The Toronto Review of Books

Tag: poem

  • XVII, from The Minutes

    XVII, from The Minutes

    Let’s begin: Come man know your span sing wilde curcles with no circumference where even the birds cannot pass an emptiness that contracts to a point no count is sure, there is no point to the act if you already know what will come to pass passes, bird- brained song man you know too well…

  • Hokkien Lesson 1: The Granddaughter’s Phrasebook

    Hokkien Lesson 1: The Granddaughter’s Phrasebook

    ang mo red hair jin sui very beautiful wah pah de leao see I will beat you to death wah zaiiyah I know wah gaiigee I can do it myself

  • DNA poetry, thinking like Sherlock, and defining Toronto: Bookishness, Jan. 14, 2013

    DNA poetry, thinking like Sherlock, and defining Toronto: Bookishness, Jan. 14, 2013

    The little questions “What does Toronto even mean? What kind of city is it? What kind of place do we want it to be? That’s the big question, isn’t it?” – Edward Keenan, Some Great Idea. While you think about how you might answer the big question, try your hand at answering some little questions…

  • History, true and fictional: A review of poet Kate Cayley’s “When This World Comes to an End”

    History, true and fictional: A review of poet Kate Cayley’s “When This World Comes to an End”

    When This World Comes to an End By Kate Cayley Brick Books, February 2013 $20 A first book of poems is a beautiful thing. But while this is Kate Cayley’s first poetry volume, she is no newcomer to writing. Her short stories and poems have appeared in journals across the country, she has authored a young adult novel, The Hangman…

  • Poem: My Life Aboard the Last Sailing Ship Carrying Cumberland Coal

    Poem: My Life Aboard the Last Sailing Ship Carrying Cumberland Coal

        You give your firstborn daughter A central-Asian name Meaning blue or water. Years later two bluebirds alight on either arm And an artist’s quick needlework Stitches birds to skin So even In your obsequies your fetlocks Wing away, appear then disappear. Of course Now you are a horse   With pale blue withers…

  • Poem: Three Studies of Fruit

    Poem: Three Studies of Fruit

      Have I painted these scenes? Or merely collected them? I will try to display them in pure colours, simplest form. i.   First: the orange of an orange1 in the dining room, Caroline is cutting the fruit for me and I am sitting on her lap when a cow rushes past the window startling…

  • Choice Poems: Zach Wells and Naomi Guttman

    Choice Poems: Zach Wells and Naomi Guttman

    The TRB team is pleased to announce Choice Poems, a semi-regular series of poems on Chirograph curated by the TRB’s Poetry Editor, Moez Surani. For this, the first Choice Poems post, we’re climbing under the covers and into a lover’s heart with a pairing of poems on love and temptation. Zach Wells shows how a lover…

  • OF NATURE: A Poem

    OF NATURE: A Poem

          a murder in The National Gallery the corpse evidence or art a bloodied face attracting files    

  • SPRING: A Poem

    SPRING: A Poem

    Listen to the author read this poem: [audio: issue3/surani.mp3] (i) You visit each day in a different dress, a clear umbrella for the rain. Coffees. And one day this week, with a daisy whose stem you sawed with a kitchen knife     (ii) Only the magnolias have squandered their colour. Their shells convalesce over the…

  • Poem: Blessed Cotillion

    Poem: Blessed Cotillion

    That grocery store he went to for a can-a-corn and maybe bread flashed right into a blessed cotillion and mister m turned to a produce boy just about fifteen years surprised (talking like a distant cousin) turned and said “excuse my frankness, but I have been removed.” Dropping that can from three of his weary…