Hey, it's Jay.
I'm a Canadian tech writer and book reviewer, and this is my book blog. ¶
Saeed Teebi, Her First Palestinian
It is not surprising to me that Saeed Teebi was able to come out absolutely swinging with this first collection of his, pulling no punches.
MLA Chernoff, Estro Flunky
It’s sonorant, evocative, unrecalcitrant, and pulls no punches with readers familiar with the joys of punctuation, formatting, and the eschewance of orthographic convention.
Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah
Comedy and tragedy are two sides of the coin flip of every paragraph in Mourid Barghouti.
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
As a Canadian, I don’t want to lib out anymore.
Jerome Ramcharitar, The Riddle of Three Crimson Doors
Jerome Ramcharitar’s first full-length collection touches on a familiar nerve with static electrically charged bliss.
Corrections, April 2025
Any mistakes I missed are entirely unintentional, as were the ones I noticed or was apprised of.
Patrick Grace, a blurred wind swirls back for you
Patrick Grace caresses the line between romance and desire with long, knowing strokes.
Karen Schindler, The Sad Truth
Few poets in Canada glimpse half the eyeful of beauty Schindler evidently beholds.
Lance La Rocque, Glitch
Lance La Rocque, I believe, contains such perspicaciousness and self-awareness. I trust his poetry.
Eileen Myles, Teenage Whales
Eileen Myles is not one to pass up a double entendre as a segue.
Rose Maloukis, Cloud Game with Plums
Rose Maloukis is indecipherable, but has rhythm—her poetry must be crackable.
Vivian Lewin, Colville Suite for Mixed Voices
Lewin is deft in not only her curation of Colville’s artworks, but in responding to them in verse that is as observational and deliberately meek as the paintings themselves.
Dale Tracy, The Mystery of Ornament
Dale Tracy is a mastermind of storytelling, daring, and it’s honestly just a really fun, brief read.
Eric Nicol & Peter Whalley, Canada Cancelled Because of Lack of Interest
These dudes were born over a century ago and even they know it’s all bull hockey.
Stephanie Bolster, Ghosts
Bolster very much shows her prowess in long stretches of stories in verse.
Cary Fagan, then / here / now / there
He makes it look effortless, but these poems are elastic balls of references, stories and allusions begging to be unraveled.
Misha Solomon, Full Sentences
A fluid interplay of satire, literary devices, facetiousness, darkness, memory, imagination, and implication.
Monty Reid, Vertebrata
He’s almost athletic in his prowess to extend verse to a whole host of subjects within a narrow scope to achieve his ultimate effect: omniscience through poiesis.
Rob Taylor, Weather
But I’ll say this much: I wouldn’t put so much of myself into my reviews if it weren’t for Rob Taylor putting himself into his verse.
The Baggage Handlers, The Suitcase Poem
This is something only Canadian small press poetry could produce. The baggage handlers.
Dominique Fortier, Les villes de papier
Fortier’s Les villes de papier is expertly crafted, the vignettes enthrallingly curated, and the impact of the story comprehensively calculated for maximum effect.
Ilona Martonfi, Wilde Rozen
I am left with only one impression from my first impression: it is time to read more Ilona Martonfi.
Sheryl Halpern, An Argument Against Jumping Off a Balcony
Halpern's poetry is addicting to read, evocatively sincere, knowing and novel.
Lillian Nećakov, 3¢ Pulp
For a book so brief and light to the touch, it nearly brings a tear to my eye just to hold it and read quietly in my apartment’s warm and cozy solitude of afternoon weekend silence.
Jessi MacEachern, Television Poems
The thing MacEachern gets about ekphrasis and TV is that these poems work like easter eggs: if you’ve seen it, know it, and then read the corresponding poem, it can be a portal of discovery.
Alice Burdick, I Am So Calm
Alice Burdick is simply masterful.
Claire Sherwood, Eat Your Words
It’s a cure-all, it’s a catch-all, it’s an everything bagel, but the everything is kitchen lore, and the bagel is Montreal-style.
Simon Peter Eggertsen, Hawking Comes Close to Finding God
It’s rare to witness the emergence of a writer such as Eggertsen in any time period, in any country, in any lifetime.
Gary Barwin, Seedpod Microfiche
What is the algebra that reverse engineers Barwin’s paperweight enigmas?
Mayan Godmaire, Yesterday’s Tigers
We’re not in media res; we are part of the ritual that is audience-performance.
Ken Norris, Moon Over Thailand
Wistful and world-weary and world-travelled, Norris’s voice echoes the spry blank verse of Irving Layton or R. G. Everson.
Derek Webster, The Thinker
It is a parade of those things that make life worth living to the post-Enlightenment humanist poet, dalliances and assurances that feel increasingly seldom in the world we live in today at that.
Sarah Burgoyne, The Tentaculum Sonnets
Sarah Burgoyne has a propensity to show off like this in every stanza of every page she works on, and it’s scary, talented and exhilarating to read.
Moez Surani, The Death of Volodya Putin
Every line enumerated with a note, a reference, seems to be as confident, if not more so, than the last. But it is a purloined confidence, from the headline writers and lede buriers, a farce ad nauseum.
Hugh Thomas, Jangle Straw
This brief collection of mistranslations could only happen in Montreal. It has something of the city in it, I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Pearl Pirie, A Couple Sumerians
These poems are domestic, full of love, adoration, and humanity, yet brief, soft, and lightning-sharp, with a recurring motif of eye contact. Intimate.
John Metcalf, What Is A Canadian Literature?
What Is A Canadian Literature? is a thought-provoking work bearing a perspicacity utterly alien to the nimbyist pricks lording over CanLit.
Sarah Moses, Strange Water
If you’re a reader that delights in texts that surprise, then Moses’s Strange Water is a book you’ll want to read.
Manahil Bandukwala, Heliotropia
I am confident when I say it is genuinely so exciting to read and listen to everything Manahil Bandukwala creates.
Brian Dedora, The Apple in The Orchard
Brave, astonishing and unique: now that is exactly how I would describe Brian Dedora’s work.
Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee at the International Marquee
Originally published Oct 1, 2011 on Literatured.com. The Samuel Beckett student and the screenplay writer are come a long way. Sitting in the balcony, I am in line with J. M. Coetzee, reading from the correspondence he’s had with Paul Auster, stage left. Two great novelists whose letters
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