Here Comes The Sun? Book Review by Jude Joseph Lovell Last May, author Lauren Groff claimed in the New York Times in May that “something invisible and pernicious seems to be preventing even good literary men from . . . reaching for books with women’s names on the spines.” To that I can only add Read more
Her Royal Misanthrope Book Review by Jude Joseph Lovell Earlier this year, around the time that Britain’s Prince Harry was marrying the actress Meghan Markle, there was a popular Internet meme floating around. It depicted George Washington standing on a bloody battlefield next to the Stars and Stripes. The caption read: “I stopped caring about Read more
Dickens: My Annual Literary Pilgrimage by Jude Joseph Lovell When I was a graduate student in Creative Writing, I came up with a crazy idea: I would challenge myself to read one Charles Dickens book every year for the rest of my life. What prompted me was this: a friend of mine had talked me Read more
Return to Memories by Timothy Niedermann Originally published in March 2017, Ottawa Review of Books “The House on Selkirk Avenue” by Irena Karafilly Guernica Editions, $20.00 It is late September 1998, and Kate is back in Montreal to help her daughter, Megan, move in to the “student ghetto” next to McGill University, where Megan is Read more
WHAT LIES BENEATH by Jude Joseph Lovell (Review of Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor) It may be different for some readers, but this one had to become fully immersed into the British writer Jon McGregor’s widely praised fourth novel, Reservoir 13, before it became clear that some literary slight-of-hand was being pulled. That I had Read more
the hubble cantos, by Tree Riesener, is brimming with astonishing imagery and thoughtful verse. If, as Joseph Campbell stated in his book Creative Mythology (and I paraphrase here), the role of poetry is to cause the floor to fall out from under the everyday and plunge us into the mythic, Riesener has accomplished this in spades. Not only does she take us on a tour of the cosmos in an ekphrastic series of poems based on images from the Hubble Telescope, she challenges our perspective of ourselves in our world and that cosmos. In the process of completing this daunting task, Campbell’s proverbial floor drops out from fantastic and beautiful images from the Hubble, to the infinite, the unknowable, and sensations beyond the capacity of humans to comprehend. In other words, by the end of this collection, she comes pretty damn close to describing the indescribable, and leaves us, at last, feeling as if we’ve not only witnessed, but have experienced, the majestic workings of our universe. Read more
Customer Service and the Decline of Civilization By Johanne R. Deschamps I got my first real job at the age of fourteen, working in a family run bakery/coffee shop. The bakery was new to the area and I was trained by the matriarch of the family in the appropriate way to serve customers. “Always greet Read more
Sea Dream Written by Stu O’Conner Distributed by CD Baby & amazon.com I once read an article that claimed the very best music for growing plants was the voice of Joan Baez; researchers claimed Baez’s golden pipes were even more beneficial than classical music for the growth capacity of our green co-inhabitants of this planet. Read more
