The new year has spawned a brighter, more productive Agora. There are two new goodies for ya'll: a review of Jesse Ferguson's Harmonics as well as an interview between Nathaniel G. Moore and Kate Eichhorn about a very important anthology she co-edited called Prismatic Publics which you can read here. More to come soon!

There are two new reviews to kick off the New Year: a peek at Catherine Wagner's My New Job (reviewed by rob mclennan) and Zizek's Violence (reviewed by Melissa Marie Silva).

There are a number of pieces in the works so please keep checking back. It promises to be a busier new decade at the agora.

An update! Check out the psuedo-festive review of Meniscus by Shane Neilson (written by Marcus McCann). An excerpt:

The lines are near iambic, but sway and charge like a drunk, dropping a syllable here, picking up a syllable there. But the most vivid syncopation comes from the repetition of hard consonants. In the first two lines, you get veritable machine gun fire — k-k-g-k-d/k-p-d-t — which all but disappears in the third line (no hard Ks, no Gs or Ps) only to rumble back with “crevasse you crept into.”

Many younger poets use this kind of verbal play to avoid grandiose statements or, sometimes, to avoid making any kind of heartfelt statement at all. Neilson doesn't shy away from big topics, naming abstract concepts like love and hate, life and longing in poem after poem (a confidence he may have picked up from AF Moritz, whom he thanks in the acknowledgments). This results in the odd hiccup, when a Really Big Idea (word caps) crowds out the music and imagery of the poem.

Have a happy and safe holiday everyone!

Between students and break-ins/theft, there's been too-long pauses here at the agora. That is over! rob mclennan has a review of on bondage. An excerpt:

This beautifully produced chapbook is composed of twenty-two lines, each including footnote (and parenthesis), and a brief interruption in the middle, written out as a collection of direct statements. As the website press release reads, “on bondage is an experimental collaboration incorporating a romance of alter egos against the backdrop of the Great London Exhibition of 1851, the unbound aphorism, and disrupted ideas of gender.” But is the unbinding in the aphorism or the tension between the period, being bound, and the contemporary?

Check it out!.

There are two new pieces posted just in time for Turkey Day. There's an interview with David Fiore about his new book Chimera Lucida as well as a review of Marcus McCann's Soft Where.

Also worth checking out: the Coach House launches their new books this Thursday (Oct. 15th) including this month's Agora Recommends title Joy is So Exhausting by Susan Holbrook. The following Thursday (Oct. 22) Bookthug launches their fall collection including books by Erin Moure, Oana Avasilichioaei, Jay MillAr, Kemeny Babineau and Angela Carr. See the attached poster for more details.

I wanted to begin by putting out a call for anyone interested in taking the Influency Salon this semester. The class is dangerously close to being canceled due to under-enrollment and needs students. There is a great line-up of poets including Ronna Bloom, Stephen Cain, Christopher Doda, Kate Eichhorn Nathaniel G. Moore, Lisa Robertson (two books!), Trish Salah and Jacqueline Turner. Work from past influencers can be found here at the Agora; you can sign up for the course here!

As for this little site, there are two new works up: rob mclennan graciously donated an interview with Troy Jollimore. We're also lucky to have a review of Rita Wong's and Larissa Lai's sybil unrest as reviewed by Cris Costa.

Lastly, the White Wall Review is mini-launching at Sunday's Word on the Street. Writers include Erin Moure and Oana Avasilichioaei, Adam Seelig, Matthew Tierney, the latest Chang School winners and many more!

A new review of Jason Heroux's newest:

With the mannequins of the opening poem , Heroux sets up the rest of the work by giving the reader people-like objects, non-persons brought to life that reflect the shadows of other people who haunt the work; when in the next stanza the reader reads “The paperboy was/ an elderly blind lady”, the mannequins echo. The reader is able to see the stiffness, the non-reality of the woman – she too is a prop, an object of nostalgia that can never quite be fully realized every again. It is this loss (of never becoming whole again, even in memory) that structures and resonates throughout the rest of the poems.

A reminder to the people: if you have work you want to share (reviews, essays, interviews, even if only partially finished) please email it along to aaron [at] thescream [dot] ca. The Agora is a place for sharing!

I'm very bad at promoting, particularly in this space (or doing much of anything in this space lately...that'll change!) but I hope everyone made it out to a few Scream events. It's over now and so I can dedicate a bit more time to this here site.

First, an interview with Cameron Anstee (done by rob mclennan).

Second, a review of Martha Baillie's book The Incident Report:

Interestingly though, the narrator weaves these reports next to her own description of herself and her life, her family, her job – she lists the mundane tasks she has to carry out daily, describes her boss, re-tells stories about her father. Further, the structure of the book then creates a fragmentary story that deepens the paranoia and loneliness of both her and the “crazy” strangers. Each person exists only in brief bursts, tiny portraits; the reader is given simply the incident in question without even reflection or judgment from the narrator. This same objectivity is applied to herself – there is very little emotional reflection from the narrator on her own life, but rather a straight-forward story of her own life’s events. By conflating the narrator and the characters of the incident reports, the text begins to blur the borders between sanity and craziness. The distance between the regular people and the “freaks” breaks down and the two become indistinguishable. Suddenly, the reader is asked what incidents they caused that day, each day.

A really great book that deserves to be picked up and mulled over!

I'm very excited to have rob mclennan's recent interview with Elizabeth Bachinsky. A sample (speaking about her new book God of Missed Connections):

EB: I wanted to write the book I couldn’t find. When I began this project I found it fascinating how many (hundreds!) of academic texts, memoirs, interviews, short stories, poems, documentary films, videos, paintings, collages, sculptures, websites, blogs, etc. are dedicated to the history of Ukraine and of Ukrainians in Canada—yet very few of these resources are produced by Ukrainian-Canadian authors of my generation. And almost none of these are creative works.

Read on!

Lots of goodies up and around the site: the Recent Reviews section in the sidebar will direct you to a number of new-ish reviews I've done, including an extended look at Fond by Kate Eichhorn. The review is part of the Mansfield Press' new Mansfield Revue which will be taking a continued look at new poetry books by authors from around the small press world.

Worth noting too is that The Scream has announced its Mainstage lineup. Follow the link and check that out.