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Abby Paige

BOOKS

Under P for People

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A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People, by Gabe Foreman, Coach House Books

by Abby Paige
20.06.2011

There is a subtle pleasure in pigeon-holing people. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t do it with such gusto. It appeals to our sense of order and perhaps even justice to believe that humanity could be classified by vocation, proclivity, or coolness.

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BOOKS

Getting the Axe

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Methodist Hatchet, Ken Babstock, House of Anansi

by Abby Paige
15.05.2011

According to the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, a bad dancer is said to have “Methodist feet” and a “two-edged (two-faced) axe” is called a Methodist hatchet. Apparently Methodists aren’t altogether popular on The Rock.

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BOOKS

Supersize Me

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All This Could Be Yours, by Joshua Trotter, Biblioasis

by Abby Paige
03.04.2011

But don’t let the dining room staff deter you. It’s what’s going on in the kitchen that will impress.

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BOOKS

Ode on a Dead Thing

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Song of the Taxidermist, by Aurian Haller, Goose Lane Editions

by Abby Paige
06.03.2011

Who is more attuned to the details of his art than the taxidermist? Life is not in the body’s overall fact but its odd postures and subtleties of expression, the animating powers of its inhabitant. Despite its Victorian creepiness, there is something naïve and optimistic about taxidermy: its sincere wish to interrupt inevitable decay, to [...]

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BOOKS

A Splintered Chorus of Truths

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The Obituary, by Gail Scott, Coach House Books

by Abby Paige
10.01.2011

If you have ever attempted to trace your own genealogy, you know it is not a simple matter of careful, cosy research. It is an active struggle against the forgettings, omissions, and concealments of previous generations. No matter how pristine the pedigree, every family has a few skeletons, packed away in cottony half-truths that over [...]

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BOOKS

Intimate Commerce

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The Stream Exposed with All its Stones: Collected Poems, by D.G. Jones, Signal Editions

by Abby Paige
07.11.2010

“What shall we make of Leviathan?” asked D.G. Jones in Butterfly on Rock, his 1970 volume of critical essays. In the book, Jones argued against a “garrisoned,” colonial impulse he saw at the centre of Canadian literature, which favoured the masculine over the feminine, the rational over the natural, the intellect over the body. “The [...]

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BOOKS

Isn’t It Bromantic

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Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words, by Howard Richler, Ronsdale Press

by Abby Paige
12.09.2010

The Oxford English Dictionary recently revealed the latest list of words newly granted access to its pages, including vuvuzela, staycation, and yes, bromance. It will be a while before your spellchecker recognizes these additions, but the OED’s editors’ periodic recognition of the vernacular, pinched from sources as different as climate science and Jersey Shore, is [...]

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BOOKS

Teaching Old Words New Tricks

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(made), by Cara Benson, BookThug

by Abby Paige
01.08.2010

While distinctly innovative and post-modern in its approach, Cara Benson’s first full-length collection of poems, (made), harkens back to an artistic impulse a century old. In 1915, Marcel Duchamp painted his name and the title “En prévision du bras cassé” on an ordinary snow shovel, giving birth to the ready-made. In the years that followed, [...]

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BOOKS

The Sweet Taste of Venom

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Sharon McCartney, For and Against, Goose Lane Editions

by Abby Paige
27.06.2010

These days, a little cleansing rage seems not only justified, but downright de rigueur. Between dead soldiers, greased pelicans, and one’s own everyday grievances, who doesn’t have a few choice words for the powers that be — be they oil barons, politicians, landlords, or ex-lovers? Yet outrage seems strangely rare in most contemporary poetry, perhaps [...]

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BOOKS

They in Their Cruel Traps, and We in Ours

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Penned: Zoo Poems, Stephanie Bolster, Katia Grubisic, and Simon Reader, Eds., Signal Editions

by Abby Paige
23.05.2010

Ever since we were kicked out of Eden, we’ve been trying to get back in, and sometimes the zoo seems like the next best thing. There, we can wander amid the animal kingdom from which we’ve been exiled, looking at animals and being looked at by them, seeing between cage bars the frighteningly familiar and [...]

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BOOKS

Reading Between the Lines

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R’s Boat, by Lisa Robertson, University of California Press

by Abby Paige
03.05.2010

Lisa Robertson’s latest collection, R’s Boat, may be read as a formal experiment, an autobiographical game, an argument about language and gender, or an attempt to put the unsayable on the page — but not, if you please, as a poem. Its author has described the work as neither a book of poems nor a [...]

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BOOKS

Speaking in Tongues

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O Resplandor, Erín Moure, House of Anansi Press

by Abby Paige
29.03.2010

Multilingualism begets a mental dexterity and a comfort with ambiguity that is difficult to acquire through other means. In learning a new language, we discover how words shape our thoughts and how flexible our conception of the world can be when transferred to a new grammar.

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BOOKS

This Is Your Brain on Descartes

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The Certainty Dream, Kate Hall, Coach House Books

by Abby Paige
07.02.2010

In a writing workshop, the American poet Ed Ochester once bellowed over one of my poems, “There is no philosophy in poetry.” Generally, I find such grand pronouncements about poetry perplexing and not very helpful, but I made a note of this one. Then I mostly forgot about it until, reading Kate Hall’s debut collection, [...]

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BOOKS

A Spoonful of Sugar

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Joy Is So Exhausting, Susan Holbrook, Coach House Books

by Abby Paige
14.12.2009

Susan Holbrook is funny, sometimes enough to make one laugh out loud. In Joy Is So Exhausting, her second collection, she employs a variety of poetic constraints to create poems that surprise and delight without being too cute or comfortable. Constraint-based poems often read as though they must have been much more fun for the [...]

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