“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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Elephants in the Room: New Short Fiction
by Betty Jane Hegerat
Shadowpaw Press (2025)

Betty Jane Hegerat is well known in the writing community not only as a respected teacher and mentor, but also for her skill in crafting engaging short stories. Hegerat is a masterful writer of character, place, and most of all the small things that are actually THE things that matter. Perhaps it is because of Hegerat’s earlier career as a social worker that she brings such empathy to her writing, transforming mundane, ordinary moments into compelling, relatable narratives. 

Elephants in the Room includes fourteen highly polished stories. all which deal with the awkward situations, the unspoken or uncomfortable truths, the missed opportunities in life. In other words, the elephants in the room.

The collection opens with “The Queen is Coming” a story of a middle-aged son who takes his mother to view the Queen’s cavalcade in the 2005 royal visit to Calgary. The mother feels a strong bond with the Queen as she and the Queen were pregnant with boys at the same time, and both of their sons are named Charles. There is something so tender in the crafting of these parallel lives. The story’s narrator, Charlie, balks at taking his mother to see the Queen, but dutifully does so, his mother wearing an early replica of the Queen’s mink cloche hat which Charlie’s sister speculates is made from cat fur. The lacklustre son hasn’t chosen the best vantage point of the Cavalcade, but the mother motions her son to listen as she opines about the Queen:

 “You look at her face, Charlie. She’s so…serene. How can that be possible with all the stress the poor woman has been through?”

I choke back a snort. “She has a bit of hired help, Ma”

“Oh, not that, she says. “It’s the children. The way they live their lives. What a disappointment that must be.”

I feel heavy, leaning there on my haunches, the weight of my own dull life hovering over Ma and me. 

“I guess that’s just something that comes with being a mother,” I say. 

“No, dear,” she tells me softly, without taking her eyes off the street. “Elizabeth has had bad luck with her Charles. Aren’t I a lucky old woman to have raised a decent man like you?” She turns now, and the smile takes twenty years from her face.”

Part of the magic of that story, as in all of Hegerat’s work, is the dialogue: the authentic exchange between the characters, and what is not said. Often the real story, and the drama, is just underneath the surface of the conversations in this collection.  

Hegerat is also skilled at braiding wry humour with the everyday drama. In the story, “Unmasked”, Eldon, an older queer man who experimented with sex as a teenager, and accidently got a girl pregnant is waiting to meet his progeny for the first time. He reflects on how the mother of his child declared “father unknown’ on the birth registration and cut him out of her and the child’s life. “My Dad said I should be relieved. If I had been named and Inge had decided to keep the baby, I could end up paying support for years. In spite of feeling relieved—no longer having my nuts caught in a noose, as Dad so delicately put it—my teenage mind took a secret swaggering pride in knowing I’d fathered a kid.” When Eldon meets his daughter, he ‘had the feeling that under the mask she was looking at me like I just fell off the turnip truck.’ He goes on to say, “Look I’m sorry if I keep sticking my paw in my mouth, but I’m kind of lost here.”

The stories momentarily open the door on the lives of those who don’t quite fit in and offers deeply human portraits of the working class, the elderly, the isolated. Here we meet an angry foster child, a lesbian spinster teacher, a school kid dealing with the death of his bully, a grieving widow, a wayward brother. We are given a glimpse of the quiet struggles in day to day lives, and in doing so, Hegerat never veers into the sentimental, but quietly reveals the souls of complex characters.   

It is often said that it is hard to write a great tragedy, but perhaps more difficult is to write a great story about the small happiness, conflicts, and internal transformations that happen in the lives of day-to-day characters. 

Rosemary Griebel is an Alberta writer and librarian. Her award-winning poetry has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, as well as on CBC Radio, literary magazines, anthologies, and chapbooks. Her collection of poetry, Yes (2011), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert and the Pat Lowther awards, as well as the Stephan G. Stephansson award. Recently, her essays have appeared in Reimagining Fire: The Future of Energy (2023) and Ascenti: Humans Opening to AI (2024). In 2019 one of her poems was chosen for Alberta’s first literary landmark, as part of Project Bookmark Canada’s CanLit Trail.

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By Jonathan Greenbaum

Dear Humans: Stories
by Hollie Adams
NeWest Press (2026)

Nowadays we pick up works of fiction that mix genres to achieve the author’s aims. Hollie Adams’ new short story collection, “Dear Humans,” exemplifies this. Her publisher describes the book as a place where the fantastic meets the hyper-realistic. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, Adams is a literature instructor at the University of Maine. She is the author of the novel, “Things You’ve Inherited from Your Mother” (also issued by NeWest Press).

Quirkiness is the word that best characterizes the thirteen stories in this collection. The narratives are mostly about career women. The tone and style of the stories have a minimalist flavour, like the early work of the American poet and short story writer, Raymond Carver (May 25, 1938 to August 2, 1988). Carver’s plots are memorable for their strangeness, though his one-dimensional characters quickly fade from memory.

“Eyebrow,” the second story in the collection, works on many levels. The first-person female narrator, Mary Watkins, tells us that she has “cat-sitted” Eyebrow, a pet belonging to her teaching colleague, Ben. We learn that Mary is fond of Ben. “[His] mismatched teeth, of course, no dealbreaker as far as I was concerned.” [p. 17]. And later: “I wanted to pour his scent [Ben’s] over ice and drink it.” [p. 19]

Some of the quirkiness in this story comes out in its humour. For example, Eyebrow butts his head into Ben’s shin and then abruptly turns away “to show us his butthole, tail curling like a question mark, asking for feedback.” [p. 18]  Mary notices that she has a mysterious bump on her forehead. Strangely, the bump grows into a horn. Later, when Ben unexpectedly visits Mary in her home, he sees the protuberance on her forehead.

“I can’t explain it,” [Mary says]. “My doctor isn’t sure—”
“It’s so white,” [Ben] says. [p. 27]

Ben touches the horn. Then he and Mary undress. We are led to believe that they will have sex, as Mary wishes. Only at the last minute Ben surprises the reader. “Heavy-breasted and horned, I may be an obscene image, a vulgar teenage fantasy, but a fantasy all the same,” Mary says, thus concluding the story. [p. 33]

How are we to read this? Is Mary’s horn a phallic symbol? Ben touches it and seems to like it. Is this some kind of sexual role reversal? Or just plain fantasy? We are left wondering.

The narrative, “Like That but Times a Million,” is similarly odd. Sarah, the pubescent first-person narrator, tells us that her neighbour, Robbie, has lost his father. Sarah remains in her house to avoid seeing Robbie. Hoping to cheer up the boy, Sarah’s father invites him to swim in his pool. And swim Robbie does, lap after lap, refusing to stop even when the weather turns menacing.

The lightning flashes closer now but everything else is so very black and when I look up, it seems that more than half the world is sky. [p. 37]

This is very good descriptive writing. It portends what might happen to Robbie if he doesn’t get out of the pool. The story is told in different sections. At times Sarah wonders about death and other things. She cannot bring herself to tell Robbie that she’s sorry for his loss. What will happen? Will Robbie be struck by lightning and perhaps die like his father?

In the story “The Documentary We’ve Been Making for Fifty Years,” the narrator describes the vicissitudes in the lives of a group of friends who begin to shoot a very amateur film in the late 1960s. The filming scenes serve as a backdrop for a narrative about what happens to these people over the next fifty years. The ghost of a gorilla hovers over these characters (fantasy, again).

The story, “The Sessional Years,” is told by a first-person narrator, an English instructor named Britney. Britney is asked out by James, one of her adult male students. Later, James follows Britney to her apartment building. Is James really stalking Britney? A confrontation ensues between these two characters. Students stalking their teachers? This seems to be the “realism” that Adams’ publisher evokes.

I wondered about the “Dear Humans” of the title: is Adams addressing the characters in her own stories? Does she find them “endearing?” Or is the title a statement to the world at large that humans are dear creatures? (Never mind about the wars we start).

Hollie Adams tries very hard to create clever, hip female characters. Some readers may find this wit and hipness humorous.

“But if I let all those skeletons out of my walk-in, I’ll lose Poppy [my daughter], spend the next 5-10 taking communal showers and longing for non-Velcro shoes,” says the female narrator in the story, “Liking It.” [p. 104]

I confess: dialogue like this strikes me as flippant.

In sum, Adams’ narrators serve as vehicles to tell the quirky stories. I often wished that the stories, themselves, would be the vehicle to delve deeper into the hearts and minds of these women.

Jonathan Greenbaum, is a retired Ontario high school English teacher. A graduate of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, Jonathan’s short fiction has appeared in The Nashwaak Review. 

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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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Beneficiary
by JoAnn McCaig
University of Calgary Press (2026)

Seren lived many lives. She was born into a picture-perfect family with matching sweaters and yearly personalized Christmas cards. She never fit in. On the break of 1970s, she escaped her pearls-around-neck life and rebelled through her teenage years and early twenties. Some think her life started when she married TJ and became a mother, though it might have been the end of her. Seren certainly felt more alive than ever after sudden inheritance brought her back to the life she once ran away from.

It is a story of a woman who is afraid of being defined. A mother, a divorcee, a rich girl… Seren never wants to live within constraints of one word. She seeks her life and freedom, avoiding yet falling victim to uncomfortable stereotypes that keep her safe. Seren is not a loveable character at first sight, but she becomes an old friend whose flaws you accept and cherish her honest charisma. Seren, as a teenager, is a seeker of an unknown fantasy; she rarely understands her own desires or actions of others. We see a more mature version of her later in life, although still clueless about the way people around her think and bitter about some tragic parts of her life. By the end of her life, Seren becomes a conscientious citizen with a stable moral compass. She is reflective of her life and her actions. She knows she isn’t perfect and she owns her flaws. “What she thought to herself was I don’t deserve this. But I accept it with gratitude” (214).  After living a life of denying her privilege, she finally accepts it and sets out to help less fortunate, to make a difference in a meaningful way.

Beneficiary is a book for readers who take their time getting to know true nature of characters. JoAnn McCaig masterfully recreated Canadian 1970s to early 2010s depicting each decade as a distinct era for Seren. This book is packed with vivid detail; it replicates Seren’s emotional turmoil with great care that combines turns the novel into a beautiful recollection which often reads like a memoir. McCaig is not afraid of brutally honest sentences and sincere reckoning moments. The way she tells the story reflects the narrative in Seren’s head, highlighting the memories she considers of great importance to her character, while briefing through some significant parts, the ones she is doing her best to forget.

“A few days later, she woke up from yet another sweaty hallucinatory daytime dream and she knew exactly what was wrong with her: I miss my own pain. An ill-favoured thing, but my own” (88).

The author manages to create a palpable presence of a woman who is perceived so differently by every person in her life that a reader cannot help but wonder who she really is. Sometimes it remains a mystery to Seren herself. She makes mistakes, lots of them, which makes her character so compelling that it’s impossible to think of her less. Like all of us, she navigates this life with blind effort, and she is sincere about every turn.

Sasha Yurchenko is a Ukrainian-Canadian writer and a prose editor for a queer-led journal Ivy Literary. She is currently earning her B.A. in Creative Writing and Publishing in Sheridan College. New to Canada, she enjoys reading about unique cultural experiences, especially from marginalized communities. Her work can be found in Darkness Falls anthology and B222 Journal.

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Toxemia
by Christine McNair
Book*Hug (2024)

Toxemia, the first work of creative non-fiction by multiple-award-winning poet Christine McNair, is a powerful and emotive collection of lyric essays that tracks McNair’s several horrifying experience with illness and injury. “Toxemia” is the historic term for what is now called preeclampsia, a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy which is life-threatening and significantly increases the risk of subsequent stroke and heart conditions. McNair suffered with preeclampsia with each of her two pregnancies, notwithstanding clinicians’ assurances that having a second episode would be highly unusual. The book seems part of a continued effort to contextualize these experiences and “to contain my fear and put a circle around this work.” (150). 

Skillfully constructed, evocative and compelling, Toxemia is far from a static chronological recounting of illness and its impacts. McNair guides the reader through layers upon layers of incidents and reflections. “My mother peels layers of my skin away with the washcloth” (95). McNair says, and she herself peels back layers of personal and familial history. Another compelling metaphor is that of nesting doll(s), which McNair uses as the titles of two of the essays. Memories of a childhood accident live within the joys and terrors of giving birth and fearing death, nested among stories of her forebears, both real and cobbled together or fleshed out from scant and perhaps inaccurate information. “I introduced a ghost memory to the fold” (155) she muses, but concludes that nonetheless “a sliver of something like a person … is something of a person.” (156). 

McNair brings us intimately into other health crises besides preeclampsia, including stroke and heart issues, sharing the visceral impact of symptoms and fears prior to a rare heart condition, marantic endocarditis, being diagnosed: “I am not having a heart attack. It is my asthma. It is anxiety. It is indigestion. It is my heart. It is my lungs. It is my brain. It is the fae. It is excess of mercury. It is a familial curse. It is a small elephant curled onto my breast bone. What is it.” (51) and the moving lines “Please let there be something that can be found and treated… It just has to stop. I’m drowning in the unexplained.” (53). Anxiety and mental health challenges are also revealed as life-threatening, with eating disorders, clinical depression and a suicide attempt among the layers and intersecting elements of McNair’s medical experiences

McNair uses a variety of devices that amplify the impact of her themes. Some essays are very brief, while others unfurl in numerous sections. With a few exceptions, McNair uses present tense, bringing urgency and immediacy to the medical events. Some essays probe French grammatical tenses, with titles such as “imparfait” and “passé composé”, and the terms’ explanations (in English) as epigraphs. This adds to the nested, time-shifting feel – the difference between repeated past actions is blurred into fears of what might happen. Other titles play upon the notion of déjà vu: “déjà vécu”, “presque vu”, “jamais vu”, “déjà vu” (for two poems), “déjà rêvé’ and “déjà entendu”. 

“foliate” employs a technique McNair used for the poem “the problem with orchids” in Charm, her Archibald Lampman Award-winning poetry collection: strategic replacement of key words in an official text (here a 1916 “mother and child” guide) to surreal and occasionally chilling effect. She writes of the “flower pressure” of “explosives” during their “latency”, of one explosive who “went into the defoliating room and gave mirth to a perfectly normal changeling”, of “roses and irises” and “sluggish owls” (71-74). 

The essays “jamais vu” and “déjà vu” are shaped from text from Downton Abbey where the fictional Lady Sybil’s death exemplifies the historical frequency of maternal death when preeclampsia could not be halted. Other cultural references ground the experiences in the quotidian, while elements such as historic texts, a comparative table of symptoms, and a listing of treatments over time add context without pulling focus from the personal and immediate.

Visual images are effectively interspersed throughout Toxemia. Two photos are especially moving despite their simplicity. In one, McNair’s grandmother’s hands are loosely clasped atop folds of fabric on her lap, and in another tiny children’s clothes belonging to McNair’s two young daughters are displayed as in a museum exhibit. The latter photo is situated within the longer “Nesting Dolls” essay, one section of which enumerates questions to be answered “based on research about what people want to hear from their parents who die too soon.” (100). In an earlier section of this essay, McNair worries “If I die now, my children will barely know me… They’ll remember me in stories that other people tell them until those become their memories of me… They’ll remember cut-outs of who I was” (99). 

The book’s sections headings echo stages of medical diagnoses: “symptoms”, “presentation” “risk factors” and “treatment”. The progression through these stages is subtle and nuanced, with the intersecting memories culminating near the end of the “treatment” section with McNair’s hope that she will leave “some sort of glow record for the kids. I want a touchstone for me of time and good for when things go dark.” (157).

McNair writes that “every body survives something. Or they don’t.” (145) and that “The body remembers what the brain forgot.” (67). Toxemia is an impressive and deeply moving evocation of survival, and of remembering.

Frances Boyle is the prairie-raised, Ottawa-based author of three poetry collections, a Rapunzel-infused novella and an award-winning short story collection. Her debut novel, Skin Hunger, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in fall 2026. For more, visit www.francesboyle.com.

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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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