review

Susan Holbrook has a lot of tricks up her sleeve. In this, her second collection, her favourite is to rework borrowed texts, including poems by Lorca, a pet-training website, and a report from a home-inspection consultant. It is refreshing to encounter such a range of sources, especially from everyday ephemera (two poems even use the form of a Sudoku). For Holbrook, the joy is in dismantling language -- and she is devilishly playful, digging into words and phrases like a toddler with a box of crayons.

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.

Isobel and Emile is the story of two young lovers who separate and then try to survive on their own. The novel opens on the morning after their final consummation. Emile boards a train bound for his home in the city. Isobel stays in the town where they conducted their brief affair. For each one, the pain of separation becomes an existential crisis.

Excerpted from The Mark News:

Neighbour Procedure engages. 'Grievable' is a poem that lists names of people who have been killed. The poem that follows is entitled 'Nominal.'

It's not surprising Alan Reed works in the realms of poetry, theatre and performance art. His first novel, Isobel & Emile, often reads like the latter, the narrative in carefully orchestrated declarations and observations.

Here as in six earlier glittering books, Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy.

Excerpted from The Globe and Mail:

'Fiction must justify itself in every line,' Joseph Conrad said more than a century ago. Editors have quoted it to writers ever since. Rules, of course, can sometimes be broken with impunity, even with panache. Consider Alan Reed, a Montreal poet and student of semiotics. His stylistically audacious first novel jettisons the notion that every word and sentence must be necessary ...

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.

Joshua Corey at the Cahiers de Corey blog as given some preliminary thoughts on Rachel Zolf's Neighbour Procedure, along with Geoffrey Nutter's Christopher Sunset.

'A work of radical and rigorous empathy for Jew & Arab ... Zolf's world is raucous, contested, its heteroglossia weighted both ethically and aesthetically ... how physically beautiful the book is: its printing, and that gorgeously textured paper.'