The AMPA awards finalists have been announced. Congratulations to Tyler Hein for “Mouse Trap” (fiction), Dee Hobsbawn-Smith for “Departure” (poetry), and Bruce Hunter for “Dark Water” (poetry). We would also like to congratulate past FreeFall prose editor Sabrina Uswak for her story “Medusa’s Murder in the Piazza Della Signoria” from Funicular Magazine. Winners will be announced at the Alberta Magazine conference and awards gala in September ..read more

Michelle Hardy A Review of:   If You Lie Down in a Field, She Will Find You There Colleen BrownRadiant Press, 2023 ISBN: 978-1-98927-494-1 110 pages $20.00 CAD Remembering an Unremarkable Woman: Colleen Brown will not allow memories of her “perfectly human and unremarkable” mother to be overshadowed by the “spectacle of her murder.” Brown’s memoir If You Lie Down in a Field, She Will Find You There, published by Radiant Press in 2023, investigates the story of her mother’s life. Only eight years old when Doris Brown died, Colleen Brown consolidates her own childhood memories with present ..read more

By Catherine Owen Imagining Imagining by Gary Barwin Wolsak and Wynn (2023) “I love the syncretic web of experience,” Gary Barwin states exuberantly in his essay “The Selected Walks,” from his compendium of celestial proportions, Imagining Imagining; in another meditation on “Writing as Rhizome,” he ponders how the making and distribution of art forms a “network of communications…you’re both the centre and there is no centre.” The centre does not want to hold! So if you’re seeking a conventional text on prosody or poetics or even a straightforward, common garden autobiography, Barwin’s pastich ..read more

By Mary Vlooswyk I Have Forsaken Heaven & Earth, but Never Forsaken You by MA Hui, translated by Leilei Chen Frontenac House (2023) Have you ever played the telephone game? The one where one person whispers in the ear of the person next to them, then they whisper to the next, until the last person shares what the message is? The fun lies in the transformation of the message as it is shared. Dalai Lama is a title given by the Tibetan people to their foremost spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. I could not help wondering how the poetry of Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso (1683 – 1706) may have ..read more

By George Elliot Clarke Faithfully Seeking Franz by Elana Wolff Guernica Editions (2023) Elana Wolff is a cosmopolitan poet—with eight collections to her credit and English, German, and Hebrew at her command—who exhibits irrepressible wanderlust as well as unrepressed wonder about our current, war-cursed world (itself the result of the Holocaust of a people and the wholesale destruction of topographies). A sometime instructor in English at Toronto’s York University and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the prize-winning, Jewish-Canadian poet undertakes her most significant prose work to d ..read more

By George Elliott Clarke The Walled Garden: Essays by Mark Frutkin Guernica Editions (2023) The Latin, floral epithet for the chaste Beloved in the Canticum Canticorum—The Song of Songs (The Song of Solomon)—is “hortus conclusus.” “She” is a garden enclosed, a private Eden that only the faithful husband may enter and relish. For Mark Frutkin, the book is the Beloved, and so his Walled Garden is a florilegium of subjects, essays on everything from Michelangelo’s temple of sacred art to the masterful cinema of Fellini and Tarkovsky and others. Frutkin’s Walled Garden—like Whitman’s democratic ci ..read more

By Katherine Matiko Antecedent by Juleta Severson-Baker Frontenac House (2023) Juleta Severson-Baker dedicates Antecedent to her ancestors, so it was no surprise to encounter a boy coming to terms with life and death on the prairie (My Father) and the multigenerational impact of a child’s drowning (The River). But as I read further, I was surprised to find myself in so many of these evocative poems. For example, Severson-Baker writes eloquently about the loss of her mother. My sisters and I recently became “motherless girls,” as the poet puts it, in the fifth and sixth decades of our lives. We ..read more

By Mary Vlooswyk Among the Untamed by dee Hobsbawn-Smith Frontenac House Poetry (2023) Among the Untamed by dee Hobsbawn-Smith is an exploration of how to be a woman in today’s world. Through her poetry, Hobsbawn-Smith tackles the many forms of violence against women “Mourning Mothers,” aging “Faith-writing in the dark,” accepting one’s body “Jeanne Dark comes of age on the prairie,” as well as the subtleties of female friendship “Sharing mason jars.” She takes the reader on a journey from farm life “Jeanne Dark contemplates the prairie sky” to the city “The Only,” back to the farm “Where Jean ..read more

By Steven Ross Smith Surface Tension by Derek Beaulieu Coach House Press (2022) Following on and expanding upon the appearance and evolution of concrete poetry, which exploded language’s visual and representational potential in the 1950’s Derek Beaulieu’s Surface Tension captures, in a small square book – à la Bob Cobbing’s bill jubobe, also from Coach House (1976) – sets of stirred and swimming lettristic images. In nine discrete sequences Beaulieu’s language elements – its letters, its surfaces – are rendered in swirls, grids, clusters, and trailings, using Letraset – that plastic dry-transf ..read more

By Katherine Matiko Circle Tour by Eva Tihanyi Inanna Publications and Education Inc. (2023) Eva Tihanyi’s Circle Tour takes readers on a spiralling journey from hope to societal and personal disharmony and back to hope again. Her tautly-written poetry brims with memorable imagery. I discovered poems within her poems; stanzas such as Eschatology’s On the pages of now: the past / indelibly present, a haunting watermark could stand alone and bear cherishing. The book is divided into three sections: Outer Circle, Inner Circle, and Centre. In Outer Circle, Tihanyi’s examination of our defective wo ..read more