Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Even a cursory reading of Holy Wild assaults our senses with a relentless documentation of the many ways a trans woman is despised for who she is. Cries of pain at the violence visited upon her. Lamentations at the betrayals. But also hope. Hope for a new life through a new body and through new relationships that promise understanding.
So what is all this kerfuffle around the Toronto Public Library (TPL) renting space to Meghan Murphy? And why should it matter to someone like me, a cisgendered, middle-aged white male i.e. the ideal symbolic stand-in for privilege in all its manifestations?
One could easily accuse the outlying fog of spying on my inner state, or worse, of manufacturing it by drifting into my ears and eyes and nostrils and gaping mouth, and supplanting my accustomed mental chaos with a vague stillness.
The first question that entered my head was: What happened to the roof? As a Canadian boy, I had no experience of medieval anything. My experience of sacred architecture was pretty much confined to churches built in the postwar suburban boom.
A poem to mark July 4th, 2018, and the celebration of American Independence, or whatever. As a Canadian, I find it hard to give a flying fabrication.
Is there a difference between the dirt-smudged smile pasted to a seven-foot face on a billboard and a Netflix scientist riffing on the stardust that lives and moves and shapes our being? The teeth survive the body; our dentists have seen to that. But they’re no match for the stars which wheel through our dreams…
We’re smitten by extroverted summer days, effusive skies, sunlight chattering through leaves. Soon it’s time for the weather to turn, a seat alone, rain clattering against the pane.
In an age when it’s increasingly easy to make technically “perfect” images, it’s correspondingly easy to be complacent about whether or not those images do what images are supposed to do. Do our images merely allay anxieties around formal requirements? Or do they satisfy deeper needs? While the two are not mutually exclusive, there are many photographs that move us deeply even though they are deeply “flawed”.
A poem inspired by my neighbour’s sexual prowess and the feelings of inadequacy it engenders.
My cultural moment came and went. Now the useless pendant chafes my neck, brings to mind remaindered analytic books whose theses chased the waddling ass that lapped me on the straight-away. I let it pass and listened to their twaddle. The blubbering cheeks squidge on. Their route? I couldn’t say. There was an instant, back…
Ogden Nash wrote: I think that I shall never seea billboard lovely as a tree.Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,I’ll never see a tree at all. If Nash were alive today, he might update his poem: I think the billboard’s here to staywith its products on display.If you want to see a tree,try Home Depot, aisle…
While browsing used titles in Cambridge, / I found an old volume, The Limerick. / Tho not illustrated, / ”Twas unexpurgated / The famous Paris Edition and you get the idea. It’s a consolidation of various sources dating from 1870 to 1952 and even includes one questionable mention of Toronto from 1941
More tomb than room, was what she said.My grandmother fled to the fields,convinced the old farm house held death,a mid-life freak, I guess, though to hear hertell it, planets must have collidedand debris come raining from the skies.Grandfather had quit his farming, severedten acres for himself and sold the rest.I had just been born, maybe…
Yesterday, David Gilmour got himself caught up in an internet shitstorm. Unlike most of his detractors, I chose to let my opinions ferment overnight. I hope that leads to something more considered than much of the self-righteous anger I’ve read. Here are a couple things that might differentiate my opinion from others. First, I’ve actually…
It would be easy to select poetry that assumes a prophetic/righteous/angry tone, especially in light of the Harper government’s policies around exploitation of the Alberta tar sands and dismantling of environmental controls. However, Anand and Dickinson have made selections that frame things in positive terms.