Review by Lisa Williams of "How to Pronounce Knife" by Souvankham Thammavongsa

How to Pronounce Knife is a hard-hitting short story compilation. The author was born in the Lao refugee camp in Thailand before being raised in Toronto. The stories focus on Laos immigrants, with an overarching theme of people being in places where they don’t feel they belong. 

Often told from the viewpoint of a younger person, the book features a collection of disparate characters. These are small stories about vast issues. Each one lands like a slap across the face and leaves a sting that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading. 

Her debut work of fiction, I’m eagerly awaiting Thammavongsa's next!

About the reviewer
Lisa has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She writes word-limited flash fiction, mostly drabbles - stories of exactly one hundred words. You can find her online @noodleBubble 

A Book That Changed Me, by Mikiko Fukuda: "Obasan," by Joy Kogawa

I read Joy Kogawa’s well-known, CanLit novel Obasan for the first time while I was in high school in Ontario. As a young Japanese Canadian, I knew I was reading something that was important to the canon, to Canadian history and to me, but as I was still learning how to do close readings, I didn’t fully comprehend how much this book would mean to me.

Obasan is a story about a woman named Naomi who recalls her life while she lived in an internment camp in Canada. The dual timeline is narrated by Naomi as a child and as an adult. Her aunts, Obasan and Aunt Emily, help Naomi piece together her and her family’s history.

The next time I read Obasan, I was a busy undergrad student completing courses in North American history and English Language and Literature. During a history lecture about WWII and the Japanese internment camps, I knew I had to reread Obasan. This time around, reading the novel roused feelings of anger in me. Although I’m thankful for the emotions that it stirred in me, I kept thinking that my reading experiences with Obasan couldn’t end in anger. I wanted to turn my anger into positive action, so I did: I applied to the graduate program “Literatures of the West Coast” at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. I felt certain that UVic would be the place that I could finally write a thesis based on Asian North American literature and, in 2010, I turned my reading experiences of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan into my MA thesis.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read Obasan. I know that it’s not a novel everyone will enjoy. But there is something powerful in Naomi, Obasan and Aunt Emily’s stories that reveal dark secrets about Canada’s supposed “multiculturalism.” For me, Kogawa’s novel highlighted incidents in my life that serve as reminders that - even today - I’m not welcome or accepted in Canada as a (Japanese) Canadian. 

About the reviewer
Mikiko obtained her MA in English Language and Literature from The University of Victoria in Canada. She has worked as a language and literature instructor at post-secondary institutions in Canada, Japan, Kuwait and Oman. She worked as the Editorial Manager at a publishing firm in Shanghai and currently writes reviews for sabotagereviews.com. You can find her on Instagram @mikifoo82 or on her blog, thetravellingeditor.blogspot.com.

Interview with Michael Winter

Michael Winter is the critically acclaimed author of the novels The Architects Are Here, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, The Death of Donna Whalen, which was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, The Big Why, which was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and This All Happened, which was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award and won the Winterset Prize. Along with two collections of short stories, in 2014, Michael’s first work of non-fiction, Into the Blizzard: Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead, was published by Doubleday Canada. Michael lives in Toronto and Newfoundland.     

Interviewed by Lee Wright

LW: Am I right in saying that Edgar Saltus’ A Transient Guest was a pivotal moment in your decision to become a writer? And what was it about Saltus’ book that turned your head? 

MW: The book itself is a hilarious fantasy full of purple writing. What changed me was the contrast from reading and writing dry, science-based material. And happening upon the novel by accident: I was looking up “road salt” and came upon the name, “Saltus”. Then I searched for “Transportation Canada” and discovered A Transient Guest. I was heading towards a degree in the sciences and this discovery of an imaginative novel reminded me that the way I saw the world was not merely surface, but human and interior.  

LW: I have heard you mention that you re-read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night every ten-years or so. Is this your favourite novel? And why this particular work? 

MW: I’ve read everything of Fitzgerald’s, including his unfinished The Last Tycoon which is pretty spectacular as well. I hold a greater affinity for books by, say, Nicholson Baker, books I think I might be able to write myself. But Tender is the Night, there are so many crazy passages and thoughts in that book, things that match a feeling I have about living in the world, and yet I know I will never write a book like that. It reminds me another type of person I may have become. And yes, every ten years or so the book seems to find me and it’s as if I’ve never read it before, that the publishers have altered the book. It’s not that, of course - it’s that I’ve changed. And so I pick out new things, new characters, from the book to admire and love. And the book is big and complex enough for that new selection to happen.

LW: Talk us through your writing day routine.

MW: I wake up and get the boy to school and then go upstairs. In the winter, I zip up this little down vest that is too small for me. The vest, as I zip it up, gives me a little hug to say, “it’s going to be okay.” It’s a reassuring zip. Then I write until noon. That’s it. I keep a cheap small notebook with me through the day to write down observations. For instance, this is something I wrote just now: “one of his friends wore a hoodie with the soft fangs of a shark around the brim.”

LW: You divide your time between your homes in Toronto and Newfoundland. In which do you write better?  

MW: The location doesn’t affect me, except I do tend to write more things in the small notebook when in Newfoundland. I always think I’m going to write more while there, but then a roof needs repair or a friend is going on an excusion I can’t pass up. There’s a man I buy firewood from, and I saw him last when it was raining. I knocked on his door and he opened it. I thought you might be in the woods, I said. “No,” he replied, “in weather like this I tend to stay busy around the door.” That expression, “busy around the door,” that is the sort of thing I like to write down. And those expressions occur more frequently in Newfoundland.

LW: In your novels you write without using quotation marks. Why is this? 

MW: The atmosphere I am trying to create is one of saying, quietly, to the reader, “Come with me and listen to these people converse.” If I use quotation marks, it sets up an external form, a pre-set notion that what one is reading has already happened, or I’ve shaped it somehow. I want to conjure up a “cinema-verite” feel to fiction, that the narrative is occurring outside of my control, even though the tense structure is almost always past-tense (and so has the look of hindsight). The lack of inverted commas allows the reader to eavesdrop on characters talking to one another; the author, or narrative voice, drops out of the equation. The book should give the reader two feelings at once: you are on a selected tour infused with meaning; you are not being led at all – you are on your own experiencing things in your own way.

LW: For your last book, Into the Blizzard: Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead, you turned your hand to non-fiction for the first time, going back to the First World War and telling the story of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment at the Battle of the Somme. How did that project come about? 

MW: I was standing on a piece of land I had just bought. It took a lot of effort to find out who owned the land and to persuade the owners to sell it, for it wasn’t worth much money. Anyway, during the research at the government offices to discover ownership, I realized that the grandmother of the people who now owned the land had had a previous marriage in the early 1900s. She’d had a son and then her husband died. When that boy was a teenager his mother remarried. War broke out and the son signed up. He was killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. While at the war, his mother was pregnant and gave birth to a new son. This birth occurred a few days after the death of her first son. And it struck me that she would have heard about the death of this first child soon after giving birth to her second. And this second child was the father of the people I was now dealing with, trying to buy their land. But how mixed with grief must her joy have been! Anyway, standing there in that field, realizing if there had been no war that boy would have lived and had a family and that family would be here on this patch of earth now instead of me, that sort of moved me. I wanted to write about how a distant war still affects us today.

LW: What was the research process like for Into the Blizzard and how did it differ from researching a novel?

MW: I knew I wanted to follow, physically, where the regiment trained and fought. And to enter archives and read material stored there. In that way it was a bit like a return to the life of scientific research. But I promised myself to avoid big ideas and concentrate on small things - things that might point to big ideas. Let the reader connect to the big ideas. I read, in an officer’s diary, that he spent four years trying to join the regiment in France, only to be kept back because he was a good marksman and was better to the army if he trained new recruits. That man was finally sent over to join the regiment just as the war ended. He didn’t get to fire a shot. But what I didn’t know was some regiments, the Newfoundland regiment included, marched into Germany to occupy the country after the war. And, on their way, this man noted they had stopped at Waterloo. There was a museum there, to the battle with Napoleon. And the soldiers went into the museum and were struck by this huge panoramic mural of Napoleon’s army. He wrote that, for the first time in his life, he felt he knew what war was like. And he was in a museum! To a war that occurred a century before. And here I was, in another museum, reading about his experience a century after he had felt it. In that way, noting down this transference of feeling, the research was quite similar to writing a novel.

LW: You have written short-stories, novels, and non-fiction. Which form do you prefer and why? 

MW: A common desire in writers is to be writing something other than what they are currently writing. Right now I’m accumulating paragraphs that, I hope, will be a novel. And so, unwittingly, I have two shapes in my head for things I might think are stories. But I tend to believe that whatever one thinks for five years can be shovelled into a novel. And so I will do my best to convert those story-scenes into novel passages. I must, or else I’ll never finish anything.

LW: Have we seen Michael Winter’s Magnum Opus yet? Or do you believe that is still to come?  

MW: I doubt that is something one can predict – an artist’s big book is usually labelled as such with hindsight. My sister sent me a small book entitled Minor British Poets and I thought how funny is that – none of these poets would have carried such a meagre ambition. My son’s mother is a writer too, and we often write his memoir for him. It begins, “I was the son of two minor Canadian novelists…” and all three of us roll on the floor at the humility. But one can only be humble. Many of the grand, ambitious, rolled-up-their-sleeves novels by my contemporaries bore me to death.

About the interviewer
Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Review by rob mclennan of "Silvija" by Sandra Riley

After the diminishing / dirt body kicked against kitchen wall /


Kept alive / what mercy has lessened / quietened as we speak


Of light / spoiled / cry-babying / a bunkum transubstantiated


Our cunning remains within. (“FARTHER / FATHER”)


Ottawa poet (by way of Saskatchewan) Sandra Ridley’s fourth trade poetry title is Silvija (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016). Following her collections Fallout (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2009), Post-Apothecary (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2011), and The Counting House (BookThug, 2013), Silvija is a book-length suite broken into “five feverish elegies,” composed as a “linguistic embodiment of the traumas of psychological suffering, physical abuse, and terminal illness.” Ridley’s poetry has long managed to be remarkably precise in detail while concurrently evasive, and yet, the poems that make up Silvija can be seen as incredibly revealing, writing:


You are no less dangerous than you were as you drag


Your bones / field stones / we never once wept upon


The firmament / eight children left with the lone wife


Who would not carry the quiet / the final cardiac pall


Paled thirty years / crescent moons / scars strapped


Below the heart. (“FARTHER / FATHER”)


The poems in Silvija still manage to maintain her particular flavour of evasiveness. Ridley’s Silvija takes its title from the name of her dedicatee, a “Silvija Barons,” coupled with dictionary definitions of “Silva” and “Silvan, Silvana, Silvanæ” that open the collection, suggesting a compounded definition involving a wooded area, a creature from a wooded area and the writing produced about a wooded area. Still, Silvija includes elements that are possibly more revealing than her previous collections, exploring and attempting meaning out of a poetry of violence, trauma and healing, and furthering her capacity for the book-length exploration. And, as much as her elegies hold together as a single, extended unit, two sections were actually composed as part of other projects, such as the section “CLASP,” composed as a response to Gatineau artist Michèle Provost’s multiform art installation, “Playlist,” or an early version of “VIGIL / VESTIGE” commissioned as “an engagement with Petro Isztin’s photo installation, ‘Study of Structure and Form.’”


While the effect of Ridley’s short phrases staccato and accumulate into a complex tapestry that refuses anything straightforward, the emotional content is raw, savage and brutally stark. There are epistolary elements to Silvija, writing a narrator speaking intimately and directly to an unnamed and shifting “you,” and the poems reveal a furious content of trauma and grief, pushing to comprehend and, ultimately, heal as best as possible. As she described, quickly, her first three collections in an interview at Jacket2: "the downwind effects of nuclear radiation in Fallout, medical incarceration, and the archaic and experimental treatments for tuberculosis and mental illness in Post-Apothecary, the trauma(s) of a relationship gone wrong in The Counting House,” Silvija writes out the trauma of loss, whether through physical and emotional abuse or death, composing four sequences – “FARTHER / FATHER,” “CLASP,” “VIGIL / VESTIGE” and “DIRGE” – that are surrounded by fragments of the fifth and final section, “IN PRAISE OF THE HEALER.” Via this simple thread, she holds the book together through a kind of mantra, or Greek Chorus, allowing that for whatever elese has occurred, healing, and even resolution, is possible (and the “healer” requires acknowledgment): “You give my hands the weight of your body. // Rest in me. // What I mean is this is where I choose to die.” What becomes so compelling is the understanding that it is through the very act of writing that allows the entire healing process, as she writes: “If you can’t speak / write in a fissured / alter-language / Of nerve-matter.” Indeed.


You and I—confined to our scrying room. Every falter of the limbs and every muscle of the face exposed to view. You are what I am. You cause as much sorrow. In what worse way could we vent this rage than by beating this head against these walls?


Sing for me. You seized the words out of my mouth—who suffers the most? You keep it all in. Noise—no noise. You upset me, baby. And you can’t do that.


We’re never left alone. Consider what the means are—we can’t lose what we haven’t ever had. You asked for it. You won’t get mercy. You are no more a whisper. (“CLASP”)

About the reviewer
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. In March 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). In fall 2015, he was named “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Review by rob mclennan of "Conjugation" by Phil Hall

 
 "Orange chair    blue porch    white Stetson
am re-reading      Cold Mountain   translated by Red Pine


  woke to fog    a cremation dream    it is garbage day


Olson:     words made to taste    like accuracy    pincers
  the king birds are back    an osprey shrieks


in the wooded swamp    ice reigns yet    first the school bus


  no motor    no drive   passes    only one child so far    up front
then the Trueloves    would it hurt them to signal    bastards
 
   despair is elitist    do not count pages   forget    the work


w & k    both built   from 2 Vs   or 3   end up with only    or  deface the cartoon    until the joke    is fearful"




Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall’s latest collection is Conjugation (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016), a complex, engaged and expansive collection that continue his meditative explorations into the lyric fragment, collage, poetics and the deep self. “Conjugation,” according to one online source, is “the modification of a verb from its basic form,” and Hall’s poetry manages a deep and serious play in the way words are constructed, pulling apart the mechanics of language and how it interacts with ideas (a play that has, it would appear, deeply influenced the work of Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie). As he writes: “but there’s a fee / a fee that sees    & hears wonky // fe-ces   we’re were   subtler/fugues   etc.” Similar to Dennis Cooley, Hall engages the mis-heard word, the mis-step, and runs with it, managing to make connections where there otherwise might not have been.


Over the past few poetry collections, Hall has shifted from his more overt engagements with Ontario gothic/rural, including his own childhood and history of abuse, to a more overt engagement of multiples—poetics, “the prison of metaphor,” pulling apart the minutiae of language, personal history, direct observations and his immediate environment (including the Ontario wilds of his Perth homestead)—each holding similar weight throughout, woven together as a precise, dense and thorough series of ongoing threads.
 
Constructed out of an opening poem, seven suite-sections and a coda, the short poem-fragments in Conjugation follow a similar tone and structure set in a number of Hall’s poetry collections, and, as with much of his work, the poems within could be presented in a variety of orders. It becomes curious how an order built so carefully, with such precision, is also constructed to be opened at any page, and read in either direction. His poems are less narratives than a series of accumulations, and the order in which you interact with them might even bring you to an entirely different conclusion.


Hall has become known for his shuffling, reworking and reprising his work, giving the sense that his poems might be less “finished” than simply set in a particular way for a particular temporal, whether temporary or permanent, reason, including poems shuffled and re-set for the sake of a chapbook, a public performance or a trade collection. “Early versions,” as Hall himself writes in the acknowledgments, of elements of the first section, “Gap & Hum,” appear previously in his X (Thee Hellbox Press, 2013) and My Banjo & Tiny Drawings (Flat Singles Press, 2015). The fifth section, “Essay on Legend,” was originally produced as a 2014 chapbook through Mark Goldstein’s Beautiful Outlaw Press (Goldstein is also designer of this current volume, as well as many of Hall’s recent trade collections). Cobbled and stitched together from a variety of threads, found and salvaged lines and objects, his “Essay on Legend” begins with an anecdote about a dog, utilizing such as a starting-point for a sequence of observations on poetry, anecdote and violence, each circling around the very idea of “legend.” The chapbook version was produced in an edition of 52 copies “in commemoration of the second annual Purdy Picnic at the A-frame, Roblin Lake, Ameliasburgh, July 26, 2014,” acknowledging the late poet Al Purdy as one of Phil Hall’s long-standing touchstones. At the Ottawa launch of the chapbook in 2014, Hall spoke of starting out as a good Ontario “son of Al Purdy” poet that slowly began shifting towards Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (1978); from stories and the anecdote to “that purse sound of the vowel.”


About the reviewer
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. In March 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). In fall 2015, he was named “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Review by rob mclennan of "A Pillow Book" by Suzanne Buffam

"F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote lists. Abraham Lincoln took midnight walks. Tallulah Bankhead paid a series of young caddies to hold her hand in the dark, as did Marcel Proust. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb so he could read after dark. I put a piece of paper under my pillow at night, and when I could not sleep, I wrote in the dark, wrote Henry David Thoreau, who once spent a fortnight in a roofless cabin with his head on a pillow of bricks" (Suzanne Buffam, A Pillow Book). 

"There are two kinds of insomniacs: those who fall asleep easily, only to wake up hours later to toss on their pillows until dawn; and those who toss on their pillows from the start, only to drift off just long enough to be roused at dawn by the crows. A little game I like to play, when I crawl into bed at the end of a long day of anything, these days, is to guess which kind, tonight, I will be" (Buffam, A Pillow Book).

Canadian poet and Chicago resident Suzanne Buffam’s third trade poetry collection, A Pillow Book (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2016), is a book of lists and a study of sleep, or, a lack thereof, akin to Anne Carson’s “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)” that appeared in an issue of Prairie Fire (Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 2004), before being included in Carson’s Decreation (New York NY: Knopf, 2005), or even angela rawlings’ collage-study Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006). As Carson wrote: “I want to make a praise of sleep. Not as a practitioner–I admit I have never been what is called ‘a good sleeper’ and perhaps we can return later to that curious concept–but as a reader.” Buffam’s, also, is very much a praise similar to Carson’s—as reader, admirer and not necessarily practitioner—and written as much as a series of observations amid a history of sleep and, specifically, pillows, which suggest structural echoes to Ottawa poet Brecken Hancock’s prose poem-history of bathtubs and bathing, The Art of Plumbing (above/ground press, 2013), a work later included in her remarkable Broom Broom (Ottawa ON: Coach House Books, 2014). As Buffam writes: “I am awake, begins a seventeeth-century British meditation intended for the dead of night, but ‘tis not time to rise, neither have I yet slept enough. I am awake, yet not in paine, anguish or feare, as thousands are.”

Following her two earlier poetry collections—Past Imperfect (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2005) and The Irrationalist (Anansi, 2010)—both of which were structured more traditionally as collections of shorter lyrics, A Pillow Book is striking for its structure as a single, extended series of observations and explorations, most of which exist as titleless and seemingly standalone prose pieces of varying lengths. One section, for example, includes but a single sentence: “Men and women sleep on the same pillow, says a Mongolian proverb, but they have different dreams.” Some elements of her two prior collections hinted at such kinds of longer, extended prose structures, but hadn’t the ambition of A Pillow Book. The collection (and title) plays off and explores Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, an infamous work of prose and poetry fragments (made further known due to Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film) often referred to as the first Japanese novel, composed as a “book of observations and musings recorded by Sei Shōnagon during her time as court lady to Empress Consort Teishi during the 990s and early 1000s in Heian Japan. The book was completed in the year 1002.” (Wikipedia). Buffam’s collection riffs off both content and form of Sei Shōnagon’s work through an accumulation of short sections, most of which exist as prose (or prose poems), some of which are written as short sketches and/or lists. As she writes: “Sei was her father’s name, Shōnagon her father’s rank. For a brief span of time at the turn of the tenth century, we know that she spent her nights behind a thin paper screen, recording her fugitive aperçus by candlelight with an ink stick on rice paper behind the bolted Heian gates. We know that she slept, when she managed to do so, on a small, hollow pillow mad of polished bamboo.” 

"Many lovers came to see Shōnagon, but few seemed to please her. Those who did, tact prevented her from praising. Anyone turning to her Pillow Book in search of courtly dirty-talk or cozy boudoir scenes by candlelight will turn away unsatisfied. The raciest scene in my abridged bedside edition consists of a woman taking a nap alone under bedclothes that smell faintly of sweat. It is, by and large, a dry read. So many Senior Courtiers of the Sixth Rank, Chamberlains of the Right and of the Left, Middle Counselors, Minor Chancellors, and Chancellors’ Messagers attend so many Festivals of the Fourth Day of the Fourth Month, of the Eighth Day of the Eighth Month, of the Blue Horses, of the Kamo, and of the Cherry Trees, wearing so many unlined robes of green, yellow, plum, scarlet, crimson, violet, rose, and cherry silk, in palm-leaf and wickerwork carriages, bearing herbal balls, hare-sticks, zithers, and thirteen-pipe flutes, it is hard to endure more than a page or two at a stretch. Therein lies much of  its appeal for me. It affords sufficient distraction on one’s pillow at night to transport one to a late Kurosawa dream sequence, but also enough repetitive and inconsequential minutiae to conjure, on a good night, the infinitely gentle god of sleep."

Sprinkled with personal moments of partner and daughter amid proverbs, historical tidbits on the pillow and sleep, as well as a book that works its way through Shōnagon’s thousand year old work, Buffam composes the fragments that make up A Pillow Book through and against an inability to sleep, sketching out short observations, lists and other fragments against what she aims toward but somehow misses—sleep itself: 

"Not a memoir. Not an epic. Not a scholarly essay. Not a shopping list. Not a diary. Not an etiquette manual. Not a gossip column. Not a prayer. Not a secret letter sent through the silent palace hallways before dawn. Lacking as it does a table of contents, an index, plot, or any discernable chronology or structure, with almost a thousand pages of surviving material, translated, retranslated, and republished in ever-shifting editions, what are the chances, I sometimes wonder, that any two people ever read the same Pillow Book?"

And, as Buffam suggests, hers is an entirely different creature than, say, Canadian-turned-American poet Alan Davies’ Sei Shōnagon (Ottawa ON: hole books, 1995), a chapbook composed as a sequence of one hundred and eighty-three tercets which barely reference the title (and alluded source material), writing:

Longing for sweet daybreak
and saying nothing of it
we hang a brazier on our mouth

About the reviewer
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. In March 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). In fall 2015, he was named “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.