All Books

Is he talking about botany or…hmmm…ahhh…well now. The very act of reading Steven Ross Smith’ fifth volume of his Fluttertongue series draws shock, secret smiles, and out-loud exclamations from the most stoic, stuffed-shirt readers of poetry. Rife and ribald, his disjunctive prose-poem forms contain stimulation for all five senses. Jumping off the page in explorations of joined oppositions, the richly-worded poems reveal beyond-intimate experiences of the physical world, exposing snapshots of human experience and relationships with nature. Personal-impersonal juxtapositions, syntactic structure, and randomness appear here in disjunctive prose poem form to express primal-scream poetry.
Each page sets a prose-poem atop a sly and sensuous moss-like footer that unfolds at the bottom of each page, giving its own experience of wink-and-nudge word play. The book becomes a distraction in itself, tempting the reader to peek ahead, disregarding proper book-reading etiquette.
With Smith’s irresistible word-play and a deep and complex poetic sensibility, Fluttertongue 5 is a rich, rewarding and delightful read.

Flux is everything a significant debut should be–the arrival of a fresh, confident voice with an extraordinary range of form, direction and style.From a sequence that captures the art and vocabulary of commercial fishing with careful precision, Denham bursts into a free-flowing and varied narrative based on the angst-ridden and picaresque life of a hitchhiking, cigarette-scrounging West Coast university student. Between these poles, Flux draws on Denham’s broad palette of expression to evoke the various shades of urban life: house fires, street life, garbage strikes, disturbing and life-affirming revelations of young love, and friends and relatives possessed by drugs, child abuse and suicide.All of this leads to “Two Waters,” Denham’s brilliant long poem painstakingly laying out the natural beauty and geography of the small coastal town he grew up in and its transformation into “Memories rippling/ On the periphery of vision between clean new buildings . . . Stripmalls. Traffic. Suburbia’s/ Low-swell panic moving in . . .”

In 1993, after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accord, Gary Geddes travelled through Israel with the blind poet and scholar John Asfour, he serving as Asfour’s eyes, Asfour as his tongue. The contrast between his friend’s competence in the sighted world and his own incompetence in Asfour’s Arabic world forced Geddes to ponder the blindness, physical and metaphoric, that is central to human nature.

The poems in Flying Blind meditate on seeing and not seeing in many ways. Flying Blind, the section documenting Geddes’s eye-opening trip, confirms his status as Canada’s foremost political poet, while the poems in the other three sections are riffs on sight and vision, some extended, some as trenchant as haiku.

Flying Red Horse is a book of poetry, with a lyric essay, about fatherhood and masculinity, and the conditions of whiteness that pressure those terms for contemporary relevance and meaning. It looks at the precarity of relationships between people and place in diverse geographic and racial contexts; it addresses the crisis of climate change; and it considers parental connections to children in uncertain global circumstances.This book speaks to an experience of Canada and the United States, drawing attention to the conditions of spectacle and surveillance governing each nation. It asks where we stand in relation to the global technological power of connectivity and disconnection that disturbs contemporary social relations. Without seeking resolution, Flying Red Horse puts in correspondence four episodes of poetic meditation on the disparate facts composing the contemporary moment through the personal encounter of lyric language.