review

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.'

The Poetry Project Newsletter ran an advance review of Rachel Zolf's highly anticipated new collection, Neighbour Procedure, in their February/March 2010 issue.

Below is an excerpt:

Susan Holbrook claims that Joy is So Exhausting, at least according to the title of her new collection of poems (Coach House Books). I don't know about that. When I finished the book, I was exhilarated.

These are poems about things such as motherhood, breakups and chocolate. The results are clever and dizzying. One poem blenderizes a guide to writing essays by Constance Rooke with notes written by her home-inspection consultant, leavened with excerpts from Leaves of Grass.

As coming-of-age novels go, Cordelia Strube’s vivid portrayal of a teenage girl searching for her true mother places the genre firmly in the peculiar times in which we live. In their initiation into the world of adults, the literary adolescents created in what we like to think of as simpler times — the Holden Caulfields, Scout Finches and Huck Finns — moved from innocence to experience and from youthful idealism to budding pragmatism. The denouement became the tenuous reconciliation of disillusionment with hope, a fine balance that is necessary to sustain us all.

The Edible City addresses the past, present and future of food in Toronto. Like its predecessors – uTOpia, GreenTOpia and HTO – the book is a mix of political advocacy, social history and reportage.

I’m normally skeptical of a book of poetry containing multiple references to contemporary metaphysicists and epistemologists. Academic poets can be such stiff writers, getting stuck in a search for canonical purpose and intellectual weight. Their poems get 'workshopped' until they are systematically drained of all their energy and inspiration.

This is not the case with Kate Hall, whose finished poetry sounds much more like Wallace Stevens than GWF Hegel. Some lines from the last poem capture the feel of this book as a whole:

In a fall 2008 Herizons review, legendary Quebec writer Nicole Brossard declared:

'Belonging to the feminine gender requires that you learn to identify the philosophical or social lie that's taking away your energy and positive image of yourself. Girls have to learn very early to become their own subject of interest ... to become aware of the world, of differences, and of ... potential creative energy.'