Drakkar Noir, Dodds's second collection, is quite a return: Dodds re-inhabits his own gory, gothic world with the relish of a contemporary Lord Byron. The title references an arch brand of ’80s cologne, and many poems have a sardonic, sledgehammer musk made up of off-kilter epigrams, heavy rhyming puns, and scenarios that display a fury at the selfishness and idiocy of humans.
Princess Diana had just died. The internet was barely a thing. I’m not sure there were websites yet. The word Amazon called to mind a river, not an information technology behemoth. Grunge was over and something called electronica was being touted as The Future. Yes, things were different in the fall of 1997, no less so in Montreal.
Openness, dissection, reconstruction, and the wringing out of language are key to the newly released Planetary Noise. Celebrating one of North America’s most prolific and groundbreaking poets, this anthology also honours Moure’s ongoing project of embracing the fallibility of language and, by extension, of poetry itself.
Mary Soderstrom might just be my new favourite writer. She’s been writing for years, and we’ve been reading her for years, but meeting her reveals an energy that is contagious, and a humility that should be. Soderstrom in person is as unassuming, open, and delightful as she is erudite and elegant on the page.
Taking place nine years after the events of Sleeping Giants, Waking Gods flips everything we learned in the first volume on its head. When an alien robot related to Themis arrives in downtown London, followed by a dozen others who take up residence in the most populous cities in the world, it’s no spoiler to say that the results are a little bit destructive.
The word “millennial” doesn’t mean anything anymore. Although the new 30 Under 30 collection, published by In/Words Magazine and Press, describes itself as “an anthology of Canadian millennial poets,” it seems more interesting to me to think of it as a compilation of poems by digital natives living in cities all across Canada, whose birth years happen to range from 1987 to 1993.
In Tumbleweed, Josip Novakovich is equipped with a deep writer’s arsenal – a sharp eye for the telling detail, a subtly rhythmic prose style, and deadpan humour.
“Right words sound wrong,” Laura Broadbent opens in her latest book, In on the Great Joke. Borrowing Lao Tzu’s words, Broadbent explores this “wrongness” of language, its limits, mistranslations, and shortcomings.
Inspired by the Black Lives Canada Syllabus, activist Robyn Maynard explores the past, present, and future of Black writing and resilience in Montreal.
