Tightrope Books has made a Best Canadian Essays 2009. They keep making interesting choices those folks. I’ll have to get my hands on that sometime for at least a flip thru.
I did find Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion. Now that looks interesting. I don’t know what kind of funding allows over 300 pages to be produced for $13 of heavy stock and colored plates in it. It’s cooperation of a lot of people.
Varied styles of poetry. Book reviews are at the front instead of the back like teeny-fonted film credits. There’s plain English not attempting to sound more impressive than thou. An article on “divine flakiness” quoting Kurt Schwitters and Lisa Robertson and by neither “seriousness is the enemy. it creates enemies”. There’s an article on Chinese film, one by CD Wright, and 5 new poems by Rae Armantrout, from p 244
We think the gesture
must come first,
the body follows
by remaining
Rather a nice interview on rob mclennan’s novel Missing Persons. A good read. It is both sketch-like and highly detailed at the same time about the first couple years in a family after the dad dies leaving two kids to sort their way thru adolescence and the mom to figure out how to navigate their teenage years and relationships both.
Some further thoughts from Gary Barwin on the Caged Match.