“Lisa Martin’s Believing is not the same as Being Saved cleaves even closer to the holy, keeping religious motifs so near her natural language that they slip in unnoticed until they start to pile up, as in the various uses of the sword ‘saved’ in the title poem. Martin’s best poems have a knack for […]
Category: Books
I saw this post last year – A Bookstore Is Displaying All Books By Men Backward – and thought it to be a great post to share this year for International Women’s Day. It is a strong visual aid that illustrates the gender gap in publishing. So today, Cathie and I turned all male-authored or […]
Lougheed House offered the perfect venue to launch Doris MacKinnon‘s newest book, Metis Pioneers as it was the home of one of the two women whose lives are described in the book: Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed. Both Isabella and the second woman in the study, Marie Rose Delorme Smith, were born in 1861. They experienced […]
“The seven quirky stories in Gisèle Villeneuve’s new collection, Rising Abruptly,all have mountains at their heart…. The characters’ relationship with mountains evolves throughout the stories, creating an arc that models a romantic relationship: infatuation, the conflict between independence and commitment, and the acceptance of love coupled with death. Rising Abruptly is a literary ode to […]
“… Beach’s spare, poetic prose swept me away from the present world of mad dictators into a magical timeless realm like the sweet books of my childhood. I was transported and found myself rationing each page near the end, because I did not want to leave Beach’s fictional world. Highly recommended, even if you don’t like […]
“…Darryl Raymaker, has recently written an excellent book about Alberta and the Trudeaus, calledTrudeau’s Tango. In his compendious book, Raymaker reminds everyone that the Trudeau name has always been controversial in Alberta—but respected, too. The Trudeau name gave ‘Alberta Liberals hope,’ Raymaker writes. The father, then—like the son, now—’was a man for his time—new, youthful, […]
The staff of the University of Alberta Press had a treat on Monday: a visit to the Bruce Peel Special Collections! Linda Quirk, Assistant Special Collections Librarian, and Kevin Zak, Exhibitions & Collections Assistant, spent an hour showing us a range of treasures and telling us about the general operations of the Bruce Peel Special Collections […]
Co-Editor Shirley A. McDonald and contributor Jennifer Koshan, along with MLA Dr. David Swann, organized an event to honour the many faceless/invisible/unrecognized workers whose labour puts food on our tables. A celebration of Farm Workers’ Day and the launching of Farm Workers in Western Canada: Injustices and Activism in Calgary on August 21 exceeded their expectations. Even before the […]
“Sleeping in Tall Grass is an outstanding first poetry collection…. In the opening long poem, ‘Nowhere in Sight,’ Therrien uses the physical experience of walking across the prairie as a metaphor for poetry while a walking rhythm sparks spiritual insight…. Sleeping in Tall Grass is a wise book, erudite and philosophical at times but foremost […]