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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
