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.

The post Review of Elana Wolff’s “Everybody Knows a Ghost” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

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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By Kathryn MacDonald

What We Know So Far Is…
by Conor Mc Donnell
Wolsak and Wynn (2025)

Conor Mc Donnell has published two poetry collections and three chapbooks and now this wild, exhilarating, and complex howl of a long poem: What We Know So Far Is…. 

Thirty numbered (in Roman numerals) fragments comprise the long poem. These are interspersed with 9 numbered short poems that, when read in sequence, form one long poem, which is in dialogue with the thirty longer pieces. Integral to the poetry are six pages of endnotes that provide insight into the many references and allusions Mc Donnell embeds in the poetry. This all sounds serious – and the poems are serious – but there is ample wordplay mixed with stream-of-consciousness thoughts on subjects from biology and medicine to vampire movies and musical groups that, like Mc Donnell’s writing, are experimental. Where to begin with a collection like What We Know So Far Is…?

Mc Donnell begins his endnotes with: “This book is influenced by anything and everything I have consciously/unconsciously soaked up through most if not all of my sentience to date” (87). 

Following a poetic prologue in which Mc Donnell sets up the idea of dimensions, the first poem begins: 

cars crash. Omagh. Wrists are slapped. Omaha.
Nothing happens not willed in a haptic universe (I, p 13).

Omagh, from Irish An Ómaigh, means the sacred, or virginal, plain, the site of the 1998 bombing in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles.’ Omaha is both an Indigenous People and the code name for a deadly D-Day landing during WWII. Haptic universe refers to digital sensations, simulations of touch. You can already hear the voice and see the philosophy that breathes throughout What We Know So Far Is… in the way events and ideas combine like a dream, not exactly surreal but the unconscious surfaces. 

The speaker is on a quest, seeking, imagining, and reimagining. He is interested in so many things, a tumult of ideas cascading like time.

Mc Donnell describes “this flight of ideas” that run down the pages

like
throbbing skulls on stilts, like
turtles twisting over limerick’s worth of worms,
like snacking serpents shook loose and spread across fields;
the itches they scratch will weep and leak…
erupt if left undisturbed. (III, p 15)

The collection is a cornucopia of ideas and images tumbling down the pages, a torrent, but not random nor haphazard, as one might think on first reading. For example,

What We Know So Far Is
Interzone is safe haven within which to improvise:
This is why the first burial was the first act of love (XIIId, p 29)

The act of burial is symbolic, ritualistic, and it is evidence of love, an act bridging the liminal space between the living and the dead. This relates to the prologue and our introduction to dimensions, mentioned above, in which Mc Donnell writes: “Vocabulary remains mostly recognizable, but the use to which it is put cannot be understood by those who exist beyond its boundaries, nor can we calibrate current audiology to decipher what is otherwise perceived as ramblings, flights of fancy, pressure of ideas and supposed elusions” (Prologue: Nulla, p 11). Nevertheless, in this excerpt, he is suggesting that we can find what we’re seeking in the interzone.

Perhaps because Mc Donnell is a physician, there is a focus on illness, death, ghosts, and vocabulary sprinkled throughout:

 … the Irish for ghost, taibhse, means show,
while taibhseach means showy or spectacular,
and taibhsim means I appear.

                                                Tabhsim taibhse taibhseach,
                                                I appear as spectacular show

but also                                   I appear as showy ghost.

 

Words worm there way in …
We screw things up to an uneasy peace,
fill it with missed opportunities (XIV, p 31).

XXI, a long portion, begins: “I pray for magic, and pull at invisible switches” where the “cell is dungeon and everything,” where [I]  

… ferry them through surgeries wipe memories
clean, then pull their spirits back through most miraculous
recovery: let them redock themselves. So long since
I lost perspective on death after years of smelling
it on your breaths, the linens and robes your loved
ones wrap you in before they brave home. Only then
do angel wing and furies beat. Your time is come and
I am sorry that you’re stuck with me but I put down
my drugs, unplug the electricity […] 

[…]

… or maybe the truth I’m fighting is that when I
wrote I will be there when you die, it might not just
have been for my wife but for some stranger’s as yet
unborn child, and when that nightmare lands on
me, I will be better there for you, not pausing the world so
I can sleep too: what we know so far is another world (p 49)

Internal conflict. On the page a teasing out. Isn’t this why we write poetry? Isn’t this why we read poetry?

All of this aside, What We Know So Far Is … abounds with wonderful wordplay and riffs on language. My favourite takes me obliquely into Alice in Wonderland, a surprise: “Take the Hatter’s t away, a thirsty Hater takes his place” (XXIX, p 77). Another example:

Murmuration unleashed by the throng, prays high in beams above:
swoops and swoons over sacristy, lording over the gathering beneath,
deftly sculpting angle of descent
                         anger of dissent
                         angst of decency
                         angelic deception on auto-repent (IV, p 16).

The Arabic numerals that identify a separate, but integral, long poem create a second voice, one that is more, what? Personal is not quite right. They shift the tone and are less stream of consciousness. Taken together, they create what Jane Hirshfield calls an Assay, a poetic essay on a theme. In this series of poems is some of Mc Donnell’s most beautiful writing:

when we were unmade, we were scrutinized
to death. when we were unmade we were
words of and for wolves. we were unmade
to churn out the latest millennium (7, p 57).

 Still, in the final Arabic numbered piece, we remain “unmade,” our situation “unresolved:”

                           9
so far, what we are sorry for is unresolved
despite the pause despite Deepwater Valdez
despite Port of Beirut despite so many
generations unmade with a word and even
though the oirish have no word for no even
though the plural of word is sword and will be
for millennia at this rate of mutation-
imitation those born to only sleep forever
are worn for weeks in swaddling hems
until we reach the triptych sea sky &
beach, sat still in perfect shirtless circles,
and unstitch sleep from skin, set loose
the bloodlust of a thousand piercings
                          9

On one level, one can read this collection and pleasure in the music, in the words, allusions and images. But if we do that, what we might miss is the howl (think Allen Ginsberg). What We Know So Far Is … a cry for our time, a cry for us lost in a haptic world.

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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The Oneironaut 02
by Sheri-D Wilson
Write Bloody North (2025)

The Oneironaut 02 by Sheri-D Wilson, is the second book in her long-poem fantasy, dystopian trilogy. The wild dream state of bespectacled, brilliant scientist, Rain, continues at a fast pace. Rain is defying the oppressive D.O.D (Department of Dreams) who force their citizens to take a Meta Noia pill to prevent them from dreaming.

The Willows of Sweven, omnipotent, clairvoyant, keepers of dreams are seven women who open the book in a deep ceremony, or are they searching, or maybe they are communicating with the beyond. This is a book where it’s okay if you don’t really know what’s going on. You almost do but as in any dream state part of the fun is not really understanding and just going with the flow. Pages 13 through 15 provide the reader with a brief, tempestuous summary of what occurred in The Oneironaut 01. We know Rain is being chased by the DOD, and we know, Gauge, her best friend shows up, and we know the Ovoid Pearl (her teleporter vehicle) has been compromised. We don’t yet know what this all means.

Maybe we’re part of something larger,
more a G-5 geomagnetic astrocyclone — a gravity
well of dark matter tempest, an ugly quantum
weather anomaly (99). 

In The Oneironaut 02 Wilson’s long poem traces the twists and turns of Rain’s mind as she attempts to create connections. Rain grapples with her dream state, reclaims her ability to dream and weaves this into a consciousness full of possibility. She faces compounding dangers as she attempts to evade the DOD’s enforcers. 

“So what the hell am I doing? How can I be scaling
along a narrow ledge on the outside of a window?
Is this me inching toward a getaway? Truly mortifying
for an acrophobe (45). 

Humans have always exalted dreams. “All men,” wrote Plutarch, “while they are awake, are in one common world; but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.” Pinder of Thebes, the Greek lyric poet, suggested that the soul is more active while dreaming than while awake. Wilson’s poetic writing opens up contradictions and leaves questions unanswered. The reader experiences the feeling of being roused and disoriented, on the edge of something impossible to decode.

HyRain, this world
was created by you & for you as a time sensitive crash
course glimpse into the world you are fighting to save. (217) 

According to Jungian interpretation, when a fish appears to you in a dream, the animal represents insights bubbling up from the intimate, oceanic mystery of the unconscious. Wilson’s deft hand entices with this metaphor throughout:

Rain questions, Is this a fish? (48) 

         I am.
         I am nought
         in a fish. (70) 

           There are many ways to save yourself
           & all fishers.  She unwinds herself
           around my body.  I am the rod
           of Asklepios. She is remarkably soothing. (127) 

Like in a dream, Wilson unfolds the impossible before her readers. As if in an altered state of (un)consciousness where our focus, range and clarity of perception are dramatically changed, Wilson provides a condensed version of mythology based on Asklepios who used the dream state to delve into both diagnosis and prognosis. On pages 176-178 Wilson offers her readers alluring and impossible intimacies. Hygeia, Greek goddess of health and cleanliness, Pythia, high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Zeus, Asklepios all play a role in the call and answer format Wilson has chosen to “connect the dots” that indicate why Rain’s rebellion is the path of least resistance.

Wilson has chosen to use dreams as a portal to shift every one’s perceptions just a little. Rain encounters knowledge that has been marginalized, erased and/or demonized. We voluntarily become a fish in what feels like an ocean of her dream. Who is to say that dreams are not real? As Wilson herself once stated in an interview, “Do you want to use reality to explain the dream or the dream to explain reality?”

Mary Vlooswyk is poet whose writing has been published locally and internationally. She has been a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine since 2019. Her first book of poetry, On the Prairie Fringe, was self-published in 2022. Her charcoal drawing, Surrender to the Wind was published in Shanti Arts. She is an adult student of cello. An avid lover of nature, she lives with her husband on the edge of beautiful Fish Creek Provincial Park.

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If I Know Anything About a Knife
by Carley Mayson
Frontenac House (2025)

The need to be honest about one’s torments, from addiction and self-harm, to relationship pain and the horrors of seeing a loved family member descend into dementia, is at the core of Carley Mayson’s debut collection. As she states bluntly in the poem, “On Being a Week Sober,” the truth is that “nothing lies like an addiction.” As a reader, having been in relationships with addicted men, I can vouch for this ouch of accuracy.

While rarely a proponent of “trigger warnings” as I think that those who turn to poetry are generally able to process most subject matters, I will still note that If I Know Anything About a Knife is not easy reading. While there are balancing poems of solace such as the couplet piece “Prayers to the Moments In-Between” that list simple redemptive pleasures like “a long walk in the snow, a dog’s nose/new books, clean sheets on a made bed,” or paeans to erotic and supportive partners, most of the book is necessarily relentless. If you read poets from Sharon Olds to Lynn Crosbie and Beth Goobie, Mayson’s poetry will serve up similar risks.

Beginning with glimpses of a childhood scarred by a father’s death, birds flit hauntingly throughout, often as symbols of vulnerability: a canary in the coal mine of her grief turning into a “yellow bird…[that] sharpened its beak on my wrists and ankles,” while later on she morphs into a “red-eyed sparrow, all out of songs, hoping for a resurrection.” The final haiku reminds us too of the danger of windows she began the collection with but now underlines that “the songbird won’t die.” 

Mayson’s eruptive poems leap between lyrics and a haibun, a pantoum and breath-punctuated prose pieces. Some don’t work as well, like “Chamomile Tea” whose scattershot typographies “and I/ho/wlp/ani/c” twist discombobulation into unreadability, while others are a tad too marked by cliché (blood rushes, legs tremble, “sounds catch in my/throat”), an effect, along with the occasional romantically-flat endings (“you treat me so differently/than anyone else”) that gives the feel of song lyrics (perhaps most overtly in “Xanny” where Billie Eilish is invoked). Yet most pieces pierce. When Mayson converses with figures from Emily Dickinson to Gerard Manley Hopkins, or when she writes of rehab in “Withdrawal Cracked Me Like an Egg” then picks up on images of Solitaire, pills and yolk and replays them in a subsequent form so it becomes pain, redux, or when she recounts the agonizing narrative of her grandmother’s dying as she tries to resist the theft of “Benzos out of her open mouth,” the collection rises to that essential wound that poetry can be, needs to be, so we can enter what we suffer, wholly, and hopefully, heal. 

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.

The post Review of Carley Mayson’s “If I Know Anything About a Knife” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

On a Tension of Leaves and Binding
by Renée M. Sgroi
Guernica Editions (2024)

I was first introduced to Renée Sgroi’s poetry online at the Oakville Literary Cafe recently. I was taken by her openness to science and her macro and micro views of life, as well as her moving poetry about grief. I immediately sought out her book In a Tension of Leaves and Binding and was again impressed by her delving into the Latin names of plants, her vast empathy for the world and its flora and fauna, large and small. This is her second book, but it has a maturity of voice, as well as a confidence with many different forms and styles including lyric, language poetry, list poems, free verse, documentary realism, odes and elegies, to name just a few.  Whatever form she uses, there’s the sophistication of a poet who is an informed non-scientist in earth science with a passionate curiosity about all of language. In a Tension of Leaves and Binding has already established Renée as a poet of note. I provide her website below where you can check out some of the reviews of this well-received book. 

How do you describe yourself?

In literary terms. I used to say “writer”, but since I now have two poetry books out, I say “poet”. 

Who are your influences both contemporary and classic?

I think you mean for this question to relate to poetry although no doubt like you and other writers, I read other work too. I’d definitely have to say that Italo Calvino — can I say especially Calvino? Always Calvino? I think I‘ve read Invisible Cities at least four times already! 

Dionne Brand, Lisa Robertson, Paul Auster, and Orhan Pamuk are certainly influential for me.  Their books invite multiple readings. That’s a sign for me that they’re influential. In terms of poetry (because both Brand and Robertson are also novelists), I’d say Ellen Bass’s work, Kayla Czaga’s Midway, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang’s Grappling Hook, both of these two latter collections I have on my shelf to reread as well. And then there’s Louise Glück, Diane Seuss, Anne Carson. I haven’t ready everything published Carson, but I’m getting there.  If I like an author’s work, I tend to do a deep dive. For poetry that has stayed with me, and in this sense, gets at the “classic” part of the question, Dorothy Livesay, A.M. Klein, Alden Nowlan, P.K. Page, Robyn Sarah. Oh, Gertrude Stein. I think I have a penchant for more experimental, or less lyrical work (also in my choice of novels), although I’d actually have to qualify that statement by saying how much I love Frank X. Gaspar’s Late Rapturous (I’ve read it twice, three times? I will no doubt read it again at some point!). I’ve just finished reading Susan Andrews Grace’s Hypatia’s Wake, as well as Michael Trussler’s Realia and 10:10. All three brilliant works. But I’m also about halfway through Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy, and have his Watt on my list for the summer. Outside of Waiting for Godot (which I had to study more than once in university), Beckett, I can already tell is going to get his name on my “influential” list.

Can you tell us about your Italian heritage and connection to the language and how it has impacted your understanding of English and poetry?

Yes! I grew up knowing that my family heritage was Italian, or more precisely Calabrese, although when I’m asked now, I will generally respond that I have a southern-Italian background, which I think is an important distinction (at least for me) because of the historical exploitation and underdevelopment of southern Italy, which led to its own unique cultural characteristics. My parents immigrated to Canada before I was born, so the immigration narrative and the dialect of Calabrese was a huge part of my life. I guess I’d be considered a “compound bilingual” (English and Calabrese) because I heard both languages from birth, although English tends now to dominate in most family functions, especially as some of the older generation have passed on.  In university, I took an introductory Italian class, and learned how much about the language I didn’t know, because my parents didn’t speak Dante’s Italian (which is the basis of standard Italian). And yet… There is definitely an underlying linguistic structure in my brain and in me that is Calabresi, which I’m finding increasingly apparent as I get older. If I’m angry, I’m angry in Calabrese, and equally, if I love someone, it’s the same. But yes, in relationship to poetry, I sometimes think that when I write, I’m unconsciously using a Calabrese syntactical construction, but just writing it in English. When I see this in my own writing, depending on what I’ve written, sometimes I change it, and sometimes I don’t. I know other writers have sometimes commented on my unusual syntax, and I really think that’s the reason why. It also explains why, when I took an introductory linguistics class in university, I was really great at phonology, but couldn’t figure out syntax!

You are definitely a gardener in your poetry. Are you also at home in the garden?

Thank you for asking this question! So many people have commented on the garden in my book, but I don’t think anyone’s ever stopped to ask this! Yes, I am a gardener. Not the type who’s out there in rain, sleet or snow (and kudos to you folks!), but I enjoy creating a space for plants to flourish, and with my husband, we’ve created some vegetable patches, as that’s more his thing. But I definitely have a green thumb, as nine times out of ten, anything I put into the ground will grow. And I have numerous plants inside my house too. Recently I rescued a little asparagus fern from the nursery that was on the “needs rescuing” shelf, and now it’s happily growing across, between, and above the poinsettia it lives beside, draping itself over the poinsettia pot, so yes, definitely, I am at home in the garden.

I don’t want readers to equate my relationship to the garden in any kind of stereotypical way that has to do with my heritage, though. I think it’s a trope, a negative stereotype that “all” people of Italian heritage “naturally” have a garden, or lots of plants in pots, or are growing tomatoes, etc., that probably has to do with historical bias towards the waves of immigrants to Canada, particularly in the 1950s and 60s. More importantly, it’s not actually the case, even if some people do like their tomato vines in their backyards! My husband is from Trinidad, so case in point, he’s the one who wants tomatoes, looks after tomatoes… As for myself, I don’t understand or see my relationship to my own garden through a cultural or heritage lens. For me, I think it’s more about how all of us as human beings exist, co-exist, as beings in a world that also includes plants. There’s something really grounding in the ability to be near, and live alongside plants, and when I discovered in my early twenties that I have a green thumb, it was much more of a communication, perhaps something that even led to poetry years later, that was important for me.

How did this book of poetry begin for you?

I think I am always writing about nature in some way (see comment above), or I had been for some time. I suppose I started to realize that I had a number of poems on a theme, so I started to put them together, and started to pay more attention to nature.  And then my mom passed away. And then the pandemic hit. I was lucky that I had the ability and the means to spend the first summer of the pandemic just sitting in my backyard, reading and writing. And then in the summer of 2021, I was in the online workshop at Sage Hill, and that completely changed everything for me, including how I see poetry. And it was during that workshop that I also realized I wasn’t just writing about the garden, but I was writing about grief. I rearranged everything after Sage Hill, and I think the book took off from there, even though most of the writing was probably already done at that point.

So, I didn’t start out with a set idea, but instead, the book developed organically. Maybe that’s apt for a book about plants!

I was so moved when I heard you read the poems about your mother, I rushed to buy your book. Can you tell us about those poems?  Did it help with grieving such a huge loss? 

Oh, that’s so lovely to hear, Bruce. I really appreciate that. It’s interesting, because those poems are about my mother in some ways, yet they’re not. I was trained last year in the Amherst Writers’ and Artists’ (AWA) method, which always asks workshop participants to focus on “the speaker” or “the narrator” of a piece, rather than to assume that the “I” of any given text is the author. Even before I joined AWA, I was aware that somehow in the transformation of a lived experience into a poem, the poem was no longer ‘the’ experience, or was not simply a direct mirror of that experience (and after all, can anything ever be?). In order for the experience to become art, the words have to serve the needs of the poem, so details may change, a perspective may change, a feeling may change, or perhaps something else. I know lots of other writers have spoken or written about this, so I’m not saying anything inventive or new in this regard. Was it cathartic for me? I suppose in a way, although I don’t know that writing about our experiences is therapeutic, or that it alleviates feelings that are larger than anything we can put down on a page.

Others have mentioned your use of Latin names for plants. I love that too and your openness to science.  Can you tell us how this came about.

I had been reading Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk when I was writing this book, and thinking about names and categories, and I think I am predisposed naturally to aim for precision in my work, which required me to learn the Latin names for the plants and animals. And as I mention in the “Of Binding” section at the back of the book, I do really love the sound of Latin, and how it rolls off the tongue. But as I said, I was reading Brand, and thinking about the problems of classification, the colonialist thinking given to naming flora and fauna (and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is so great at explaining how Indigenous names for plants and animals show relationships, rather than proprietorship), so it became important to try and split those names apart, even while recognizing that I too have been educated in that system, and am, in that sense, complicit. And then I was asking myself, how can I move or push against that?

You are a terrific supporter of your fellow writers through organizing events and participating in the AICW.  Can you tell why this is important to you?

I certainly try to support my fellow writers! I think I’m a person who believes in community building, even if its on a very, very small scale. When I was president of the Brooklin Poetry Society (in Brooklin, which is a part of Whitby, where I live), I was able to get a website up and running, a poetry contest, an anthology published. I needed to pull back for awhile, and then I became part of the executive of the Canadian Authors Association – Toronto Branch towards the end of Covid, which was really great, and gave me a sense of contributing to a larger organization. For the past three years or so, I’ve been a first reader for Arc Poetry Magazine. It’s very behind-the-scenes, but it’s important work because it contributes to the poems that eventually get sent forward to the poetry editor, and make it into the publication. And I feel it’s been a real education for me, too, in terms of the poetry that is out there, so it’s a win-win! With regards to the AICW, I actually haven’t participated in too many events, as right now, it’s a bit of a challenge for me to be physically present as much as I would like, but I became an Amherst Writers and Artists’ affiliate last year, and have occasionally helped out with their online workshops, in addition to running my own workshops online, so no, I don’t have a problem helping out writing communities that I’m a part of as I think it’s important to make a contribution. As Louise DeSalvo wrote in her book, Slow Writing, “being a writer isn’t easy”, and it isn’t. We need all the help we can get. 

What have you learned thus far that you would like to share with your fellow writers, beginning or established.

Keep writing. We all get rejected. Trust yourself. Listen. Read widely. Pay attention. When I say read widely, I mean really widely. Don’t just read the authors you like. Read those you don’t like too – you’ll learn from them. Don’t be afraid to explore, to invent, to play. Try something new. Share. Support fellow writers. Be a part of your local writing community or group.  Look after yourself. It’s okay if you don’t write the best novel or book of poems, or whatever. It’s the act of writing that counts. A rejection letter shows you have your hand in the game. 

What’s next for you?

Right now, I’m working with two other authors on a couple of collaborative pieces, so that’s at the forefront for the moment. I’m also booked to work with an editor on one of my manuscripts in early fall, but before that, I’ll be attending Sage Hill online again in July with a different project I’ve been sketching out. If I have time, I’d like to revisit a novel project that I haven’t been able to attend to for a few years (fingers crossed on that one). But I’m planning to take the summer off from offering workshops so that I can concentrate on my own writing and time for reading. I have a stack of books I hope to get through! 

Bruce Hunter is an active gardener, writer, speaker and mentor. In 2025, his award-winning novel In the Bear’s House was rereleased by Frontenac House. In 2024, as Nella casa dell’orso, it was published in Italy, as was his 2023 poetry collection Galestro in 2022, A Life in Poetry, all by iQdB edizioni. In 2021, his memoir essay “This is the Place I Come to in My Dreams” was shortlisted for the Alberta Magazine Publishers’ Awards. In 2024, his eco-poem “Dark Water” won the gold prize for poetry for the same awards. Bruce’s poetry, fiction, reviews, interviews, translations, and nonfiction have appeared in over 100 publications internationally.

Renée M. Sgroi (she/her) has published two poetry collections, life print, in points (erbacce-press) and In a Tension of Leaves and Binding(Guernica Editions), the latter of which was on the CBC’s highly anticipated poetry books for 2024. In addition to FreeFall Magazine, Renée’s poetry has been published most recently in Room, Pinhole Poetry, yolk literary magazine, and Augur Magazine. A member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets, the Association of Italian-Canadian Writers, the Canadian Authors Association, The Ontario Poetry Society, and an Amherst Artists and Writers Affiliate, Renée is also a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine. 

The post Renée Sgroi, in Conversation with Bruce Hunter  appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Lost Signal
by Chris Hutchinson
Palimpsest Press (2025)

If you don’t have an ear for the music of language, why do you write poems? This, the confused query that assails me when I peruse many leaden collections. Fortunately, Lost Signal is not among them.

Chris Hutchinson has been honing his assonantal antennae for decades now and his sixth publication, in four sections featuring a range of lyrical styles and one long poem in parts, sings an intellectual investment in engaged inhabiting.

In the piece, “What I Want isn’t Always What I Want to Want,” Hutchinson anchors philosophical musings on identity and yearning with a bookend of sunflowers, the final quatrain an echo of Wallace Stevens’ ballast of lyricism amid ‘thinkiness’: “I’d rather be cursed/like a field of sunflowers/seething with seeds/under a night full of stars.” I’ll be carrying those vowels in my blood awhile.

Lost Signal is unabashed in its homage to Stevens, overt in a superb piece like “Waving from the Shores of Key West” (and of course I hear the ghost of Stevie Smith in there too), that draws on onomatopoeic words like “squelchy” and more scientific terms like “matrices” to again question what the purpose of human creation is against the utter wonder of the ocean, each stanza a mere “tiny wind-torn flag.”

Part Two is a lengthier, fragmental meditation on aging and his father’s death, another acknowledgement of limitations in parameters, definitions, modes of expressing anything and necessary regardless even if, “…this is not a poem…This is just me/pissing and moaning.” A recognition that yields to the next section’s elaboration of other forms of loss and bond. Hutchinson weaves from curious statements such as, in the poem inflected by a Robert Frost epigraph, “Fire, Honey and Ice,”: “all my mentors are dead/or gone to beekeeping,” to the subtle unpacking of language because “No word ever says/exactly what it means,” the last line daring sentimental charges to show how the word “love” inhabits the word “clover.”

Such a willingness to be won over by sonorities is also evident in the gorgeous “Elongated, Waterworn Sonnet,” an Edmontonian adoration poem of river and a poet “lost/in the word pearlescent.” The final section might have been shorter, as the voice becomes, on occasion, an overly-familiarized reverberation from prior pieces, and I did wonder where the attribution to John Thompson’s “Yeats, Yeats” ghazal was in the poem that begins “Nietzsche, Nietzsche….” but Hutchinson remains a reliable traveler in exegesis and attentiveness, whether arriving at a “Motel 6/on the outskirts of Red Deer,” or recollecting “crushing Pong/zonked on Fruit Loops.”

The poems in Lost Signal truly locate semaphorical longings in everyone from a dyslexic skywriter to Diamond Tooth Gertie. A relentlessly erudite text, Lost Signal never forgets its child-like “why” or its need for the most sensorial of expression, the intimate witness, at the end, “falling asleep in my arms.” 

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.

The post Review of Chris Hutchinson’s “Lost Signal” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.