Oni’s collection captures some of what makes her a “hurricane” This is a difficult review for me. The nature of spoken-word poems defies the regular norms of what is inaccurately labelled “European” poetry. Spoken-word poems are performance-based iterations of thought that depend as much on force of personality and spoken rhythm as on the hinges…
More from Rob McLennan’s new press This week I’m continuing my coverage of Ottawa’s Chaudiere Press with a look at the final two books in their small but potent roster: Clare Latremouille’s The Desmond Road Book of the Dead and Meghan Jackson’s Movements in Jars. Editor Rob McLennan is known as an admirable poet in…
Her play delivers powerful poetry Leo is a marvellous yet occasionally uneven production from a young author whose potential – as demonstrated in her latest work – is absolutely amazing. Rosa Laborde’s play tells the story of Leo, a poet whose youth and growth parallels the Socialist revolution of Chile’s Salvador Allende. Leo (Salvatore Antonio)…
Ottawa’s small press Chaudiere delivers as good or better At a reading, I once watched an author bring the microphone to his lips and say, “Book awards are the new book reviews.” Not quite up to Oscar Wilde standards, but with a bottle in my hand it seemed to be graced with a beery concinnity.…
Yellow Rabbit’s Dream Machine nearly complete One Yellow Rabbit’s Ottawa debut comes in a flashing tangle of limbs, a ringing soundscape, and, above all, in sublime words. It is a stylish and extremely ambitious presentation, a homage to the literary Beat movement of mid-century America, centred on the legendary (and Canadian-inspired, incidentally) mechanical device that…
T.E. Lawrence and Robert Graves’ rebellion When you’ve been part in the unimaginable slaughter of WWI, what does one do in its aftermath? With the world reshaped through monumental sacrifice, do those men who once lay at the very burning core of events simply become the flotsam of history? Written by playwright Stephen Massicotte, The…