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Violence in our bedrooms and kitchens: A review of Julie Bruck’s Monkey Ranch
Reviewed in this essay: Monkey Ranch by Julie Bruck, Brick Books, 2012 Julie Bruck’s poems have the transparency of fingerprints on glass. The achievement of Monkey Ranch, her Governor General Award-winning collection, is not obvious. Her third book, it contains poems about rituals and family life–a son at a window, a lover sleeping through the noise of…
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Hope at life’s end: Michael Haneke’s Amour
Reviewed in this Essay: Amour. Written and Directed by Michael Haneke. Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuele Riva, and Isabelle Huppert. Running time: 127 minutes. Mainstream cinema often treats death with cosmic reverence or ignores it altogether, but Michael Haneke’s Amour forces its viewers to confront mortality, as intimately and physically as possible. The film is nominated for five Academy…
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Touching from a distance: On Sam Pink’s Rontel
Reviewed in this essay: Rontel, by Sam Pink, Electric Literature, 2013. One of the old canards people trot out when waxing (prematurely) on the creeping death of the publishing industry is that there’s just no way to sell books anymore, not when brick and mortar stores are on the wane and even the once future-proof…
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Livestock for some, ownership debates for all: A review of Who Owns the Stock? Collective and Multiple Property Rights in Animals
Reviewed in this essay: Who Owns the Stock? Collective and Multiple Property Rights in Animals, Khazanov, Anatoly and Günther Schlee, eds., Berghahn Books, 2012. This volume suggests that, in the face of the rapid diffusion of the notion of private property across the globe, there remain three main domains of objects subject to more complicated…
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Staging history: A review of Susan Steudel’s poetry collection, New Theatre
Reviewed in this essay: New Theatre by Susan Steudel, Coach House Press, 2012. A high school teacher once passed an antique book of fairy tales around our creative writing class, asking us to make new poems by blacking out and decorating the printed words. Susan Steudel’s debut book of poetry, New Theatre, reminds me of…
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Post-apocalyptic collaboration: A review of Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home
Reviewed in this essay: The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, by Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman, Wattpad, 2013. “I dabble in modernity,” Margaret Atwood joked to George Stroumboulopoulos when pressed to explain her recent foray into online self-publishing on Wattpad. Wattpad is a YouTube for digital scribblings, a free online database where writers can instantly upload and…
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Changing the narrative on peace: A review of What We Talk About When We Talk About War
Reviewed in this essay: What We Talk About When We Talk About War, Noah Richler, Goose Lane Editions, 2012. George Grant wrote Lament for a Nation before official multiculturalism, before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, before the liberalization of Canada had begun in earnest. But he understood that his preferred canon of national stories…
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Slavery, cinema, and sensitivity: Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained
Reviewed in this essay: Django Unchained. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Running time 165 minutes. Now playing in Toronto theaters. In recent weeks, moviegoers have been treated to two radically different films about American slavery, each of them trying to unpack the burden of that violent…
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Forgoing truth for drama: Kathryn Bigelow’s not-so-true story Zero Dark Thirty
Reviewed in this essay: Zero Dark Thirty, written by Mark Boal. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, and Kyle Chandler. Running Time: 157 minutes. Opening in Toronto Jan. 11. Kathryn Bigelow’s Academy Award-winning The Hurt Locker (2009) succeeded as a straightforward study of military bomb disarmers. Although the film was set during the…
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Man-boy fury: A review of Tim and Eric’s The Comedy
Reviewed in this essay: The Comedy, written by Rick Alverson, Robert Donne, and Colm O’leary. Directed by Rick Alverson. Starring Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, and James Murphy. Running Time: 94 minutes. Available for Download on Itunes immediately. Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are the two most interesting comedians working in America today. Best known for their sketch…
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Danger Music: On the Intimacy of Screaming
Reviewed in this Essay: Dick Higgins’s “Danger Music #17” performed by Jenn Cole and Didier Morelli for The Future of Cage: Credo conference at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto, Oct. 26, 2012 Didier Morelli said that when he plunged his head into his kitchen sink to recite Dante’s Inferno,…
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Sex, Bugs, and Schizophrenia: A review of Poison Shy
Reviewed in this essay: Poison Shy by Stacey Madden. ECW Press, 2012. Sex, bugs, and schizophrenia form an unlikely trinity, it is true. And yet they converge with surprising semblance in Stacey Madden’s first novel, Poison Shy. Told through first-person retrospective narration, Poison Shy is the story of a love triangle between two heavy-drinking late…