There’s is a careful beauty about this chapbook. The layout is beautiful, the font is beautiful, the back cover is beautiful, the acknowledgements page is, quite frankly, breathtaking, even the ISBN number is beautiful. So it isn’t surprising that there is an overwhelmingly apparent effort to make some beauty happen in the poems themselves: “breath tumbles/through shellacked lips/coloured kisses of stinging nettles/ripe currents of red fundy anger/carried you/away” Unfortunately, the price of all these beautifully arranged images is an almost complete lack of spontaneity or feeling.
chapbook / publisher: friday circle / main creator: b. stephen harding / $? / Department of English, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5