A collection of poems, most of which you would want to call nice. Nothing against nice, but it’s, well, nice. These are wordy, narrative poems that speak about a past moment, not to it. Emily Chungs’ The Day I Almost Drowned is particularly guilty of historicizing the unimportant, her confessional whisper lilting into camp (literally). But Mike Fuhr’s Halloween comes up with something a little more substantive despite being set in the crumbling structure of the reminiscent past. His poem sets a tone, and speaks decisively to order a moment for readers — the moment a boy meets his pumpkin, pumpkin into boy, boy into pumpkin, the season rots, alone, almost but never quite over. When I picked up Pandora’s Box I thought I might be about to encounter something dangerous, perhaps even a little lewd. This would be because my earliest associations with the story of Pandora’s Box evolved out of the incredulity I felt the day my grade eight teacher walked into class and, with an absolutely straight face, started talking about some woman’s box. So maybe the fact that I didn’t much enjoy P.B. is due in some part to the fact that my expectations were entirely disappointed. P.B. is anything but dangerous.
lit-chapbook / publisher: Pandora Publishing / main creator: Mellissa Last / $3.60 / 1265 Richmond St., #207, London, ON, N6A 3M1