Klara du Plessis

It is at once shattering and comforting to read River Halen’s Dream Rooms, a series of poems that deflect themselves into essays with a poetic bent.

At his best, Clarke enters an epic mode reminiscent of Homeric extremes.

Poet, artist, and performance artist Fortner Anderson has designed a highly conceptual book project that is available open access.

This is a collection that contracts into the everyday delights and difficulties equally as it expands towards the universal.

When I ask Avasilichioaei whether the performance piece or the print versions of this work came first, she explains that the creation of different renditions of the same work often happens simultaneously, and these versions mutually impact one another so that it is ultimately irrelevant which one originated the process.

Through his first-person narration, his honesty, humility, and stringent self-criticism, through the descriptions of his internationally acclaimed performance work beyond the scope of his literary achievements – of which I had already been aware – I was able to become more familiar with Wren. If I already held Wren in high esteem as a writer, artist, and person, this fascinating hybrid of memoir, archive, performance history and theory, and humorous storytelling reinforced that impression.

Klara du Plessis reviews Marc Di Saverio's new translation of some of Émile Nelligan's poems and Louise Dupré's Rooms

This is a truly exceptional work, not only for the content – which is rich in both narrative thread and evocative imagery – but also for its visual impact. It is printed in full colour on beautiful paper; materially, it is a quality broadsheet within the pages of a book.

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.

Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life, edited by Concordia University professor Sherry Simon, collects scholarly perspectives on the multilingual city, ranging from historical and political to activist and creative points of view.

In a world devoid of affection, the word “gentleness” reverberates like a blow to the head when it materializes suddenly in the final pages of Karoline Georges’s novel Under the Stone – newly translated into English by Jacob Homel.

Couched in the English title of Madeleine Gagnon’s newly translated autobiography is a consciousness of the inability to accurately convey the facts of one’s life. Memoir refers not only to a Life, but more specifically to a Life in Writing: “fiction is everywhere when you tell your own story,” Gagnon writes. Autobiography emerges from the contradiction between a unified life and multiple selves.