What are the constructs we’re born into, and how do we conform to or evade them? How does being a woman today dictate the way we move through the world, as we’re taught from an early age how to be: to always be smiling, to have thigh gap, to be apologetic, to comply with conventional […]
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There’s nothing like finding a book that is so open and honest, you feel as if you’ve found a window into the author’s psyche. That’s how it feels to read Marianne Apostolide’s latest, Deep Salt Water (BookThug), a powerful memoir about abortion and the experience of loss as it evolves over time. It’s a beautifully […]
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I remember being mesmerized the first time I saw Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged session, as I’m sure countless other teens have. From the first notes of “About A Girl,” I was hooked, feet up on the couch, listening and wondering about the mystical blue-eyed man growling into the microphone in that famous oatmeal cardigan. It’s a […]
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From her balcony on the 21st floor of a Miami high-rise apartment, a woman, identified as “J,” muses over the comings and goings of neighbors and strangers, all the while contemplating her own solitude. It feels a little voyeuristic, reading the intimate thoughts of a woman being a voyeur herself, and at times even like […]
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There’s nothing like poetry that makes you stop and reread. Poetry you can savour – that clings to the back of your throat, insists on being taken in not just in one sitting. This is the poetry you fall back on, and that, perhaps, you have resting beside you on your bedside table, waiting. It’s […]
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I remember my first encounter with the term “feminist killjoy.” It was in my gender and media studies class, and we were assigned feminist scholar and writer Sara Ahmed’s Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness as one of our readings. The term, I’ll admit, had me worried at first – I’d had enough […]
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Good things come in pairs. I know that’s not the actual saying, but it certainly holds true of the beautiful bundle that is the Grimoire Series 1 from Sad Spell Press, Witch Craft Magazine’s publishing arm. The series includes grimoires, or chapbook-length poetry and prose from Jon-Michael Frank with Nostalgia Flower, and from Sarah Lyn […]
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There was something familiar about the cover of this book on first glance. Nadia Bozak’s collection of short stories, Thirteen Shells (House of Anansi), on the surface looks quite similar to the poster for the 2014 Richard Linklater film Boyhood. The former features a young girl lying in the grass facedown, one arm extended above […]
Read moreIt’s tricky to pin down what, exactly, The Irresponsible Magician is, but that’s the fun of it – it defies genre. A work that weaves between essay and fiction, Rebekah Rutkoff’s collection from Semiotext(e) is exploratory and pushes beyond what we have often come to expect from our books – that extra readability that comes […]
Read moreThere are always those early friendships that shake you. My first ‘best friend,’ as with most first friendships, came to me out of a mixture of proximity and shared interests but also a need to engage with friendship and connection in a deep, all-consuming way. Sleepovers were a must. We had to be around each […]
Read moreDo you remember the way your mother would see you off to school in the morning? Did she sit with you for breakfast, or was she busy in her room, getting ready for the workday? Maybe her own mother used to sit with her for breakfast in the morning, and that’s what’s become routine, along […]
Read moreThis isn’t the domestic sphere you know, the one you’re told about. This is a deconstruction, a dismantling, a tearing apart. This is a doing away with expectations – a refusal of the woman’s “role.” In The Filaments of Heather, author Heather Goodrich’s chapbook from Sad Spell Press, we find a woman ridding herself of […]
Read moreThere are typically two things I like to do after reading a book of poetry for the first time, especially when it’s for a review. First, I come up with a first-impression word cloud – it may be only one word or a few, but it’s meant to sum up the general feeling I have […]
Read moreJust reading the author note that precedes Danielle Perry’s Phases (Sad Spell Press), her first chapbook, is enough to spark your enthusiasm over what’s to come. She’s a tarot reader who is “generally amping up her witchiness,” and who couldn’t use more of that in the world? Of course, we wouldn’t expect anything less of […]
Read more“How much can you tell me about love?” asks the bird in Darshana Suresh’s opening poem, “Birds on a Power Line,” from Howling at the Moon (Platypus Press). “Enough to fill my breakfast bowl,” answers the other. In her debut poetry collection, 19-year-old Suresh has more than enough to share about love, loss and survival […]
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VAGABOND CITY 