Pearl Pirie : part five

What poetry books have you been reading lately?

Short Answer: The joke of the same $15 making its way around the small circle and trade economy of small press fairs across Canada seems to fit here. I read what falls across my path.

Long Answer: I generally have a few dozen books on the go— science, essays, architecture books, novels (on a Catherine Asaro kick). Currently, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca Letters to a Stoic, and a few poetry collections, Shake Loose my Skin by Sonia Sanchez, Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar, 89 Objects of Happiness Arrayed in Ascending Order by Mike Finley (Kraken Press, St. Paul, 2017), The Deep End of the Sky by Chad Lee Robinson (Turtle Press, 2015), Different Conversations: Short Poems and Literary Fragments by Alexis Rotella (on Kindle), Nobody Move by Susan Stenson, The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry ed by Valerie Mason-John and Kevan Anthony Cameron (Frontenac, 2013). Upcoming: This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Mêmewars by Adeena Karasick, and The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Also on tap, Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit by Lynn Gehl, No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe, The Inner Life of Animals: Grief, Love and Compassion by Peter Wohlleben, Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery (Simon & Schuster, 2015). The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, and What is Architecture and 100 other questions by Rasmus Waern and Gert Wingårdh, trans John Krause. Sample of the last “Uniformity can be incomparably handsome, but it has a kind of built-in insensitivity.”