In Review: The Week of March 23rd

On the Blog

~ Yvonne Blomer discusses the essential nature of water and shares two poems from her collection Sweet Water (Caitlin Press): “It is true that water is life. It is also true that literature can feed us…”~ Author Amanda Leduc discusses accessibility, books, and the way forward in “The Humdrum Magical: On Accessible Formats in Publishing”: “How many of us, I wonder think of the printed book and see it for what it is: an inaccessible piece of technology [that] still manages to disenfranchise a great many people?” ~ Home Sickness (Linda Leith Publishing) author Chih-Ying Lay talks LGBTQ+ culture in Taiwan, issues of translation, censorship and more: “I hope that my short stories could be the vectors or bridges between the Canadian/English readers and Taiwanese culture.”~ Our #ReadHarderChallenge is for anyone who’s missing all the poetry readings that this time of year usually brings. Check out Brick Books’ Brickyard, a showcase of established and emerging voices in Canadian poetry. 

Around the Web

~ If anyone has ever finished Infinite Jest it isn’t Momofuku chef David Chang. ~ Books are balm: here are some of the books Canadian authors would isolate with during the pandemic.~ Social distancing hasn’t stopped book clubbers: virtual book clubs continue to rise during the pandemic.

via GIPHY

ICYMI (last week)

Inner Ear: Listening for poems

“Physicists tell us reality is oddly subtle. What’s present and apparent is alive with dark matter. In his Massey Lecture, Neil Turok says ‘quantum physics teaches us that, in a very real sense, we all live in an imaginary reality.’ To calculate quantum physics, mathematicians use imaginary numbers. Dark glasses help us see in blinding sunlight.If a poem is an energy moving through you into language—something latent becoming kinetic, a thrust manifesting as a ball that could thunk into a catcher’s mitt, your whole body is going to feel you receive that energy.”