Spending the year with new(ish) books by friends, locals, and other Canadian poets old and new. Follow along daily on BlueSky and Instagram.

This micro-review is going to start with a detail that, though completely meaningless with no impact whatsoever on the book or how it is read, reviewed or received, has nonetheless been bugging me all week. As you can see from the cover image, “Empty Spaces” appeared on the short list for Amazon’s First Novel award and it won the 2024 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. This book deserved both honours. It is an absolutely fantastic book…of POETRY.

That’s right, you heard me. I think I know better than everyone else in the literary world – from the CBC to the Los Angeles Review of Books. They all call it a novel. It is so much more than a novel. It is anaphora piled up and up and up like an apocalyptic tower of song. It is borrowed image, stolen image, image graven in stone and concrete and glass and air and blood. It is a whirling dervish. It is just noise. It is so much silence. It is sticky with blood. It is whirling there, some hundred feet in the air. The taste of copper and the wet, black branches.

This is my review for the week. You must read this book. Slowly and out loud. You will be changed by this book. This is what has been driving my creativity: I became, among other things, no light other than this light: