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

This week’s micro-review is of yet another book I waited far too long to read. ryan was in Edmonton as the University of Alberta’s Writer in Residence in 2024/25 where he both read from this book in progress and finished “No Depression In Heaven” which was published by Talonbooks in the Spring of 2025.

Rather than get into the micro-review right off, I am going to start with the call to action. When you do go out and buy this book and then sit down to read it, give serious consideration treating this like and album and read the Liner Notes before, or as, you read the tracks. Doing so will not only get you in the proper mindset of treating this book like and album, but it will tip you off to how the poems were constructed, give you a leg up, a way in, to better, more fully connecting with the text. Just like reading the liner notes in a new album.

Which is one of the things I love the most about this book. I came of age in the middle of the golden age of physical media. Music came on tape and on record, and soon on CD. Cassette sleeves folded open and open and open again covered in 6 pt lyrics, credits, and random notes. Each album had a story to read along as you listened. This is why Gen Xers remember all the words to Duran Duran’s “Seven and the Ragged Tiger” and every other tape we wore out in our yellow walkmans (walkmen?)

This combination of the aural and the visual is why I believe physical media will never go away, why it is making a resurgence as some say. This two channel consumption of art is why we designed the Olive Reading series to include a chapbook to be given away at each reading.

ryan has included in the liner notes of “No Depression In Heaven” a track list of further listening that forms a kind of aesthetic sound track to the book. Put one of the albums he recommends on as you start to dig into the poems. I ended up listening to a lot of the “Sons of the Pioneers” who I knew were my fathers favourite by the fact that he had not one but three of their albums on 8 track. This is such a great idea and adds a wonderful, and vital, extra dimension to the experience. Why aren’t we all doing this?

TLDR micro review: doesn’t matter if you like country music or not, if you grew up in North America, this stuff is already in your blood. Read along and aloud and follow these poems as they push country music tropes past their breaking points to expose their underlying dried mud riverbeds, dead-end gulches and dive bars smelling of stale cigarette smoke, staler beer and broken dreams.

So, in addition to the poems I’ve highlighted this past week (and below,) these lines from the track ‘Empty Craft’ are what have been driving my creativity:

as you face
the daybreak’s
set menu, alarm
cottons my softly
class-bent luck