Only thirty-eight years old, the tortured poet John Thompson died in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 1976. His second book of poetry, the scarcely finished Stilt Jack, was published two years later. It has been deemed a minor Canadian classic—the kind of book that, in a more just or literate world, would be hailed as a national treasure. It has also been taken to suggest that Thompson—by all accounts, an alcoholic—was so in love with death that the coroner was wrong to rule his demise an accident.
The first of thirty-eight ghazals in Stilt Jack establishes the dismal mood: “Now you have burned your books: you’ll go / with nothing but your blind, stupefied heart.” In an essay on Thompson, poet, critic, and journalist Michael Lista writes that Stilt Jack “opens with a tone any barfly will recognize, the self-admonishing second person of your conscience telling you that you’re ruined.” Seemingly innocuous, that same word—barfly—reappears as the title of Lista’s disturbing new volume of poetry.
Despite disbelieving in Albert the Great’s talking head, Naudé gave it a powerful new name, referring to it as the “android”. Thus deftly, he smuggled a new term into the language, for according to the 1695 dictionary by the French philosopher and writer Pierre Bayle, “android” had been “an absolutely unknown word, & purely an invention of Naudé, who used it boldly as though it were established.” It was a propitious moment for neologisms: Naudé’s term quickly infiltrated the emerging genre of dictionaries and encyclopedias. Bayle repeated it in the article on “Albert le Grand” in his dictionary. Thence, “android” secured its immortality as the headword of an article — citing Naudé and Bayle — in the first volume of the supplement to the English encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia. In denying the existence of Albert’s android, Naudé had given life to the android as a category of machine.
Gardens are, or at least have the potential to be, an enormous but as yet untapped solution to the climate and biodiversity crisis. But what are we doing? Disappearing them beneath plastic and paving. Beneath weed-suppressant membranes and “decorative” purple slate chips. Beneath cars, beneath gravel, beneath entire new homes. Beneath large stones and driftwood to make them look like the beach (my absolute favourite).
Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.
The concept of literary debuts is a particular obsession of the publishing industry. I understand the appeal: Novelty attracts attention, and attention garners sales. It’s one of the most surefire sources of publicity in a time when the amount of content produced rapidly outpaces consumer interest. It also creates the opportunity for authors to debut in multiple disciplines or genres, allowing audiences to be reintroduced to a talented author in a new context, as is the case with the revelatory short story collection Ninetails by Sally Wen Mao. Ninetails is the author’s fiction debut, although she’s previously published 3 acclaimed collections of poetry: Mad Honey Symposium, Oculus, and The Kingdom of Surfaces. It’s a frequently surprising collection of short stories that shows just how much Mao’s time as a poet has sharpened her skill as a writer, and signals the entry of a bold new voice in fiction.
The excellence of Barry’s work is difficult to quantify. His prose has an unusual quality; a laughter than is by turns mocking, sly, despairing and disbelieving, yet it is never vicious. This novel could not be described as a comedy – it is too full of pathos, regret, disappointment and reasonless suffering – yet it is not exactly tragic, and it is certainly not maudlin.