Winnipeg Free Press finds The Certainty Dream 'whimsical and enlightening'

Montrealer Kate Hall takes on reality in her debut collection, The Certainty Dream (Coach House, 79 pages, $17), a whimsical and enlightening riff on the philosophic nature of knowing.

Hall is a poetic ventriloquist, reaching into reality's hollows to puppeteer a dream she is waking inside of: "Sometimes I get the urge to scream warnings / at the fish as I reel them in."

Hall's imagination liberates language and subject at every blink. A tongue, tucked into a crow tucked into another bird, speaks. A blackbird is both the vastness of the sea and an unfinished basement. Nouns shift to verbs and "cranberries" are a state of mind.

Hall's poems scale the world to fascinating dream proportions: "The pear orchard yields beautiful / bottles. But we've forgotten to / account for wind. In a storm / the glass breaks. Around the tree, / there's a ring of shards / we can't cross over."