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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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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Mythologies of Outer Space
edited by Jim Ellis and Noreen Humble
University of Calgary Press (2025)

“The moon belongs to everyone – / the best things in life are free” 

The opening quote of this inspired anthology sets the tone for this gorgeous coffee table book. The first thing to note is the stellar production of the physical object itself. Stunning, high quality pages, with vibrant and eye catching visuals punctuate this wide ranging contemplation of the moon. People have been gazing upward at the moon in awe and reverence since eyes could see. In this particular chapter of reverence, Dr. Jim Ellis notes, the moon “remains an astonishingly fruitful (and revealing) site for human fantasy and exploration. . . originating in the forty-second annual Community seminar for the Calgary Institute for the Humanities.” He further notes, “the contributions that follow will explore how different cultures have regarded space and celestial bodies, and how space has been imagined in art and literature.”

Multi-genre texts by a variety of experts and pontificators illuminate mythologies, science, ontologies, poems, and contemplations. In the first chapter, Alice Gorman, space archaeologist, ruminates on the ways the moon lives, as god, goddess, or man, while also reflecting on the ways the moon is mapped as a geography, or dead planet to be investigated, mined, and colonized as territory. 

The idea that the moon is both living and dead fascinated my imagination, as a sort of Schrödinger’s moon. Gorman pushed me to think about new ways the moon can be considered, even after centuries of contemplation! 

Noreen Humble’s essay on “Imaginary voyages to the moon: Lucian and his legacy” furthered ways in which the moon is the source of endless travel narratives. “Journey to the moon”, “the moon as halfway house during the life cycle of souls,” and, of course “Melies rocket into the moon’s right eye.” Humble illustrates the infinite capacity of human imagination to reach the destination, and such a wide array of vehicles and animal servants to get there, that once again, I was struck by the sheer breadth of commentary within. The moon is a planet and perhaps the greatest canvas for imagining. Both present and unattainable, it breeds story, hope, vibrancy, and acts as the greatest mirror to human civilization. 

Dr. Hilding Nelson, an astrophysicist works on intersections of indigenous ways of knowing and traditional western science, dives into ways that the moon is part of the eco-system of the Land, colonialism. He tells the names of indigenous stars that are ever present, “Chickadee”, and Binary stars, while illustrating knowledge, and discussing the erasure of more ancient knowledge than western based textbooks contain. 

Further works press into biology, science, science fiction, speculative fiction, poetry, habitation, and contemplations about outer and inner space. 

At the book’s conclusion, astronaut Robert Thirsk, discusses exploration, space debris, and commercialism in space, debris, and rules that are seemingly unenforceable. There’s deep concern about stewardship. He says, “I am frustrated by misguided decision makes, and some aspects of space governance, but I have many kindred spirits who are determined to explore space safely and sustainably, and with equity and peaceful intention.” He finishes with exploration of the final frontier is too important to get wrong.”

Mythologies of Outer Space is an eclectic and wide ranging exploration, and the ways in which humanity has a relationship with space. This beautiful book will stretch your imagination and knowledge of our common friend, the moon. 

Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate emerita of Calgary (2016-18). She was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award for literary contributions to Alberta in 2022. She is the senior acquisitions editor (poetry) at Frontenac House Press. She is a Walrus talker, a TEDX talker, and she a past Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). Her most recent book is The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021) won the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for best book of Alberta poetry and has been translated into Italian La Cattiva Moglie (iQdB).Her latest essay introduces Hunger: The Poems of Susan Musgrave (Wilfred Laurier Press. 2025).

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By Vivian Hansen

The Longest Night
by Lauren Carter
Freehand Books (2025)

There are tropes to be observed in the writing of a time-travel novel. The major trope: do not interfere with a time-space continuum; as in ‘if I could go back, I could change the outcome.’ The great writers of time travel fantasy have experimented with this rule. Jack Finney’s Time After Time, and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. Lauren Carter’s The Longest Night offers some new theoretics and perspectives about the genre.

It seems simple enough, and possibly not fantastical at all. Where memory is the location of desire, trauma, apprehension and comprehension, it becomes the portal for travel. In this book, Ash grapples with the joy of seeing long dead relatives again in a new time with new possibilities for change. But she recalls the rules:

All the rules from a glut of science fiction clutter up her head. The prime directive. Don’t interfere in the normal development of a society or the unfolding of a timeline. She’d give anything for Jean-Luc Picard to be in charge right now, to arrive with his fatherly authority and tell her what to do. (99)

I would argue that time travel, as plotted by Lauren Carter, takes down the science fiction and fantasy construct, and leaves it in the theoretic of memoir.  

The major tension in this superbly plotted story is situated shortly after the horror of 9/11, and the ensuing questions of how to change the future for a few seemingly unimportant people. Ash is not empowered to change anything about a catastrophic event. Her personal circumstances of surviving sexual abuse and predation have effaced 9/11. The personal catastrophe affects the reality of the universal catastrophe, and this binary opposition is necessary to her own survival and to those whom she loves.  She knows the future; she has a memory of it, and when returned to her own drastically altered future, she forgets a little of this, a little of that. The past is eroded; transgressions against her slide away into abyss.  

It occurs to me that the sense of MeToo in this work is far more critical than, or sensate with, the horror of nations as exampled in 9/11. If my narrative instincts are correct, Carter has achieved a brilliance that is unimpeded by the violence of patriarchy. Is it not true that the tendency to forget the worst is a female generational problem? Surely Ash, and any of us, do not forget the atrocities of sexual abuse, predation and patriarchal injustice.  And yet, we forget a few small things in time, memory and trauma. A little of this, a little of that, until a new generation of women dares to say we’ve grown beyond all that.  

This book was a fast page-turner for me, as I absorbed the more subtle drugged-tea offerings that Ash endured, growing into memory/memoir as a site of deferred dreams and un/resolved trauma.   

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.”

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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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