Welcome!
Northern Poetry Review is an online home for poems, reviews of poetry books, articles and interviews, with emphasis on Canadian poetry. Reviews are meant to be honest but diplomatic.
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Publishers will be requested to send a book directly to a reviewer, when a review is arranged. NPR encourages a limited number of reviewers to generously donate their time, while trying to keep in mind the number of books that deserve recognition here. Again, your patience is appreciated.
Editor
Alex Boyd writes poems, fiction, reviews and essays, and has had reviews and articles published in magazines and newspapers such as Books in Canada, The Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire and on various websites such as The Danforth Review and poetryx.com. His award-winning book of poems Making Bones Walk was published by Luna Publications.
Associate Editor
Alessandro Porco is the author of two collection of poetry: Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems and The Jill Kelly Poems. He’s also the editor of the forthcoming critical study, Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey. Currently, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Porco is completing a dissertation on hip-hop and postmodern American poetry. He writes “In Extremis,” a hip-hop-focused column, for Maisonneuve Magazine online.
Associate Editor.
Lori A. May is a poet, novelist, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications such as Rattle, Two Review, and The Writer. She edits The Ambassador Poetry Project and Poets' Quarterly. Stains: Early Poems is now available, in addiction to three chapbooks of poems -- please see her site for more details.
Featured Interview
Johanna Skibsrud
Interviewed by Alessandro Porco
So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading
Featured Review
The Good News About Armageddon
By Steve McOrmond
Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."
The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.
With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading