In Robert Anderson’s debut chapbook The Hospital Poems, the ward becomes the world, becomes the word, becomes the war. Drawing the reader into the strained intimacies of hospital halls and personal and social breakdown, Anderson’s fragmented, fragmenting poems are “spills/spells of narrative” that brilliantly sabotage the institutional from the inside. Selected for BookThug’s Summer Chapbook […]
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This month BookThug is launching two chapbooks by poet Helen Guri. Of her poetry chapbook Here Come the Waterworks, Helen writes, “Here come the waterworks” is in most contexts an accusation that someone is about to cry profusely in order to manipulate people. But since anyone who is paying attention ought to be crying profusely […]
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Lesley Battler‘s debut collection Endangered Hydrocarbons channels the poet’s personal experience as an employee of Shell Oil into an ingenious suite of poems confronting the extent and the implications of oil production in Canada. As a veteran of Big Oil, Battler is able to write from the unique perspective of the poet-insider. Appropriating the corporate and scientific language of oil extraction […]
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Mike Steeves’ new novel Giving Up is an uproarious, unrelenting look inside a contemporary middle-class relationship. Taking place over the course of two or three hours on a deceptively inauspicious evening in a non-descript, unnamed city, the novel, Steeves’ first, has the rare immediacy of a play—only turned inside out. Much of the action here is internal, […]
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The lyrics populating Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie‘s new collection, the pet radish, shrunken, buzz with oblique wisdom and surgically sharp wit. Cicadas chirp from beneath the troposphere; secret agent squirrels conspire among the peonies at sunset; revelatory reversals and unfamiliar aphorisms grow like wild flowers. Playing on themes of love and relationships, future-politics of the English language and the current […]
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Carellin Brooks’s acclaimed new novel One Hundred Days of Rain chronicles an unnamed narrator’s struggle to rebuild her life in the aftermath of a violent breakup. Set in the profoundly rainy city of Vancouver, each short, elegant chapter (99 in total) is a rainy day, or a rainy moment of a day in the life of the unnamed […]
Continue readingOn March 18, 2008, at the height of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama delivered his famous “A More Perfect Union” speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was an iconic moment in an already memorable campaign that had seen the meteoric rise of then-candidate Obama from bright […]
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