Quill and Quire

Reviews

★ Question & Answer

By Alison Pick

What is the answer?” No answer came. She laughed and said, “In that case what is the question?” (Gertrude Stein) In her debut poetry collection, Question & Answer, Alison Pick takes up Gertrude Stein’s challenge, ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

★ Forde Abroad

By John Metcalf

John Metcalf has not published a stand-alone book of fiction in some 10 years. This is unfortunate, because he is one of Canada’s best writers. With the publication of Forde Abroad, a brilliant 80-page novella, ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Missing Children

By Lynn Crosbie

If you write an unflinchingly human portrait of a murderer, are you glamorizing his crimes? That’s the question Lynn Crosbie has posed in four previous poetry collections (most notoriously with her piece of true-crime poetry, ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

The Alchemy of Happiness

By Marilyn Bowering

Alchemy. The word conjures images of medieval laboratories, of quasi-magical transformations, and, perhaps most importantly, of failure. For despite their many important contributions to modern science, the medieval alchemists ultimately failed in their primary goal: ... Read More »

November 20, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry

Careful

By Jacqueline Turner

Careful, Jacqueline Turner’s second poetry collection, is partitioned into nine sections, most of which feature short-line, lower-case poems that form lexical stalactites creeping down the left-hand margin of the page. As random words percolate, the ... Read More »

November 20, 2003 | Filed under: Poetry