Winnipeg Free Press reviews Prismatic Publics, The Inquisition Yours

Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (Coach House, 407 pages, $30) is the first anthology to exclusively showcase Canadian avant-garde women poets.

This is surprising considering the significant influence of the writers collected here and the four-decade time span in which some of them have been publishing.

Scrupulously co-edited by Heather Milne of Winnipeg and Kate Eichorn of New York, the volume features 15 poets, including such lauded voices as Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt and Gail Scott alongside their emerging contemporaries Sina Queyras, Rita Wong and Catriona Strang.

This is a dense collection that offers a dynamic range of concerns, motivations, influences, constraints and perspectives, from significant women poets in conversation. The interviews or, perhaps more accurately, conversations, are deft, fluid, sincere dialogues, delightful in the ways in which they inform not only the respective poets' work, but their work within the context of their peers.

. . .

A cynic takes on herself in The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 111 pages, $17), Vancouver-based Jen Currin's third collection.

Written in the 'surrealist lyric,' in this case, an image-based composition of statements/fragments that work against any linear notion of narrative, The Inquisition Yours is clever and playful in its obscure titles and idiosyncratic imagery. But it seems to expend most of its energy dodging its subject rather than querying it. Which could very well be the point.

Many of the poems seem to work simultaneously toward and against an essentialism of identity 'who people really are when we peel ourselves away.' Some of the strongest images are those relating to childhood.