetics Book Series, and whose work I greatly admire: both writers construct poems that radiate with energy. Torre’s poems straddle the contentious fence between industry and environmentalism. They’re filled with the vernacular of tree-felling and farming; of the beautiful, raw and disappearing landscapes he’s called home along the Pacific Northwest in Canada and the US; and with the birds, fish and animals he’s shared these wild rural and coastal locales with. He laments the capitalistic fervour that reduces shorelines to realtors’ signs, and though he’s lived mostly off-grid, he ponders his own part in it, ie: how he “drove deeper, and drove away/antelope and eagles from their spring nesting,/eager to rip up sage and greasewood,…