All Books

A sculptor, someone said, carves an elephant from a block of stone by chipping away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. So in Monkey Soap, Glen Downie wields a poet’s incisive chisel to reveal poems hidden in other people’s prose. Not only a sculptor of language, but a loving archaeologist of lost or abandoned voices, Downie ministers here to words from distant eras and disciplines: an 1825 treatise on gourmandism; an early 20th century penmanship training manual; the cynical dialogue of film noir; food essays from the rationed war years; a 1964 handyman’s guide; and sartorial advice from the 1990s. What he elsewhere calls ‘a choir of available voices’ makes new and strange music in this eccentric collection. Try Monkey Soap. It’s good for washing dull familiarity off our language, and the dirt out of our ears. In so doing, it restores a poetry we didn’t realize was there.

In his debut poetry collection, A.J. Levin presents a world in which the past overlays our modern existence, where classical allusions and philosophical observation are married to slapstick humour and carnival: Plato is a blues singer, Tantalus is a prospector in BC, and Descartes wanders around a Montreal amusement park. Monks’ Fruit is above all a work of faith. Redemption lies in humour, imagination, curiosity and knowledge, though not in organized religion: Lazarus is reborn through his love, even extinct species have a second life when we remember them, but a parking lot is death itself.Levin guides us not just through time but through place-a cramped Istanbul apartment, brown Mexican fields, noisy Toronto restaurants, and through England, Brazil, the American South. And everywhere is a “place filled with the poem / of human architecture,” a land made real by the ability to love and remember.

In Monoculture, Sue Goyette imagines that Nova Scotia’s last surviving stand of intact forest has been preserved for the enjoyment of the public—a premise that seems more like an inevitability than a speculation. Framing the text as visitors’ comments posted on the forest’s official website, Goyette speaks through a chorus of voices to explore the long consumptive, anthropocentric attitude that permeates our relationship with the natural world—from destructive harvesting practices to our expectations about outdoor recreation and leisure. This unique work takes its cue both from the incessant chatter of social media and from the long slog of a map-less hike, showing how a little scrap of wilderness can still unsettle and disorient us, humble and astonish us, and open its truths to us.

With intellectual energy, Sarah Klassen takes the reader on an unforgettable journey by Klassen’s unsettling, stimulating and wonderful experiences in Israel/ Palestine and Lithuania, as well as life at home. Combined with reflections on nature, the poems explore the ongoing challenge of how to live in this world with compassion, hope and faith. Nature and personal experience, beyond what media and books can convey, bring together both the spiritual and physical dimensions of living in this conflicted world. Remaining firmly grounded in reality, Klassen seeks enlightenment and higher understanding of humanity through moments of clarity.