In Review: The Week of August 3rd

On the Blog

~ “We carry to baseball some desire for clemency, some wish to lay ourselves down before it, to know that it is bigger than us.” Pandemic baseball anyone? We’re revisiting Andrew Forbes’s The Utility of Boredom (Invisible Publishing) a power-hitter collection of baseball essays including “Lost in the Fog,” about what happens when we stay hopeful during disappointments and delays.~ “Readers will love the strange and unique apocalyptic universes Ursula creates, much like the seeds of new futures her characters plant and nurture throughout.”For #ALUbookclub, we chatted with Inanna Publications Editor-in-Chief, Lucianna Ricciutelli, about how the press helped bring to life Ursula Pflug’s new short story collection Seeds and Other Stories.~ “From my perspective as a disabled person, the existence of sickness poetry is so important, especially within the landscape of Canadian literature where this type of poetry is still markedly underrepresented.” Poet Lauren Turner talks to us about her debut collection The Only Card in a Deck of Knives (Wolsak & Wynn), sickness poetry, disability, and more. ~ “Writing, for me, serves many different purposes. It is a creative and therapeutic outlet, a way to better understand myself, a mechanism that allows me to imagine my own worlds, and a tool to advocate for change.” At fifteen, Uma Menon wrote what would become Hands for Language (Mawenzi House), a poetry collection that shows us the world through the eyes of a young girl of colour living in America. 

Around the Web

~ Get Out, Antebellum, Lovecraft Country: Black storytellers use horror as tools for anti-racism.~ A London, Ontario woman leaves handmade bookmarks all over her city for people to find ~ Netflix released the trailer for Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of Iain Reid’s psychological thriller I’m Thinking of Ending Things — our calendars are marked. 

ICYMI (last week)

Watch This, Read That: Classics Edition

In this edition of Watch This, Read That, we bring you classics and a bit of nostalgia—along with book pairings that offer fresh perspectives from Inanna Publications, Playwrights Canada Press, and Porcupine’s Quill.