John Barton has published nine previous collections of award-winning poetry, six chapbooks, and two anthologies. He has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, a Patricia Hackett, an Ottawa Book Award, a CBC Literary Award and a National Magazine Award. Born and raised in Alberta, he worked as a...
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, 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...
In a writing workshop yesterday, my peers had a bad reaction to one writer’s use of the word “hooker.” This term is derogatory, they said. So it was jarring, hard to read. But sometimes a narrator or a character can say things that are derogatory, but in a way that is true to...
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...
by Michael Walter Can the internet free us from Canada’s history of censorship? The Canadian government hasn’t always been the biggest protector of free speech. Sure, things have improved a lot in recent years; we’ve gradually seen the growth of an open public space where queer literature has made...
