Read and recommended over the last two years.

 How I read… many books on the go that I pick up when needed:) No stress, no duty:) And I switch between books and audio. Almost all from London Library or book exchanges. I no longer post on GoodReads, as it’s owned by Bezos/Amazon. But I broke my rule today on Winter Solstice for Jane Uquhart’s novel: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6743304485.

My fave 3 Novels of 2025
Jane Urquhart, In Winter I Get Up at Night
Ian McEwan, What We Can Know
Maria Reva, Endling

“I wanted to grow up and just be a reader, just someone who read. Even then I knew that wasn’t a job.” —Lydia Davis, The Art of Fiction No. 227

Read on!  Write on!  

In order of the alphabet:

Jordan Abel, Empty spaces
What it is to be Indigenous without access to territory. Rewriting landscape, revisiting James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans.

Maleea Acker, Hesitating Once to Feel Glory
Marvellously startling shards of ratcheted colour, set in Mexico and BC, from Nightwood Editions https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6384247772

Claire Adam, Love Forms: A Novel
Steupse ho! 
“to remember the past is its own gift”

Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy
Exegesis on the Talmud and the Kabbalah
Each story a lovely exercise in empathy and engaged, engaging writing..
“Yehi’or. Let me translate you
out of the original tongues.”
jall is open. Spirits. Ghosts. Ophanim.”
“More intense concentration on the words and their relations,
including even the physical shape of the letters and even the text’s
     punctuation.”
“She was pushing him… inside his own slime coils, into the…distant loops where his fear had organized itself into that monstrous shape, where it squatted in the extended cave of who he actually was.”

Ai Weiwei, Zodiac: a graphic memoir
Marvellous combination of memoir and the Chinese zodiac

Kazim Ali, Sukun
“Sukun (Arabic for stillness or rest, as well as being a diacritic that indicates there is no vowel to pronounce”
Goose Lane

Roland Allen, The Notebook
“the gloriously sonorous noun zibaldone…came to signify a personal anthology, or miscellany.”
“In the late 1300s, Dutch and German adherents of the devotio moderna—‘modern devotion’—movement were encouraged to keep rapiaria. The name for these notebooks derives from the Latin rapere, meaning to seize; we might call them ‘grab-bags’. In these devotional notebooks, the pious collected phrases or ideas from their scriptural reading, and added their own spiritual insights; the act of writing led to further rumination, helping the writer benefit from the wise words they copied. The Imitation of Christ—a hugely popular book—started life as the rapiarium of its author, Thomas à Kempis, a monk from Zwolle.”
“ Ricordi, ricordanzi and zibaldoni arrived in the thirteenth century as Florence established its commercial pre-eminence, grew in popularity over the course of the fourteenth as the city’s first great writers and painters made their impact, and peaked in the fifteenth, as the Renaissance flowered.”

Will Alexander, Divine Blue Light  
Ode to Coltrane!

André Alexis, Other Worlds: Stories
Adored “Contrition: An Isekai” Tam Modeste, Carib buyeis /obeah in Trinidad: “Isekai is a Japanese term that translates to “different world” or “other world”. In the context of anime, manga, and light novels, it refers to a genre where the protagonist is transported or reincarnated into a new, often fantastical, world.” In Other Worlds the last piece in , “An Elegy,” André Alexis writes that his grandparents were Modestes. Autofiction in flight.

Julia Alvarez, The cemetery of untold stories
“I am a shapeshifter, Alma concedes. It’s a professional handicap. Ever heard of negative capability? As she often told her students, writers are `always betraying someone’, to quote Joan Didion. To get at a higher truth…”
“To close a story, the old people back home would utter a chant. Colorín colorado, este cuento se ha acabado. This tale is done. Release the duende to the wind. But how to exorcise a story that had never been told?” Hence, a place in The cemetery of untold stories. Novelist Alma’s characters chat away to Filomena and one other. Symbolic names, no? This Filomena speaks.

Lisa Alward, Cocktail
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6424972109

Madhur Anand, To Place a Rabbit
Not knowing the idiom of her title in French until the narrator explains it, I imagine a rabbit in a magician’s top hat. To Place a Rabbit conjures Rachel Cusk in its lack of proper names for the characters; the meetings at international conferences; a similar distanced tone that immerses the reader in contemplating desire and inspiration its many forms with “the power of translation to mitigate desire, and of fiction to transform the course of reality.” Anand conjures a synchronistic symphony of poppies that mirrors my own mise en abyme: worlds within worlds all reverberating. Just before I start the book, I’ve posted my father’s painting of scarlet poppies for Remembrance Day, a coincidence of recursive co-relations. To Place a Rabbit is a novel of metacognition recasting past moments in the present. Anand’s literary experiment parallels her ecological work as a scientist, shape-shifting, looping back on itself.  Lisa Moore is the novelist who inspired the book.

Madhur replies, “Oh my heart, Penn!”  I wonder what ecology tells us about the larger pattern of correspondences that resound all around!

Anastacia-Reneé, Side notes from the archivist: poems
Fascinating glimpses into the life of this poet, with intriguing experimentation.  Literal side notes from the archive. “Aunt Jemima meets Victoria Secret”: more of these please.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6384333128

Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Acâhkos: nikamowini-pîkiskwêwina: nêhiyawi-kîsik âcimowin = The Star poems: a Cree Sky narrative
“Aided by Grandmother Spider, Star Woman discovers the Hole-in-the-Sky, opening a pathway for the Star People to experience the wonder of life on earth. But the world falls into the hands of the Paper People, jeopardizing the sacred harmony between nature and the cosmos.”

Katherine Arden, The Warm Hands of Ghosts: A Novel
Set in Belgium and Halifax, 1918. Characters cardboard, but the horrific setting, WW1, kept me reading. Excellent audiobook. “Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn’t one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone.” “It was so much easier to hate a man than a system: vast, inhuman, bloodstained.”
“He’d chosen the new world… chosen the wasteland of his life, with whatever green shoots he could coax out of the parched terrain of his soul.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6263123304

Kelley Armstrong, The Boy Who Cried Bear.
#2 in series, set in the Yukon.

Fatimah Asghar,If they come for us: poems
“these are my people & I find

them on the street & shadow

through any wild all wild

my people my people

a dance of strangers in my blood”

Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook
The latest and most engaging in her mystery series, with Jackson Brodie and Reggie C. And read for you by Jason Isaac, who played Brodie in the TV series! A not-so-cosy country house mystery in the small world department: “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.” Fun and funny.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6900844252

Margaret Atwood, PAPER BOAT: New and Selected Poems, 1961–2023
https://www.amazon.ca/Cut-Thirst-Short-Margaret-Atwood-ebook/dp/B0CRJGKXBS
Margaret Atwood, The Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts
Delighting in Atwood’s memoir, truly a marvel… and we were there for so much… her voice on audio, acerbic and funny.

Ashley Audrain, The Whispers
Ah, family in the suburbs. Ah, motherhood. Drama ensues. THE WHISPERS: “The moments that are trying to tell you something isn’t quite right here. The problem is some women aren’t listening to what their lives are trying to tell them.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6424996150

Paul Auster, d. May 1, 2024
“when a writer enters the past, their lesser efforts become instantly unimportant and we are able to see the masterworks as a constellation, glinting together, and nothing else matters.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/02/paul-auster-jonathan-lethem-tribute-author
“One of the things that Paul always stood for was the ability to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about the world within, in order to also acknowledge the wider world around us. We must understand the lives beyond our own. Open the curtains. Unlock the coordinates. This happens, Paul suggested, within the labyrinthian nature of storytelling.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/01/a-literary-voice-for-the-ages-paul-auster-remembered-by-ian-mcewan-joyce-carol-oates-and-more

Ramona Ausubel, The Last Animal
What makes a family? What are the ethics of bioengineering? Weave the two strands together and you have this lovely, tender and very original novel. Quixotic and darling, though I wonder about the actual science.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6501955681

Emily Austin, Interesting Facts about Space
A strange, disjointedly awkward style of writing that jumps from the titular space facts through true crime and family drama. It works because the voice of the narrator rings true to this style. A narrator on the spectrum. h
ttps://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6426032689

Mona Awad, Rouge
Down with the beauty industry! Up with the sendup! Wanted to like this more, but Tom Cruise? Really? Tangled up in weird and weirder till the end.
‘I stared up at the horrified white face masks on the red walls. Twisted in varying degrees of terror. As if each face had been frozen confronting its worst nightmare, really. It was lovely.’ https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6502127504
Mona Awad, We Love You Bunny
Nasty, twisty… and fascinating re dark academia and competitive MFA college women in “Fiction”. Awad wears her hair over one eye, like Samantha, obvi, Bunny. “I will help you birth from your mind’s vagina … into a living entity of double-spaced pages beautifully screaming.”

Britta Badour, Wires that sputter: poems
“ : To admit what you call beauty :”
M & S

Britta Badour, Wires that sputter: poems
“ : To admit what you call beauty :”
M & S

Manahil Bandukwala, Heliotropia: poems
“To be marvellous enough
for the sun”
“We glance up
to the sky for an invitation lost on a day
when no flower            was poem enough.”
Lovely.

John Banville, The Drowned
“When I speak of style, I mean the style Henry James spoke of when he wrote that in literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style, and in which everything is redeemed by style.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/may/06/fiction.johnbanville
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6835415787
John Banville, APRIL IN SPAIN
I’ve read the series, but not APRIL IN SPAIN: so enjoying it on audio, with those entrancing Irish accents!
John Banville, Venetian Vespers
Effete, overblown language that fits the nasty protagonist.

Muriel Barbery, One hour of fervor
“Que vient-on chercher dans le thé sinon l’invisible?” To write about One hour of fervor, I pour a cup of Macha tea to honour the Japanese tea ceremony, as described from Muriel Barbery’s very French sensibility. Lush prose, beautifully translated and highly symbolic. An entrancing mélange of cultures, abstract despite the fecundity so poetically described. Oh, and there are kami. And Fox! 
In Haru’s words, “we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers…” “we tear up our own roots to flee from our own stardust…” “the depths of our souls are in that divide, it makes up my dark and sparkling legacy, my legacy of ancestors and estrangement, of solitude and closeness, of melancholy and joy.”
Now to read her previous book about Haru’s French daughter in Kyoto, A single rose. Busy in the garden.https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6507288409
“A l’heure de mourir, Haru Ueno regardait une fleur et pensait : Tout tient à une fleur. En réalité, sa vie avait tenu à trois fils et le dernier, seulement, était une fleur. Devant lui s’étendait un petit jardin de temple qui faisait voeu de paysage miniature parsemé de symboles. Que des siècles de quête spirituelle aient abouti à cet agencement précis l’émerveillait – tant d’efforts tendus vers une signification et, à la fin, une pure forme, pensait-il encore.”

As I read Muriel Barberry in the garden by my pond, the first iris blooms, as if straight out of her novel. To be followed by dozens more, ready to burst into purple. Crabapple blossoms float on the water, shimmering.  Goldfish circle one another. Very Kyoto. On the day beloved Alice Munro dies. Coincidence?

“we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers…”
May 13, 2024

As I read Barberry’s An Hour
of Fervour in the garden beside
my pond, the first iris blooms as
if straight out of her novel. To be
followed by more, ready to burst
into purple. Crabapple blossoms
float on the pond, shimmering pink. 
Goldfish circle one another. Very
Kyoto. On the day our dear Alice
Munro dies. Coincidence? 

Fervent (Barberry’s favourite word!)
 in that florid French way that veers
 toward la vie sentimentale but is
nonetheless captivating. Abstract
despite the fecundity so poetically
described. Oh, and there are kami.
And Fox! An entrancing mélange
of cultures. To be followed by her
next novel, A single rose, “Que
vient-on chercher dans le thé sinon
l’invisible?”

This before we knew of Fremlin’s
abuse. How like Munro’s Menesteung,
her purple

Muriel Barbery, A single rose 
When laid up lately, I’ve found consolation in 2 novels by Muriel Barbery. Translated from the French, they are fervent (her favourite word!) in that florid French way that veers toward sentimental but is nonetheless captivating. Read One hour of fervor first!

“Que vient-on chercher dans le thé sinon l’invisible?” To write about the novels, I pour a cup of Macha tea to honour the Japanese tea ceremony, as described from Muriel Barbery’s very French sensibility. Lush prose, beautifully translated and highly symbolic. An entrancing mélange of cultures, abstract despite the fecundity so poetically described. Oh, and there are kami. And Fox!

In Haru’s words, “we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers…” “we tear up our own roots to flee from our own stardust…” “the depths of our souls are in that divide, it makes up my dark and sparkling legacy, my legacy of ancestors and estrangement, of solitude and closeness, of melancholy and joy.” Second, read her previous book about Haru’s French daughter in Kyoto, A single rose, which follows One hour of fervor chronologically, though written first.

Mary Barnes, Moving Upstream 
“Drawing on her Ojibwa roots and storytelling, Barnes shares stories that take the heart on the path to the past” atbaypress.com

Gary Barwin, The most charming creatures: poems
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but
while we watch”
Poems after poets he’s reading, in the style of: marvellous!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6409616242

Gary Barwin, Scandal in the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 1984-2024
Gary Barwin & Lillian Necakov, Duck eats yeast, quacks, explodes; man loses eye: a poem
Fun, as always!

Peter S. Beagle, I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons
Have you been waiting for high fantasy equal to The Last Unicorn? Then read Peter S. Beagle’s whimsical I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons. Heroes all! Will there be a sequel? We can’t wait another half century. “The warning came in the form of a great wind, sudden and cold, sweeping out of the western mountains on a perfectly bland and cloudless summer day.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6626396961

Jessica Bebenek, No one knows us there: poems
New to me and very powerful.

Francesca Bell, What small sound: poems
“I want to be the tree
when cold has come…
and my leaves
have burst into burning…
I want to feel what’s next
curled inside me, tight as fists.”
Red Hen Press

Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests
Marvellous audio as well, read by Diana. “Mast is the old word for food that dates back to the earliest years of the human family, found in Sanskrit and in Old Gaelic as meas. Mast comes from the countryside. It is a gift of nature.” Interconnecting us.

Frédéric Bernard, The hidden life of trees: a graphic adaptation
“This vibrantly illustrated graphic novel follows Peter as its loveable main character, revealing the secret network of the forest and sharing struggles and triumphs from his career protecting trees. Told in Peter’s warm, conversational voice, not unlike that of a beloved grandfather chatting fireside, this visually stunning book offers scientific insights and pearls of wisdom gained from Peter’s decades of observing forests, including how trees impact weather and climate, how they communicate with each other, and how they interact with fungal networks deep within the ground. It also offers poignant memories from Peter’s personal life.Mary Hamilton, Still born. Stepping into the unknown: a memoir of dying with my daughter

Dominique Bernier-Cormier, Entre rive and shore
”A profound, engrossing interweaving of text(e)s and texture, Acadian legend and family history: “the moment of translation is one of turbulence, of shifting currents, allegiances.”
“I am writing in
a language of displacement, of erasure. To insist too heavily on the
borders between these languages is to recognize their claims to the
land.”
Goose Lane
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7001922529

Sarah Bernstein, The Coming Bad Days
Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience
A searing, elusive fable about shame on the part of the very unreliable narrator and the town’s guilt in the history which this seemingly good and obedient woman also inherits: “I had never been able to live in my life.” The introspective voice is like Rachel Cusk’s but the thrust of the novel is pure Shirley Jackson. The meek shall inherit power over: “. . . it seemed that my obedience had taken on a kind of mysterious power.” Brilliant prose on the nature of belonging, and belonging to nature: what happens when she returns ‘home’ to an elliptical, slippery legacy. “I thought often about life and its chance encounters, the inexorable question of complicity, about how not one of us could claim to be innocent any longer.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6243530330

Biblioasis. John Barton selected my poem for “Best Canadian Poetry”.  As a long-time reader of your marvellous books, I would love to work with you! My favourite title of yours is A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.  I’m intent on reading UNMET by stephanie roberts and We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah soon. Most recently, I have read Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins;Years, Months, and Days by Luke Hathaway; Instructions for the Drowning by Steven Heighton; The future by Catherine Leroux; Ordinary Wonder Tales: Essays by Emily Urquhart;  Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann; A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson; and May Our Joy Endure by Kevin Lambert, Donald Winkler’s translation, as well as your Ghost Stories and your newsletter! I’ve just started A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet and look forward to 

Brandi Bird, The All + Flesh
“Grief turns over in bed & wants me to visit in its dreams.
Is a halo over every word I write…
There is power in fear too.”
Anansi.

Sash Bischoff, Sweet Fury
Twists of revenge, Fitzgerald’s Tender.

bill bissett, lovingwithoutbeingvulerabul
Signed to Gloria Alvernazy Mulcahy.

Gloria Blizzard, Black cake, turtle soup, and other dilemmas
Fine collection of essays.

Ali Blythe, Stedfast
From the cosmological to the personal, Ali Blythe writes deft lines across a night sky. The title is taken from Keats’ “Bright Star” and the title poem illustrates Blythe’s dexterity:
“In a pouty bout
of astral projection

I have done the manly thing
and hunted you into the stars.”

O Blythe spirit, these poems were made to be read aloud
“because you are the mystic
of your own how“
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7018099356
@aliblyther @goose_lane

Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
I enjoyed this book written by a non-scientist until I read reviews by evolutionary biologists who disputed Bohannon’s leaps especially on natural selection. So what to trust? https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6425009004   
“the range of overtones female-typical ears can hear”
“Deep in the cochlea of the inner ear, the hair cells snap in a series of tiny clicks called otoacoustic emissions (OAEs). Every time a sound cascades down from the eardrum and middle ear, the hair cells in the cochlea wave and snap, boosting the signal.”
“Women’s OAE’s tend to be both stronger and more frequent than men’s—so predicably that acoustic researchers describe inner ears as ‘masculinized’ or ‘feminized… females more sensitive to noise: if the cochlea boosts the sound signals in female ears more than in male ears, that could, in principle, make the experience of hearing loud things feel louder for females… more dominant in the right ear”
“This right-sided quirk in females isn’t isolated to the ears. For example, the length ratio of the pointer finger to the ring finger for most human girls is lower than for most boys, and that difference is more pronounced on the right than on the left.”   Not for me: the same

“Saccades are the twitchy ways eyes move from one spot to another in a visual field, and when they linger on a spot, it’s called fixation.”  Women tend to have more saccades, men tend to fixate. Women are better at learning new faces and “a bit better at accurately judging what emotion that face is conveying. We also tend to focus on the left eye region… that tends to be more emotionally expressive.”  We tend to cradle infants on the lfet side “this bias seems to be useful for social interaction, because it lets both the mother and the infant better see the more expressive side of their faces.”

“Because women are generally born with two X chromosomes, some are actually tetrachromats—they see the world not in three color dimensions but in four. Like bird, these women can tell subtler differences between red, green, and yellow wavelengths…” 125 of girls
“Not UV light, though: from tests of human tetrachromats, it seems the fourth type of human retinal cone is sensitive to wavelengths in the middle space between red and green.”

“the social context of our perceived worlds influences how we interpret and act on the signals brought to us through our sensory array. Change the context, and you’re very likely to change the perception… Women smell things more finely and accurately than men do…” ”women can often hear things that men can’t” ”There’s a directional stream of information between the eyes, the optic nerve, and the vision regions of the brain. Some of it loops—for instance, while the eye moves through its automatic saccades, the brain directs the eye to focus on some things over others, look one way or another. The brain determines the need, and the eye adapts accordingly. …” if they’re not asked to use this ability”
“The strange cones in their retinas will like dormant, or maybe their optic nerve just ignores them.”

Aaron Boothby, Continent: poems
From California to Montreal: “Paul Celan places our singing, both against and in spite of oblivion, within the petals that are the word over the thorns of a rose.” M & S

William Boyd, Gabriel’s Moon 
His usual upright Englishman as hero; his usual good writing.

Frances Boyle, Openwork and Limestone
Openwork and Limestone is a celebration of the lyric at its most intricate clarity:
“wonder turns to joy in such folding
and unfolding. Aerobatic origami,
the cries and percussion of pummelled air,
smoothed into edge, the fall and rise
a singing synchronicity. In their wheeling
a whirled word of beauty, of praise.”
“Murmuration”

“I want that spiral
in a song
the pond a bowl
of light and sky”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67927

Alan Bradley, What Time the Sexton’s Spade
Back by popular demand, I’m glad to see. Not the best of these cozies, even though Flavia is slowly growing up. Lovely line:
“We were not allowed to lie, but we were allowed to tint.”
In conversation with Louise Penny:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh9zM…
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6911194272
“Truth is the most precious thing we have. Economize it.” Mark Twain
“you can hear the darkness. In it, sounds are distinctly different, as if they are being amplified and focused. Could it be that when sight ceases, your brain turns up the volume on your ears?”
ear perk

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time
You’d be a “Pizzle-headed doorknob” not to delight in this delicious, delirious, mixed-genre thriller. Bradley’s secret power is the subtle complicity of metaphor. Oh, and character. A natural for BBC adaptation.  And here he is, our hero on the Franklin expedition, from 1845:

“Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6659264857
“The sky is an unwavering blue, its blankness and infinity reminding me, for some reason, that we are on a small round planet inching its way through a terrifying void.”

Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here
Dionne Brand, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck
Dionne Brand’s Salvage is a fierce, necessary critique examining the untold, assumed stories of the source of wealth (slavery) behind classic colonial novels like Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair and Robinson Crusoe.
Essential reading & unreading, unlearning, in this “autobiography of an autobiography”, this “autobiography of interruption, but much more.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7020905801
https://tinhouse.com/podcast/dionne-brand-salvage-readings-from-the-wreck/

Kristina Bresnen, Pascal’s fire: a poem
Moses and his oracular stutter: strangely orphic

Brené Brown: Strong Gound: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, the Wisdom of the Human Spirit
Metacognition
Attention, Latin attendere, to stretch toward
Humility: Latin humilitas groundedness
Clear out attentional residue from “lingering cognitive activity” after switching tasks

“Cognitive empathy, sometimes called perspective taking… Affective empathy”: experience sharing
“Intentionality and consistency over wild intensity… a focused and systemic change across your life. This is about you making a commitment to body, mind, and spirit, and holding yourself accountable to that commitment.”

Lock-In: Flow. Deliberate Practice. Deep focus. Loss of reflective self-consciousness. Distortion of temporal experience. Present moment concentration. “Flow isn’t just a state—it’s a skill.”
Lock Through: cognitive life, context switching. Mental Toughness, emotional Tenderness.

Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets
Skimmed via audio. Can’t believe I spent hours in and out of sleep with Dan Brown’s latest on audio. Cliché after cliché, but his descriptions brings me back to Prague and his research on symbology is entertaining. The halo as antenna: receiving light rather than radiating: yes, that’s my experience of “how the light gets in”.

 “How the light gets in”

What can the saints

tell us of light, of

love?

The halo as antenna

receiving light rather

than radiating it: yes,

that’s my experience.

Bring it down. Come

on in

Who would believe

that it’s Dan Brown

in his latest tome of

cliché after cliché

who informs us that

the halo is a universal

symbol of the divine

of the blessed across

religions.

 Katherine Solomon: “Your brain is just a receiver — an unimaginably complex, superbly advanced receiver — that chooses which specific signals it wants to receive from the existing cloud of global consciousness.”

Natasha Brown, Universality a novel
A short snappy taut novel on woke and spoke: “the rhetoric of power”.

NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
dnf

Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Quiet: Poems
“Dreaming is a form of knowledge production
& they don’t want it to be that easy for us.”
“Black noise is a phrase used to describe an absence of noise… silence inflected with random instance of noise.”
Visual and sonic profoundly at play in these powerful poems. They lured me into writing, the mark of a true poet imho.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6910959240

Graeme Macrae Burnet, A case of matricide
Grey book set in provincial grey Alsace, with twists.

Maggie Burton, Chores
Women’s work in Newfoundland, featuring the very tough Nan.
“The sky birthed a woman so thorough, so good
at chores that the rose bushes

Would have no leaf left unscrubbed, even after
Nan leaves me behind.”

Ina Cariño, Feast
                      “I am as mother
in a marrow tongue, as mirror
spurning shadows into fractals…
          yes I name myself. I am
the last spell, the only song left,
deliberate utterance of bone.”
“both poets & children grieve
the shifting contours”
Alice James Books

Anne Carson, Wrong Norma
Dispersed and disparate so she calls these pieces wrong.
“the impression of a
tendency to self-reproach that I shared with Mrs. Woolf
from the beginning. We writers feel the burden of being a
subject-in-process no matter who we are.”

Kate Cayley, Lent
“What is this obedient loneliness?
When I think of modernity I am reluctantly grateful…
most of my life is unthinkable without it.” Rusalki, luring.
Book*hug

Victoria Chang, The trees witness everything
A brilliant concentrate that lights the page:
“The Sound of the Light”
I can’t overhear
light, can’t stroke it or scratch it,
can’t turn it over.
It’s a lot like grief, which has
ringlets of light streaked through it.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6231402875

Clare Chambers, Shy Creatures
Art therapy in Croydon works for mute William, thanks to Helen. Beautifully observed.

Tracy Chevalier, The Glassmaker
Follow Orsola Rosso through 500 years of glassmaking in Murano.  Chevalier’s tricks in jumping time line work in transporting the reader through this gleaming historical fiction. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6709151024
“Maestra Maria Barovier says, “Beads fill the spaces between things […] They don’t get in the way. They are inconsequential, and women can make them because of that”.
Murano, Island of Glass across from Venice, City of Water.
June 28, 2024: The dark-haired, sharp-faced lawyer named Peter is chatting with me at the conference. His little orange kitten is exploring around our ankles. We are waiting with others in the hall for the literary readings to begin. The cat trails after me down the corridor to the other conference room. This meeting hall is political, filled with men in suits, talking deals to one another. Picking up the kitten, I bring him to the administrative desk to locate the lawyer. Not knowing Peter’s last name, I return with the cat in my arms to the first room. There Tracy Chevalier is about to read from her new novel. What an adventurous little creature this darling is! I wish I could keep him, but I’ll find Peter.

I’m about to read Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, The Glassmaker. The orange cat appears in the book I pick up today to read, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, and on the cover:   https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6626631824

Yangsze Choo, The fox wife: a novel
Enchantingly read by the author. “Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking.” And seductive!
Manchuria, 1908. “In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now.
Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change—or does it?
Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.
New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and
spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. Epic in scope and full of singular, unforgettable characters, The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about old loves and second chances, the depths of maternal love, and ancient folktales that may very well be true.”

Dawson Church, Bliss Brain: the neuroscience of remodeling your brain for resilience, creativity, and joy
EFT in proof.

John Lee Clark, How to communicate: poems
“A limb/that knocks my head because I didn’t duck?
That turns my heart into a chainsaw.”

An  eye-opener, ear opener study in perception by this DeafBlind poet. Fascinating forms shifts in perspective with written translations of ASL, Protactile and erasure poems   The metaphor of knitting… and a fabulous ekphrastic poem about the sculpture of the matador by Jacques Lipschitz

 Conyer Clayton, But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves
“…She weeps quietly behind a bush.
Where does all that salt go? Forget about me,
fox. We’re both shuffling sideways on this
golden shaft of light. My boot heels nuzzle into
snow. Shame is a feather duster in constant
motion, a small tail clearing the path.”
“Encounter”
These urgent poems pan across a cinematic kaleidoscope of grief and joy. A gorgeous collection of surreal poetry, not surprisingly published by Stuart Ross’s imprint, Feed Dog Books, from Anvil Press.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6807524423

Joan Clayton, The Man Who Stole Her Hair
“How do we claim and categorize history, both of them wonder. Which is the true story, when every remembering demands a twist to keep it palatable?
‘Do they resent me for being alive?’ she asks”
It’s a magnificent, cinematic romance: I love it. May you read at Shakespeare and Co! And Klimt’s Adele Bloc-Bauer! https://www.facebook.com/groups/3992303404! You write beautifully and the story is marvellous. It could be a film.

Ann Cleeves, The killing stones
Neolithic Orkney love
Ann Cleeves, The Dark Wives
In the midst of.

Teju Cole, Tremor
Such graceful prose:
‘I’m talking about J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). No encounter with this painting can be pleasant. Its details are terrible and its full title directs our looking, telling us to focus first on the grisly foreground and then on the roiling weather in the background. The title volunteers a great deal of information as though it were speaking itself out of a state of alarm or frenzy. In fact both the painting and its title are excessive, they overspill. And perhaps it is this feeling of excess, this feeling of obscene overmuchness, that makes one repeatedly forget that it is indeed right here just around the corner, just in the distance. We forget the Slave Ship, we must forget the Slave Ship in the way we must forget many difficult things with the kind of forgetfulness that allows us to keep on living our lives.’
‘In Turner’s painting the sky is a riot of reds and yellows, stippled with orange, pink, purple, blue, and white. The painting depicts a sunset in a tempest though it’s unlikely that the mass murder on the real Zong took place during a tempest. The sky in Turner’s painting looks as though it is on fire. His seascapes often depict a natural world in a state of wildness beyond human control. The oncoming typhoon as imagined by Turner in this painting will compound the miseries of those in the water. The lurid colors of this sky are not denotative, they are simply atmospheric effects of the kind Turner frequently employed and part of what drew the critic John Ruskin to his work.’
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6425054543

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, Black Holes: the key to understanding the universe
DNF, not for lack of trying to understand…
”We always see things slightly in the past, because it takes light time to travel to our eyes.”
“The difference between two peaks is known as the wavelength, and the number of peaks that pass by per second is known as the frequency. For visible light, we perceive the frequency as colour. High-frequency visible light is blue and low-frequency visible light is red.”
beyond low: infrared, microwaves, radio waves. Beyond high: ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays

Melissa Crowe, Lo
“I’m afraid to tell you the rest, afraid also
to leave you on that em dash forever,
watching through a crack”
U of Ohio

Michael Crummey, The Adversary
Unrelentingly grim, this historical fiction is set in outport Newfoundland, with the fierce weather, as always, a character, to be read along with his earlier The Innocents. The adamantly unfair patriarchy of the 18^th c. (and on!) reveals itself in the rivalry between obnoxious, power-mad siblings. I found it too hard to finish in this dark time. Maybe in Spring…
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6203782348

The Library due date dictates what I read next. So these days, it turns out by chance to be Michael Crummey’s The Adversary and Donna Morrissey’s Rage the Night, both set in Newfoundland outports.

Michael Crummey, Passengers: poems
With lapidary clarity, Michael Crummey translates two European poets onto his beloved homeland, new-found in this collection, Tomas Transtromer and Zbigniew Herbert, along with Lucifer, circumnavigate Newfoundland to perceive the landscape new.

Tom Cull, Kill Your Starlings
These poems from a concerned activist ward off “Extinction Events” with hope and ongoing activism as a family. Gorgeously produced by Gaspereau Press.
”Look to the door;
the hunger coming
has no appetite.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6569910621

Michael Cunningham, Day: A Novel
Julianne Moore reads the audio! Cunningham writes with such tender, elegant humanity about people that his characters come alive.
“He can only hope he is able to survive his life”
“If he has learned nothing else he has learned an artist is someone who refuses to listen to reason”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6263130762

Jude Currivan, The Cosmic Hologram: In-formation at the Center of Creation
Currivan strides the gap between quantum mechanics and ancient spiritual wisdom with imagery such as Indra’s net. In her lucid explication of an enfolded information system, consciousness connects.
“The harmonic and coherent relationships that pervade our Universe and that are the signature of the cosmic hologram manifest through the principle of resonance, which we individually and collectively embody on physical, emotional, and mental levels…Conversely when we’re dissonant, we’re literally out of tune.” “on the same wavelength” “chimes with”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6775335343
“the supernormal phenomenon of presentiment or precognition seems to corroborate that the informationally entropic process that is the flow of time does, however, differentiate between a past that’s already happened and a future not yet physically manifest.
In such precognitive cases, nonlocal awareness appears able to access a potentialized future whose super physical in-formation is ‘crystallizing’ but not yet fully real-ized to form the present…. They seem to essentially form the superphysical bow wave of space-time. This makes eminent sense from the perspective of the cosmic hologram… within space-time there is no violation of causality

Rachel Cusk, Parade
Cusk is as chillingly accurate as ever in her acute observations on art and the artist’s life, especially as lived by women. “Can the element of the eternal in the experience of femininity ever be represented as more than an internalized state?… To be led by instinct is the pre-eminent freedom attributed to male artists, and to the making of art itself.” The narrator remarks that people want “a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it”. Parade of course demonstrates that deepening.

To be read alongside Hari Kunzru‘s Blue Ruin, an equally gripping depiction of art, the art scene and the life of the artist. The prose in both novels is fiercely eloquent, but in Blue Ruin, the characters are fully present.
G thinks: “When they brought out something new, it was compared to the last thing they had done; it was praised or criticized on that basis; a familiarity, a form of ownership had been established that permitted judgment. Was it impossible to create without identity? Why did a work need to be identified with a person, when it was just as much the product of shared experience and history?”
“reality would always be better than the attempt to represent it.” subjects are “broken down into shapes, into disintegrating shadows that seem to be fading or reintegrating into the picture plane.”
“We acquired things and used them and disposed of them. What we liked best was disposing of them. It felt like disposing of the bad and burdensome parts of ourselves. It felt, momentarily, like disposing of our own bodies.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6628314255
“We realised that the death of our mother’s body meant that we now contained her, since she no longer had a container of her own. She was inside us, as once we had been inside her. The pane of glass between herself and us, between the dark of outside and the day of inside, had been broken.”

Mary Dalton, Interrobang
“the triad, an Irish verse form:
Three emblems of limit:
the flaw in the carpet
the fly in the ointment
the snake in the garden”

Carys Davies, CLEAR
Set in 1843, this tender, elegant novel depicts the last of the Clearances and the rise of the Free Church of Scotland. “Slowly John Ferguson looked around at the walls and up at the opening in the roof, blinking once, twice, and then a third time before his eyes came at last to rest on Ivar himself.” I didn’t know the name Ivar, but came across it again in a novel, The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen (https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/26/the-end-of-drum-time-) in which a Sámi man is called Ivarr. Connection? I think so, given the Viking Ivarr the Boneless, Old Norse. Clear’s lush language explores Jakob Jakobsen’s Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, written in the early 20th century. The ending, however implausible, is eloquent and endearing. Published by Granta. I’ll be reading more by Carys Davies: The mission house: a novel.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6621076681

Wade Davis, Beneath the Surface of Things: New and Selected Essays
“Creativity is a consequence of action, not its motivation. Do what needs to be done… Nature loves courage…
You hurl yourself into the abyss only discover that it’s a feather bed.”
“Henry Corbin described as the imaginal, a suprasensory dimension that transcends religion, a space of intuition and revelation ‘through the eyes of the heart.’”

Jude Deveraux, Order of Swans
Sweet feminist fantasy, the start of a series.

Helen DeWitt, The English understand wool
An impeccable novella presenting good taste as a mode of living. Funny and shrewd. Like FINNIGANS WAKE, it begins and ends with the same sentence, worm ouroboros.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6751989696

Antony Di Nardo, Forget, sadness, grass / poems by Antony Di Nardo
Paean to the daylily in all its variety; lyrics with lines that chime like this, “I marvel at the charm of the lilies”. The title comes from the Chinese ideogram for daylily. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6854041297

Hernan Diaz, Trust
“The Doppler effect of memory. The pitch of past events shifting as they rush away from me.”“The diarist is a monster: the writing hand and the reading eye are sourced from different bodies.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5900159221

Cherie Dimaline, An anthology of monsters: how story saves us from our anxiety
“Shining attracts more light to us.”

Emma Donoghue, THE PARIS EXPRESS
“That’s the paradox of trains, he supposes; they show you what you’d never have seen otherwise, but only for a tantalising second.”

Ariel Dorfman, Allegro
Young Mozart…

Dan Ebbs and di morrow, Crazy beautiful people: 50 years of enchanting stories of Home County Festival
Dan, fun to read through Crazy beautiful people. What a hoot, Chippy!  So many good names! Thanks for including the Great Canadian Haiku event. After spreading the word through poetry circles when I was poet laureate, it was fun to collect poems from across Canada and choose the winners. And even MORE fun to hear the poems performed by the four great musicians up close as I hosted! Catherine, Emm, Hawkley, Royal… Only half the recording turned out, but I played it several times on my CHRW show, Gathering Voices. 

Omar El Akkad, One day, everyone will have always been against this
As I pray for the Gaza/Israel ceasefire to hold, I readRashid Khalidi’s comprehensive and measured tome, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. And at night, I listen to Omar El Akkad read his heart-wrenching memoir, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. And I read it: “Northrop Frye once said all art is metaphor, and a metaphor is the grammatical definition of insanity. What art does is meet us at the site of our insanity, our derangement, the plainly irrational mechanics of what it means to be human. There comes from this, then, at least a working definition of a soul: one’s capacity to sit with the mysteries of a thing that cannot in any rational way be understood— only felt, only moved through. And sometimes… sitting with it feels an affront to the notion of art as a conduit of beauty.
   Still, sit. Sit.”
And take a stand against genocide.

Bret Easton Ellis. The Shards
One can only hope The Shards is not autofiction. These characters are awful teenagers who do not improve with age. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60880820-the-shards
56 going on 17 going on 1.y. Sad, weird.

Almal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots
@tithenaiThe first rule of grammar: “Every conjugation is also a translation… But not every translation conjugates.”How I loved this fairy tale. Here’s to cygnets and signifiers!

Karen Enns, Dislocations
Superb riffs of ecopoetics
“The sounds you hear in the night
might very well be them, those past selves
crowding in…
more fervently. We were relevant. We lived.”
“less than fissions, fragments,
faint displacements I barely hear,
the trailing off of echoes like falling leaves.
And time? The light just flickers there.
Give me your word that these peripheries,
these floaters that form music in the space behind my eyes,
come together in the end. Tell me
their fonts, their strokes and patches,
the tiny particulate blooms,
are integral to some luminescent whole.

I’ve held my ear to the ground as I was told.
I’ve listened to the modulations of my age,
been exile and participant at once, a keeper
of resonance and swirl, of emptiness, too.

And I have been amazed….
the move toward synchronicity and home.”

“visions in the under-pitch,
                      slow reverberations.”

“What is necessary happens between each sound.”
“Can sound be this pristine, this caught?
Yes. Each pitch is an elevated sphere.
Suspended. Think appoggiatura.
The radiance of rise and delay.”

Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red
Red River Valley anecdotes…

Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos
The title lifts a love affair out of the ordinary and places it in a larger time frame.  Hans W., novelist, gas lighter supreme, Stasi agent as Katharina discovers in Epilogue. Of course.
November 12, 2025: Moving again. In the crowded room, there’s a mattress on the floor for me to sleep on, but where are my sheets and pillow? Packing to return home in the morning, I don’t need to worry about having too much luggage since so much has been stolen. Even changing flights/trains, I’ll manage easily. But once again I haven’t yet booked my airfare! A scene from Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos.

Jenny Erpenbeck; translated by Susan Bernofsky, Go, went, gone
Clearing his office after retiring, Richard, a professor of Classics, begins to “incorporate their contents into his private realm. Bone to bone, blood to blood, as if bonded together. That’s right, the Merseburg Incantations. This too—what’s known as learning: all he knows, everything he’s ever studied—is now his own private property and nothing more.” As he meets African refugees, their lives become tenderly embroiled in his. Learning their stories, he is engaged in confronting public bureaucracy. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6409395334

Jenny Erpenbeck; translated by Susan Bernofsky, The end of days 
The last chapters are a sombre account of Jewish relics to be brought to a dying mother, age 90. And her drifting intimations of mortality. Marianne writes that she dreamt of a Jewish scroll today. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3723244609 How I love that connection! Yes, to a scroll inside the mezuzah! Please do add all these synchronicities of today to our dream work mss: it gives such context! I think we all have the tragedy of Israel/Gaza in mind.

Percival Everett, James
How necessary and apt a retelling! Language and boats and familiar characters, all upended. “How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premisses of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6843861859. Great to read JAMES on Friday the 13th!

Having just read Percival Everett’s James, where being Black does not necessarily hang on the colour of your skin.

Kathy Fagan, Bad hobby: poems
“…flying like the birds I cannot stop
Writing into poems no matter how many
People say, Enough with the effing birds!
Actually only poets say that. And we’re lying
because there’s never enough for us.”
“The Supreme Farewell of Handkerchiefs”
Milkweed Editions

Katie Farris, Standing in the forest of being alive: a memoir in poems
“Why do love poems attract birds                             
 as sure as seed or worm or nectar?”
“In the Shadow of This Valley”
Alice James Books

Forough Farrokhzad; translated from the Persian by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season: selected poems
All the repetitions: I would love to hear the poems in the original (Farsi?) for their rhythms. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6976465740 

Andrew Faulkner, Heady bloom
Advil vs. Headache… you’ll feel these poems viscerally.
“Raymon Llull saw Christ

Pinned in the air. What should one
do with the information

One receives? Juan Diego was told
to gather flowers, so he gathered flowers.

Light and sound beget a need
beyond reason.”
“We are hinged
to our conditions. Caravaggio says

In all paintings the dominant metaphor
is light. When the headache arrives

The weather is an anthem
of silence”
“On Proportion”
“theory murders by praxis”

Coach House Press.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6799237648
Editor, Invisible Press.  Wife, Leigh Nash

Elaine Feeney, How to Build a Boat
Jamie’s currach. “swallows fly to the sun in swarms on a feeling they once had in their wings
and these journeys we make
all this intersection, this criss-crossing
means we can also fall off the edge–
a line drawn off the edge”

Paola Ferrante, Her body among animals
Among reptiles, insects, chimera.
https://twitter.com/PaolaOFerrante

Ryan Fitzpatrick, Sunny ways
Two long ecopoems. The pattern: “No… but”.
“how do you live in the twenty-first century
you ask
taking a sip of San Pellegrino
through a straw you just banned
because a straw is a kind of pipeline
you can ban without letting go of something”
Invisible Publishing

Dominique Fortier, Pale Shadows, exquisitely translated by Rhona Mullins
Lush recreation of the afterlife of Emily, as experienced in her close circle.
Lavinia is who the ghosts haunt “and she carries them wherever she goes. She is, we are all, nesting Russian dolls, made of ghosts, memories, the departed, down to the heart of word that is both living and dead, always at risk of going up in flames.”
I love how the author interjects her own longing into the work. Should I do the same with the Island novel? That would be interesting, lifting the narrative into something more meta… but how to recreate those perceptions through the decades…! But it’s long enough as it is.

Mariah Fredericks, The Wharton Plot
Edith Wharton in the Belmont Hotel, Belle Epoque. An entertaining mélange of fact and fiction, more so for the characters (Henry James, etc!) than the mystery. “Who else do writers have but other writers?”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6785292945

Siaara Freeman, Urbanshee: poems
Searing poems on the haints of intergenerational trauma: her father murdered.
“My mother clouds when she don’t want nobody to see her pain, which is how
I inherited my blur.”
“I sound like my mama now,
who sound like her mama who sound like her mama who
sound like her mama, who sound like her
mama who sounds like her mama who sound like her
mama who sound like her mama, who sound like a scream.
& that’s why I’m so loud remember? You wanna know
where I’m from? Easy. Open a wound
& watch it heal.”
 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6635673690  

Tania French, The Hunter
After The Searcher, Cal Hooper settles in.
“Johnny Reddy has always struck Cal as a type he’s encountered before: the guy who operates by sauntering into a new place, announcing himself as whatever seems likely to come in handy, and seeing how much he can get out of that costume before it wears too thin to cover him up any longer.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6445984112

V. V. Ganeshananthan, Brotherless night: a novel
“I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes.” Brotherless Night bears compelling witness to 25 years of the Sri Lankan civil war through the eyes of a Tamil girl who trains to be a doctor in impossible circumstances. “Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6622025769

Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach
Spare, lean and electrifying: what is said between the words, between women folding sheets off the line. Foreword by Ben Lerner. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6854004954 September 17, 2024: A gathering in the country in which I feel left out, being on my own. Out of some desperation, I marry Michael, whom I’ve only recently met. He’s a lean, wiry guy, a mechanical engineer, so he informs me, though no engineers can get work these days. Will I have to support him, then? As we lie in bed at my house, I’m regretting my hastiness. So is he, apparently. Has he been reading my mind? He rolls over toward me to complain, disgruntled. “Why are you so…” I sink back, regretting the disenchanted muddle we’re now in. Oh, how I miss Gavin’s largeness and largesse.  He was more than I, not less as this Michael is. And from a higher class, not lower.
Having read the delicious Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach. Michael from McClary, 1981, brief but Jake remembers him as a possible father figure.

Gary Geddes, The ventriloquist: poetic narratives from the womb of war
Through the decades, Gary Geddes has been delivering vivid poetic narratives from specific wars. “These tragic stories of war and conquest demanded to be told, and as powerfully as possible.” He quotes Dylan Thomas: “Out of the inevitable conflict of images—inevitable because of the creative, destructive and contradictory nature of the motivating centre, the womb of war—I try to make that momentary piece which is the poem.” In this, Gary Geddes succeeds. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6488442461

Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River Love, Loss, and Liberation
Back to your novels, please, Liz…

Don Gillmor, Breaking and Entering
The trick of picking locks and finding oneself inside…
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7009382820

Nikki Giovanni, Make me rain: poems & prose
“Bio
I’m Here
And If I Mist
On Emotional Soul
A Weed Will
Grow
Make Me Rain”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6384328745

Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death: A Meditation
Her composer husband is more interesting.

Natalie Goldberg, Writing on empty: a guide to finding your voice
The title of this book belies its true nature as an irritated memoir of Goldberg’s own writer’s block during Covid. You’ll be listening to her voice, not finding yours.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6976307205

Beth Goobie, Lookin’ for joy
“When she reads aloud, words resound like ancient cities in her mouth…
For the reader embodies entire civilizations. Though she embraces solitude,
she contains a rabbit warren bustling with come-and-go personas…
An inkling can summon the reader on an interdimensional pilgrimage;
a mad chronology of verbs takes her in and out of metaphor,
the howl of vowels prowls her along the cliff edge of transformation,
altered states open her like a Japanese fan.
The reader lives inside the perpetual request to be changed…
The reader’s very chromosomes are an alphabet inviting innew letters,
her flesh a language that invents itself through dialogue”

“‘Civilization lives in the throat’
like a bird cross-stitching a backyard with sound…
What is language if we do not speak what stammers the tongue?”

“In the world I make, flowers are tiny gurus;
that backyard of dandelion Buddhas opens your chakras
to a euphoria of colour that inhabits form
the way laughter lives the body.
Touch only what longs toward your gratitude of hands.”

“and then I sensed a rippling between the petunias—
not the wind but a soundless chattering,
as if the blossoms were tossing thoughts to each other—
a floral conspiracy, tiny excited petunia cries”

“The Wild of You”
“If the wild know how to speak, it would not be wild.
Words are always some kind of taming.
Words walk around hearbeat, learing it, guarding it,
fencing it in. Words close down the horizons
silence opens. The harvest moon is a soundlessness
rising up the throat… 
breaching the top of the skull, soul
become sky. Everything you cannot say
suspends in that single glowing syllable
blessed by such darkness.”

“But are you poet enough to howl the moon down onto your tongue…
Can you take that starmind and silence it.
Does that silencing teach you, as creator,
to see death in your flesh—
the death that makes way for others
poet enough to live the poems in their skin.”

And titles: “The Cerebral Cathedral”

Sean Virgo, editor. Exile Editions. I know a good poem when it inspires me to run off on my imagination’s own tanguents.

Figments of imaginary objects are figs
meant to prophesize

Allegra Goodman, Isola
Isola “is based on the true story of Marguerite de La Rocque, a 16th-century French noblewoman who was marooned on an island near what is now Quebec. She was exiled there with her lover and a maid by her uncle, who was angered by their relationship. The story is a fictional account of her survival on the island for two years before being rescued…in the 1540s.”

Nadine Gordimer
“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.”

Genevieve Graham, On Isabella Street
At first, enjoyed, with Toronto folksinger protest scene. Drawn out to boring.

Jorie Graham, To 2040
Reader, beware, this book will change you.
“I am writing this in code because I cannot speak or say”
“Translation Rain”

“alphabets and their hiving, swarming–“

“Can you”

“hear

the tips of water on

us, lithe &

so heavy with light & bending

lends-tips.”

“Can you”

“You feel the suddenly. You feel like an itch a thing you used to call so
casually yr inwardness”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6911311408

Hannah Green, Xanax cowboy
“Poetry like a palm. The way my life line breaks.”
“Poetry like a palm. The way my life line breaks.”

“Don’t want to be lonely? Just pretend you are a cowboy, they are meant to be alone.”

Hannah Green’s Xanax Cowboy
Poems can be paired with Andrew Faulkner’s Heady Bloom: Advil vs. Headache.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6799270856

Genni Gunn, Accidents
Absences, Artifacts, Accidents…
Lovely use of the glosa form, especially with Mark Strand’s stanzas. Edited by John Barton, from Signature Editions.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6502095018

Don Gutteridge, Into the milkweed meadow
Under the milkwood, skimmed. Lite. Souwesto

Eva H.D, The natural hustle
“a French verb for
to take on the colours
of the rainbow.”

Nejmeh Khalil Habib, A Spring That Did Not Blossom. Translated by Samir Habib
A long calamity.

Mark Haddon, Dogs and Monsters
“Where am I being encouraged not to look?”

Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
Matt Haig, The life impossible
The framework: 72 year old Grace Winters, responds in a very lengthy email to a desperate former student. 

As a settler in the land that Daniel Lockhart celebrates, I pay close attention to the way the land is acknowledged in Lenape headings to each section. It is our responsibility to listen.

Beyond imposed national boundaries.The term literally means “common well-being”. It was originally a phrase, “the common-wealth” or “the common wealth”, and was analogous to the Latin term res publica. In premodern English, “commonwealth” was used in place of the term “republic” A commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. The noun “commonwealth”, meaning “public welfare, general good or advantage”, dates from the 15th century.^[1] Originally a phrase (the common-wealth or the common wealth – echoed in the modern synonym “public wealth”), it comes from the old meaning of “wealth“, which is “well-being”, and was deemed analogous to the Latin res publica.^[2] The term literally meant “common well-being”. In the 17th century, the definition of “commonwealth” expanded from its original sense of “public welfare” or “commonweal” to mean “a state in which the supreme power is vested in the people; a republic or democratic state“

Louise B. Halfe – Sky Dancer, Bear bones & feathers
“her space of song”

Sylvia Hamilton, Tender
Powerful poems beautifully produced by Gaspereau Press.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6488415162 t

Isabella Hammad, Enter ghost: a novel
An all too apt title for a haunted complex story, well illustrated in an enactment of HAMLET, in Hammad’s translation from the Arabic. “I think that, sometimes, when calamity strikes and puts normal life under strain, feelings that have been stifled by everyday evasion can break free and make it easy to talk where before it felt impossible. Clouds, parted, dissolve. I wondered if this was always happening in Palestine, where calamity was always so close. Or whether it was different for those who, living here, endured it without respite, for whom constant calamity was itself the condition of normal life.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6776770153

Lisa Harding, The Wildelings
“building me up, putting me down, the glare of attention followed by complete withdrawal… craving Daddy’s love. “The worst has already happened; you have already been abandoned.”’ Kierkegaard “No part of Mark was acknowledging what has happened”  fury he loves me loves me not

Jo Harkin, The Pretender
 Lambert Simnel, peasant boy or heir to Richard III’s throne, and crowned as King Edward the Sixth, Plantagenet, son of the Duke of Clarence, in the 1487 Yorkist rebellion.

Deborah Harkness, The Black Bird Oracle (All Souls, #5)
A most unusual family with cute seven-year-od twins in danger. Part of a fantasy series I’m not likely to read more of, as this one rambles on.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6757956260

Kamala Harris, 107 Days
Daily notes and maybe some revision on Gaza. Where is the Democrat power behind the scene? And then 108…

Emilia Hart, Weyward: a novel
Haven’t I read this book before?  Fayne, for one character.  Hester, for another…Weyward Cottage at Crows Beck in Cumbria connects all three time-lines in a weird matrilineage of generational trauma redeemed: hands across the divide.  Its garden with its crows is transformative for these survivors. “Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those who speak it, not those it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.”
“Perhaps one day (…) there will be a safer time, when women could walk the Earth, shining bright with power, and yet live.”
A neat twist of an ending, with these words from Adrienne Rich, “The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6632157977

Mikko Harvey, Let the world have you  @mikkoharvey
Anansi
Gnomic nuggets, both gentle and searing, best illustrated directly:
𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐤

that my life was nothing

more than a perch from which

to be kind, like the foliage

that successfully hides

a turkey from a hunter.

It is my intention to listen, but my hands

keep giggling while reminding me

I don’t get to be a human being

for very long, as if this were the punchline to a joke

whose first half I missed. I arrived too late.

𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐞

there is

the person you show

the world

and the one

known only

to you

𝐋𝐞𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐇𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮

The signs fantasized

about the activities

they forbid.

Funny Business

I wonder if later

I will forgive myself

for having denied my loved ones

demonstrations of my loving them.

I was too busy demonstrating

myself to the universe.

I was too busy turning

strangers into sites of worship.

Microsleep

I’ve noticed

the more you

interrupt

yourself

the more

destinies

you invite

in.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6882923180

David George Haskell, Sounds wild and broken: sonic marvels, evolution’s creativity, and the crisis of sensory extinction
Delicious on all the senses, especially re bird song!
Humans process the spoken word in the left hemisphere; other sounds to the right. “The left brain uses subtle differences in the timing of sounds to understand semantics and syntax. The right brain uses differences in frequency spectra to grasp melodic and timbral content. But this division is not absolute… The intonations and prosody of language activate the right, but the semantic content of sung music lights up the left. Sung music and poetical language, then, braid the operations of our two hemispheres…. across human cultures… we communicate emotion and meaning through changes in pitch, timing, vigor, timbre, and tone.”

“Tuvan throat singers use “constrictions created by their tongues to filter out all but a few overtones while their tightened larynx drones. Theirs is a sophisticated vocal art that build on the interplay of the larynx and mouth”

“The intelligibility of consonants depends on high frequencies and rapid changes in amplitude, features that are degraded by dense vegetation. Sonorous oo and aa may be more comprehensible in the forest… tonal vowels are more taxing for the larynx in dry air{savannah]. My abundant English consonants and sparse vowels differ from vowel-rich languages that developed in tropical forests.
The environment also seems to shape human linguistic diversity at a regional scale. Lush environments with stable, year-round productivity of plants have higher densities of human languages than places with high seasonality or unpredictability…partly sculpted by the hbiitats.”

Birds “are superior to humans at discriminating the subtle nuances within individual sounds, seeming more attuned to the rules and syntax contained in syllables than the arrangements among strings of syllables”

Returning to the water world that surrounded us for nine months. First silent, then sounds intrude. “our hearing starts with bass throbs and murmurs” low-frequency tones. red noise, which are low-frequency and are used for sleep and relaxation because they are deeper and less sharp than blue noise, high frequency “We keep a memory of the primal ocean and womb inside the coils of our inner ear. The rest of the ear’s apparatus—pinnae, middle ear chamber, and bones—delivers sound to this watery core. There, deep inside, we listen as aquatic beings.”  

Diana Hayes, Hawking the Surf
In Hawking the Surf, myth is embodied in the particulars of place. Diana Hayes’s “pilgrim wander” leads the reader into a labyrinth through “the memory of wonder”: she paints a “olfactory, tactile” world of colour that is both keenly observed and gloriously illustrated. This collection soars, leaning into poetry as solace, “trumpeting alarm” for a gone world, lost and found, but always brought home. Hayes is also hawking her favourite poets, most beautifully “In the Garden with P.K.”.
Blurb, Penn Kemp, author of Ordinary / Moving (Silver Bow Publishing)

“magic is always found in water” from “In the Garden with P.K.”. “sat with memory’s palette, mine now sharp as decades past” myth embodied in the particulars of place. In Hawking the Surf, myth is embodied in the particulars of place. Diana Hayes’s “pilgrim wander” leads the reader into a labyrinth through “the memory of wonder”: she paints a “olfactory, tactile” world of colour that is keenly observed and gloriously illustrated. This collection soars, leaning into poetry as solace, “trumpeting alarm” for a gone world, lost and found, but always brought home. Hayes is also hawking her favourite poets, most beautifully “In the Garden with P.K.”.

 Diana Hayes is also hawking her favourite poets. Her “pilgrim wander” leads the reader into a labyrinth of wonder, of “the memory of wonder”, painting the “Olfactory, tactile” world of colour, keenly observed and gloriously illustrated Celtic heritage contains the marvel. Poems made from other poets’ poems, poems from land. Her

Cliodhna, the Irish Queen of the Banshees, (pronounced Klee-nah) is a prominent figure in Irish mythology, known as the Queen of the Banshees and a goddess of love, beauty, and the sea. She is associated with healing, as her three birds’ songs can cure sickness, and she is the patron goddess of County Cork. Her character is complex, embodying both protective and dangerous aspects, and her name can also be a modern Irish first name. She is the Queen of the Banshees and a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a mythical race of gods. Clíodhna is also a goddess of love, beauty, and passion. She is a sea goddess who is associated with powerful waves, and her presence is linked to the sound of the sea, particularly large waves breaking on the shore. Clíodhna is not a simple good-or-evil figure; she is a powerful and morally gray deity who can be both a protector and a vengeful figure. One legend says she helped a man win a court case with her eloquence after he kissed a stone at her rock, a story that eventually became associated with the Blarney Stone. 

Natalie Haynes, Divine Might: goddesses in Greek myth
Droll, engaging and thorough, especially in audio. Haynes delivers fascinating glimmers as she delves through the literary history, from Hesiod on. A pantheon of 9 goddesses:
the muses, Hera, Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Hestia, Athene and the furies.
“Not only did the ancient Greeks seem to have modelled gods in their mortal image, but they apparently chose their worst selves as the template.”
“If oxen and lions and horses had hands like men, and could draw and make works of art, horses would draw gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and each would draw pictures of the gods as if they had bodies like their own.
But what would the goddess-lionesses look like?”
“If we have learned nothing else from myths, folklore and fairy tales, we should at least know this. If an old woman approaches you and asks for anything, or suggests anything, you always, always say yes, and thank you very much for asking. There is an almost zero chance that she is an actual old lady and not a goddess, a witch or an enchantress in disguise. You either change your offending behaviour immediately or – and this is the best-case scenario – you find yourself stuck in a castle full of singing furniture, with one erratic houseplant your only hope of salvation.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6463406150
glaukos: grey0blue. The visual seen as sparkly, “wine-dark sea”
larium shrine set in a wall for Lares, household gods
Aeneas founded Lavinium. Vesta shrine.500 yrs later: Romulus and Remus suckled
Muses’ hair the colour of violet
magpies 9 women lost contest to Muses
Sirens lose contest and lose wings
Niobe compares herself to Leto: Artemis and Apollow kill her 12 children

Rebecca Heisman, Flight Paths
Migration et al

Sarah Henstra, The lost tarot
A brilliant, utterly engrossing exploration of: Surrealism and its effects; academic feminist politics; an art mystery; male posturing; a cult; oh yes, and the Tarot. Henstra’s voice narrating this audiobook is perfect. Henstra could have emphasized women’s suppression in 20^th century art history by reminding us of the controversy over the artist behind Duchamp’s “The Fountain”: was R. Mutt Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven? A twining twist to this tale of doubling.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6761509275

The Dutch term alterstil “describes the work of an older artist whose stye no longer conforms to any prevailing trends or known models”

Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries
“This unconventional text comprises diary-entry excerpts that are arranged according to the alphabetical order of their first letters. The sections derive their meaning not from chronology but from unexpected juxtapositions: ‘Dream of me yelling at my mother, nothing I did was ever good enough for you! Dresden. Drinking a lot.’”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/10/alphabetical-diaries-by-sheila-heti-review-easy-as-abc?

Sharlyn Hidalgo, Celtic tree ogham: rituals and teachings of the aicme ailim vowels and the forfeda
The ancient alphabet in which each “letter” represents a tree or plant. This book covers the last ten ogham of the Celtic tree alphabet.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6502279696

Linda Hogan, The Book of Medicines
“Dearest Gloria,
  You have your own medicines
but I hope these words will join
 them. What a woman you are!
A real elixir. May healing
be with you always.
              Linda and her clan”
Signed to Gloria Alvernazy Mulcahy. I know how important Gloria’s visit to Linda’s house was to Gloria: she saw a cougar down the mountain below the house.
Hello Linda, I’m a poet friend of Gloria Alvernazy Mulcahy here in London Ontario. She has severe memory issues, so I now own your THE BOOK OF MEDICINES! You wrote the kindest inscription, which meant so much to her:
“Dearest Gloria,
  You have your own medicines
but I hope these words will join
 them. What a woman you are!
A real elixir. May healing
be with you always.
              Linda and her clan”
I know how Gloria valued her trip to your house… and the cougar she saw down the mountain! We collaborated on a book/cd of poetry, Gathering Voices.

Matthew Hollett, Optic nerve: poems
Remarkable, incisive Nfld poems, schooled by Don McKay; edited by Barry Dempster and Sue Sinclair. Brick Books.

India Holton, The ornithologist’s field guide to love
Silly, engaging fun: “All may be fair in love and war, but this is ornithology. Cheating is practically one of our scientific principles.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6976439365 
I LOVED the silly, froth of a 1890 romp/romance.

Aridjis Homero; translated from the Spanish by George McWhirter. Self-portrait in the zone of silence
Powerful to read with the Spanish conveniently alongside
“We have traveled east all day long
on acoustical roads and boats of old wood.
Our ears registered the shadows.
Our eyes harkened to the whirrings.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6976473512

Nalo Hopkinson, Blackheart Man
Rollicking tale.

Anthony Horowitz, The Word is Murder. Hawthorne & Horowitz #1
The author as detective, a bumbling hero of his own narrative. Fun.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6758120665
Anthony Horowitz, The Twist of a Knife  4
Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death 5
Anthony Horowitz, The House of Silk
Anthony Horowitz, Marble Hall Murders: A Novel (Susan Ryeland Series Book 3),
All 3 are films with Lesley Manville as well books in the library. Manville asked Horowitz to write a third novel, now being filmed. It’s the best book: Marble Hall Murders: A Novel

Scott Alexander Howard, The Other Valley: A Novel
Oddly French setting in a kind of Okanagan Valley. Philosophic inquiry.

Marie Howe, Magdalene: poems
Marie Howe, The Good Thief
Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time
Marie Howe, New and Selected Poems
(Norton 2024)
Marvellous.

Caoilinn Hughes, The Alternatives
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/25/the-alternatives-by-caoilinn-hughes-review-follow-your-own-path
January 15, 2025: In the video, several women are standing in the kitchen, talking, their hands having nothing to do. “Just sit at the table,” I suggest. “That’s what women do. Being still is powerful in itself.

Siân Hughes, Pearl 
“What if no one is to blame? I prefer the word accident. Or the official one. Misadventure. Death by misadventure. Because I like the word adventure. That describes her well. My mother’s life was an adventure. But it went wrong.” Set in the context of a mediaeval poem, this small novel is a pearl of great price. Our narrator is haunted by the loss of her mother, lost who knows where. Her magical childhood “traced the plot of ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsies’”. Margaret: Pearl.  In the original Pearl, a father, distraught at his daughter’s death, dreams of a divine garden, so different than the green garden in which he sleeps. There he meets his beautiful Pearl, who instructs him in Christian allegory; the genre is the high medieval dream vision.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6911159700

Reminds me of Chaucer’s near contemporary The Book of the Duchess, where the narrator also falls asleep under a tree, and dreams… “When he asks whether she is the pearl he has lost, she tells him he has lost nothing, that his pearl is merely a rose which has naturally withered. He wants to cross to her side, but she says it is not so easy, that he must resign himself to the will and mercy of God. He asks about her state. She tells him that the Lamb has taken her as His queen.”

Helen Humphreys, Followed by the Lark
So many fine Canadian novelists began as poets and now write fiction that is contemplative and poetic, not dependent on plot. Thus Helen Humphreys presents naturalist, poet, and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau in graceful vignettes that describe the beauty of the seasons in her usual elegant prose. serene contemplation poetic When a poet turns to fiction.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6384380853

John Irving, Queen Esther: A Novel
“‘The passage of time is a major character!’ Mieke exclaimed.”
Truly an interesting historical read of Esther and her legacy… and a kind of autofiction: “Jim­my is an exag­ger­a­tion of myself as a younger man.”
Irving remarked in an interview that he knew the ending to the novel, not how to get there. How that ending shocked me in its one-sided interpretation of ‘from the river to the sea’: get them before they get you. SIGH.

Anne Frank’s last entry in her diary: want to “keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if… if only there no other people in the world.” And I have had that change to become what I could be in these last seven decades

“In atrial fibrillation, the small chambers of the heart just ‘fibrillate’” quiver. blood gets into larger chamber but the electrical signals are disrupted… little blood to fill the chambers and v. little being pumped out. Lightheaded, rapid uncoordinated heartbeat”. So stagnant blood in the chambers forms plots, when the “small chambers start to pump again, the clots fly out—sending a massive number of emboli to the brain, causing a stroke. Brain tissue dies”

Eowyn Ivey, Black Woods, Blue Sky
While listening to Eowyn Ivey’s Black Woods, Blue Sky, I fall asleep while Emaleen, the young heroine, is driving north along the BC coast to Alaska.

Uzma Jalaluddin, Detective Aunty. #1 in series
Fun.

Tania James, Loot: A Novel
Delighted that the Carol Shields Prize long-listed LOOT! An expansive epic that leaps from Mysore to France and England. Invention in its many forms!“‘Were an artist to choose me for his model—How could he draw the form of a sigh?’This verse is attributed to Zeb-un-Nissa, a Sufi poet and patron of the arts, and daughter of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. It is believed that Zeb-un-Nissa authored a collection of poems under a pseudonym, Divan-i-Makhfi, or Book of the Hidden One.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6428290893

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
Talk about resilience! And Jon Batiste. To continue the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zvsA . Note her visionary paintings, from a hospital bed, a la Kahlo. The next chapter.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6153114013

Natalie Jenner, Every Time We Say Goodbye: Jane Austen Society #3  
Such an ambitious work covers the complexity of war-time trauma in dramatic scenes but sometimes stretches into exposition that does not catch fire.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5897321004
Love these interconnections on how story happens, Natalie!
Natalie Jenner, Austen at Sea
Austen’s navy brothers meet Austen fans, two Boston sisters.

Amishi P. Jha’s Peak Mind
An excellent presentation of mindfulness practice.
Highlights:
Find your flashlight, attentional focus
Body scan
content labelling; drop the tory. Situational awareness

Perceptual decoupling from mind wandering/ salient simulations
Decenter, keeping watch: open monitoring, wide meta-awareness

Memory consolidation
Episodic memory: “selective encoding of only those aspects of experience that were most attended to and held in working memory.”
Semantic memory: what you have learned

A subnetwork of the default mode network “has nodes comprising the medial-temporal long-term memory system… like a thought pump. It pumps out content like memory traces… een without our conscious awareness.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6472589537

Sonora Jha, The Laughter
Awful Anglo prof meets student, a woman of colour: you guessed it. Did not laugh. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6425174906  
Heard enough but DNF.  Anglo prof, student of colour: you guessed it.

Al Jiang, Linghun
A very serious study in grief, in family dynamics, in culture clashes. Linghug in Chinese means, appropriately, soul. This haunting novella is set in the strangest Ontario suburb ever called HOME: Homecoming of Missing Entities. “This town worships the dead, but it has no respect for the living.” “There is only one reason anyone would trek through the guarding trees to get to HOME: not to seek new life, but to satisfy a longing for the dead.” Nancy Wu was a terrifying narrator, her voice echoing. “Interacting with the ghosts as much as possible will keep their presence in our lives strong.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6546834526

Janine Joseph, Decade of the brain: poems 
Alice James Books.

Fady Joudah, [Ellipsis]
Of which, many.

Susan Juby, A Meditation on Murder
Loved MINDFUL OF MURDER and looking forward to the third volume in this delicious series. What’s not to love abut the Buddhist butler, Helen, with her calm presence. She doesn’t have to be so described, though, quite so often. We already love her. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6425375837
“Bunny Levine had ineffable grace, a generous heart, and a slightly hedonistic quality kept in check by her rigorous training as a surgeon and her devotion to the easier parts of Buddhism.”
 “Can we serve him a chicken that has died of natural causes?” asked Dr. Levine.
…Helen was a life-long vegetarian, but even she hoped they wouldn’t decide to serve a bird that had been partially eaten by a fox or run over by a tractor, and she was relieved when Chef had sourced one apparently so high-strung that it had died of fright during a thunderstorm.”
‘She had made the incision in place and time, and infused it with a climate, and longing. There was earth and fire and water on these pages; there was a man and a woman and human loneliness, disappointment.’

Susan Juby, Contemplation of a Crime
Kidnapped. Helen to the rescue!

Eva Jurczyk, That Night in the Library
Enjoyed her first book, so was looking forward to this. Intriguing concept and ending but in-between is splatter, hard on the rare book collection. Go for Paris Green! 
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6761053308

Miranda July, All Fours
Between fiction and autofiction falls a shadow…
John McPhee, a pioneer of creative nonfiction, advices on the importance of endings for story: “The finish might be even more important [than the lead]. It’s your destination. Ideally, it should respond to the question or issue that the lead raises. The finish should feel like the end of a trip. You’ve arrived and you now know much more that you knew at the beginning.”

Miranda July makes her finale dance, however improbably.  But what a trek…
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7015560742
Listening to Miranda July’s All Fours. Miranda reading. (I get a LOT of books “read” that way!) Did you know she is the daughter of Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough of N. Atlantic Books??  They are old friends from 1975, when I invited Richard to read at the A Space series I organized in Toronto. They stayed with me on Toronto Island.

Han Kang, We Do Not Part: A Novel
Jeju Island Massacres. Enigmatic dream borderland. “spaces within the crystal that absorb and trap sounds, dampening the acoustics of its surroundings. As its multiple surfaces reflect light in myriad directions, the snowflake appears colourless, appears white.”

Hisashi Kashiwai, The Kamogawa Food Detectives. #1 in series
I’ll be right over! Comfort food for gourmets and Japanophiles. Especially scrumptious after reading Muriel Barberry’s recent novels, also set in Kyoto.  Elegantly translated by Jesse Kirkwood.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6626631824
Precognitive: The orange cat I dreamt appears throughout Hisashi Kashiwai’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives. 

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017
As I pray for the Gaza/Israel ceasefire to hold, I readRashid Khalidi’s comprehensive and measured tome, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. And at night, I listen to Omar El Akkad read his heart-wrenching memoir, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day: stories of women and men
Perfect. What a materclass in story-telling!  I did mean master, but mater is fitting.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6270571939

Louise Kennedy, The end of the world is a cul de sac: stories
Listening to Louise Kennedy’s startling stories of domestic abuse in The end of the world is a cul de sac: stories. 15 starkly and brilliantly compelling stories, especially in audio with the diverse Irish accents.  Her men, though, are much of a nasty muchness, and her women: surprised. Should they be?
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6455994942

Serena Kent, Death in Provence
Picturesque Provence, the Luberon Valley! And then Penelope Kite, Englishwoman, buys Le Chant d’Eau! Chaos ensues with great food and rosé, too guiltily consumed.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6445915327 
Serena Kent, Death in Avignon: a Penelope Kite novel
Book 2. May there be more. Love these cozies with great food, a la Louise Penny and Donna Leon.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6502460375  

Conor Kerr, Prairie Edge: A Novel
DNF

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
Herzl’s 1899 plan to displace all Palestinians, Zionist

Claire Kilroy, Soldier Sailor
When Soldier meets Sailor: postpartum depression in one long cri de coeur. Lovely lines that capture early motherhood exactly: “How committed you were to being a baby. You stayed up half the night practising.” Repetition too, I remember, in the upheaval of expectation; the husband’s work “more important”, as she mutters bitterly. But where’s the Joy?
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6761075164

Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance
You would love Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance, especially her enthused reading on audio (from my library). She asks the berry about its gift economy.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/21/the-serviceberry-by-robin-wall-kimmerer-review-the-fruits-of-labour
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/16/weve-become-distrustful-of-each-other-braiding-sweetgrass-author-robin-wall-kimmerer-on-trump-rural-america-and-resistance 

Thomas King, Aliens on the moon
Elder drivel.  Know when to stop. Another Pretendian, sigh, scooping literary prizes.
Thomas King, Black Ice: A DreadfulWater Mystery
Social commentary in the guise of breakfast at Al’s. 
Mystery series writers who are also foodies: Donna Leon, Louise Penny, Martin Walker. 
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7056974225

Kirby, She
@knifeforkbook. SHE incites joy and delight in the daily with a keen eye and ear, attending to and engaged in her beloved, entangled city of Toronto as it flickers by in poetic sequence. Thanks, Kirby!

Katie Kitamura, Audition
Performance in a play that doesn’t work. In the second act, it does. Unknowability.

Emma Knight, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
Pen, the protagonist. On motherhood et al. Sweetly written.

Elizabeth Kolbert, H is for hope: climate change from A to Z
A graphic abecedarium by this leading writer on climate. Of hope, not so much.
“’Hope is the pillar that holds up the world,’ Pliny the Elder is supposed to have observed. ‘Hope is the dream of a waking man.’”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7056922569

Virginia Konchan, Hallelujah time
“The chrysanthemums / open their opera throats:/ prima donnas waiting/ for the rain to come/ thundering, like the idea/ of devolution, down;”
“death sipping a daiquiri/ underneath a beach/ umbrella, a scowl affixed, while the rest/ of the world frolics/ and bathes”
What ingenious confidence and scintillating wit these poems display, from ecopoetry to the abecedarian, “Vox Populi”! Sharp and smart, smarting beyond the lyric. A luscious production from Signal Editions, the poetry imprint at Véhicule Press.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6270613591

Halyna Kruk, A crash course in Molotov cocktails: poems. Amelia Glaser and Yulia Ilchuks, translation.
Witness poetry of the war in Ukraine at its most devastating.
“the truth is on your side, but it’s your buried side”
“war kills with the hands of the indifferent
and even the hands of the sympathizers”
“someday you’ll dig me up in a slab of coal
and you won’t even know what I’m burning about”
“citing anthracite”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6740627489

RF Kuang, Yellowface
Define racism… On to Katabasis: A Novel.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Wait Softly Brother
Read Loghan Paylor’s riveting The Cure for Drowning on #worldwater day2024 in conjunction with Zalika Reid-Benta’s marvellous River Mumma  and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s Wait Softly Brother!  A zeitgeist of water works set in Ontario! https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/world-water-day.html  Here’s to the fiction in auto-fiction!
Kathyrn’s comments on the process of writing are intriguing: more such ruminations, please. Several haunts
“They say that everything you write, just like everything you dream, is a replica of you, or your unconscious self. They say that you can’t write a character who is not, in some true way, an aspect of yourself. If this is true, then all fiction is autobiography. All writing is self.”
“Lives are stories or stories tucked into other stories.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter what I write. Maybe it is the fact of writing that will always be the thing.”
“In the hush of the forest now, the rain like white noise, I can finally hear myself think. How I need this water, is what I am thinking, despite the chill of it. It’s like I am beginning to recall my roots with a liquid thirst.”
“It’s funny, the word dwell. Funny how it implies obsessive rumination but also living in a place, as if the two things are contiguous or even precisely the same thing.
Trauma is body just as writing is. I know their trauma even if I don’t have words for it yet

“I keep thinking maybe no one will ever read this. Humanity will be extinguished before it is printed. I think of all the books jouncing on an open sea that covers the entire planet.”
“And the story, like a great snake eating its own tail, is just another way of seeking myself. You see, you can’t escape the duty you have to that. You can’t exit the matrix or whatever it is in you that needs healing. Either you stand in it and suffer, or you exit and suffer less. And by you, I mean me.”
“This expedition is another rabbit hole. There is no there there. The truth – whatever that means – resides somewhere between the research and the fantasy. The archive is only productive insofar as it is spurring my imagination.”

Hari Kunzru, Blue Ruin
Blue Ruin completes Hari Kunzru’s eloquent, elegant trilogy, following White Tears and Red Pill. To be read alongside Rachel Cusk’s Blue Parade, an equally gripping depiction of art, the art scene and the life of the artist. The prose in both novels is fiercely eloquent, but in Blue Ruin, the characters are fully present as people rather than symbols.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6628205850

Andrey Kurkov, The silver bone: a novel
Samson Kolechko investigates” in 1919 Kiev… the start of a series. I thought a mystery set in the confusion of 1919 would prepare a reader for Kyiv 2024, but no. Longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize, sigh. No sequel for me.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6502471187

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
Narrator Sadie Smith, our unreliable spy, describes her imaginary home, Priest Valley, as prelapsarian: is it parallel to  Neanderthal culture . From his isolated cave in Southwest France, philosopher/mentor Bruno Lacombe emails that the Thals linger in our DNA as “a precious keepsake, an heirloom, the remnant of a person deep inside us who knew our world before the fall, before the collapse of humanity into a cruel society of classes and domination.” Do the Thals live on in the oppressed minority Cagots?  Are the Neanderthals, like the revolutionary eco-activist commune of the Moulinards purer, without capitalistic greed? 

Having infiltrated the Moulinards for a year, Sadie remarks that the commune’s beliefs just “shore up their own identity.” “The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and ‘beliefs,’ is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is hard, white salt.”

What is it to be human? The title, Creation Lake, conjures the primal all from which we emerge. A cosmic ending. Reach for the stars!

One character, Pascal Balmy, is an homage to French intellectual Guy Debord and his “The Society of the Spectacle”. Michel Houellebecq is satirized as Michel Thomas, with “the frayed hair and ill-fitting dentures, who was touring this area as research for an ‘agronomy novel’— whatever that was.” 

Dannabang Kuwabong, Sargasso Sea scrolls: poetry
“Each poem is a narrative, a medallion of suffering and a testimony of resistance and survival. The collection is a concentric gathering of voices connecting” the poet’s native Ghana through trans-Atlantic crossings.

Brianna Labuskes, The Lost Book of Bonn
The Monuments Men retrieve books for The Offenbach Archival Depot 

Anita Lahey and Pauline Conley, Fire Monster
A poetic graphic novel: that description encompasses the many genres of this beautifully produced book from Palimpsest Press. The specific community in Cape Breton animates the monster’s power, just as a new fire season rears its head in Canada, fiercer now by magnitudes. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6504473869

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/27/safe-haven-or-symbol-of-injustice-what-our-gardens-tell-us-about-the-world-we-live-in?utm_term=662df3f556104ca4fd969daa2390c5ed&utm_campaign=Bookmarks&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=bookmarks_email

Kev Lambert, May Our Joy Endure
Proustian satire! “If Gabriela seemed strong on the day of her hiring, a confident young woman who held herself erect at the entrance of the studio, trying to attach her bicycle helmet to the strap of her vegan leather bag, if she had seemed capable of slaying all those disgusting creatures, dressed as she was in an armour of European linen made 50 percent from sustainable materials, if this assurance sometimes frightened her colleagues when for the first time a woman called into question this lazy ideal they thought to be pure genius, it was because, like those engaging cutthroats who peopled her childhood imagination, Gabriela had, at the age of twenty, seized a sword to kill the young girl she had been, slipping into the bedroom of young Gaby—her dirty glasses and her hair full of knots, spending hours on her bed, devouring thick books in which she almost always found a map of imaginary lands where the story took place—placing a hand on a shoulder and planting a sword in the neck, pitiless, two solemn tears coursing down her cheeks.”

Ann Lauterbach, Door
“Clarity is not the same
as the literal.”
The Door is a liminal threshold, entrance and exit, in these transformational narratives. We are in “eschaton, the ancient word for an extreme”, one reviewer claims, and so we are.

“Simone Weil talks about attention.
To what should we attend?
Attention is a form of response, not just
perception. If you attend, you respond;
otherwise you are in an aesthetic morality,
pleased with yourself for seeing. We see and
we say, but what do we do?”
“Is writing a way of stalling for time,
to delay the tasks in the next room”

I heard Mark Doty’s interview with Ann Lauterbach, her red hair tied back in a red bandana. Today I read her new collection, Door: “not ever

knowing who went out, came back,

went out came back, went,

never came back. Tenuous, the sign

with the name, the false resemblance.

Waiting is a form of thought. Thought

turns away, unable to name its ancestry.”

Amanda Leduc, Wild life: a novel

Harper Lee, The Land of Sweet Forever
Sweet Past childhood. Sweet Capote.

Jen Sookfong Lee, The hunger we pass down
Hunger as dead young women, ghosted through the generations.  Mornings are a terror no matter what generation.

Jessica J. Lee, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging
Having enjoyed Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan’s Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family’s Past, I look forward to her new collection of essays.

Christy Lefteri, The Book of Fire
As fire season starts again as early as April, this novel is a vivid depiction of solastalgia, as the author remarks in her Note regarding climate change. “The fire has burnt our souls, our hearts, it has turned to ashes the people we once were.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6430205660

Asha Lemmie, The Wildest Sun
Hemmingway’s daughter?? Enjoyed leaping from Paris to New York City to Havana with the intrepid Delphine. Is Papa Hemmingway her papa? She’s obsessed. And writes best-selling novels. Beautifully narrated by Imani Jade Powers.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6456038977

Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits 
Ater the Peloponnesian War in 412 BC, seven thousand captured Athenian soldiers were left to die in an abandoned quarry in Syracuse, Sicily. But theatre intervenes to save the day! Euripides rules! Ferdia Lennon’s vernacular is colloquial Irish, which leads to harrowing, picaresque immediacy: “that’s what the best plays do. If they’re true enough you’ll recognize it even if it all seems mad at first, and this is why we give a shit about Troy, though for all we know, it was just some dream of Homer’s.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6979884420

John Lent, Molecular Cathedral: The Poetry of John Lent, selected with an introduction by Jake Kennedy
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2024
   …And there it is again, this mystery
        of joining, of intersections, corners, fits, so
        damn important in everything we do, each
        small jazz symphony we might
        construct, for example,
        or song we might want
        to sing in the middle
        of the night, or poem 
“Carpenter”        
        You turn a faucet, you
        feel the chrome handle
        while another part of you
        reaches for the coffee beans
        and all surfaces, outside and in,
        are illuminating this instance
        of pure glee, pure surface
“Light”

Donna Leon, Wandering through life: a memoir
Slight vignettes, offhand, informative on bees. Wandering indeed, and fun. Looking forward to her latest, A Refiner’s Fire: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6704798095
“the bolt of delight I felt as I grasped this miraculous truth: a word could have too separate meanings. Suddenly, language was revealed to me as the best toy, ever.”
Donna Leon, A Refiner’s Fire: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery

Joanne Leow, Seas Move Away
“Tell me I can grow white in a country
that punishes with frostbite”
Left handed poem

Catherine Leroux, The future, translated by Susan Ouriou
(Biblioasis)
2024 Canada Reads winner, well deserved. Stupendous ending.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6423082391

Deborah Levy, An amorous discourse in the suburbs of Hell
The most engaging poem is the title.
“Listen I’m under the
Influence of your sleazy
vowels”
He/she in dialogue: sad angel meets suburban man…
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6911244677
Deborah Levy, The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies
Neat takes on Colette, Duras, Ballard and painter Paula Rego. Where’s the Table of Contents when you need it? “There comes a day when the scattered pieces of knowledge need to be fixed in a transmission line.” Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory
“go in deep, then deeper, and then to play with surface so that we become experts at surface and depth.”

Ellen Lewinberg, JOEY AND HIS FRIEND WATER
Glorious and necessary for understanding our relationship with water: kids of all ages will love this book!  Ellen Lewinberg’s book delightful book, JOEY AND HIS FRIEND WATER, is essential, engaging reading celebrating connection with nature, for children of every age! #IReadCanadian. Beloved author and critic Elizabeth Waterston writes: “This book offers an interesting approach to the concept of connectedness in nature, translating it into story form for young children. Colorful illustrations help present a complex idea in a readable way.” For more information on this earth-friendly, kid-friendly book: https://ellenlewinbergauthor.com/ https://www.amazon.ca/Joey-Friend-Water-Ellen-Lewinberg/dp/0228881692/ref=sr_1_1

Amanda Lewis, Tracking giants: big trees, tiny triumphs, and misadventures in the forest
Foreword by Diana Beresford-Kroeger.
Lovely intro by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. Insights galore!
“bending the map describes our bias toward trusting our own immediate perceptions rather than a representation, making us believe we’re somewhere we’re not.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6415497148
Friends of Clayoquot Sound (FUCS) Peace Camp in the summer of 1993

Tess Liem, Slows: twice
“the past becomes an exercise where I draw
in the negative space”
Indonesian. CHP.

Mark Lilla, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know 
“Mesmerised crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumours trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.”
“It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance?”
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, quoted by John Banville in THE GUARDIAN:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/24/ignorance-and-bliss-on-wanting-not-to-know-by-mark-lilla-review-the-enduring-power-of-stupidity

Ada Limon, The carrying: poems
I don’t remember what I first saw, the brick of light
that unhinged me mfrom the beginning…
the way[leaves] shaded and patterned the ground…
I’ve come from the lacing patterns of leaves,
I do not know where else I belong.”

Clarice Lispector, Too much of life: the complete crônicas
Newspaper columns, dnf.  A light touch.

Alan P. Lightman, The transcendent brain: spirituality in the age of science
“emergent phenomena—collective behavior of complex systems not present or understandable in their individual parts—and view consciousness in the brain as such a phenomenon.”

D.A. Lockhart, Go Down Odawa Way
Kegedonce Press
In Lockhart’s pulsating poetry, the bones of land live:
“the first gift of creation
is the turtle shell we tread upon”.

Marty Gervais’s review expresses Lockhart’s complex history of home well, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60604793-go-down-odawa-way

“Go Down Odawa Way, guide this sedan
northward to the great bending shores
between lakes larger than seas. Make
front page driving news, arriving along

spider vein freeways. This is home
in the lands warmed in the afterglow
of the second fire of the Midewin”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6792916302

To be read in conjunction with D.A. Lockhart’s earlier Tùkhòne: Where the River Narrows and Shores Bend, Black Moss Press:
“I sing out words
formed from muscle memory, don’t let the sound of your own wheels
drive you crazy.”

“a constellation of loss behind him.

Flickering red lights
emerge between clouds,
ancestors return home.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6792929282

In these collections, tributes to the Moon, to local rivers, are all named in the Southern Unami dialect of Lenape, sounding out the names. These poem sequences are presented in Japanese forms and narrative as a rich hybrid mélange, just as tradition surfaces in city life.

Poems of long memory, closely observed.

Daniel Lockhart, COMMONWEALTH
These medicine songs, the song lines of Daniel Lockhart’s intensely articulated master work, demand to be read, and read aloud. In this immediately vibrant collection, Lockhart includes Lenape words (primarily) in a natural and “critical aspect of decolonization’. As we sound out such terms on our tongues, we return to the land in relation to sound and meaning, clear in each poem’s context. Such visceral language on our tongue returns us to the poet’s ancestral haunts south of the arbitrary border of nations: “this river before me is our border against what was lost”. The arbitrary national line vanishes in Lockhart’s long view, grounded in the particulars of history, legend and the present. Where is rest found for the anxious wanderer? Where home? Shifting, everywhere, past and present in the palimpsest laid on the land over time. As a settler journeying with the poet, I become a ‘landed’ immigrant as “the song settles” the poet. “Rest,” he counsels. “Breathe / deeply of ancestors. / Speak of returns. / And river / around us / like a river / that knows nothing of northern promises”. “Our roots shall hold,” just as COMMONWEALTH attests.

Michael Longley, The stairwell
“the repertoire
goes underground”
“Ogham”

Canisia Lubrin, Code Noir
A harrowing, essential read. Each vignette reflects articles from 1685’s Le Code Noir, issued by Louis XIV, presented with erasures from the Code itself. “I stood there withholding the weight of what we were both thinking: that here was something true and strange between us, lacking a name, and we had turned around at the same time and seen each other.”
“We know that to remember is to call upon something like time and for everything to move in response like a mirage. It was our dead who sent us this far out to sea.” 

“The story that does not obey itself produces another mark of authority… Who reads the unclassifiable mind?”
“The voice speaking has a nature such as the nature of sound in a wilderness, or a cave underwater, the voice has a wilderness.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7005100468
Just reading/listening to Code Noir @canisialubrinThe audio is captivating!

Paul Lynch, Prophet song
Raced through it.

Jeanette Lynes, The Paper Birds: A Novel
Rose Quinn, move over to Lake Ontario.

Patricia Lockwood, No one is talking about this: a novel
Very hip, in and out of internet portal

Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive?
Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? is one of the most literally MOVING book you’ll read this year or maybe ever, and one of the most necessary.
Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie River) in Nitassinan Rita Mestokosho, poet, shaman
“a tree is a river, bound in bark”
gods Dana /Danube  Deva the Dee  Tamesa Thames Sinnan Shannon
Thomas “ Berry coined the world ‘inscendence’…’to enter deep within’” verb inscend
Giuliana Furci “To be erumpent is to be part in and part out of the soil” fungi only
slime moulds, protists, “a separate kindom”, not fungi. Not kingdom
The Epic of Gilgamesh: cedar forest demolished
Ivan Ilich, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness “Following dream-waters upstream, the historian will learn to distinguish the vast register of their voices.” Waters “of the deep imagination”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “a grammar of animacy”
Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest
Vico, “history isn’t circular but helical. … like tree rings— but if you follow it down or up, itt’s actually Dantean, which is to say, a spiral.” Wayne
“Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’, face turned toward the past”
Google: “Katabasis, derived from the Greek κατάβασις (katábasis), refers to a descent, particularly a journey to the underworld or the realm of the dead.”
Google: “Reticulation is a net-like pattern, arrangement, or structure. Reticulation or Reticulated may refer to: Reticulation (single-access key), a structure of an identification tree, where there are several possible routes to a correct identification. A coloration pattern of some animals (e.g. the reticulated giraffe)”
LiDAR Light Detection and Ranging

“a tree is a river, bound in bark”
a rock is a river, bound by time
Time is no river but a spiral bound
notebook, note a book gathers wisdom
Spiral descends and ascends as you choose
Coice is a coincidence that you embrace
Embrace is a moment lost to that moment
Moment is momentum undone by time
Momentum is movement moved to tears gorge
Tears tear the fabric between eyelid and eye
I dunno, do you? Where I resides, inside.
Inside by side, I sidle by.

Fareh Malik, Streams that lead somewhere: poems
Makenzi House. Beautifully printed by Coach House.

Claire Malroux, Daybreak: new and selected poems; translated from the French and with an introduction by Marilyn Hacker.
So much fun to read the English and then hear Robyn read the French. Very classical French, no slang, so it’s easier to understand.
“For over four decades Claire Malroux has forged a unique path in contemporary French poetry, informed by the French tradition, poets such as Yves Bonnefoy and Mallarmé, and more unusually, by the Anglophone tradition, especially Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott. A preeminent translator of English poetry into French, Malroux claims as a signal event in her literary life her discovery in 1983 of Dickinson’s poetry, which she describes as “an encounter with the uncanny” and the awakening of a “personal affinity.” Malroux is one of those rare poets whose work is informed by day-to-day intimacy with a second language in its greatest variations and subtleties. Her poems move between an intense but philosophical and abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. In almost every poem there is a characteristic and unsettling amalgam of past and present that collapses distance and incarnates through metaphor. This bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents Malroux’s oeuvre from her early lyric poems, to an excerpt from A Long-Gone Sun–a poem-memoir of life in southern France before and during World War II–to new and uncollected poems from two sequences of elegies written after the death of her life partner, the writer Pierre Sylvain”

Hilary Mantel, A memoir of my former self: a life in writing
Her memory surfaces in brilliant phrases from her own writing, her reading, her observation.
A ghost is “a disturbance in our consciousness, in that deep place where we carry the dead, like the unborn, sealed up inside us.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6780205860

Sally Wen Mao
AUBADE WITH GRAVEL AND GOLD

I’m sick of speaking for women who’ve died
Their stories and their disappearances bludgeon me in my sleep

Their language is the skein in my throat that unravels every time a bullhorn blows, every time a road is paved, every time a railroad is constructed, ballast to blast, built to last against the orange flames of an open, unwritten sky

I am trapped in someone else’s imagination. My borders lose shape. I become a woman without boundaries, permeable as water. From my mouth, sepals fall. From my skin, armor and scales slough off. I am a silkworm before the harvest. In my throat, a protest—but no sound escapes, except the soporific sound of a reed flute. Where am I? I try to ask. Whose fantasy is this? What are the implications of living in your fantasy? Nothing. No answers.

Effortless dance between  Examines the resonance of   fractured notions

Sally Wen Mao, The Kingdom of Surfaces: Poems
This fierce collection examines myth and history from silk to her birthplace, Wutan.
“I am trapped in someone else’s imagination. My borders lose shape. I become a woman without boundaries, permeable as water. From my mouth, sepals fall. From my skin, armor and scales slough off. I am a silkworm before the harvest. In my throat, a protest—but no sound escapes, except the soporific sound of a reed flute. Where am I? I try to ask. Whose fantasy is this? What are the implications of living in your fantasy? Nothing. No answers.
Silkworms always die for human imagination.”
“AUBADE WITH GRAVEL AND GOLD”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6626333872

“This ferocious collection ruthlessly articulates rage against being stereotyped or exoticized. Sally Wen Mao revels in the depth of history as it reverberates under the surface: the poetry is serious, ferocious play brilliantly attuned. She interrogates the surface through history and myth. Her birthplace, Wuhan, the first epicenter of the pandemic, a household name.”

“Years ago, I visited Suzhou, world capital of silk and wedding dresses. At the Silk Museum, the silkworms crumpled themselves in baskets, lazy and dazed in the spoils of mulberry. weft / weave / reeling / warp / dye After the first molting, the second molting, silk moths lay eggs. Then the weavers—at the museum, these wax dolls—brought offerings to the gods of sericulture.”

Nicole Markoti, After Beowulf
Do you have to be an English scholar to enjoy this labour of love and kennings?

“His unspoken name loiters before
he speaks himself into that name, so:
fold his name into these lines…
HE swan-dives into that swan-road”

Upturning the hero is fun!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6910996790

Domenica Martinello, All day I dream about sirens

Armistead Maupin, Mona of the Manor
A romp through Cotswolds dilapidated splendour.

Bernadette Mayer, Milkweed smithereens
“i agree to find the holy grail if you pay me a poem.”
“who else would have a memory of the future, it’s all I can think about. i’m guessing blake did & psychics of course”
“i’m reading nabokov’s ‘insomniac dreams’ which is an attempt to prove this guy dunne’s theory that dreams are precognitive.”

Victoria Mbabazi, The siren in the twelfth house
Fun with a knowledge of astrology… otherwise? Palimpsest Press.

Rowan McCandless, Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments
Intriguing experimentation in various forms to express the way biracial Rowan McCandless straddles two worlds, as does Persephone.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6508287207

Colum McCann, Twist
“Thunder at sea can help you believe all the myths.”

Susan McCaslin, Named and Nameless
Named & Nameless celebrates I and Thou, the moment when the protagonist meets a specific Other, pursuing some pointed self-examination. Her I Am interrupts, points to the Douglas fir outside her kitchen window, “a tree whose only sentence is sentience.” McCaslin has burst the bounds and bonds of the self in this, her finest work, a metaphysics grounded in eloquent, exquisite observation of the natural world. https://inanna.ca/product/named-and-nameless/

Susan McCaslin, Consider
 A gorgeous book from Aeolus House that explores the sacred and articulates spirit in richly elegant form. Consider, con sidere: this poetry is stellar, as profound as it is fun:
“cracking comic eggs
        making wise cracks
can open cracks

crack us up    crumble our egos”

Alice McDermott, Absolution
“There’s a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the hopeless only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing”. When the word ‘absolution’ appears in the book, it is for something so light that it cannot stand the weight of such an abstract title. But colonialism rules, and regret: “I recall our hubris on that first morning in Saigon, our confidence, our Western centrism enhanced, inflated beyond all forgiveness, by our far more conceited, bone-deep New-Yorker-from-Yonkers self-regard.” An elegant description of wives in their assigned roles: “Be a helpmeet to your husband. Be the jewel in his crown.”
Born in 1940, the wife in 1963 Saigon is only four years older than I; we even share a popular name at the time, Patricia. But an entire generational gulf separates us. She represents the values of war-time wives and mothers, my own included, unchanged since World War 2. I married into that time period, being 21 in 1966, but could ignore the strictures, the lack of autonomy. Life unfolded very differently as the ‘60’s progressed…
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6152888527
Relict “something that has survived the death of another.”

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know
Among my faves for 2025, especially in its concern for and with poetry: “The past, jumbled in the mind, survives in its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present. A journal, whatever its quality, fixes events like beads on a string.”
“we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.”
Reading Ian McEwan’s marvellous What We Can Know: a different dinner party. The first half, beyond brilliant.

rob mclennan, World’s End
A cinematic pan across the current canlit scene, with quotes, appropriations, tributes. “John Berryman wrote: ‘We must travel in the direction of our fear.’ And so mclennan does, leaving the trail of a mind in action, in word play, in alternate histories, always reading and writing. He quotes Ann Carson in one epigraph: “It is always tricky, the question whether to read an author’s word in light of his life of not. Appropriately, I keep mistyping the title: Word Send. Lovely book by ARP Books.

Wendy McNeil, First there were feathers
A marvellous cd/pamphlet, beautifully presented. Complete with video on https://www.wendymcneill.com/first-there-were-feathers.

Bruce McRae, Boxing in the bone orchard
Marvellous, from Frontenac House Poetry.
“Waiting for light’s translation, all of a darkness.
I’m sitting in my prophet’s chair, a rib-thin hermit
building alien gods from sensations and words.
Asking, why not a new sun and other mornings,
rancorous muse?”
“Wanted dead or alive, Schrodinger’s cat
is living outside the box, its ears back
and tail switching frenetically, torn between
paradox and measurement, being and non-being”
“Twin State”

Vladimir Megré, The Ringing Cedars of Russia
Vladimir Megré, Rites of Love
“Archaim is an academy”. From the Web, 2 circular bastions: “Scholars have identified the structure of Arkaim as the cities built “reproducing the model of the universe” described in ancient Indo-Aryan/Iranian spiritual literature, the Vedas and the Avesta.”  2050-1900 BCE, period of Sintashta culture”
Sungir: “Upper Paleolithic…between 32,050 and 28,550 BCE”

Imam Mersal, Threshold
“I’m pretty sure/ my self-exposures/ are for me to hide behind.”
Teaches at U of Alberta. Translated by Robyn Creswell. A dry political wit, devastating narratives. Cairene.

Claire Messud, This strange eventful history: a novel
“This strange eventful history that made a life”, yes, many lives in this novel that reads like memoir. Homes, found and lost across the century and the world.  “Was it purely joy or also relief? That they were rich, still, in minutes, inshallah still in years, that the now-chill air could still kiss them, that they could fight, dither, joke, read, laugh, complain, be.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6784674324

Bruce Meyer, Grace of falling stars 
Another lovely Black Moss book!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6477283345

Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?
I’m including Sean Michaels’s marvellous Do You Remember Being Born? in these recommendations because our heroine throughout the book is modernist poet Marianne Moore: “A whole life in luster.” “All poetry’s feathermeal,” I told her. “We grind it down and use it for other stuff.” “Some things aren’t… invented,” murmured the voiceover. “They’re awakened.”
Curring: murmuring as of doves “There’s a line I read once, by an Egyptian poet whose name I cannot remember: that a diary’s function is not to show you who you are, but who it is you have ceased to be.” Sean Michaels’s marvellous Do You Remember Being Born? in these recommendations because it’s a celebration of a woman poet, though not Canadian… our heroine throughout the book is modernist poet Marianne Moore, who in the book remarks, “A perfect poem, (…) a perfect poem can change the world.” And “‘All poetry’s feathermeal,’ I told her. ‘We grind it down and use it for other stuff.’” The Author’s Note at the end of the book informs us that AI (Open AI’s Chat GPT-3 and Moorebot poetry-generating software generated Charlotte’s poetry, as highlighted in the book: “”Some things aren’t… invented,” murmured the voiceover. “They’re awakened.”” “‘But what does it do to people if everything they read is just the upchuck of a very smart computer program?” “Humans have a difficult time with “natural”. We are better at “interesting” or “beautiful” or “forceful” than we are at “natural.” Everything is an exertion, everything is performance.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6246608896
Day 9 #NationalPoetryMonth #todayspoem #npm24 #npm #NpmMania #poetrymonth #poetry

Michael Mirolla, At the end of the world
Our urbane Vergil, well-travelled in time and space, invites us into caves across the world, caves of dream. “A place with neither inside / nor out. A place that can’t be imagined. / Imagine then what can’t be imagined.” We are lucky to listen as he engages the reader in such fine, mind-expanding reflections. A gorgeous collection from Black Moss Press.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6511165776

Kent Monkman, Gisele Gordon, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island
Not for the faint of heart. A fabulously wild ride upturning colonial history, and colonials, with Monkman’s magnificent paintings foregrounded.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6203850615
Kent Monkman, Gisele Gordon, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 11: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island
Not getting to sleep, I listen to The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 11.  A horrific rendering of tragedy upon tragedy. Good choice for resting, eh? Not. But necessary to know if only to bear witness.
Freya querulously remarks that she has send her cousin to fight with Poundmaker: why hasn’t that made a difference in the rebellion’s outcome, given his power?

Shannon Morgan, Her Little Flowers
The language of flowers is such an intriguing extended metaphor, vividly depicted here in this Gothic tale set in the Lake District. Captivating. The audio is superb. 
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6184378338

Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment
How to explicate one good idea: what would you do if you knew when you were going to die? And could you stop fate? Ah, I wish Moriarty had gone deeper into myth.

Donna Morrissey, Rage the Night
The Library due date dictates what I read next. So these days, it turns out by chance to be Michael Crummey’s The Adversary and Donna Morrissey’s Rage the Night, both set in Newfoundland outports.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6508321708

Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen
Um, no. Neither Eileen nor non-Eileen 50 years later works as narrator, reliably or not. Chekhov’s gun misfired.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6779066802

Sarah Moss, My good bright wolf: a memoir
The memoir flips between the narrator’s voice and another voice that challenges her every memory. “Insight doesn’t naturally lead to action.” “The purpose of writing is not competitive suffering. The making of art is always both privilege and necessity, always dependent on other people doing other work”
Sarah Moss, Ripeness

Alice Munro, Friends of my youth
I’ve been writing on Alice Munro’s awful husband… traumatic to work on.

Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation
Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls
“Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?” —Haruki Murakami, from the afterword
“a Dream Reader reviews dreams and where our shadows become untethered from our selves.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/27/the-city-and-its-uncertain-walls-by-haruki-murakami-review-a-labour-of-love While listening to Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, December 11, 2024: Gavin and I are visiting a green park on an Island. Sprawled on the grass is a young woman author. She’s reading over loose pages from her manuscript. Since I’ve just read her first novel, I comment “You could cut some of the repeated phrases to tighten the work.” In my opinion, it’s been published too hastily and the result’s shoddy.

While listening to Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls. And yes, sometimes his prose is very repetitious. But that’s not for me to say😊

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
Having just finished Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, with the characters’ ambivalent feelings about country life. Funny? I don’t think so, unless you find grim funny. And the ending? Horrific or frustrating or frustratingly horrific. But given a protagonist called Cassandra… The Irish in me was curious, appalled, fascinated. Not your idyllic country life. Home, bitter home. Not your idyllic country life. And yet the pull, back. “I’m changing the truth.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6703791629

Susan Musgrave, Exculpatory lilies: poems
Heart-wrenching, heart-twisting poems for Stephen and Sophie

Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations
“Like Inanna, she seems capable of being left for dead on a meat hook, then magically revived and returned to the arena. In this way she remains a good-enough mom, à la D.W. Winnicott” Hi rob, Yes, Maggie Nelson’s new LIKE LOVE is excellent, especially on Lhasa de Sela, “My Brilliant Friend”.  Maggie Nelson has a nice piece, “This Living Hand, or, My Hervé Guibert”.

Always interesting, always an unusual take, whether you know Nelson’s subject or not, especially on Lhasa de Sela, “My Brilliant Friend” and the interview with Eileen Myles.
“Let’s face it. Were undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” A deep dive introducing Judith Butler’s lines.
In conversation with Jacqueline Rose: “Everybody deserves the kind of non-stultifying internal breathing space of fluidity or instability that is attributed to queers, or to women, or whatever.”

David Nicholls, You Are Here
A sweet, vicarious romp across Yorkshire and on…
“She had become addicted to the buzz of the cancelled plan.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7056797220

Erin Noteboom, A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen
5*. Sharp and cutting from a science writer. Science “is only half a turn from love.” Brick Books.

Jenni Nuttall, Mother tongue: the surprising history of women’s words
First poems in English: “Our breost-sefa, the ‘breast-mind’, held our innermost thoughts… our heart of hearts.”
“a wifman is a woman-human.” Wf: waving, waving?
Whether “trots, veckes, hags or crones
Crone was in the sixteenth century…a
farming term for an older female sheep
and as an abusive name for an elderly
woman. …the same root which gives us
carrion.” The aged as walking corpse.

Naomi Shihab Nye, Grace notes: poems about families
“I told the boy
I had a bad dream.
He said, Have a new one.”

Téa Obreht, The Morningside
“It’s always dangerous to give people a way to tell themselves stories about you before they get to know you. Always.”

Maggie O’Farrell, The distance between us
Read but not remembered; Hong Kong, Scotland love story… My least favourite of her work. “He has to keep promising himself this — that his life will not for ever consist of mad dashes up and down a country in search of people who do not want to be found.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6446467513

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road
Don’t have time for 600 pages, but it’s just too engaging to put down.
The aesthete as Eliot’s Hollow Man.

Heather O’Neill, Valentine in Montreal: a novel
Now I know Métro’s artwork, station by station…

dg nanouk okpik, Blood snow
The morning dream in a distance, an inukshuk,
young-old-women of igneous rock standing

at rest, tall and safe. In the sunglow I roll
a handful of ice silt clay, roll it in my hands until

they’re red-rose red—I don’t let them bleed….

My eyes flow, eyes of tears to the angels & archangels,
as I make wet, dry, warm, cold & fire flame. I’m off kilter.”

Day 8 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6384182476  Day 9 #NationalPoetryMonth #todayspoem #npm24 #npm #NpmMania #poetrymonth #poetry

 “A toil of one inside me: / She/I cast a thick, / sod-wall / time out of mind, / out of sync, off course.” Wave Books
From https://www.southeastreview.org/single-post/an-interview-with-dg-nanouk-okpik
“Use of pronouns, the symbolic meaning of the “I” of the poems, helps me open the poetry to new curves or slant writing to appeal to the reader, to draw them in in a physical way, to present the internal strife of one, me, she/I, mind. Especially, the “we” instead of the “I” is represented as an Inupiaq way of thinking.
Then the external world is given by metaphorical language such as boundaries. Sod walls create a sense of border, then the complications and tensions mount when the mind (internal) changes. Change is presented in an altered state of mind, which creates space for fragmentation. There is no ego. There is a transformation going on with the internal and external language. So urgent is the writing, but these times require the urgency of language.”
“my diction is a composite of these travels”
“I have the ethos of water in all its many roles/forms to create fluidity.”

“Translanguaging is the ability to move fluidly between languages”

Ben Okri, Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-HeartedThis sweet scenario plays out today as I listen to Ben Okri’s Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted. Precognitive.

Mary Oliver, West wind: poems and prose poems*

Michael Ondaatje, A Year of Last Things
“Reading the lines he loves / he slips them into a pocket, / wishes to die with his clothes / full of torn free stanzas / and the telephone numbers / of his children in far cities” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6404095508
“So many things to learn, keep on learning / during these last days, watching us / with an awareness that we perhaps / have not learned but shall.” 

Heather O’Neill, The Capital of Dreams 
The Capital of Dreams begins with a girl holding her soon to be talking goose. Truly, a lethal heroine @lethal_heroine! Tricky twists & engrossing writing. Highly #recommended! @harpercollinsca
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6970774662
October 31, 2024: Holding a goose. Inspired by Heather O’Neill’s The Capital of Dreams, which begins with a girl holding her talking goose.

Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed
Richard Osman, The last devil to die
Richard Osman, The Impossible Fortune
Ah, cozies…
Richard Osman, We Solve Murders
Fun but no cigar, though Rosie has a certain aged charm…

Elaine Pagels, Miracles and wonder the historical mystery of Jesus
Schoedinger’s cat, released! Narrow slots…a rich man can’t get through the eye of a needle. Reading the marvellous Elaine Pagels, Miracles and wonder the historical mystery of Jesus, as she sets out context and setting. The Romans need to be placated in a time of war and so Pontius Pilate is unfactually exonerated in the gospels

Daniel Silva’s The Order describes an apocryphal Gospel with Pontius Pilate’s account of Jesus’s trial. “Silva has a greater purpose: He wants to settle, for the record, the origins in Christian beliefs of anti-Semitism, the root of centuries of pain and persecution of Jews, particularly in Catholic and Christian Europe.”  Co-incidence? At the same time, I’m reading Elaine Pagels. Her marvellous Miracles and wonder: the historical mystery of Jesus presents a similar treatment of Pontius Pilate as responsible for crucifying Jesus.

Jodi Picoult, By Any Other Name
Jodi Picoult’s novel on Emilia Bassano. I’d read another, Dark Lady: A Novel of Emilia Bassano Lanyer by Charlene Ball. Is Emilia connected to de Vere??

Helen Oyeyemi, Parasol Against the Axe
DNF

Loghan Paylor, The Cure for Drowning
Read Loghan Paylor’s riveting The Cure for Drowning on #worldwater day2024 in conjunction with marvellous River Mumma  and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s Wait Softly Brother!  A zeitgeist of water works set in Ontario! https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/world-water-day.html Here’s to the fiction in auto-fiction!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6508330285

Molly Peacock, A Friend Sails in on a Poem: Essays on Friendship, Freedom and Poetic Form. With an Afterword by Phillis Levin
Female friendship, fraught, funny and full of good food for body, heart, mind. “the overlay of a trinity…the tercet is the most spiritual of stanza structures. It is inherently as graceful and stable as a geometric triangle.” “When a sentence winds around lines, then bridges the gap between stanzas, its syntax has a special plasticity.” Palimpsest Press
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6843920990 Jonathan Galassi, Random House. Norton. Michael Groden volunteer for Poetry Society of America
The Widow’s Crayon Box: Poems
Alphabetique: 26 characteristic fictions

Tyler Pennock, Blood; edited by Joshua Whitehead
“anything we create
can’t be forever…
should be the water”

Louise Penny, The Grey Wolf
Oh, the cliffhanger!  Who’s afraid of the big black wolf, coming up next? I am, because there are many threads to unwind…
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6990741285
Louise Penny, The Black Wolf 
Psalm 63: “In a dry and parched land where there is no water.”
Jean Brassard reads in a much more appropriate Québecois accent. I loved it on audio, with a Québecois reader! And so precognitive!

Sarah Perry, Enlightenment
The novel I recommend: ​Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment. Pagan and lushly anthropomorphic writing: a gay man debates faith and fate in the most sumptuous language. Delicious.
“He was enfolded in persistent time that had only ever seemed to pass—that everything that happened in Lowlands was still happening, and would always be happening”
“Sound requires substance—you can hear nothing at all unless the air and its molecules are made to oscillate, creating sound waves like ripples in a cloth. When these ripples reach your eardrums, that membrane also begins to vibrate, and so you hear”
“I found as I walked that at certain times, when the position of the puddle and the angle of the light were judicious, the moon would arrive at my feet”
Enlightenment conjures Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, with a panorama of and, and, and till it focuses…and Carol Shields’s Luck, on goodness. Not luck but predetermined fate… or influence, from the stars.

Elizabeth Philips, The Afterlife of Birds
Sweet, gentle and pertinent, very Canadian. Could be a portrait of a poet, in lovely prose: “landmarks appear to morph with the season and time of day” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6499834338

Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch
Faulkner lite.  Good on audio, though.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6757936372

Jodi Picoult, By any other name: a novel
In 1581, Emilia Bassano

Alycia Pirmohamed, Another way to split water
“In the middle of the night, I walk right into my dreams
and cluster with the other lost sisters of the moon”
“I’ll split into myth

And pass through the mouths of a hundred generations.
I am woman after woman after spooling
Woman, ensorcelled by water”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6404060568

Michelle Porter, A Grandmother Begins the Story
The enchanting cover by Métis artist, Lisa Shepherd, is the perfect emblematic introduction to Métis writer Michelle Porter’s haunting saga. The land is alive with bison and women, down the generations. Yes, the story begins with a grandmother, Mamé: “It’s not about me, not anymore. It’s not like that. Up here the stories are us and we are the stories, every single one of them. Took me a long time to make my way here and now it’s almost my turn to be the stories—or to tell the stories, as we used to say before we passed.”
Especially immersive if you listen to the full-cast audiobook. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6709367214 
“All I know to say is we’ve got to play our music no matter who leaves us and no matter who fails us, no matter the memories preying on us in the small hours of the night.”

Richard Powers, Playground
“Play was evolution’s way of building brains”. This astonishing book is playground for mind and heart in ever-expanding spheres. “her conscious mind had found its way back to the arrival point that her animal mind had already reached…. The ocean was forever unfolding, forever exploring, forever tinkering with form. And eery part of it was busy talking about what was all around. So was she.  So was every being…” “Everything Evie once learned through her own senses she now learned again, through the ears of her imagined readers.” “Porpoises and dolphins and killer whales whose ears could see tiny difference in buried objects.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67982
Makatea, a small Pacific island in French Polynesia

Nita Prose, The mystery guest
Fun! A hotel cozy in which I expected Harriet the Spy to appear… maybe in Molly the Maid, #3!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5802677359
Nita Prose, The Mistletoe Mystery (Molly the Maid #2.5)
Nita Prose, The Maid’s Secret: #3 in Molly the Maid series

Shelley Puhak, Harbinger: poems
Excellent, jarring. The portrait of an artist as woman.

Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket
Just another prolonged Western? Don’t have the time.

Sina Queyras, MxT, or ‘Memory x Time
“The endless loop of feeling, what does it reveal?” Aperçu upon aperçu.
“Grief is too bright. Too head on. We want to hide it with the empties.”

Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time
Very gneiss. And magnetite and… Mico memoir in macro magma
For “Claude Lévi-Strauss, Freud’s method was a geology of the psyche. And geology like archaeology, had its utopian dimension— the promise of suturing time”
“space and time become one; the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages. Thought and emotion move into a new dimension [and]I feel myself to be steeped in a more dense intelligibility” Claude Lévi-Strauss

Zalika Reid-Benta, River Mumma
How I wish River Mumma was on the short list for the Carol Shields prize. It’s original, beguiling, enchanting: Jamaican folklore brought to Toronto.
“the vision within her vision: the rivers…that once belonged to River Mumma had dried up”

“The rushing of the water turned to whispers, hisses sounding one word over and over: Alicia, Alicia, Alicia. It became a song. Alicia could hear River Mumma’s voice in the current. Intoxicating and haunting. Waves splashed on the bank, breaking upon Alicia’s feet, encircling her ankles like hands gripping her joints. She felt an ever-so-delicate pull toward the river, and she complied. She should resist, but she couldn’t. She had to listen to what the voice said.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6425524411

“You experienced an ancestral dream” P. 64
a huge bull, the “rolling Calf” charging them
“the vision within her vision: the rivers…that once belonged to River Mumma had dried up”

Anastacia-Reneé, Side notes from the archivist: poems
Fascinating glimpses into the life of this poet, with intriguing experimentation.  Literal side notes from the archive. “Aunt Jemima meets Victoria Secret”: more of these please.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6384333128

Maria Reva, Endling
Brilliant, evocative, sardonic, picaresque metafiction! How Reva inserts herself as writer and grant applicant into the novel of well-assembled yurts. I love how Reva includes her grant application for art council support in the middle of the novel: brazen.
endling – the last living member of a species. all have culminated in an endling.

CS Richardson, All the Colour in the World
All the Colour in the World weaves art history with memory in the Giller Prize-finalist novel while “gatling guns” is spoken: the CD is playing CS Richardson’s All the Colour in the World.

Sandra Ridley, Vixen
“Out of the fire, bone. Out of the bone, light. Out of the light, longing—the hollow and the lack.”

Fox, not victim but elegantly feral, however harrowing.
“Askew in the eldritch”  “But isn’t the body a mouthful and a startlement?

Ridley’s language enchants and electrifies, scalp prickling. Karen Solie’s editorially astute eye is evident in the shifting format of the poems. Beautifully presented by Book*hug.

If you loved VIXEN, take a look at FOX HAUNTS, another compendium of fox lore, looking both outward to the world and inward to the imaginal realm. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39743870-fox-haunts
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7018171399
https://www.facebook.com/Bookhugpress
Dear Sandra,
How I loved your VIXEN! I wrote about it.

Rebecca Romney, Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: a rare book collector’s quest to find the women writers who shaped a legend
A Jane Austen fan looks to her sources in 18^th c. novels! Marvellous. Romney reads it on audio too.

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo
Engaging, 400 pages in… and worth the slog, despite two conflicted brothers: “what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
Throw in Philosophical Investigations: “The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, says Wittgenstein, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent…. Each name including within itself a complex of assumptions.” Ah, variations of family relations in grief. The women come out well, except, of course, for mother.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6798295471

Stuart Ross, A Hamburger in a Gallery
A veggie burger across the spectrum of shifting poetics as elucidated in the interview with Jason Camlot: so much fun.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6798346970
Stuart Ross, Razovsky at Peace
ECW Ross’s manic energy is settling into a play of and with form:
“But now I am in control, and from the sofa headquarters of
my inert body, my atrophying limbs, my glowing angel’s
visage, I make things come to me.”
And so the poems descend from dream, from other poets’ lines, from family story. Adventures in liminal land, where dream merges with ordinary, avidly observed absurdist reality.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6798355611

Carlo Rovelli, White Holes
How Rovelli interweaves lines from The Divine Comedy and from Rilke, Spinoza and Kant grounds me in language I understand: “to study space, time, black holes and white holes is a way of us being in relation to reality, a reality that is not ‘it,’ but ‘you’—as lyric poets have it”. And Rovelli wrote White Holes in London Ontario! “Kepler flies thanks to his mother’s magic, and describes the solar system as seen from outside the Earth.”
Penrose “A net is a set of nodes connected by links. The nodes denote the elementary grains of space. They are the ‘quanta of space,’ just as photons are the quanta of light.” “Photons move within space, the quanta of space are the grains that weave net that is itself space.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6496993256

Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland
Oh, to absorb these brilliant minds.

Katherine Rundell, Super-infinite: the transformations of John Donne
Mesmerizing portrait of a complex man whose poems still inspire.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6854305118
Katherine Rundell, Impossible Creatures
Truly marvellous adventure, with the odd wink, to “old poets, John Dun, John somebody… it’s truth.” Such sweet turns of phrase: “dryad fruit… tasted still living: fruits with opinions and jokes and laughter in them.” Or “watching the splendor of the infinitely fragile night pass by overhead… alight with silver; it looked alive, an ancient, breathing thing.”
Katherine Rundell, Vanishing treasures: a bestiary of extraordinary endangered creatures
“An’ when I’m far fa every strand,
My dwelling is in Shool Skerry.”

Karen Russell, The Antidote
“At daybreak, the light shrinks into the ground. As if the earth is gasping back a dream.”
“Maybe I can restring myself, and learn how to make music from my hollow place.”
“Freedom turned out to be a territory we occupied.” Pawnee
The plurality of voices on memory and the karmic cost of erasure; hence the Dust Bowl. The landscape alive and speaking in the strange everyday. I keep thinking of Jane Urquhart’s blue sky book in contrast.

Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
On metaphor and meaning:
“Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife.”
“We would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6446000390
Salman Rushdie, The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories
Happy to say this is my fave Rushdie since his early work. How well he writes about aging and the afterlife! What is it, a waiting room before the entity’s next move, perhaps to final dissolution?  So posits Rushdie in his new short story, “Late”.

Jennifer Saint, Atalanta
Another feminist take on an old story! Saint pulls together some less well know details of the myth in her reimagining, but the novel is long-winded. “I didn’t have to be an obedient follower of Artemis, jumping to serve her every command; I didn’t have to be a hero in the mould of Jason or Heracles or the angry boar-hunters at Calydon. I wasn’t going to try to shape myself to be like one of them, a ruthless, self- serving, glory- seeking man. I was something different to them all.” Terrific twist at the end.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6153765525
“According to Ovid (43 BC–17 AD), the sirens were the companions of young Persephone. Demeter gave them wings to search for Persephone when she was abducted by Hades. However, the Fabulae of Hyginus (64 BC–17 AD) has Demeter cursing the sirens for failing to intervene in the abduction of Persephone.”

Jennifer Saint, Hera Companion in reading Molly Peacock, A Friend Sails in on a Poem: Essays on Friendship, Freedom and Poetic Form. Female friendship, fraught, funny and full of good food for body, heart, mind..

Stella Sands, Wordhunter: a novel
Grammar on the hunt! Great on dialects.

Richard Sanger, Way to go: poems
I hope you are the reader wanting to read Richard Sanger, Steve, on hold. His WAY TO GO is marvellous! 

Zoë Schlanger, The light eaters: how the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on Earth

A book that opens the world of plant life in astonishing details. Theophrastus, heir to Aristotle’s school, said “humans needed metaphors they could connect to. The core of a tree should be called the heartwood”. Not Aristotle’s hierarchy but “an autonomous being with desires and the will to satisfy them.”’ interlegere, means ‘to choose between.’”

A potential hearing organ is the flower itself, cupped like a satellite dish. “Roots, it seems, can be just as acoustically sensitive.”

Goldenrods without much threat “issue chemical alarm calls that are incredibly specific—decipherable only to their close kin.” In more hostile areas, they signal chemicals to all the goldenrod! “intentionality in plant communication: theseare signals meant to be heard.”
“goldenrod can sense the volatile signals of nearby gall-forming flies and jump-start its immune system before the flies…If the goldenrod is exuding volatiles that indicate it has put up anti-fly defences, the female flies that carry the eggs take notice and avoid it.”
“Yellow and purple are diametrically opposed on the color wheel, and produce a reciprocal visual effect: our eyes respond more strongly when yellow and purple are placed together… When Kimmerer tested her hypothesis—that asters and goldenrod must grow together for a bee-related reason—she found that they attracted more pollinators while growing together… the visual display”
birch defend themselves against the weevil better growing new Labrador tea
tomatoes send out messages that get the caterpillars to eat one another!

Phytoacoustics: Sound, to plants, is vibration, and travels very fast “when they sense a vibration that they know is associated with their own harm. Like a caterpillar mouth masticating plant flesh.”
hairlike structures called “trichomes allow plants to sense… and mount defences; trichomes are clearly exquisitely sensitive organs…” like animal inner ears, “specialized hair cells that vibrate in response to sound waves, and convert those vibrations into electrical signals that are sent along nerves to the brain.”

The way we perceive gravity: “in our inner ear, we have canals angled at 90 degrees to each other. The canals are lined with trigger hairs, much like those inside Venus flytraps. The canals are also full of liquid in which crystals are suspended, like glitter in a snow globe. As we bend or turn, those crystals fall down with gravity, settling onto some of the trigger hairs… sending electrical signals to our brain, which tells which direction is down.

“parasitic plants can read this changing light ratio to know who or what is nearby.”  And grow toward

“Immersion is an action of ‘compenetration,’… pervasive, mutual interfusion.”  Everything interconnection Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
From Yeats. “The title story in the volume In Dreams Begin. Responsibilities (1944, 1978). The phrase was used as an epigraph by W. B. Yeats for his book of poems”, Responsibilities. ‘In dreams begins responsibility.’ Old Play”: epigraph. April 22-29 2024 New Yorker: what a fascinating article on Delmore Schwartz in community! I hadn’t realized Bellow had based Humboldt’s Gift on him! And Lou Reed his student! I have Reed’s audio memoir on order from the library.

Bernhard Schlink, The granddaughter: a novel
Very touching portrayal of Germany East/West, then/now.

Francesca Segal, Welcome to glorious Tuga: a novel
Delightful.  So glad a sequel is in order!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6976386484

Danzy Senna, Colored Television 
Married to Percival Everett.  Woman writer, stuck.

Diane Seuss, Modern poetry: poems (Graywolf 2024)
Loved her Keats. “This is the danger of the ecstasy of kissing
the dead or dying poet on the mouth.
The diseas you’ll catch— well,
it changes you.
The tingle in the spine,
the eraotic charge, will be forever married
to poetry’s previous incarnations.”

Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky
 I did love Elif Shafak’s talking fig tree in her The Island of Missing Trees. As snow falls, I am cozy by the fire, reading Elif Shafak’s majestic and riveting There Are Rivers in the Sky. A magisterial tale of water through millennia, from Nineveh to the Thames:

‘We make art to leave a mark for the future, a slight kink in the river of stories, which flows too fast and too wildly for any of us to comprehend.’
At the end: “We weave poems, stories and songs out of every breath.
May you remember us.”
“Now and always, praise be to Nisaba

 Elif Shafak writes; “Nisaba was widely loved, known and respected all across Mesopotamia. She was the goddess of writing.
The deity of storytelling, learning, agriculture and harvest.”

“Water… the strangest chemical, the great mystery.
With two hydrogen atoms at the tips, each bonded to a single oxygen at the center, it is a bent molecule, not linear. If it were linear, there would be no life on earth… no stories to tell.”
“Water… the strangest chemical, the great mystery.
With two hydrogen atoms at the tips, each bonded to a single oxygen at the center, it is a bent molecule, not linear. If it were linear, there would be no life on earth… no stories to tell.”
“Later, when the storm has passed, everyone will talk about the destruction it left behind, though no one, not even the king himself, will remember that it all began with a single raindrop.”
“Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7059880330

“Enheduanna, the high priestess at Ur, a poet who breathes life into words and a devotee of Nisaba” “the goddess of writing” until Hammurabi of Babylon’s codes. Nisaba “is transmuted into ‘the loving wife of Nabu’… his secretary. When Marduk is crowned king of the gods, Nabu carries Nisaba’s sacred lapis lazuli tablet

“deq” patterns drawn on the face in ink  “wedged-shaped vertica marks” water
lamassu, a protective spirit body of bull, wings, human head

“daylighting:0 “returning a lost river to the open air”

Hana Shafi, People you know, places you’ve been: poems and illustrations bring to lift the poems, observing characters around the poet
How well the illustrations fill in the gaps

Sherry Shenoda; foreword by Kwame Dawes, Mummy eaters
A marvellous, harrowing dialogue between a daughter of Akhenaten and her Coptic descendent, the poet. We are transported back to Akhenaten’s time as well as through his daughter’s graphic journey of mummification to the afterlife.
“What becomes of the soul / whose body is unearthed / whose body is eaten?”
“reverence for the human body as sacred matter and a pathway to eternal life is juxtaposed with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European fascination with ingesting Egyptian human remains as medicine and using exhumed Egyptian mummies as paper, paint, and fertilizer. Today Egyptian human remains are displayed in museums.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6384074978
“When someone dies in the Coptic Orthodox tradition we say to their descendants: may you live and remember. It’s a prayer for living forward while holding the memory of their beloved dead.” https://theadroitjournal.org/2023/04/04/a-conversation-with-sherry-shenoda/

Evie Shockly, suddenly we
Brilliant, complex inquiry. To be read along with Harrow, by Cecily Nicholson!
“I cast my dreams
into a future the shape of
          my body”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6190975704

Daniel Silva, An Inside Job: A Novel  
Gabriel Allon, Animus in Action. Oh, and Venice. And art fraud. Yum
Daniel Silva, A Death in Cornwall
Enjoying the art and Cornwall in Daniel Silva’s A Death in Cornwall. 24 in the series, but that’s enough to get the gist, the arc.
Daniel Silva, The Collector
Back to Israel and the Mossad….no more.
Daniel Silva, Portrait of an Unknown Woman 22
Listening: I think the Louvre thieves have been reading Silva:)!Daniel Silva, The Order 21
My fave so far with the new Pope and an apocryphal Gospel with Pontius Pilate’s account of Jesus’s trial. “Silva has a greater purpose: He wants to settle, for the record, the origins in Christian beliefs of anti-Semitism, the root of centuries of pain and persecution of Jews, particularly in Catholic and Christian Europe.”  Co-incidence? At the same time, I’m reading Elaine Pagels. Her marvellous Miracles and wonder the historical mystery of Jesus presents a similar treatment of Pontius Pilate as responsible for crucifying Jesus.

Bren Simmers, The Work
How to carry on through grief. “A pair of goldfinches
flash yellow bling outside and finally
a sweetness to the air. Tiny buds
leaking spring.”
Nimbly inventive and engaging. Beautiful edition from Gaspereau.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead

A celebration of Indigenous values and an expansive, essential diatribe against colonialism. I’m aware of the colonial values I’ve assumed. I was brought up to compete at whatever I attempt rather than collaborate. To be best, or if not best, at least better than. My innate demand for fairness was not equality for all. Rather it demanded that the competition be fair. My parents, raised in the Depression, saved money.  They did not give it away. Like them, I am not generous. Neither can I lightly receive more than what I believe to be my due, without needing to immediately return something of equal value to the giver. My sense of reciprocity is transactional rather than relational.

So how can I change my spots? Through awareness? Through recognizing these shadow qualities as colonial, the imperialist values of presumed superiority. Such introspection is uncomfortable and necessary. I am not humble. I respect my own artistic ideals, for example, more than what I consider the common prioritization of commerce and capitalism. I eschewed materiality at my children’s expense, raising them without the things they wanted.  (Though now, we share those cultural values.)

Change is difficult, especially when the necessity to change is not recognized. So, thank you, Leanne, for your explication.  History informs us that a paradox shift occurs when the older generation dies off, and new ideas are adopted.

Such paradoxes. I believe in community, but as a devoted introvert, prefer to live on my own, with little social interaction. Before buying my mother’s house, I asked my lawyer to research Indigenous land claims. I believe in reparation, but am not willing to give my property. I believe in allowing refugees safe haven in Cananda, but do not invite them to my home. NIMBY? I welcome immigrants, but oppose the new apartment tower to be built nearby. I welcome immigrants, but vehemently object when our precious farmland is paved over for new suburbs. I abhor factory farms, but occasionally indulge in a grocery chain’s roast chicken, despite knowing how it lived and how it was killed.

I attend to the news daily, turning to The Walrus, The Toronto Star, The Guardian, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and Lead Now, with Substacks by Timothy Snyder and Charlie Angus. But my poetry pays little attention to politics. When I write, I’m alone, looking out the window at the seasons’ garden where politics does not enter and so is not top of mind. I write from dreams.

Jaspreet Singh, How to hold a pebble: poems
“a believer
In the task
Of witnessing”
“Whatever you do, defy the sweet rhetoric of empire”
“I am a unit of sound
two charmed particles of light”
CrowSaid, NeWest Press

Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don’t Tell
Private school malaise, middle-aged women.

Robin Sloan, Moonbound
Solar Punk, according to Cory Doctorow. DNF, sadly. So little time.

Ali Smith, Gliff
“Like there was such a thing as a family of words, one that stretched across different lnguages all touching on each other, hitting or striking each other, acting on each other, influencing each other, agreeing with each other or throwing each other out, disturbing each other, doing all of these things at once.”
“Why do you think they call it a net? Why do you think they call it a web?”
“With reference to the tamagotchi phenomenon of the early 1990s-And that’s what people, somewhere in their unconscious, think about their smartphones, she said, that if they don’t keep attending to them and pressing their buttons, always making them light up and answering every little baby chicken automated cheep they make, then there’s sure to be a death, but this time it’ll be you, the owner of the phone, that’ll be a new kind of dead.”
“𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘥 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦, 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘦, 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘤𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦, 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴, 𝘐 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘤𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘰.”

Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful
Poetic vignettes of the aftermath of a marriage breakup by a fine American poet. The freshest phrases come from her children: her son “has a mom who loves him, and a dad who loves him. But he doesn’t have a family.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6572345951

Patricia Smith, Unshuttered: poems
Portraits. “We had grown canny to the chase, the hunt, the metronome
pursuit.”

Zadie Smith, The Trial so many trials, and unheard stories
Longeurs…I wouldn’t believe it possible to tire of the engaging, stalward Mrs. Mrs Eliza Touchet  but you may. William Ainsworth. William Ainsworth and his literary friends, (Dickens, Thackeray, and others), So much more engaging than Zadie Smith’s THE FRAUD, set in the same period and disappointingly flat imho!
Shrewdly observant  fichly voiced by Zadie Smith
Mrs. Touchet: cousin, housekeeper, lover, and cheerleader of William is a keen observer and sardonic protagonist. More than once she brought a smile to my face. I loved her observations, loved the way she developed as she matured. The sensational trial and her relationship with the Bogles brought a new dimension to her personality, an awareness of the social injustices of the day and the unrest of the working class. She was as muti-layered as the novel.

“What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness in otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling.”

“In the misery of aristocrats she found proof of the ancient wisdom regarding camels, rich men and the eyes of needles.”

“She wished life’s pages could be flicked forward as a novel, to see if what followed was worth attending to in the present.”

“The great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls.”

“But nowhere in these mental projections had she imagined being asked to explain herself, no more than she expected the figures in her dreams to stop what they were doing and ask their sleeping author why they flew in a hot air balloon, or visited China, or dined with the Queen.” Through her eyes, we get to see the “Tichborne trial” when Roger Castro, an Australian butcher attempts to prove he is the true Lord Roger Tichborne. Andrew Bogle is a former Jamaican slave who swears that the claimant is truly Lord Tichborne. There’s a

“We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen… Yet even once one had glimpsed behind the veil which separates people, as she had – how hard it proves to keep the lives of others in mind! Everything conspires against it. Life itself.”
“… the great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls. Fact and fiction meld in their minds.”
“There was a bracketed place in her brain where things were both true and not true simultaneously. In this same space one could love two people. Live two lives. Escape and be at home.”
“What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daises, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling.”
“Justice has no time. It is eternal, it is now, it is yesterday, it is tomorrow. Every man branded like cattle feels that pain infinitely: it echoes across all time and all space.”
“As long as we profess to believe that two people may happily – or feasibly – invest all love and interest in this world solely in one another, till death do them part – well, then life, short as it is, will continue to be a human comedy, punctuated by tragedy. So she generally thought. Then there were these moments of grace when she startled herself with the idea that if anybody truly understood what is signified by the word ‘person’, they would consider twelve lifetimes too brief a spell in which to love a single soul.”

Timothy Snyder, ON FREEDOM
Snyder wrote the two books ON FREEDOM and ON TYRANNY that I’d seen reviewed.  And he writes extensively about Ukraine, so I researched him in preparing POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL. Mary Soderstrom, Against the seas: saving civilizations from rising waters
Timothy Snyder, ON TYRANNY

Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain“Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change”
“Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things?” LiPo’s poem about Chuange Tzu
“Getting and spending we lay waste our powers” William Wordsworth
“Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.” Deleuze and Guattari
“Rhizomatic became an important word for nonlinear literary structures”
 “Hope is no casual platitude in this inspiring collection of essays; it’s the realistic mindset with which to approach existential challenges​.”
“two bright threads run through the whole: the importance of hope, and the power of storytelling.
Hope is no casual platitude here. Nor is it merely a more pleasant state of mind than despair. Rather, Solnit sees it as a more accurate mindset, since nobody is an oracle, and history is full of surprises. Uncertainty is the most rational position to embrace, and unlike optimism or pessimism, it does not entrench us in complacency or inaction.” As a Buddhist, I agree. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/22/no-straight-road-takes-you-there-by-rebecca-solnit-review-an-activists-antidote-to-despair haymarketbooks.org

Francis Spufford, Light Perpetual
“Mightn’t there be a line of sight, not ours, from which the seeming cloud of debris of our days, no more in order than (say) the shredded particles riding the wavefront of an explosion, prove to align?” One of my favourite alternative histories, Light Perpetual is a way of confronting grief and mutability by imagining the life not taken. Combine Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and Paul Auster’s 4321 with the last page of Joyce’s “The Dead” for the overall reach of this extraordinary novel, its exquisite architecture. From the minute particular to a grand sweep of five young lives, terribly interrupted and here imagined to their plausible end, “love makes its always temporary claim; from which we constitute a home, we who lift our voices and pass through, pass through.” How can this be her life, how can that be her love, if it rests on such accidents? Surely her real life is still waiting to happen.”
“Nobody chooses who they love. Possessing something, being somebody, loving anyone, it rules the rest out, and so it’s quieter than being young, and looking forward, and expecting it all, that’s all. The world calms down when your choice is made.”
“It’s that she chafes, secretly, like this; that she is finding, just now, when things are hard, how sharply it seems she can still regret the lives not had, the music never recorded, the fame not gained. Old sorrows she thought were long worked through– no, more than that, which she thought were actually abolished by her having had different desires fulfilled– turn out to be still capable, still bitter, able like ghosts to billow up and start talking, if given a drop of blood to feed upon.”
“People say the world gets smaller when you’re dying: but there it still is, as astonishingly much of it as ever. It’s you who shrinks. Or you who can grasp the world less, who can take hold of less and less of it, until you’re only peeping at one burning-bright corner of the whole immense fabric. And then not even that.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6149407173

Clark Strand, Now is the hour of her return: poems in praise of the Divine Mother Kali
Clark Strand to the show to talk about his book, Waking up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse. Waking up to the dark: ancient wisdom for a sleepless age. The same?

Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything: A Novel
Immersed in Strout’s compassionate observations of characters we love. Will there be Amgash, #5? “When Bob thought about the state of the country these days, he sometimes had the image of a huge tractor trailer rumbling down the highway and the wheels, one by one, falling off.” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6751814112

Bren Summers, The Work
How to carry on through grief. “A pair of goldfinches
flash yellow bling outside and finally
a sweetness to the air. Tiny buds
leaking spring.” Beautiful edition from Gaspereau.

Susan Swan, Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir of Taking Up Space, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood
A quick read, self- indulgent but replete with gossip. What neglected daughter would listen to her mother’s self-mythologizing? Not mine! Such an interesting parallel to my own life in the 70’s: her performance art (Mary Canary, Margaret Dragu!) and the literary scene, fiction, though not poetry, and little overlap with the Island/Coach House peeps. And we both had plays produced by Redlight Theatre: Angel Makers for me, 1976. I was in Mexico and BC most of 1975, so missed Susan’s performance.
A good take on American exceptionalism: raised by their self-mythologizing to believe that the individual fails or succeeds by oneself alone, so no universal health care, etc. I think Canada is based more on community: “it takes a village” and we are a series of connected villages, successful or not.
HarperCollins Canada and Beacon Press, 2025

David Szalay, Flesh
Not an interesting protagonist, despite his adventures.

Lynn Tait, You break it you buy it
Guernica. Family trauma, son dead, fentanyl. I’m with her.

Morgan Talty, Fire Exit
“Now I know such a thing could do the world good, not the crying, not simply the body’s and spirit’s self‑recognition of pain, but the publicness of it, the body and spirit’s communicating to another body and spirit in one and only one language – that of deep, deep emotion – between the flesh of two bodies.”

Twan Eng Tan, The house of doors: a novel  
Somerset Maughan and Sun Yat Sen visit Penang, 1921.
“The world is so still, so quiescent, that I wonder if it has stopped turning. But then, high above the land, I see a tremor in the air. A pair of raptors, far from their mountain eyrie. For a minute or two I want to believe they are brahminy kites, but of course they cannot be.
My eyes, follow the two birds as the drift on the span of their outstretched wings, writing circles over circles on the empty page of sky”.
Somerset Maughan and Sun Yat Sen visit Penang, 1921.  I thought of your parents, Daphne. With complex compassion, presents an achingly moving portrayal of grief: the effects of World War One. surreal, Warm Arms

Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces
Women weaving through mythology, fairy tales and folktales: curiouser and curiouser. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7037930785

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
“The sound of the cello in a Schubert trio isn’t entirely in the cello, where the sound begins, or entirely between my listening ears, where the experience of structured sound as music happens, but somewhere between the two, where the creation of meaning takes place. The interspace is the phenomenal field of the arts.”
“The interspace is an arena of shared education as much as solitary epiphany.”
Adam Gopnik, “Unshattered”, The New Yorker, June 2024

Drew Hayden Taylor, Cold
Read this captivating tale during a cold snap in one sitting late at night… as the dread mounted with the dead. A polar vortex with teeth!
A tad disappointed with the pacing of the climax, at once a rush with too much time for unlikely quips. But fascinating overall… and fun, despite the gore.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6263893778

Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records (Granta)
Accidental Pairing read right after Scott Alexander Howard, The Other Valley: A Novel of time travel philosopiclal
“Here in the Sea the written word was considered a kind of amulet, and travellers often hired calligraphers to copy poems, prayers, family genealogies, and sometimes the names of the dead in the book of records.”
torcs (doughnut):
Spinoza “Hours curled around him, as if surrounding him in a parabolic form. What were minutes to him now, but the slow curvature of this circle of glass, the working out of a question of form, which must be a kind of essence.”
Du Fu “contemplating curls of ink.”
Hannah Arendt, as sea and sky merge: “This instant felt like the shell of an infinite memory, of two mirrors facing one another and surprising themselves into an endless labyrinth.” 
Brilliant review of a brilliant novel! https://www.theseaboardreview.ca/p/the-book-of-records-by-madeleine-thien

Colleen Thibaudeau, Lozenges: Poems in the Shapes of Things
Forge(ry) Press. Great name for a press! Concrete ooooo…
Colleen Thibaudeau, A Nau(gh)tical Afternoon
Gorgeous production. Sound poetry in play.

Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“Sound have a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite.”
“Inside the pure tone of C was a latter of rich overtones as well as the echoes of other Cs, like a… grandmother carrying all her memories inside her. Was this what music was, was it time itself containing fractions of seconds, minutes, hours, and all the ages, all the generations?”

Miriam Toews, A truce that is not peace
Miriam Toew’s new book’s central theme is wind of all kinds. How she laughs through tragedy, like the many winds she describes.
Listening, I dream, October 16, 2025: As I continue walking home, the wind before the Richmond Street bridge is so intense that it lifts me up and deposits me some yards onto the bridge. I’m lucky I didn’t land in the tumultuous water of the Thames. Once home, I recount the adventure to my worried parents. The storm is still going strong outside.

Colm Tóibín: Long Island
“They could do everything except say out loud what it was they were thinking”
“The words should have been comforting but they were not. She did not want anyone to presume that they knew what she was going through. It was too easy.”

Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story
Magic Mountain, move over. We begin with elaborate descriptions of boots. And who is this mysterious feminine plural, our narrator? Why, the shape-shifting Empusium.  (I had to look it up too.)

Here we are, slightly changed, but just the same as before, warm but also cold, both seeing and blind. Here we are, here are our hands formed from decaying branches, our bellies, our nipples that are puffballs, our womb that blends into a fox’s den, into the depths of the earth, and is now nursing a fox’s litter. Can you see us at last, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, you brave engineer from the flat woodless steppes?

My fave of the three Tokarczuk novels I’ve read. A feminist fever dream, enhanced by the local (magic?) mushroom liqueur. Horror stirred with humour and the best Acknowledgement page ever. Set in Silesia, 1913, before it all began…
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6798295189

Lola Tostevin, Who Is Kim Ondaatje? The Inventive Life of a Canadian Artist
 “All these matters absorbed his mind, drawing the world inside, into the large, chaotic space that each of us caries within like an invisible piece of lggage that we drag after us all our lives, without knowing why. Our true self.” The subtitle says it all!

Amor Towles, Table for Two Fictions
Sheer delight. Even Paul Auster takes a bow! Though the reader soon realizes whichcharacter will get comeuppance as in “The DiDomenico Fragment”. Such fine writing:
“But the greatest improbability, the near impossibility, was that somewhere in Germany back in the seventeenth something something Bach had taken his deep and personal appreciation of beauty and translated it so effectively into music…
it was the opposite of cascading—a fluid and effortless tumbling upward. An ascension.
Yes, the music was ascending and we were ascending with it. First slowly, almost patiently, but then with greater speed and urgency, imagining now for one instant, and now for another, that we have reached the plateau, only for the music to take us higher still, beyond the realm in which one looks down at the ground, beyond hope and aspiration into the realm of joy where all that is possible lies open before us.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6634321825

Barbara Tran, Precedented parroting
her name meaning stranger.
“In Vietnamese  the self cannot be defined
except through its relationship to others”

“It’s impossible to hear egret
                                               without
                                                    an echo
Regret.     My thoughts
        are scattering
                                    like sandpipes
                                                                I am falling
                                   out of reason”

“A Music numerous as space—
But neighboring as Noon—”
Emily Dickinson, “The Birds begun at Four o’clock—” epigraph
Palimpsest Press.

Y-Dang Troeung, Landbridge
Magnificent and poignant: Cambodian genocide bomb kills Y-Dang Troeung a generation later…

Quincy Troupe, Duende: poems, 1966-now
“now eye hear your foaming sea wave lines flow in here
hissing” “A Poem for Derek Walcott”

“her sentences are blues underlying broken shards”
“Chasing Words in Lines”, for Toni Morrison: 1931-2019
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6431409465

Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, Grappling Hook
Surreal, lapidary poems on grappling with motherhood’s hooks that bind… and other relationships.  A poet’s close listening to the startling things kids say. Gripping, mesmerizing poems from Anstruther Books.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6384220977
Having enjoyed Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang’s marvellously startling Grappling Hook, I thought you might find a kind of parallel in What Matters. Anstruther Books, Palimpsest Press.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something about living
Palestinian. “My poem was in that first revelation,
the text confiding that what endures
of the alluvial plain, the earth of ancestry, is love.”
“Autocorrect”

Anne Tyler, THREE DAYS IN JUNE
Her protagonist clumsily charming, as ever. 

Anne-Marie Turza, Fugue with bedbug: poems
“What is this? The Futureworld?
Same as the afterworld? Adventitious breathing sounds
in both directions. The mind is an interrobang a zip-filed

mark of kick. Or a distant crackle, actually a chip bag. Off-
target, unfurnished with an air bridge. But this isn’t me. I’m not this

venturesome.”
“Through assonance, rhythm, placement of the outbuildings,
and syllables, on can read very clearly the unknowable.”
“Such a map requires the use of ultrasound, also called
sonography. In short, sound and echo form the basis of its imagery. (1)Point
a sound in the direction of the unknown. (2) Listen for the sound’s return. (3)
Not how long this takes. (4) Now we know how distant the unknown is. (5)
The image of the unknown is its distance.”
“From Latin fuga, meaning flight. To chase an original idea.
And that idea is decamping the present participle.”
mirror fugue. Anansi

Chimwemwe Undi, Scientific marvel: poems
“I was literate in air. I was small and extrasensory… slanting through, I’m all spackle, all language, and absent even that, weeping what I cannot say.”

Jane Urquhart, In Winter I Get Up at Night: A Novel 
Highly recommending Jane Urquhart’s new novel. Like many great Canadian novelists, Jane Urquhart began as a poet. She has a mind for winter and for landscape. And that sensibility inhabits her elegant prose in a language of loss and loneliness and light. The story enthralls us in a swirl of synchronicities, characters appearing and reappearing in different guised: the effect of action on other lives. Saints and martyrs mix with modern medicine in a static rural society seemingly impervious to change.

Thus Urquhart can conjure the early and mid-twentieth century as immediately as if it were her own. Yet she has an acutely current awareness of the effects of colonialism, for instance, that settler forbears did not, to my knowledge, have. It’s an interesting perspective that allows for a wide sweep across generational Boredom was a condition of our childhood, not a state to be immediately eliminated by some new distraction, as in the movement from black and white TV to colour in faster and faster progression to Instagram, Tik-Tok and on. We were expected to entertain ourselves and we did.

In Winter I Get Up at Night is an elegant meditation on light and its absence: The stark prairie light “shadows on the snow – are an anomaly. There is brightness everywhere on the prairie in the full winter sun. To be a figure of any kind, in such a landscape, is to be inaugurated into a stare of grace.”… the pure dazzle of it all.” “Because of the snow and the clear blue sky, the room was full of prismatic light, and our sister [Sister Hildegard] looked as if she were surrounded by the kind of delicate burning swords that I had seen on the picture of the Sacred Heart…” “And so, our little lights go out.”…“under such an extremity of light, he was a radiant star, perfectly at home in this mad illumination…”

Yes, on this longest night of Solstice, brilliant.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6743304485

Simon Van Booy, Sipsworth: a novel  
Sweetly surprising. “Her vision sharpens and Helen can feel her mind emerging from the haze of her advanced age, like Excalibur from the lake. Emergency sharpens her wits. “while it’s easy to be strong in the moment, the silence later will pull you apart.” Suddenly feeling age, having hurt a tendon upper thigh, right side… of course, doing too much. Going to Guelph Sat. to celebrate cousin Tim’s 75th birthday! He’s editing the piece I’m writing on Alice Munro’s awful husband… traumatic to work on.

Anuja Varghese, Chrysalis: Stories
House of Anansi. With fierce precision, Varghese inserts her characters into situations where worlds collide. Both visionary and visceral, these exceptional, searing stories present a permeable world where old myth intersects with modern times and nothing is certain.  Mesmerizing. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/662208394

katherena Vermette, real ones
Two Métis sisters confront their pretendian na.

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness
“there’s so much room in a person, there should be more of us in here.” Hai

Martin Walker, To kill a troubadour
The latest in his feast-filled mystery series, with French hunting dogs I didn’t know.
 Martin Walker, Bruno’s challenge: and other stories of the French countryside
More feasts, more history.
Martin Walker, Bruno’s challenge and other stories of the French countryside
O idyllic St. Denis! O the food of Périgord !
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6752589219

Jade Wallace, Anomia
Forgetting names. Marvellous writing. Souwesto Gothic in a trailer park!
Jade Wallace, Love is a place but you cannot live there
Read along with Bren Simmers and Dani Spinosa. How engaging, poems written for poets

Phoebe Wang, Waking occupations: poems
“The silence is a kind of weather.

She woke up with it, dressed in its chill folds.”

“Here on the sprung earth…
What exchange for a story, a rift-making, a disturbance
in depositing my trailing and voracious spirits.”

Beautifully structured in four sections, these poems are a precise cartography of dream and the quotidian, exquisitely expressed through Wang’s particular perceptions.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6893123192

Catriona Ward, Looking Glass Sound
What purports to be a coming-of-age memoir turns into a metafiction of horror. The book in itself is twisty: “‘Writing is power,’ she says. ‘Big magic. It’s a way of keeping someone alive forever.’ ‘Why would someone want to live forever in a book?’ ‘Maybe they don’t. Maybe the writer keeps them prisoner.’”
“The sea whispers, faint. It sounds like pages shuffling. A seal barks. I lick a finger and test the breeze. The wind is in the east. A moment later it comes, mournful and high. The stones are singing and I feel it, at last, that I’m home. I listen for a time, despite my tiredness. I think, if heartbreak had a sound, it would be just like this.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6509537635

Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend
“begin to know the Water. The spirit speaks in riddles because that is how her and her kind see. The universe is no straight line, no narrow road.”
Reflecting Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer.

Alison Wearing, Moments of Glad Grace
A sweet tribute to her father beautifully read by the author, Irish accents et al. Trusting the truth in art… Dimitri Nasrallah, Hotlline
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6508370301

Jennifer Wenn, Emergence
Such breadth and depth!

Calvin Wharton, This here paradise
“Rhythm balances the days
here, tic greets toc,
argument finds comfort
in agreement, so close a word”
“This Here Paradise”
A nice glosa based on Susan McCaslin’s poem, “Immagini di Paradiso”:
“whirligigged into the possible present” Anvil Press
“A glosa typically consists of four ten-line stanzas each with ten syllables per line. The form also contains a borrowed excerpt from another writer.”

Zoe Whittall, No credit river
No credit auto-fiction. Gen x? No trauma vs. all trauma…

Eley Williams, The Liar’s Dictionary
DNF. An alphabet.

Ian Williams, You’ve Changed
Shite, literally described.

Joy Williams, Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azreal
99 illuminations of Azreal, transporter of souls! Such a delight after her harrowing Harrow, and a gorgeous hardcover, its heft and hand feel @TimHouse.
Franciscan John Duns Scotus promoted Haecceity and the Univocity of Being… The Univocity of Being is the argument that we are all one in the oneness of God… and that Being is holy.” Ridiculed into Dunce cap!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6737736827
“You dream a dream according to one order and remember it in another, Azrael said calmly. To make it more comprehensible.” 
“Univocity of being is the idea that words describing the properties of God mean the same thing as when they apply to people or things. It is associated with the doctrines of the Scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus.” Franciscan John Duns Scotus promoted Haecceity and the Univocity of Being… The Univocity of Being is the argument that we are all one in the oneness of God… and that Being is holy.” Ridiculed into Dunce cap!
Univocal means having only one meaning; unambiguous
 Scholastic Scotus believed we can speak “with one voice” (univocity) of the being of waters, plants, animals, humans, angels, and God.

Edward Wilson-Lee, The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language
On Pico della Mirandola’s interest in “enrapturing speech”. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/23/the-grammar-of-angels-by-edward-wilson-lee-review-spellbound
https://www.edwardwilsonlee.com/the-grammar-of-angels

Jacqueline Winspear, The Comfort of Ghosts
Jacqueline Winspear, The White Lady
Fast-paced intrigue, 1942-47. “There was also the ancient nature of a place, how it connected people and events, and how time moved on to heal wounds, for she knew places bore scars as deep as those inflicted upon people who had suffered.”
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6769208063

Christina Wong, Denison Avenue: a novel
Nostalgia for Kensington Market

Jenny Xie, Holding Pattern
Having admired Jenny Xie’s collection of poetry, The Rupture Tense, for its experimentation with form, I expected to love Holding Pattern. I was intrigued by the story of immigration, but except for the notion of ‘professional cuddling’, dismayed by the lack of originality that her poems so elegantly displayed.
“What was it like, I wondered, to be suddenly robbed of language and legibility? It felt too intimate to ask, the answer too hard to bear. Plus, the conversation required better Mandarin from me, which was already a step removed from her native Shanghainese. That been the price of her success: Because she’d worked herself ragged to make me an American, we would never truly know each other.” 
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6153546243

Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Brilliant details.

Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the waves: a memoir
The preface is sensational. The rest? Not for me.
From “Preface: A Return”
“Memory is a living being that moves in many-layered streams. It is not static. It is not a backwards look. It moves forward, sideways, and in a spiral.” Joy Harjo
“we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge.” Joy Harjo

“Touch has a memory” Keats

“Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only to keep the narrative open”
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths” Clarice Lispector, Aqua Viva

“memory is ‘a form of willed creation’” Toni Morrison
“all water has a perfect memory and is forwever trying to get back to where it was” Toni Morrison
“What about the waterworld of our beginnings?”

“I mean to read a few episodes from my life not a facts but as fictions, as stories that lodged in my body. Is there a way to liberate them? To rearrange the elements narratively? Might I create a hermeneutics to my own memories?… our bodies are carriers of experiences.”

“Can being or identity move and change, spiral, like storytelling can?

Memory fragment, a trace or engram “mostly a matter of metaphor” Maggie Nelson
“We carry our memory pieces in our actual bodies.”
“Memories are conjurings” … “open to endless interpretations” “a storytelling field”
“embodied memory” 
“Ancestral stories, generational stories take on lives of their own. Memory inhabits us and we inhabit memory”
“narrative transmography… Narrative is a shapeshifting space [like language itself]. Story space”
“suspended between the fall and the leap”

“ . . . I’ve chosen to spend my life creating literature as resistance. It’s where I want to put my energy, alongside legions of others who have given their lives to storytelling. It’s the ocean I want to swim in. Which means I’m in the waters of grief and imagination, of laughter and rage, of bodies that do whatever they want in the face of all, of not apologizing for writing through it all.”

Elizabeth Zetlin, Prompted by happiness: poems
Love the concept: writing a poem a day “to capture morning mind”, and the execution. These fine poems honour their prompts, the dharma, and JOY. Black Moss Press. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6466107814

C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey
Strange and isolated. Even though it didn’t engage me, the concept is intriguing. Ah, food: what have you come to?
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6508376337

Louise Zukovsky, A test of poetry, Jargon 1964.
“As poetry, only objectified emotion endures… objectified emotional intensity”
“Poetry convinces not by argument but by the form it creates to carry its content.”

I wish I’d read these comparative studies of poems in 1964 when I was in 3^rd year, Honour English.  My path to poetry might have been clearer.

Connie Zweig, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul
Just what the Hindus do in the last stage of life. I love it! Gavin was consciously doing this.  I sure am now!

ANTHOLOGY

Editors, Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston. Fourteen days: a literary project of the Authors Guild of America Editors,
“Listening to all of you up here, hiding from the plague, telling stories,” declares the Poet, a struggling Black writer and academic. “How could this whole thing not remind us of the Decameron?” Margaret Atwood

Editors Conyer Clayton & Hannah Green, CV2: Versus Narrative: The Addiction Issue. What a searing issue, responding to a bold spectrum of vivid poems and interviews. They help avert the stigma of addiction through the agency such writing offers.

Editor, Andreas Gripp. Speculum: A POETRY ANTHOLOGY. https://blackmallardpoetry.wixsite.com/home, 2025

Editor, Andreas Gripp. Synaeresis 23, Beliveau Books
“A form of contraction or elision in which two adjacent vowel sounds are run together into a single diphthong or vowel: thus ‘the effect’ becomes th’effect, and ‘seëst’ becomes seest. The device is used in poetry for the sake of conformity to the metre, especially in syllabic and accentual‐syllabic verse.”

Editor, Andreas Gripp. Synaeresis 24, Beliveau Books

Editor, Andreas Gripp: Stones beneath the surface: a poetry anthology
A strong anthology from Black Mallard Poetry, celebrating Ontario poets. Friends, congratulations! Since I know many of the contributors, I’ll highlight a poet new to me: Pujita Verma, for her lovely sense of form. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6231338528

Editor, Joyce Carol Oates. A darker shade of noir: new stories of body horror by women writers
Margaret Atwood’s fable “Metempsychosis” features.

Maria Popova, The universe in verse: 15 portals to wonder through science & poetryApril 9, 2025:  While Paul and I listen attentively in their kitchen, Anne is reading poem after poem, with commentary. Her stamina is astounding!
As I sleep, Maria Popova’s The universe in verse: 15 portals to wonder through science & poetry is playing, the poems read aloud.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
Poet Firdawsi (d. 1020), the Shahnama, pre-Islamic epic, Zoroaster
Sufi Suhrawardi (d. 1191) “saw himself as the heir of a wisdom tradition originating with the antediluvian Egyptian prophet-king Hermes Trismegistus… pre-Socratics and Platonists were its custodians and to Persia… Suhrawardi’s unification of Neoplatonism and Mazdaism finds expression in the conception of an animate universe teeming with angelic lights. All that exists is of light”
“Suhrawardi’s angelic hierarchy consists of three orders, named respectively the ‘Mothers,’ the ‘Lords of the Species,’ and the ‘Regent Lights.’ The Mothers are a vertical order descending in procession one after another, bu the principle of emanation. The first of this line is Bahman, the Avestan Immortal Vohu Mana. There follows a long, though not infinite, series of Intellects, each receiving light from the Light of Lights… By this causal chain the stary sky is lit up.
The Lords of the Species are a horizontal order brought into being by the Mothers. Here are found the archetypes of the kingdoms of creation that compose the natural world…five immortals of Mazdaism… epitomize fire, metals, the Earth, water, and plants. The angelic archetype of the human race is Gabriel.” in this great chain of being https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6508391933
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6508399413

Editors, Karen A. Waldron, Janice H. Brazil, Laura M Labatt. risk, courage, and women: contemporary voices in prose and poetry

DVD

Qi Gong five elements energy balance

Qi Gong for high blood pressure Dark winds. Season 2

You hurt my feelings

His Dark Materials, Season 3

Elvis

The Quiet Girl

Asteroid City

Corsage

Magpie murders. [Season 1]

A haunting in Venice

Empire of light

Sandman

Nona and her daughters

The White Lotus Season 2

Pain and glory Dolor y gloria

Love lies bleeding

Detectorists season 1

Dune. Part two

Journey of the universe: [an epic story of cosmic, Earth, and human transformation]
Brian Swimme.

Inside the yellow cocoon shell
Vietnam. Faith. Catholic.

Anatomy of a fall
Did she? Will she write about it?

The taste of things
 Hi Bryan, thinking of you as I enjoy The Taste of Things (French: La Passion de Dodin Bouffant), all except for the ortolans scene…

Perfect Days
Perfect by Wim Wenders

Sense and Sensibility
Ang li, yes.

UNLESS
Almost unbearable, but for Carol Shields and her oak leaf metaphor, delivered by Martha Henry: whether to hang on or drop with the others….

Bones of Crows
Bones of Crows is too raw for your class imo but the education component is good: https://bonesofcrows.com/education

Origin
Origin stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ava DuVernay’s Origin is based on Isobel Wllkerson’s influential Caste.  Her thesis is that not race but caste is the hierarchy set so that Blacks, Jews and Dalits are by law “inferior” races.

A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles

Vera
9.10, 11, 12

Mae West: Dirty Blonde

Dante: inferno to paradise
Finally in tune with Paradiso, which bored me at 18!

Cider with Rosie
Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie: 1971: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60VzhmKpYWg

Triangle of sadness
dir. Ruben Östlund

Interview with the vampire. Season 1

Nomadland
Marvellous but I waited too long for it.

Dark Shadows
On Tubi: an American gothic soap opera that aired weekdays June 27, 1966, to April 2, 1971. I LOVED the soap, Dark Shadows. Wd run home to watch it with my father:)! Oh I’ll look, merci, ma chere! Sweet memories… Glad it stands up!
Dark Shadows
Tim Burton Movie 2012.

Living
With Bill Nighy. After Kurosawa’s Ikiru, or To Live. Script by Kazio Ishiguro.

After life
In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film, the newly dead find themselves in a way station.

The Crown: final season

Moonflower Murders
The second novel in Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland series. Lesley Manville!
March 24, 2025: Here I am in BC with Gavin, ill with a chest cold so I can’t talk. Won’t contact Daphne nor Che. And where have I left my phone? I don’t even know when I’m to fly back, tomorrow or the next day? I do know where it must be.
As Lesley Manville forgets her phone in Moonflower Murders.
Manville asked Horowitz to write a third novel, now being filmed. It’s the best: Marble Hall Murders: A Novel

HERETIC
Saw the silly HERETIC, Hugh Grant pontificating on control.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
directed by Tim Burton

Wednesday. Season 1Addams at school

We live in time
Florence Pugh sure was in labour!

Wildcat
Maya Hawke as the author Flannery O’Connor in 2023 biopic Wildcat. on Hoopla.

Conclave
SO a propos! Divine timing.

Afire
Christian Petzold

Interview with the vampire. Season 2

Vienna Blood 
Season 1 in Freud’s Vienna

My House in Umbria
When thunderstorms threaten, I bustle around cleaning and clearing, making ready, and quoting that line from my poem: “all day I make ready”. It’s as I’m nine months pregnant and nesting, anxious to prepare. Then I burrow into bed and watch DVDs for comfort. In My House in Umbria, Maggie Smith is an eccentric Romance writer who dreams the truth. While the American professor scoffs, the Italian detective listens. Precognitive. On to Maggie Smith in My Old Lady!

My Old Lady
Maggie Smith in Italian villa…

Saint Omer by Alice Diop
I’d been dreading watching Saint Omer but it turned out to be cathartic, haunting… and painterly. Astonishing conversation between Alice Diop and French author Hélène Frappat on white privilege: who can talk about Marguerite Duras? Or Wittgenstein? Or sorcery? The defence attorney’s last oration is mesmerizing, depending on the image of the chimera: mother as monster but human.
“Chimeric cells in a mother refer to the presence of cells from her child (fetus) in her own body, a phenomenon known as fetal microchimerism or fetomaternal microchimerism. These cells can cross the placenta during pregnancy and persist in the mother’s tissues for decades. This exchange of cells is not limited to pregnancy; it also occurs during breastfeeding. The presence of these fetal cells in the mother’s body can have both potential benefits and risks, influencing her immune system and potentially impacting her health later in life.” https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-01-12/saint-omer-alice-diop-guslangie-malanda-true-story 

The Worst Person in the World
Director Joachim Trier

What We Did on Our Holiday
David Tennant on family holiday to Scotland: a Viking funeral!

Mad about the boy: the Noel Coward story
How often we played his record, Noel Coward Las Vegas. Full speed patter nostalgia!

To the Ends of the Earth
Benjamin Cumberbatch en route to Australia

Dalgliesh. Series 3
Adam Dalgliesh, no poet here. Bertie Carvel.

Severance
No need to see season 2

Northanger Abbey (2007)The Gothic novel live!

Miss Austen
0 Cassandra, bound by duty

Inherent Vice
Inherent noir, viewed because I didn’t want to read Pynchon’s novel

Final Portrait
Giacometti by Stanley Tucci.!

Wolf Hall The mirror and the light
As glorious and heart-rending, head-rending as the book.

Anora
They call it dancing…

Bridget Jones:Mad About the Boy
Soppy but necessary after Anora😊

The Marlow Murder Club 1
The Marlow Murder Club 2
Fun cozies for when you’re too sick to work.

Babygirl
No, thanks, Nicole. Not my role model.

Love the Coopers
Sweet and sentimental Xmas, Diane Keaton

The reluctant fundamentalist

Love & mercy
The Beach Boys

CD

Jeremy Dutcher, Motewolonuwok

[in]verse: fall for dance north: curated by Arlen Hlusko
The strangest compilation! 

From Dream Sequins, Lyrical Myrical. Art by Steven McCabe with my poetry.