The Monthly Revues

August 2009

Oneiric

Reviewed by Robert Earl Stewart

Oneiric

Nyla Matuk

Frog Hollow Press, 2009

63 pages, $36 (limited edition)

“All nights are like postcards.” This line appears, rather innocuously, in “Barbados Hotel, Almost Empty,” the second poem in Oneiric, Toronto-based poet Nyla Matuk’s debut collection. Sandwiched between “a lone Panama hat / drunk at the bar” and a karaoke performer belting Elvis into the tiki-bar night, the line can almost be glossed over, its significance to this dream-obsessed collection missed — lost between poetic details that straddle the border between painfully real and darkly comic. But which is painful? The karaoke Elvis or the drunken tourist? For that matter, which is comic? Which dark? Which real?

Review: The Velocity of Escape

 

Review by Evie Christie

The Velocity of Escape
Jim Johnstone
Guernica Editions, 2008
51 pages, $15

 

Jim Johnstone’s debut collection, The Velocity of Escape, is rife with peculiar, redolent detail. The jacket text points out for us the occurrences of “Siamese twins, circus performers, burn victims and scientists” and their uncommon link with “rhetorical science.”