Cookbooks and gardening guides shouldn’t make you feel like a useless toad, or make you wish you lived in another city. But Peirce’s Grow Organic: A Simple Guide to Nova Scotia Vegetable Gardening is a boost of confidence, even if you’ve only ever grown mould. Peirce doesn’t expect that you know a till from a […]
Literary
Posted inArts + Music
Harbour View
At a Halifax nursing home overlooking the water, the lives of residents and staff come in constant contact, physical and emotional. In such a setting, the present should do more than trigger excursions into the past. Whether staff or resident, these characters are stuck in the past, particularly the mythologized aspects of this province’s history: […]
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Poetry collection launch: Lost Gospels
“A poem comes when it damn well feels like it,” says poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn, explaining how her work is born. “The muse shows up when she’s ready, so it’s not a matter of sitting there waiting for a bolt from the blue—it’s kind of a slow awakening, really, rather than a bolt.” In the […]
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Against the Hard Angle
This fourth collection from Halifax-based Robinson is divided into two sections, “What the Rest of Us Would Call Falling” and “Toeing the Slack-Roped Narrows.” The first half then divides into three parts and the first of those, “Against the Hard Angle,” won the Malahat Review long poem contest in 2009. All this dividing and subdividing […]
Posted inArts + Music
Locavore
Food can be exhausting. It’s easier to let the grocery store make our decisions, and listening to others’ food politics can be more exhausting than running a farm. In her travels across Canada to talk with the farmers and chefs trying to get Canadians to eat local, Sarah Elton feels a bit late to the […]
Posted inArts + Music
Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music
I want to be Marisa Metlzer’s best friend. Her latest book, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, explores the history and influence of the most integral years of my life. The early ’90s were a pivotal time for women in music. Feminism wasn’t new—neither were girl groups, zines or punk rock—but Meltzer permeates the […]
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Bitter Medicine
Two of Clem Martini’s brothers have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. One is Ben, the youngest. The other is Olivier, or Liv, an artist. He illustrates this graphic memoir with a subtle hand. Spend time following the lines in his black ink drawings and his short, considered captions. This is his side in a long conversation, […]
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Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training, Tom Jokinen (Random House)
CBC Radio producer Tom Jokinen quit his job to apprentice as an undertaker at a Winnipeg family-run funeral home. That’s one way to get a book published: Western culture prefers to keep death at a safe distance, like meat processing, so when someone actually lifts the shroud, it’s pretty damn exciting. But Jokinen makes it […]
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Pain-Proof Men
In “Storm Night at Gus’ Pub,” Barger presents the bar as a nexus of magic (the musical variety, in this case) and misery. They should print the verse on the venue’s walls to complement the forest photo-mural. He situates many poems in the mythological north end, geographically central Halifax: along Agricola, where, in “Cousin’s Diner,” […]
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Penning for a cause
For all the writers who’ve received rejection slips to the effect of “Too political, we don’t do morals, try non-fiction,” there is hope. Fernwood Publishing launched the Beacon Award (beaconaward.ca) for social justice fiction, last week at Outside the Lines. The idea came from Anne Bishop, a community worker and author of several non-fiction books. […]
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The Waterproof Bible, Andrew Kaufman (Random House)
Andrew Kaufman’s All My Friends Are Superheroes had its own magical powers: the thin novella was a surprise hit when it came out almost seven years ago. The former Coast contributor’s first novel, The Waterproof Bible, still reads like multiple novellas. There are the intertwined stories of Rebecca, a young, grieving woman whose emotional powers […]
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Just Kids, Patti Smith (Random House)
If Ian Edelman, the creator of HBO’s How to Make it in America, thinks his show’s sucky protagonists and their loft-living artist friends are having a tough time of it in the Big Apple, he might want to travel back to Patti Smith’s 1970s New York, where bloody walls and lice were as much part […]
