Michael Lake reviews N.W. Lea's Understander (2015) in Broken Pencil

Michael Lake provides a new review of N.W. Lea's Lampman-shortlisted Understander (2015) in Broken Pencil. Thanks much! This is the third full review of Understander, after Julia Polyck-O'Neill reviewed such over at her blog, and Rob Thomas did his write-up over at Apt613. You can see Lake's review here. And of course, copies of Understander can be ordered directly here. As Lake writes:

N.W. Lea is a poet of brevity, and the poems of Understander are tiny sparks of an intuitive mind. There is a dreaminess about this collection, and anywhere a reader picks it up, they are sure to be dropped into a strange new world, disoriented, delighted, and surprised. The poems often feel like glances at something commonplace, twisted and skewed by shadows. Lea’s cursory observations of people and things are astute and never predictable, yet are always accessible. Many poems have the succinctness of the Imagists or of a haiku, but Lea seems to be observing the mind rather than the world. He is concerned with the details we take in and the associations our brains make as a way to understand a moment. There is the occasional rhyming, but it is always fun and clever and never plodding.

Energy also comes from how Lea never lingers on an image or idea long before floating to the next one. The poems are not so much related thematically as they are stylistically. They are short bursts of stream-of-consciousness associations that I imagine were all written under mad moonlight.They also manage to escape the trap of whimsy by being so damn beautiful. I don’t know what half of them are about, but they are lovely little portals into somebody else’s mind.

Broken Pencil reviews Andy Weaver's this (2015)

Joel W. Vaughan was good enough to review Andy Weaver's this (2015) in Broken Pencil #71. Thanks so much! This is the third review of this, after Douglas Barbour's review over at his electric ruckus blog [we prefer Barbour's review, honestly], and Marilyn Irwin's review over at her blog. And of course, copies of Andy Weaver's this can be ordered directly, here.

Ten pages of quotations foreground this collection and act as a preview for the subdued unorthodoxy that is to come. This isn’t revolutionary by any means — it is, at its best, wrestling with the irreducible paradox that to un-tie the knots in language, one must somehow do so from within language. At its worst, this is simply too self-conscious or too incomprehensible. As Weaver himself acknowledges in a quote from Gertrude Stein (“This book is interesting as there is as much failure as success in it”), any attempt made to step outside language by means of poetry is an inevitable failure, and this is therefore much more interesting in its premise than it is in its development.

Instead of individual titles, this is largely divided up into four types: “regular poems” are arranged vertically in a serif typeface; “wall of words” poems confront the reader with a brick of bold, unbroken text; “alphabetical lists” are arranged at dis-jointed angles in Courier; and finally, Weaver’s “concrete” poems appear in any shape, at any size, in any maddened arrangement. this bounces from one type to another, striking a pose that any casual reader might rightly call madness.

The collection’s strongest moments stand out in short breaks of lucidity, however, such as its likening of language to time (“what does not change / is time, the only element of change”) or, further, its connection of language-as-identity to political history (“I asked him to translate the epitaph. He could not: it was in an ideographic language that France had destroyed”). It is these memorable breaks which keep this from reading like total entropy, and they are legitimately thought-provoking. Ironically, however, their lucidity may be precisely what keeps Weaver from stepping out of language entirely, and thus the crux of this’ defeat.

Broken Pencil reviews Amanda Earl's Kiki (2014)

Megan Clark was good enough to review Amanda Earl's Kiki (2014) in Broken Pencil #67. Thanks, much! You can see her original review here.

This is the sixth review of Kiki, after Anne Burke reviewed such in the Feminist Caucus newsletter at The League of Canadian Poets, "Indiereadergirl" reviewed such over at her indiereadergirl0329 blog, Jonathan Ball reviewed such over at the Winnipeg Free Press, Douglas Barbour reviewed such over at his blog, and Matthew J. Hall was good enough to review such over at The Small Press Book Review. 

And of course, copies can be ordered directly via All Lit Up!

rob mclennan’s The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (2014) is reviewed in Broken Pencil #64

Paul Rocca was good enough to review rob mclennan’s The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (2014) in Broken Pencil #64. Thanks, Paul! This is actually the fourth review of mclennan’s short story collection, after a small write-up by Pearl Pirie (here), and more formal reviews by Ryan Pratt (here) and Ryan Pratt (here).Rocca's small write-up reads:

rob mclennan’s first collection of short stories follows the old adage, “Less is more.” Each brief story in The Uncertainty Principle is more of a disembodied thought – unfinished worlds or ideas made whole only by the reader willing to fill in the gaps. The book’s microfiction is raw, densely-packed prose ranging from wistful admissions to lighter contemplations. mclennan has constructed a literal gallery of narrative vignettes.

            Among those are tongue-in-cheek Twitter posts: the Internet’s own storytelling platform. Each post follows the theme of made-up factoids, providing mclennan an opportunity to fit witty, dry humour in a more distilled form: “Seventeen perfect clones of Winston Churchill exist, but chose vintage car restoration over politics. #IDontHaveFactsToBackThisUp.”

            The gags blend well enough with the tone of their neighbouring narratives, implying a purpose to their arrangement. Every strand of the collection’s fabric seems to weave into an ephemeral glimpse of a grander narrative. But whose story does it encompass – mclennan’s, a fictitious character’s, both, or neither? The deeper you peer into the negative space between each story, the more certain you are of The Uncertainty Principle’s deliberate design, but less so of its trajectory.

            And that may in fact explain the title of The Uncertainty Principle – a principle in quantum mechanics which states that the more you know of an object’s position, the less you can know about its momentum, and vice versa. Does mclennan know where he’s heading, or does he only know where he is? I can’t say for sure, but I’m content as his passenger, regaled by small ruminations on place-specific postcards or not-so-wild theories on Barnard Hughes’ character in The Lost Boys. Did you know he taught Kiefer Sutherland how to dance on set? #IDontHaveFactsToBackThisUp.

another review of Michael Bryson's The Lizard,

by Spencer Gordon, originally in Broken Pencil, but posted here on his blog;