Reviewed by Malaika Alex Leslie’s The Things I Heard about You is an experiment in language, editing, and meaning. The book of poems is divided into thirteen sections. Each section begins with a prose piece that Leslie edits down into a single phrase and in one case, just one word: “Thumbprint.”...
Category - Reviews
Lessons in Breathing while Gay, a Review of Andy Sinclair’s Breathing Lessons
Reviewed by Adam Holman In Andy Sinclair’s debut novel Breathing Lessons, he writes about how people “should do what they want,” whether in hookups or matters of the heart. We are forced to contemplate the repercussions, and Sinclair guides us with a precise assurance, taking us, along with its...
Snapshots of a Girl Coming Into Herself
Reviewed by Vivek Shraya Beldan Sezen’s new graphic novel, Snapshots of a Girl, opens with this definition of coming out: “The decision to step out of the unseen, the unspoken, the unnamed. Telling others, loved ones, dear ones, about one’s so-called ‘sexual preferences’ … something you know...
A Family By Any Other Name Highlights the Value of Literary Representation
by Kennedy Ryan The latest Apple software update included a patch that fixed what many users had long seen as a glaring oversight: the lack of same-sex couples with which users could express themselves. The previous “People” category on the emoji keyboard had only included straight couples...
The Argonauts a Powerful, Exploratory Vessel
by Adèle Barclay In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson crafts a new kind of text, an exploratory vessel, out of philosophy, theory, art criticism, and memoir to house discussions of motherhood, transitioning, queer family, romance. An innovative work that is exacting and enthralling, The Argonauts...
Farzana Doctor’s All Inclusive Finds Love in All the Right Places
by Matt Loney Alternating between Ameera, a sexually adventurous resort worker in Huatulco, Mexico, and Azeez, her father’s wandering South Asian ghost who tries to connect with his daughter, Farzana Doctor’s third novel, All Inclusive, is a rare, somewhat whimsical but vibrantly coloured...
R.W. Gray’s Entropic Could Use Some Sugar and Spice
by Jules Bentley R.W. Gray’s second book of short stories, Entropic, is the work of a writer exploring his gifts. Gray excels at articulating a state of pained, disempowered longing. It’s not lust, precisely, although it sometimes finds a subrogate in lust. It’s an...
Femme: Coming Out and Coming of Age in Bach’s Debut Young Adult Novel
by Adèle Barclay Mette Bach’s young adult fiction debut, Femme, is a decidedly modern and timely coming-of-age narrative published as part of Lorimer’s SideStreet Series. The series boasts a mandate of publishing edgy and realistic novels for young adult readers. In this vein, Bach offers a...
Vancouver’s Renaissance Poet: Amber Dawn’s Where the Words End and My Body Begins
by Mette Bach At the outset of this review, I must admit that I am biased. The truth is I owe a lot to Amber Dawn. She has encouraged and inspired me over the years in such ways that I’ve sometimes wondered what my creative career would be like without her. When I read her work, I inevitably find...
Deborah Ellis’ Schoolgirls in Iran Slay Cultural Demons
by Matt R. Loney Like a conscientious hiker, Deborah Ellis treads skilfully through the historical terrain of her thirtieth work, Moon at Nine. The revolutionary tumult of 1980s post-shah Iran might not seem like fertile territory for a YA novel with queer and feminist themes, yet Ellis’s superbly...
Michael V. Smith’s Body is Yours to Read
by Trevor Corkum There are books that come along once in a blue moon that split you open. Not simply because of the subject matter, although Michael V. Smith’s My Body Is Yours covers ground I am familiar with—struggles with masculinity; growing up queer in a small, secretive town; feeling...
The Blue Hour Inhabits a Strange, Beautiful, and Horrific Landscape
By Michael Lyons The Blue Hour is a hard film to sort into a genre. There’s a level of romance, but it’s certainly not a romantic movie. Maybe a very slow thriller, or a mostly pleasant horror? Actually, the closest thing to a genre that this feature from Thailand falls into is a Murakami...
Seashore Is a Gay Film With Almost Too Much Nothingness to Handle
BY MICHAEL LYONS Think about a movie that is non-stop action: explosions, guns blazing, with a trademark wisecracking, beefcake, invariably white hetero leading man—I guess what I’m saying is, think of Age of Ultron. Then think of a film that is the exact opposite of that, one that is so...
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry Takes a Fist to History
BY MICHAEL LYONS This documentary should be shown in every school as a prerequisite for becoming an adult. This statement may be showing my hand early in a review, but it’s not hyperbole. From the moment the film starts, depicting recent protests against regressive policies that limit women’s...
Naz & Maalik captures the quiet, desperate lives of young, Muslim, queer men.
By Michael Lyons On their Kickstarter campaign page the producers of Naz & Maalik claim that the feature is not a political film, but it would be difficult for any piece addressing its subject matter to stay away from politics. Two gay Muslim teens, small-time, good-natured grifters, are...
In the Turn, Celebrating Trans and Queer Women on Wheels
by Michael Lyons Have you accepted roller derby into your life? The transformative powers of this sport are best known within queer circles, but if you want an excuse to love a tough woman with a heart of gold, on wheels, then In the Turn is the documentary for you. Unlike most documentaries that...
Jess & James wanders without arriving at a destination
by Michael Lyons Two young guys hook up and decide to go on a road trip together, eventually bringing a third into their strange little relationship. In a film like this, you go in with the expectations that it’s either going to be really artistic and beautiful, with a lot of gorgeous, sweeping...
Fresno’s black humour not for the politically correct
by Michael Lyons My father has a saying about our hometown: “It’s a nice place to be from.” In But I’m a Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Committee director Jamie Babbit’s latest, Fresno, sisters Shannon (Judy Greer) and Martha (Natasha Lyonne) want nothing more than to escape their hopeless, banal...
Transfixed offers an intimate glimpse into a complicated life
by Michael Lyons As the saying often goes in the queer and trans community, it’s a small world. If you don’t know someone personally, you know someone who does, or you’ve probably seen them at a local event. Martine Stonehouse, the central figure of the new documentary Transfixed, is one of those...
Overwriting Erasure: Nia King’s Queer and Trans Artists of Color
by Jules Bentley We live in a world where resources, including those intended for the queer community, are overwhelmingly in the hands of upper-class white men. Queer and trans people of colour are forced to contend not only with the regime of heteronormativity that all queerness exists in contrast...
Fishing for Family: A Review of Arleen Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains
By Sugar le Fae Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré’s new poetry collection, is a rich meditation on place, memory, nostalgia, and loss. Paré interweaves vignettes of family history with kaleidoscopic bursts of lake imagery, biographies of local monks, maps, plants and animals, place names, and...
Believe Her: A Review of Leah Horlick’s For Your Own Good
BY METTE BACH When are we going to start believing women who are brave enough to come forward to share their stories? When are we going to trust that survivors know their own bodies and experiences? These questions haunted me while I read Leah Horlick’s latest collection of poems, For Your Own Good...
Hunting for Otters: a Review of Ben Ladouceur’s Latest Collection of Poems
By Shannon Webb-Campbell Poetry is inherently queer. At the core of a poet’s craft is an ability to toy with language in a way a prose or fiction writer can’t. There are no rules in poetry, only desires. A poet can write three lines and call it a poem, whereas a novelist must adhere to an arc of a...
When Nothing Looks Familiar: a Review of Shawn Syms’s New Collection of Short Stories
BY TREVOR CORKUM “We all had our own reasons for what we were about to do,” says the eleventh-grade narrator in Shawn Syms’s story “Get Brenda Foxworthy,” one of the standout stories in his stellar debut collection, Nothing Looks Familiar. In a collection that skillfully mines the inner lives of...
A Queer Person’s Playground: Vivek Shraya’s She of the Mountains
BY RACHNA CONTRACTOR Last year Arsenal Pulp Press published Vivek Shraya’s first novel, She of the Mountains, which elegantly juxtaposes two love stories, one based in Hindu mythology and one loosely based on Shraya’s life. With only two main characters and a handful of secondary...
Rita Mae Brown Following a Different Trail
BY LISA TIMPF Since I enjoyed many of Brown’s earlier works, including Sudden Death, I decided to check out one of her more recent offerings, a mystery entitled Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. Released in November 2014, this book is the ninth in a series that revolves around silver-haired...
The Sleepworker Glimpses Andy Warhol’s Life through a Surreal Kaleidoscope
by Derek Bedry In Cyrille Martinez’s “surreal parable” The Sleepworker, a strange fictionalized telling of Andy Warhol and John Giorgio’s creation of the film Sleep, the narrator seems to float detached above the action, an alien observer. This foreigner watches the neighbourhoods of “New York New...
Show Trans: Elliott DeLine’s New Truth in Transgender Memoir
by Evelyn Deshane In October 2014, transgender novelist Elliott DeLine released his third work, Show Trans: A Nonfiction Novel. DeLine’s book is both confessional booth and road novel, both romance and tragedy, and both true and entirely made up. Interspersed with screenshots of his phone...
Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote fail beautifully
Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon, Gender Failure (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014.) Paperback, 256 pp., $17.95 Reviewed by Rachna Contractor Based on their live multimedia show which toured across Canada, the US and UK, Gender Failure is a collection of work about rejecting the gender binary and retiring...
Brave the weather for Casey Plett’s debut collection
Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love (Topside Press, 2014.) Paperback, 216 pp., $16.95. Reviewed by Amber Dawn Let’s hear it for being at the right place at the right time. In early June, I found myself at the right place, which was Blue Stockings Books—Manhattan’s Lower Eastside stronghold indie...
Lydia Kwa’s latest book offers refuge for readers
Lydia Kwa, sinuous (Turnstone Press, 2013.) Paperback, 107 pp., $19.95 Reviewed by Chris Fox and Arleen Paré As avid readers of Lydia Kwa’s fiction (This Place Called Absence, The Walking Boy, shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and Pulse), we were excited to find her second book of...
Friend. Follow. Text.: Read. Reflect. Review
Shawn Syms, Editor, Friend. Follow. Text. (Enfield & Wizenty, 2013). Paperback, 296 pp., $19.95 Reviewed by Andrea Routley In Friend. Follow. Text., editor Shawn Syms offers a comprehensive exploration of all things online. Through 27 short stories, ranging from new writers to award winners...
Beautiful complications in stories from the “New Queer India”
Minal Hajratwala, Editor, Out! Stories from the New Queer India (Queer Ink, 2012). 447 pp. Reviewed by Rachna Contractor During my last visit to India in 2010 I noticed an overt shift: queer was everywhere–in mainstream news, family conversation, Bollywood nuance. It’s not that queer had been...
Vancouver’s Litany reading thrills audience
This review posted with permission from Coastal Spectator. Litany Reading Series Gallery Gachet, Vancouver Sunday, April 7 Reviewed by Dorothy June Fraser The first Litany Reading of the year (back in January) was so well-attended it almost burst the small comfy surroundings of the Rhizome Cafe on...
Looking Back: Lesbian Bar Culture in the 20th century
by Andrea Routley The histories of any marginalised group are a difficult thing to uncover. We can reinterpret literature, search through diaries donated to archives, find some legal records of those convicted of “lewd behaviour” or “perversions” . . . For this reason, many...
A Thousand Mornings: 82 Pages, 41 Animals, 15 Humans, 1 Slightly Annoyed Reader
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (The Penguin Press, 2012). Hardcover, 82 pp., $26.50 Pulitzer Prize-winner Mary Oliver’s latest book, A Thousand Mornings, is yet another collection of meditative poems in praise of nature’s beauty, spiritual generosity, and connectedness. This collection veers away...
“Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes” Just Moderately Compelling
Kamal Al-Solaylee, Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (Harper Collins, 2012). 204 pp., $27.99 I really wanted to love this book. Intolerable chronicles the chaos experienced by author Kamal Al-Solaylee and his family in the modern Middle East. Al-Solaylee and his father, mother, and ten siblings...
Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?” gets a Dynamic Review by Chris Fox
Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). 297 pp., $29.95 Chris Fox reviews Alison Bechdel’s latest at The Coastal Spectator. If you’re wondering why Bechdel’s name sounds familiar, she’s the creator of Dykes to Watch Out For and...
Song & Spectacle: Rachel Rose’ brave new collection
Rachel Rose, Song & Spectacle (Habour Publishing, 2012). Paperback, 112 pp., $18.95 In her third book of poetry, Rachel Rose delivers a collection soaked in maternal feeling and all things archetypically female — oceans, milky universes, blood, burial. The language is deceptively...