When the gecko is in the gully trap I do not turn on the tap I do not wash down the slops the tzatziki past its use-by date the old milk not quite right I leave the gecko (a skink in a sink so to speak) alone in its concrete bowl its dry island its Colisseum home But a cockroach? Well, it will survive the storm the cyclone the flood the tempest from the tap and the slops and the rinsing of cartons It will scurry and scamper and if fate befalls it down through the grate into the gurgler it will carry on defiant in the dark dank pipes The gecko, though, seems less robust even though it may desce ..read more

When a good friend’s dog died, she and I consoled ourselves with a bottle of wine, a couple of games of Scrabble, and Steven Heighton’s CD The Devil’s Share playing in the background. The games were enhanced by our granting double-scores to words we could justify as being ‘doggy’ (bark, leash, furred) and by the fine music easing both our souls.  So when this little book came along, I was thrilled, as I figured I’d be getting into how the songs had come about, and more.  The introduction by Steven’s longtime friend, the musician and singer Ginger Pharand, offers some consolation, but ..read more

Ars Poetica   They asked me how long I’d been in salvage-espionage and hullaballoo sign repair. Take some time, I mean, give or take, it’s all in your head, right? Realism beckons. All you need is  a laptop, a manipulative childhood and a bag of sizzling thunderclaps. A satisfactory soundtrack. The talkative and unraveling brain’s             a baggage carousel. Decorative tinder. An invasive plant called complicity. A voice-over mentioning what remains to be said isn’t done much any more. Afterthoughts of what will have happened. And behind which d ..read more

I met Carla Stein at a poetry course, our instructors two laureates. A classroom of talent with creative and artistic passion. I was impressed by the dedication and commitment by Carla, as she was commuting from Vancouver Island to Vancouver. The value of the course was never in doubt: the sessions, the teachers, the class, from which friendships evolved — a remarkable bonus — along with a growth of personal output and calibre of craft. Yet Carla’s work stood out. The nuance of a multidisciplinary artist, one whose voice speaks in mixed-media, which emerges in breadth — heightened perspective ..read more

I feel like a witness, an audience member at the theatre to see the performance of embodied wisdom verbalized in A Beautiful Rebellion: poems by Rita Bouvier. The collection is in 5 sections: “a beautiful rebellion,” “a place I know,” “supermoon rising,” “when the moon is full,” and “the rest of us will carry you along.” These section titles, together, form a poem unto itself. The first third of the book has grounding experiences in nature, the next third includes interactions with people and their struggles, and the last poems act to hold up sacred moments of being present as a way forward ..read more

Geoff Bouvier has produced a kind of long poem we haven’t seen for a long time in North America. Us from Nothing is an experiment in the epic that isn’t either doggerel or primarily parody. The poem achieves this, like most modern long poems, by renovating and subverting classical epic conventions, but also by eschewing the heavily allusive, theoretical apparatus of the long poem as it appeared in the hand of so many from Ezra Pound and Charles Olson to Rachel Blau Duplessis and Lisa Robertson. Adopting both a linear, serial structure and a deceptively simple style, Bouvier’s epic is refreshin ..read more

The Birth of an Anatomical Venus First, death: not that of her father fallen into the sea to birth her from foam but her own. Hundreds of bodies for one slashed beauty, some pulled from the water, some from dirt, wrapped in a shroud and dragged to an artist, the salt of the sea mingling with decay. This is no Botticelli. This is the work of blood and bone, fat and gristle, covered by paint and wax. An artist shapes the molds: heart, lungs, and kidneys— pearls for her new cavity. Now, a plaster cast, pour the virgin wax and colour the pale marrow with lead and cadmium. Stuff her hollows with wo ..read more

Titled “The Poetry Game,” Frog Pond Review Issue 4 offers 18 poems, several of them inspired by “a game of close listening.” Ten poets met to participate in the Game. “Gamemaster” Misha Solomon describes the process this way: “The first poem was brought to the Game. The second poem was written during the Game. The third poem was brought to the Game.” And so on. The key question for readers, of course, will be “what was the result?” I found the “poetry game” to be an intriguing concept, and was eager to answer that question for myself. The “game” resulted in an interesting linkage between pairs ..read more

Deviant as a poetry collection not only challenges accepted standards, but excavates beauty from social derision. Grace is surefooted and defiant, torquing queer love and male hostility into language that lulls and then lashes. Oxford Languages defines a deviant as “departing from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behavior.” Deviant as a poetry collection not only challenges accepted standards, but excavates beauty from social derision. Grace is surefooted and defiant, torquing queer love and male hostility into language that lulls and then lashes. Consider “Strawbe ..read more

A shimmer of vulnerability permeates the poems in Montreal poet Morris Bailey’s debut chapbook I Imagine My Brother as an Island. Bailey was born in the U.K. and is of Jamaican ancestry. This information offers a base of reference in the collection’s theme of identity. At times, Bailey approaches this theme with a sense of displacement that seemingly takes us out of this world, as he does in the opening poem, “Running Away from Ourselves”. You, I and all the others direct our gaze up into an atmosphere which appears decorated with small dots, where in some other placeseven wanderers similar t ..read more