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

This week’s books is a challenging one. Structured as an abcedarium, this second book by Erina Harris is a complex exploration of gender, queerness, and misogyny, both in art and in history. She explores these themes and how change can be created through art, both visual and dramatic. And there is humour here, puns and rhythm games and intertextuality. There are some very well-written poetry and lyric essays in this book but what impacted me the most were the sections of dramatic dialogue. The poetic possibilities of listing a “Dramatis Personae” before a sequence of poems called “Xenos, Excerpts from ‘The Handbook: How to Play with Children from Another Species’” are stunning.

Another standout section starts with the letter D and is returned to throughout the book. There are several poems called ‘Les Demimondanes’ through the entire alphabet. There is also a long section in the middle of the book exploring the social and cultural impacts of dolls in general and Dolly Varden specifically.

There is a lot going on here. More than I have time to explore or explain in this short review. This book is not a summer beach read. But then, we’re not having a summer beach read kind of summer, are we? What this books does do though is reward the careful reader. It is a long, slow contemplation while the sky remains stubbornly grey and waterlogged and the flood waters continue to rise.

This is what has been driving my creativity this week: