I was recently following the cyber trail from UVic Pride’s website to various sites describing the rights and responsibilities for someone of a “majority” group entering a “minority space.” Some of the advice included a responsibility to listen to, not to argue...
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...
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...
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...
