95 Books for 2014, List 4

It’s like this. I was thinking little photo shoots with clusters of books and stuffed animals. (And making it more complicated than necessary. What fun complications can be.) I was keeping all the read books in a read-it stack. As weeks passed, the stack got buried, toppled, raided, mixed up with new or partly read things. Now I’m not sure what I mentioned.
After 6 weeks of that all bets are off of reconstructing the reading order or making sure I got them all. But que sera.
Here are some and something about some of them:

31. Uncertainty Principle by rob mclennan (Chaudiere, 2014)
    My favourite of any of rob’s books to date. Little flash fictions, some quirky, some funny, some touching. A fun read. Some stories are expanded and deepened since I last heard them in an open mic. One I was there when it happened, in the sense of being on the same bus to St. Catherines and hearing a first draft.
    Hubby & I read the whole book aloud to one another over an evening. Cute size, lovely design.

    @robmclennanblog very good. we're enjoying. pic.twitter.com/d70waDD2Kp

    — Pearl Pirie (@pesbo) April 14, 2014

32. Fidelity by Grace Paley
    We’d seen her at Dodge Poetry Fest several years ago. She looked what some might call sprightly then but that’s a target that drifts outwards away from my age. I hadn’t realized she’d be in her 90s now.
    
    Many of the poems in it are untitled. One such starts

    I had thought the tumours
    on my spine would kill me but
    the tumours on my head seem to be
    extraordinarily competitive this week.

    Her light touch is towards verse when the subjects aren’t heavy. When the subject is heavy as cancer, the leavening is towards strength and resilience rather than facile.
    
    I can relate quite strongly to the infinitely far distance, the Zeno’s Paradox of arthritis or exhaustion. Yet somehow in her hands it is tender and comic, accepting rather than melancholic, just exaggerated as it really is.
    
    Let the day go is lovely sort of prayer to the day.

33. radish ~ a singulaity by Czandra (obvious epiphanies, 2014)
    
    radish ~ a singularity by Czandra (obvious epiphanies press, 2014)
    Meditations around pronouns and how we define ourselves and other things as it. It seems a more visibly eco-poetics than most things billed as such. It roves around the themes of human role in the world, how we came to make or be made to co-evolve with 130 plant and 8 animal species as our primary foods.
    Here’s a sample: