By Robert Hilles

The Shape of Disappearing Letters
by Marty Gervais
Mosaic Press (2026)

Marty Gervais has published twenty-five books that include books of poetry, novels, and nonfiction. He has been awarded the prestigious Harbourfront Festival of Prize and has worked as journalist for The Windsor Star where he’s won nearly twenty Journalism awards. He has twice won the Milton Acorn’s Poetry Prize and has been the Poet Laureate for Windsor. To top all that, he is an amazing photographer and ran Black Moss Press for more than fifty years. Given all that this is his bravest poetry books to date. The key word in the title is Disappearing. In this book, the poet, with much dignity, chronicles how many on his father’s side have suffered from some form of loss of vision later in life. In this book he elaborates on all of that but focuses the most on his father and his dealings with that. He writes not with self-pity but with brave acceptance. Early on he writes about an uncle who also bravely faced a growing blindness (Finding the Garden): 

“A glorious hideaway in the dark shadow
of the nearby factory where after the onset
of blindness he lost his job and soon
retreated to this cramped little paradise behind
his house where he could be seen gliding about
with a metal watering can, weaving in and around
this carefully sculpted world he so intimately
knew, almost like when he patrolled Ford’s
assembly lines as a hard—nosed union boss”

This is poem like most in the book the conveys the ability to adapt.

The poet has had to deal with poor vision all this life and it starts as young boy and his first eye exam (Eye Exam):

“‘Boy, his eyes are bad for
a kid so young,’ said the optometrist
when he asked me to read
the eye chart at the end of the room
— the large letter “E” on the top line
leaping and shouting for attention
— a kid in the schoolyard”

His first pair of glasses results in him bullied (First Pair of Glasses):

“Like my father’s — big, black, square
sliding down my nose — my index finger quickly
found a new role pushing these plastic spectacles
back and up into place
I didn’t have them a week when someone punched me
in the face and broke the bridge
I patched it with a brown bandage
forever unravelling”

These early poems help set the stage for what happens years later. First his father loses the ability to drive (The Last Drive Home):

“My father told me how on the last day
he owned a car — having had to give
it up when he failed the eye exam—
he sat in his 1991 Buick in the driveway
hands gripping the steering wheel
like a teenager pretending to drive”

And much later his father continues to work in his workshop despite being essentially blind (The Lesson):

“His hands caressed the two-by-fours
— no different than a blind man searching
the shape of a familiar face — my father
in a new apartment, as he went about
building a work bench, something
he had never been without”

This poem ends with these wise words from the poet’s father (The Lesson):

“‘You don’t need to see,’ he scoffed
‘You know when you’re good!’”

Later still his father lives with his inability to see (My Father Reading):

“My 85-year-old father sat alone —
a mug of coffee beside him
and The Windsor Daily Star spread
flat on a small kitchen table
pretending to read —
eyes straining at headlines
the index finger of his right hand
slowly gliding underneath the words”
A similar fate faces the poet (Like My Father):

“My notebooks are looking more and more
like children’s handiwork — the pages
I handed in the nuns in Grade 2,
letters tall and fat, sometimes ragged
odd and happy and frantic, big creatures
waving or dancing or misbehaving”

And as an echo to his father’s pretending to read the poet does something similar (Saving Grace):

“I spread out the map of the world
…

My eyes scan the darkening shades
of mountains, greens in the broad plains
deep blues of rivers and oceans and seas
and my hands slide freely across
boundaries like soaring birds above
in the metal grey February weather
no passport, no care as they settle
and light again —”

We eventually come to this (Seeing Him Play – For Julien)

“I can still pick out my six-foot grandson
in these televised varsity hockey games
if I stand just inches away from
the wide screen, straining my eyes
to track his lean and familiar shape
as he maneuvers the puck, smoothly weaving
and bobbing and slipping through
this pinball maze, the brightest of icescapes
a world of blurred jersey numbers
of streaks of light and colour and shadow
and sound and maybe not enough to say
I was there

but still I’ve tasted something
of all that easy grace
and luck and prayer”

The poet is bullied early in life because of his glasses but endures. That is what is strongest about this book and will give every reader hope because no matter the adversity he survives and endures. It would be easy for the poet to feel sorry for himself especially after grandfather, uncles, aunts, and father all struggle with the same loss of sight later in life. It would be easy for the poet to feel cursed or put upon but Marty Gervais does not let that best him. Instead, the good in him endures.

The book ends with this brave author’s note:

“I am going blind. No surprise. My father, my grandfather, various aunts and uncles, all were stricken with macular degeneration (AMD)—one of the most common age-related eye conditions that affects the central part of the retina, called the macula.”

Read these poems and celebrate the human spirit behind them. 

Robert Hilles lives in Nanaimo, BC and to date has published twenty-five books. He won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Cantos from A Small Room. His books have also been shortlisted for The Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Prize, The W.O. Mitchell/City of Calgary Prize, The Stephan Stephansson Award, and The Howard O’Hagan Award. He has published eighteen books of poetry, four works of fiction, and two nonfiction books.

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“We’ve always been here / monsters, queer-coded villains / performing the transgressive act / of living.”

These poems take us on journeys from Calgary to Windsor, inward and outward, from joy to sorrow, evoking visceral empathy along the way. Your blood boils as you read “How to be One of the Good Ones” as she writes of a neighbour finding out she’s trans and saying “Oh, well you’re one of the good ones.” The poem continues with instructions on how to be “one of the good ones”, with a clever and biting list of what not to do:

“Definitely don’t pour    gasoline on their front line / spill-spell    SHE/THEY / in PetroleumBold capital letters / and don’t strike the match.” 

The searing image left behind from that unstruck match has never left my mind, nor have the hypothetical pink, blue, or white hydrangeas planted in the bed of such a neighbour (“with permission, of course”). The musicality and rhythm of her verse come through in this piece too, when she writes,

“Don’t speak the spells / dripping truth from lip— / sweet      then spicy     drip drip drip.”

Kay is not bound to form, and her poems rarely rhyme, but when they do, it’s as melodic as an earworm. From a modern sonnet to braille to an answer from a magic eight ball to a concise blackout poem, Kay plays with form like she invented it. And she may very well have with the way she plays with cascading footnotes in “Mirror, Mirror … Or Maybe Overthinking … I Don’t Know Yet”. Here, the would-be simple phrase “I am a woman” is dissected and pulled apart at the seams to challenge and discuss terminology, feminist theory, beauty standards, and what it means to be transgender in today’s world. 

At the halfway mark, in “Monsterology 101: the Anatomy of Monsters” she asks, “Did you really expect rage to be harmonious?”

Because yes, there is rage here, but it’s not blind. It’s the all-seeing useful kind we need in the tank in order to show up to the fight. I see There’s Magic Here Too as the shadow self to Kay’s first collection. Where Transcribing Moonlight is soft, gentle, and melancholy, There’s Magic Here Too is raucous, funny, and, not hard, exactly, but punchy. Deftly weaving together monsters and myths and pop culture, moulding it all to enhance and tell of her identity journey, leading the reader not only to meaning, but a riotous, raucous enjoyment that gets you fired up for the cause. This is a riot grrrl album and I am the middle of the mosh pit. Let’s fucking go. 

Because this is the “trans agenda” – fighting for the right to exist. It takes courage to just be a trans person in these phobic times, and yet, Skylar Kay not only exists, she uses her experience as a rally cry for change. She’s creating, contributing, even setting the tone of the conversation: one of humour and compassion, resistance and criticism. The monsters she animates, the centaurs and werewolves, the witches and faeries, are vessels of reflection, little pools waiting to be rippled. 

People so often deem our differences as monstrous, when of course, monsters are magical. And as Kay writes in “Now You See Me”, “magic turns to truth into the dark.” So, let’s turn off the lights and let this untamed, unabashed queer magic show us the way. Because this book teaches us that magic, if we let it, can dispel the fears of otherness and unite us in the beautiful, diverse, unique tapestry of what it means to be human. 

So, if you’ve ever felt like an outsider, if you’ve ever wondered, “Is there any magic left for us?” like the eight ball answers in “Corner Store Oracle”: “The choice is yours.”

Ashley J.J. White has been writing since she was a little girl. She spent her twenties planning and promoting rock concerts. She now works as Program Coordinator for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, based in Calgary. She has always been a champion of the arts and a cheerleader of independent art. She is currently working on her debut novel, Elizabeth Who?

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In A Riptide
by Ronna Bloom
Brick Books (2025)

Lolograssing: What Means This?

Ronna Bloom’s exploration into death is an honour; as though we must all come late to the explication of words that are used to touch death.  Four intentions of dying come to close meanings of how we all come near to such closure: To Show the Scars: Sick Person, For Ten Billion Years: Old Person, The Earth Held Me: dead person, Don’t Close the Door to the Door: Happy Person With Nothing. This collection works on the essential journey of dying to the self.

In the first sequence, we come to terms with the hospital setting; the sickness of defeat. It is a place of trauma always newly visited. Here, we must encounter the difference between healing and sending, in a setting that always delivers a site of unassailable conflict. This is where we can all discover a found poem:  

Lyrical Hospital

Who is your mercy contact? (10)

Look for them; the words will comfort. Or not. The poet only promises that you can read in short, manageable bursts when you are in crisis. Or perhaps that perception is just crutch-like enough to buy you some time to feel.  

We put our heads down and try to work
our tiny magics.

Take our blessing pills, interrogate our crimes,
and commit new ones. (16)

More than likely, the uncertainty and warnings of sickness must be assuaged in how we become hollowed out to God:

Out of this, let my small noun cry faith.
Let me unperson for a minute –
here, hold my cup.
Breathe me presence into the face
of my mother’s tantrum of grief
that I can’t answer any other way.
Her whine – let it be a song-plea
to the balladeers of other centuries.
O, how the cows moo in solace. … (20)

O, how the O has it. We hear the grief.

In the second movement of the collection, the old person laughs:  

Sisyphus
Carry your own stone. (28)

I wish I had presented that stone to conflicted friends and critics over the years. There is a kind of grief with it, like time and energy wasted in the sense of obligation to roll that stupid, wretched stone upward in the illusion that we make all the difference. Was that sentence long enough? Bloom makes it easy, and I see the small poem as stone.  

Bloom envisions a scene, in Rending the Garments: “There should be a shiva for every kind of grief-/the break-up, the diagnosis, the assault-/where people come over unbidden and/wash their hands and bring casseroles/and hold you. (43) 

We are getting closer to the keening, and the reflections of grief. All is not a depth charge, though. Bloom leaves us with the magnitude of analogy. How we slip through the invisible barriers between life, death, grief and healthy contentment:

Death leaves you so alone.
Your hand goes through a mime’s window
Hello?  Anybody there? (56)

I’ve always enjoyed the faith of a mime. Bloom’s collection offers us that hope.

Vivian Hansen’s publications include three full-length books of poetry and several chapbooks. She has published essays in Coming Here, Being Here, and in Waiting. She also has a short piece in the Calgary Public Library Dispenser Series (2019) “Where We Surfaced.” Her most recent work, “A Bitter Mood of Clouds,” is available from Frontenac House.

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A Single Syllable of Wild
by Angela Waldie
Frontenac House (2026)

In many ways, the title sums up this first collection’s deep intent: to sound a singular and resonant note that fights for the wilderness. To that end, the most common pronoun in Angela Waldie’s A Single Syllable of Wild is “you.” In four consistently-lengthed sections, Waldie addresses forests, glaciers, birds, mountains and most passionately and tragically, bears. In “Bear 64,” the ursine is both watched by humans and disappeared by them, they give her a “radio collar” and a “faded plastic ear tag” and even dangerous “sandwiches thrown from cars” and take from her photographs, immunity, autonomy. Similarly, in “Bear 148” who was shot as she “crossed another border/she could not see,” or Skoki who was “banished from the mountains” and put in a zoo due to being habituated to humans, although some bears like “The Boss of Bow Valley” persist despite having been hit twice by freight trains. Waldie doesn’t flinch from baring our often-terrible incursions into the wild: as scientists, tourists “in air-conditioned cars” (Minnewanka), or just simply as clumsily-misguided humans. She extends the directive to “Please don’t touch the animals” beyond a signifier to a brute reality as with our meddling the “snow bunting could fall from the slender wire” or “The bison, in flicker of fear or fury,/might charge.” 

Knowing the value of stillness, immunity, and silence for non-human creatures, Waldie celebrates how the pandemic freed them from us for a few seasons, and rhapsodizes in tones reminiscent of Gary Snyder or Don McKay of how we need to either vanish from nature or disappear into it by becoming “waterfall,” by leaving, truly seeing, pausing and learning “humility from mouse-eared chickweed,/and from tiny pink shooting stars” (High Water, Blakiston Creek). “Can we spare some space/for places still/just bird, wind and wildflower?” (Foothills Meditation) she keens, fully aware that of all our challenges as humans, simply letting other species be seems to be the most difficult goal and, when unachievable, deadly with consequences. Such as how global warming is creating the rapid retreat of glaciers, their hope the raven who carries a “frozen incantation” (From the Bow River, Calgary) for them in its beak. On occasion, Waldie over-extends an image, for instance by giving the wings of birds the quality of “empathy;” the general gist is clear but unnecessarily couched in an airy poeticism. Otherwise, her voice is pure and direct, and at times a bit monotonous as nature can be. She also experiments with many variants of free verse: stanzaic, visual, in numbered segments, and sometimes even writes a beautiful pantoum like “How Long do Forests Remember Fire?” or the enchantingly sad spell (heroic couplets within quatrains) of “Cascade” : “Spring torrent, summer vesper/autumn shiver, winter whisper/grizzly path, stone reader/Minnewanka dream feeder.” A stirring and essential debut. 

Catherine Owen, a Vancouveriteedmontonian, has published 17 books in four genres. Her latest is Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024), nominated for both the Al and Eurithe poetry prize and the Robert Kroetsch award. She teaches Poetic Forms at Concordia University of Edmonton, runs The Clio Project, a documentary series on older women artists, and edits and reviews from her 1905 home on Alberta Avenue.

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By Catherine Owen

Baba Yaga and the Girl Who Ate the Rope
by Kate Rogers
Frontenac House (2026)

When I was young, fairy and folk tales were one of the genres first read to me, then listened to on vinyl and finally delved into myself in a book of Russian stories I absorbed on long rainy days in Vancouver. Baba Yaga is a dualistic witch character from Slavic lore, who can both be a hideously nasty child-devouring cannibal and a helpful old lady who lives in a hut that swivels on chicken legs surrounded by a bone fence. Her moral ambiguity, her ability to fly in a mortar and pestle, and her representation of the dangerous wisdoms of nature all made her compelling to me. 

Kate Rogers’s debut collection of poems (with its striking linotype on yellow stock) honours the improbable interpretability of this character as she comes to represent her own Ukrainian mother, during her struggles with dementia. It’s a challenge to write about one’s dying parents, the content ubiquitous, difficult to render originally. But recently, Bren Simmers’ did so with elided vowels to represent her mother’s increasing aphasia in The Work and Roger’s has done so in Baba Yaga and the Girl who Ate the Rope by palimpsesting myth onto the stark realities of mental diminutions. 

A daughter’s relationship with her mother is often ambivalent. Even when close, there is still a need to detach (or eat the rope). Rogers’ use of Baba Yaga as her mother’s doppelganger (also her mother’s acknowledged nickname) in the book’s first section emphasizes this push-pull feel of the bond, especially when the daughter is left to care for a mother who often can’t even recognize her, who verbally abuses her or rejects her nurturance. In “Baba Yaga’s Child” details anchor the continued connection between them, despite the constant losses:

In my pack, tins of alphabet soup.
Inside I pour two into the dented pot.
Baba Yaga smooths open the Scrabble board’s
broken spine on her cherry table,
picks seven tiles
from her black bag of charms.

At first, she remains in her forest house, still feeding the birds through cataract surgery and knee replacements, but after covid, she ends up at a care home, her mind failing. In one startling piece, Rogers returns to the house to look “In Baba Yaga’s Closet” for a coat and in a silk robe finds projected secrets, then recollects the horrifying moment when she was a teenager and her mother, “dropped [her] towel/kicked [her] leg in the air./Declared:/ “This is what a used crotch looks like!” (this scenario is so very opposite to anything I can imagine my own mother doing – I am still in shock ;).

One of the most beautiful poems is “Baba Yaga’s Garden,” both for its sweet imagery and for the way it is carved into solid quatrains, effecting a more formal accuracy than many of the random-stanzaic pieces in the book. 

The second part includes three Baba Yaga poems (the most powerful her spell against wildfires with its triadic stanzas of dance and wail) but mostly focuses on human-created despoliations of the Canadian environment. The longer couplet-structure of “False Spring” is particularly compelling with its attention to assonance and disjuncture: 

Beach sheathed
in ice. I shuffle the shore. A slumped
starling rides the rolling frazil. No:
a single black glove.

 Or “Winter Temperatures Wake Bears Early” with resonant lines like: “She saw it in her naked orchard following the ghost scent of apples” and “Out my window, ice shrinks from the lakeshore, rictus grin.” Or the heart-slaying “Letter to the Hunter at Hay Lake” that begins “What’s it like to live without/wonder.” 

The final section is only four poems for her distant father (then a somewhat insular epistle to her stepdaughter for an Outro) and it feels like a quick surface scratch, though perhaps that is the point, one can go no deeper into a man who never said the name of his teen sister after she died, whose life’s “sap barely flows to [his] heart.” These last pieces possibly belong in another book however, as the core here is Baba Yaga the mother and her forested home and how, beyond all quirks or failings, she seems to have instilled in her daughter a deep love for nature. Baba Yaga and the Girl who Ate the Rope is a memorable plumbing of myth enacted to more poignantly voice the real.

Catherine Owen, a Vancouveriteedmontonian, has published 17 books in four genres. Her latest is Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024), nominated for both the Al and Eurithe poetry prize and the Robert Kroetsch award. She teaches Poetic Forms at Concordia University of Edmonton, runs The Clio Project, a documentary series on older women artists, and edits and reviews from her 1905 home on Alberta Avenue.

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By Kathryn MacDonald

Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000-2025
by Russell Thornton
Harbour Publishing (2026)

With nine previous collections, Russell Thornton is a poet whose name you will recognize. You may have one or two of his books on your poetry shelf, but don’t assume there’s nothing to be gained from diving into Two Songs. The selected poems not only echo across time and situations, they remain fresh, relevant, and beautifully satisfying to read. A great advantage in reading this collection over twenty-five years is that you will see the consistency and the development of one of Canada’s foremost poets.

The poems in Two Songs are collected chronologically in nine sections, each containing poems chosen from individual books, plus a final section: “Uncollected and New Poems” (223-238). Thornton takes us on a journey through life, with poems focussing on childhood and parental relations, parenthood and his own children, love and violence, his home on the West Coast and his travels abroad. The collection is far-ranging in topics, themes, and place. Across this wide spectrum, Thornton’s voice sings with lyricism, boldness, and energy. From the first poem, I was engaged and enchanted, torn open and somehow soothed.

Night Tide

I stood where a tide began rushing to fullness,
drawing out long grass as it wove through sand dunes,
then walked east …
…
suddenly aware I was no longer what I had been.

This awareness, this transformation, is emblematic. The poem continues with vivid imagery until we reach the turn:

Then an old woman was at an open door.
We’re all leaving, she said. I know, I’ll be ready, I told her.
You won’t be able to keep her a secret anymore,
will you? she said. While I watched her turn and go,
I felt the one she had spoken of showing through my face.

Writing through the “dream dark,” he takes us into a space literal and magical, lays physical reality alongside the mind’s reality.

The first two poems in the collection take my breath away; they are ripe, sensuous, and layered. I cannot stop underlining, scribbling in the margins, and turning pages, until I finish the section and come up for air. I am drawn in and held by the way Thornton weaves images and metaphor, how he builds the poems with words and images that circle and repeat, search and take the reader deep inside experience and all it offers. For example, in “Creek Trout” (13), he first describes the trout then moves into metaphor:

To see the trout, to gaze after it
as the doors of the water open before it,

as the innumerable chambers of the creek open before it,
each a new exultation, a new feeling of the tough of the creek,

a new entering and entering,
…

Already, in 2000, Thornton is an accomplished poet. Reading “Morning on Wickaninnish Beach” (15), I was struck with the alliteration of “w” and the sound of it running through: “wire, walk, marrow, wheeling whiteness of a wave”, through to “world” and “word”. Many aspects of the craft of poetry can be found subtly woven into the work, alliteration is one, metaphor is another. 

Throughout the collection, words are held, repeated in such a way that they connect and enlarge thought. Thornton creates a scene, as he does in “The Beginning of Stars” (second section, Tunisian Notebook, 2002, 21-22): “The late sun burning close and slow waves coming in – / the sea’s mysterious lit wine of touch…” and few lines below, “grapes / spreading throughout the night’s summer vineyard.” Farther along: “The body is the wine-flask and the wine: / the lover is the veil on the beloved’s face.” This is simply gorgeous writing. Thornton works an image—turns it inside out. 

Jumping past the poems selected from House Built of Rain and The Human Shore, there is a space of seven years before Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (2013) is released, and while the 2003 and 2006 collections continue the delicious poetry, I see a shift occurring with poems in the 2013 selection. Here, the writing echoes back to poems selected from The Fifth Window (2000) from which I first quoted, but there’s been a change in style. Where previously, I noted how he expands on a word like wine, here he begins doing something different, more imaginative, repeating and repeating with amazing effect. In “Burrard Inlet Ships” (77-78), he repeats “As if…” ten times and “All night…” three times. “They’re always there” stands out on the third line and is repeated on the final line. These repetitions create music, a beat, sonorous, demanding. Another example, “Nest of the Swan’s Bones” (70-80) begins with an epigraph and a dedication, and continues:

High in the blue air above the dumpster in the back lane,
between the mountains and the tidal flats,
on the thermals and updrafts a summer hawk does slow turns.

The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt.
The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life
in prison year. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught

trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives
and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild
baby fish run, they run the gauntlet of penned fish. They are eaten alive,

their eyes popping out as sea lice feed inside their heads.
The hawk dances. Circles, dances. Its shadow flits
unnoticed across men, spreads over a rodent or bird

//

…The hawk hunts and kills the swan for love. It will build a new

nest of the swan’s bones. It will keep this nest unseen.
I am a person. I soil the cage in which my heart flings
and flings itself against the bars. I try to own

the view of every murderer, and yet I try to sing
the way out through the hawk’s claw holes to the repose
in the nest of fire at the tip of the hawk’s wing.

A new rawness enters the poems in the fifth section. They powerfully witness both the situation of people and of the environment. They follow an observation, a word, a thought, enlarging and enlarging, employing an echo strategy, until the poem is resolved and the reader left breathless and satiated. 

Some of my favourite poems in the collections are in this section, poems of Thornton’s son and daughter as children, such as “River Rainbow” (87) and “My Daughter and the Seagull’s Cry (90-91). These are mixed in with heartbreaking poems such as “Aluminum Beds” (88-89) about his own childhood.

I am fascinated by the way Russell Thornton weaves stark reality with dream. It is something we see as we read through the collection. The first poem, when we opened the book, began that way. The first poem selected from the sixth book, The Hundred Lives (2014), continues blending the two realities of our lives: the everyday and the dream. There’s another thread that runs through Thornton’s writing that has become obvious and that is something secret, recognized but elusive. All three come together in the sonnet,

Pitcher

Entering her parents’ house in secret,
finding a pitcher of ancient design
sitting on a plain wooden shelf. Knowing
that moment in the dream that she has died
and time has passed. No one having told me.
Then going with the pitcher in my hands
out into the vague street. Great energy
beginning to flow through me. The smooth loop
of the small handle. The quick curve and gleam
to the base. The soft plummet at the mouth.
The dark space within will urge me on now
and I will see that it is desire vast
and wild as death, and it hid here before
it came to break me, and is filled with her.

These poems haunt me with their immediacy, their authenticity, their narrative flow. But it is their craft that makes them poems to study, to reflect upon. 

The poems grow and deepen. In The Broken Face (2018), the seventh section of Two Songs, in the long poem “The Wound” (147- 150), Thornton links Greek myth, Shakespeare’s soliloquies, and Keat’s odes to the stories of Skaay the Haida. In “The Wound,” Thornton names the space between the everyday and dream, as he explores “the boundary between worlds” and the reader knows we are experiencing mythic truth:  

The opening, closing, opening wound, breaking, stitched, breaking—
is love freed again and again from anything that binds it. 

The love in the surface bird, the desire in it for the other shore,
the other shore that has no shore—
is the hunger of a gull trying to flap wings oil-slicked or trapped in coils,
and the waves circle and the surface bird cannot lift itself from the sand.

From Answer to Blue (2021), I want to mention two poems: “Great with Tigers” (173-74) and its first line that surprised me: “The smell of menstruation moves…” and “When the Whales Return” (175), with the line “… a girl carrying a tiny heartbeat / that had joined her own in the space she discovered inside her …”. He manages to combine the orcas’ return, “the first time in eighty years” with the intimacy of the poet in his mother’s womb. These poems feel like little miracles, so accomplished we can read them without noticing the skill woven through.

The final section of Selected and New Poems continues the subjects of family and images of the environment, of birds and sea, people but always the poet is engaged, seeking. In “The Missing Letter” (227-228) we find “memory’s measureless line of sight restored.” The puzzling mysteries Thornton struggles to uncover are never quite revealed: “One morning, you are given a glance at your entire life” (One Morning, 233), but it is a mere glance. Lights continue to flicker “on the verge of an abyss”, “Decorum” (232). The questions that drive the poet continue. 

Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000-2025 came highly recommended, but I was leery of such high praise. Reading over my notes and claims in this review, you may wonder if the book is that good. It is. I can read a poem and love the story, admire the idea, thrill at the imagery. Russell Thornton’s poems give the reader these things and more. These are poems to read and enjoy, and they are poems to ponder – their intellect, passion, authenticity.

Kathryn MacDonald is the author of The Blue Gate (Frontenac House, 2026) and four other poetry collections. Learn more about her work at kathrynmacdonald.com

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Everybody Knows a Ghost
by Elana Wolff
Guernica Editions (2026)

The title foregrounds universality, knowledge, and the spectral. “Everybody” encompasses Manu (name for the 14 rulers of earth in Hindu mythology, special painters, music (modern and classical), writers (particularly Old Testament and Kafka), filmmakers (Wes Anderson and Jacques Tati), the poet’s family members, and strangers (children and adults), which, of course, shows the poet’s mind concentrating while also ensuring that her presentations of experience and meaning oppose laziness of perception. Poet and critic Jane Hirshfield contends that “good poems hold more than one knowledge,” and this is certainly true of this collection where meaning takes the forms of intellectual component, imagery, and sound that widen our sense of what humanness and its wonders and puzzlements might be. Slipping with admirable facility through the mystical, the mythological, and the empirical, Wolff’s poems are revelatory and transfiguring, using knowledge to signal perception, familiarity, recognition, and experience, and linking this to shades, shadows, spirits, daemons, demons, and traces. Though portentous, they are never pompous, even when they use esoteric allusions—Wolff’s ruminations often being ambiguous even when completely entered by a reader. And one of their fascinating qualities is an eroticism in the sense of wooing a reader’s mind and heart the way a tender lover would, especially a lover of words and their sonic patterns. Interestingly, Wolff’s sixth collection, Swoon, had an overarching sense of a poet’s mind swooning with compulsive perceptions (spare, introspective, elliptical) climaxing in transcendental insights. Her next collection, Shape Taking, exuded the ecstasy of mind and body, its world stroked lovingly with vivid images. 

Everybody Knows a Ghost has a looser arc than those collections because of its quirkier, more tropical patterns, and because its imaginativeness and suggestions of altered states are filtered or angled in slices that she, like Kafka (one of her favourite literary models), turns into precise but fragmented, concentrated yet concealing poems. It is easy to chart Wolff’s technical excellences—especially her masterful deployment of sibilance (“Or Else” has 30 superbly deployed “s’s”), fractured words and forced enjambments relating to philosophical increments (“Use of the Room”), modulated rhythm and revising trope (“Fishing with DB”), elliptical metaphoric form (“Tapioca”), or colour synaesthesia (“Manu’s sphere”)—just as it is easy to cite the phantoms or shades or traces that infiltrate and charge many of the poems in which daytime hauntings and nighttime dreams challenge the poet to keep her heart open to the ineffable. The book has many spectral concentrations: Manu; a husband whose shape fades away nightly; a night wolf; the terrifying ghost of a murdered victim; even perennials and a haunting vase; and the enchanting gliding spectres of Kakfa and his treasured Milena. 

The real significance and value of the poems, however, is not a statistical compilation. Rather, it is the poet’s inward and outward looking.  Wolff is not woman as passive or decorative being. That would be unforgivingly simple. She is not a diagram or a mere engine of action or a convenient frame for a proposition. Her poetic images and sounds are not ornaments: they express truths. Which is not to insist that they have all or even most of the answers to questions of reality. She is not a woman who dives into wrecks; nor is she aquiver with lingering scents or clinging sentimentality. She is game to work with hunches and inklings, believe in dreams, read relics, parse apparitions. She is an adept, one whose lines are “as slant /as ladders,” and who is intent on building meanings between selves and random things, as she confesses in two poems (“Entering the painter’s space” and “Use of the Room”). Everybody Knows a Ghost adopts different angles of reflective and elliptical meaning: the first and simplest being the outer world; the second, a kind of dialogue with what is perceived; and, most significant of all, the poet as a voice and eye, with language as controlling and shaping organ. The poem “After-cast” could well be the model for Wolff’s virtuosity, but there are others (for example, “Gloss,” “Adept,” “At the Heart of a Ghost,” “O-zone,” and “Catalytic”) where the quotidian is mysterious, where perdurable change and synergetic forces show that death is “not oblivion,” and where what we don’t see has a presence that is charged, sometimes unremitting. 

Keith Garebian immigrated to Canada with his family in 1961, and after earning his doctorate in Commonwealth Literature from Queen’s University (1973), he became a freelance literary and theatre critic for such varied sources as Canadian Theatre Review, Scene Changes, Mosaic, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Canadian Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Performing Arts in Canada, Books in Canada, Canadian Forum, Literary Review of Canada, Theatrum and others. He also taught Canadian and Commonwealth Literature and Canadian drama part-time at McGill, Concordia, and Trent Universities.

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Long Exposure
by Stephanie Bolster
Palimpsest Press (2025)

Long Exposure is Stephanie Bolster’s fifth and most recent poetry collection. Readers may know Bolster’s writing from her Governor General’s Award winning The Alice Poems, her first book (1998) through to her fourth, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (2012). After Wonders, she noted in an online interview with Poetry in Voice, that “increasingly I feel that the best poetry arises from some social calling, or fulfills some social need.” Long Exposure does just that. 

The collection opens with the words, “It is not something that begins.” Following about a 10-line white space giving readers time to consider, then continues:

Before there was land there was water.
A place silted itself up.
Around the time of the pyramids
parts of other places made this place.

and, so, we are introduced to Long Exposure and to New Orleans, a key place for the unfolding of Bolster’s theme.

“What began in 2009,” Bolster writes in the acknowledgements, “as an interrogation of my unsettling fascination with Robert Polidori’s photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans became an education that has lasted for 16 years and does not end here.” As Bolster probes Polidori’s images, she notes how the hurricane’s destruction was multiplied many times over by failure of the unmaintained levies. And she resurrects other disasters: Chernobyl and the nuclear meltdown of 1986, the Interment of Japanese-Canadians in B.C. during WWII, Mothers of the Disappeared in Mexico. She exposes a litany of social atrocities in the compelling and extraordinarily-crafted singular poem, Long Exposure.

Bolster’s collection is a kind of rabbit hole, a warren of man-made disasters. She tells us: 

Sometimes to look
is merciful, sometimes
to turn away. (32)

The poetic images are, themselves, horrific. In “Shelter Object,” she introduces the first of the Chernobyl poems:

The constellations made of fear. Chaos
where a shape was. Stars where a roof.

A fire where a place. The world
asleep in its bed. World irrevocable.

The heat unfathomable. They worked
shirtless. Already acute in hospital.

Soon coffins of zinc. Soon
they’d gut the wards of the dead.

The writing builds to a crescendo. Following 17 couplets, the tone and pace shift, slow to conversational speed:

His mother asked when the bus was coming and in a while
she asked and again and then didn’t and
he turned she was dead.
He covered her there in her wheelchair outside the Convention Centre.
Put a note on her. Came back
four days later she was still there.
The bus came for him. She was still there in her chair
bus was leaving he wanted to go to her National Guard said
You’re just going to get on the bus. You must be on the bus.
The bus took him to another city.

Bolster controls the pace using her poetic skills honed during her previous award-winning writing. Her language remains controlled, yet she draws us in, hold us, hold up the horror. (17-19) 

Beside the poetry, in small type against the righthand margin, are facts and numbers should anyone imagine exaggerations in the poetry. In order to credit her sources, Bolster includes the names of the journalists and their publications at the end of the book, requiring more than three pages of dense type.

Depending on her subject, Bolster shifts techniques. For example, when she moves from Chernobyl to Canada’s Pacific Coast, she almost names the poem with a parenthesis (BC, Would you or Would You, 1942), repeating the phrase:

Would you or would you not flee when the day came to report to the address.
Skip curfew slip a note ask for people who knew people.
Coats with many pocket baby teeth in your shoes.
[…]
Would you or would you not build the place that would house you.
What if you went to the front of the line.
What if you danced.
[…]

and the words continue, taking us back to Katrina, all the while the verification notes in their small print bump up against the righthand margin.

How many words to describe disasters and the human cost? How many ways to point to our failings? 

Another disaster close to home she doesn’t name, but clearly Bolster points to the 2013 train derailment at Lac-Mégantic:

Rail cars full of oil slid faster down
the slope until at the curve where the town
was a birthday party exploded and a woman
with cancer who’d chosen not to mark
this year still lives because she didn’t
go. All that long-dead
plankton lit the sky. (71)

Another horror story caused through bad choices, neglect, another of many that haunt Bolster, echoing the manmade failure of New Orleans’ levies, which caused more damage than Hurricane Katrina.

And so, how does Bolster end the collection of breathless, near-punctuationless poetry when page-after-page draws us into documented disasters, through words that lead us into the emotional experience of the victims, wounded, first responders, and those left to remember?

Rain, physical and metaphoric, begins each line of the final 10 pages of the collection:

RAIN (Rain)

Rain on the willows.

Rain on the shore willows.

Rain on the swallow house.

Rain on the swallow.

Rain on the ash treated with a pesticide.

Rain on the lawn treated with a herbicide.

[…]

Rain on the eyelids.

Rain on the tongue.

Rain on the drought.

Rain on the parched crops.

Rain on the parched soil.

Rain over the parched soul.

Rain in runnels past the fields.

[…]

Rain on Diana.

Rain on Anya.

Rain on Ernie.

Rain on Edna.

Rain on Arn.

Rain on Elise.

[… and the list of names goes on and on]

Rain on the awning of the famous café.

Rain on the place people used to dance.

Rain on the continent.

Rain in the well.

Does the rain cleanse the names of the lost? the places lost? Is the rain a rage? Is the rain a prayer?

Shortly before “RAIN (Rain),” there is a haunting line: “Can you spare just five minutes to help us create a better world? ” (127)

At times, reading, Long Exposure feels like a series of failures and at other times a celebration of survival, a naming, a social calling account and to action. 

The final lines in Long Exposure put words to action: “Author proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated equally to lowernine.org (New Orleans, LA) and the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre (Burnaby, BC).” 

Kathryn MacDonald is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon and A Breeze You Whisper. Learn more about her work at kathrynmacdonald.com

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By Beth Everest

The Blue Gate
by Kathryn MacDonald 
Frontenac House Poetry (2026)

From the very first poem in Kathryn MacDonald’s latest book The Blue Gate, the poet held me, transfixed, by stunning clean and clear imagery that melds the human and the natural world, rife with beauty and destruction. Readers are brought into a love relationship, but even in the opening pages, there are shadows of impending loss.

The first lines of “What she knew” (11) aptly sets the scene:

Love felled her like a tree
A robin’s egg in a windstorm,
A pretty blue thing 

Felled is an interesting choice of verb, especially in the context of love, but it is perfect in this context. Felled warns the reader of upcoming doom, suggestive of a violent emotional blow, but fell also nods to the words fall and feel, and particularly in situations of love and death. Stanza after stanza in this book contains such harsh contrasts that are emotionally charged; compelling; unexpected; mesmerizing. 

Take the birds, for example, and there are many species named, including waxwings, sparrows, owls, goldfinches. Most notably, though, are the red-tail hawks. The birds “nest,” an appropriate image for love. They dance, both together and apart. But many are birds of prey. It’s not all soaring fun. The images are both beautiful and horrific. From “Sky dancing” (24):

Sharp talons and beak
pierce my flesh, shred my heart—
death a bird of prey

And from “One hawk” (26)

I scan the cavernous sky
hollow full of lament,
startled that the sun has risen,
dogs need walking
birds need feeding

It is not waxed wings I need
but cerement

MacDonald’s rendering of love and grief is poignant, visual, tactile and heart-wrenching. Even the title takes on this role, but not necessarily in the way we would expect. Nothing in this collection is what we might expect. 

Throughout The Blue Gate, we see blue in various tones/images. Not only is blue the visual colour of the gate that opens and closes, it is also symbolically “the colour of longing” (27), sadness and grief, and the tumult of “robin’s egg in a windstorm,” but it’s also “pretty” even as it blows in the windstorm, and visual like the lizard that “turns brilliant African bluu in August/ The month you died (56), and it’s reminiscent of the speaker’s time spent grieving in Kenya

where women in high heels (or barefoot)
walk elegantly – laden with burdens
perched like birds’ nests on their heads (59)

Blue is the burden that shows up again and again, contrast after contrast, always emotionally laden. 

In fact, in the poem titled “At the blue gate I breathe” (38), the speaker of the poem wonders “Can grief be a perpetual falling.” A falling, a felling, a diving of the birds, and opening and closing of the gate. And then, the next few lines:

We race past gates
                      past gatekeepers
in lengthening shadows 

The gate opens and closes, but not necessarily at will. Sometimes it stands closed, sometimes locked, or there are gatekeepers, or opened by the boy “who cannot leave” (60). Sometimes the shadows lengthen. Sometimes the gate just opens. But this gate is not an ordinary gate. It is blue. It stands between the before and the after. It is the division between what was and what is. From the beginning to end, it is blue. The poems in this stunning collection end with these lines (75).

Albinoni’s Adagio
         rises
                      falls
                                 swells
                                             into fullness
                                 slowly
                                             cascades
into silence
to haunt
each blue
breath                       and still
                                             I live (75)

Beth Everest enjoys the freedom to write, to create jewelry, and to dig carrots in her own garden. She is fortunate to publish in journals across the country, and occasionally come out with a book.

The post Review of Kathryn MacDonald’s “The Blue Gate” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Stock
by Jennifer Bowering Delisle
Coach House Books (2025)

We’ve all seen those smiling faces. Impossibly joyful families, mother impeccably groomed as she serves weekday breakfasts or bakes with her child, a no-nonsense “Lady Boss,” arms crossed and powerful yet totally feminine. We view these images – “attractive enough to be forgettable, and forgettable enough to be relatable” (12) – and usually move on. But, in her new collection, Stock, Jennifer Bowering Delisle places images at the forefront, interrogating and engaging in conversations about what they represent and what lies beneath.

Many of the poem titles, as Delisle explains in her author’s note, “mimic typical keyword-laden image tags in stock databases” (91). Such titles include “Good Morning, Happy Family Mother Father Children Playing in Bed” (24) and “Female CEO in Pencil Skirt Stands on the Mountain Summit”. 

There are also untitled poems, where a speaker views stock images in various contexts. At work, she searches for an image of “a couple buying insurance” and one “that connotates jurisprudence for occupational therapists” (17). On bus posters, on the side of a drugstore, on Instagram, one woman’ repeatedly appears: “She is a type, like a font, or blood.” (12).

One section of the book focuses on family images, the dominant keyword in the poem titles being “happy”. The speaker engages the woman in the photos (“let’s call you Sarah” (22)) in slightly off-centre dialogue. She contrasts her own perceived failures in parenting when “[s]ometimes I am not tender enough … Sometimes I do not want to play” (29-30) to Sarah’s perfect constructed life where “No one peed or dreamed and Sarah / you are rested”. Eventually, the speaker comes round to musing that “maybe it’s not guilt your pictures bring / but loss” (35) and how the images remind her that “to have child is to feel / nostalgia for a time not past” (38).

“Cara, the model” appears late in this section, speaking of the incongruity of “the first time I came across my own face” (34) and of “the gaze of love I feigned so well” (37). In the section’s final poem, dialogue becomes chorus, with a multiplicity of Sarahs (including an “AI-Generated Sarah”), along with the speaker and Cara, all giving voice. 

Two other sections largely feature women (often Beautiful or Attractive) outside the domestic sphere: dramatic monologues by corporate go-getters, female empowerment exemplified by protestors carrying signs that are likened to a “[l]abel for a museum diorama. stuffed” (70). Model Cara crops up again, offering commentary counter to what the poses are intended to represent such as “When [the photographer] said go for it, /I thought jugular” (71).

Interspersed throughout, and concentrated in the final section, are a poems where the clichéd results of database searches on subjects such as “Winter”, “Writer “Pain” and “Heels” are lyrically expanded and explored.  These, as well as found and erasure poems, add to the dynamic probing of gender roles and corporate representation. Stock’s commentary around what is authentic, and how the world wishes us to be seen, is often humorous but always pointed. Delisle ultimately comes down on the side of what is human, and what is true.

Frances Boyle is the author of three poetry books, most recently Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022). Her 2014 debut collection, Light-carved Passages, was republished in 2024 by Doubleback Books. Her other books include Seeking Shade, an award-winning short story collection (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020) and Tower, a novella (Fish Gotta Swim Editions 2018). Recent and forthcoming publications include work in The Fiddlehead, The Honest Ulsterman, Consilience, Dreich, Freefall and The New Quarterly. Originally from Regina, Frances has long lived in Ottawa. For more, please visit www.francesboyle.com and follow @francesboyle19.

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