rave

One of the open secrets of Canadian poetry is the number of women poets who are stop-the-presses funny in their explorations of contemporary womanhood. Jeanette Lynes, Sue Goyette, Adeena Karasick, Catherine Hunter…. I’m making a list, and Susan Holbrook’s at the top. While the various cultural reasons for this accruing of poetic gender comedy deserve a great deal of discussion, suffice to say that Holbrook’s follow-up to the comic linguistic accidents of misled (1999) feeds the feminist- comic fire with its cheeky-serious, sexy-goofy language games. Take the title.

Shipwrecked in magic Parkdale

A local playwright has an entertaining ball with a rich kingdom around the King car

April 20, 2008

Patricia Robertson

Claudia Dey's magical and sensuous first novel, Stunt, is a triumphant launch to the award-winning playwright's literary career. Dey has produced a remarkable piece of magic realism.

Maybe I'm particularly sentimental. Or maybe Adrian Michael Kelly is just that good a writer. Either way, Down Sterling Road had me misting up at points. No word of a lie – misting up, I tell ya. I took a phone call at some point while reading this book, and I could feel (and hear) a lump welling in my throat.