A Shepard-Risset Glissando is a set of three musical scales, separated by octaves, played simultaneously to produce the auditory illusion of notes forever ascending (or descending). The effect isn’t ethereal so much as it is unnerving, because the layered scales never resolve. Songs and symphonies teach us to expect resolution. Melodies are boomerangs and hungry dogs: they always return. An ascending Shepard-Risset Glissando, instead, builds tension and anxiety to the breaking point—but without ever breaking.

Composer Hans Zimmer loves Shepard tones. And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that Dani Couture does as well. Listen Before Transmit (Wolsak and Wynn, 2018) her fourth book of poetry, never resolves—not even close. It only ascends. By the time you’ve reached the third and final untitled section of Listen, you’ve somehow made it to the outer atmosphere in a weather balloon: all the Earth you know reduced to miniatures, and space incomprehensibly massive above you.Continue Reading Listen Before Transmit by Dani Couture

Each September, I wend my way through the back roads of the Annapolis Valley to attend Becoming an Outdoors Woman (BOW): a volunteer-organized retreat and workshop series aimed at women interested in hunting, fishing, and other outdoorsy pursuits. This year, I brought my copy of Kate Braid’s Elemental (Caitlin Press, 2018), which I snuck away to read in my bunk between starchy meals, awkward attempts at skills acquisition, and quality time daydreaming into the campfire.

As a companion to a woman in the forest, Elemental is patient and instructive: a friend whose gaze you follow to a camouflaged rustle of bird-on-branch or “a wilderness of pattern” (10), or whose fingers find “a small red tattoo of arbutus bark” (15) on your skin. Elemental explores water, fire, wood, sky, and earth, and again, like the wise companion that it is, teaches you to see each of these materials erupting from the others: water from sky, earth from fire, fire from wood.Continue Reading Elemental by Kate Braid

The relationship between a mother and her child is a rocky phenomenon that can be difficult for some authors to capture. Genevieve Scott’s debut novel, Catch my Drift (Goose Lane, 2018), is a wonderfully realistic story of a complex family, and at the heart is mother and daughter, Lorna and Cara. As a millennial feminist, I’m pleased with even one unique female main character, so to read a novel with two female protagonists—women I was instantly devoted to—was a treat. Lorna’s social awkwardness and ambition, juxtaposed with Cara’s anxiety and longing to fit in, was perfectly told in this story. And while the two characters are like oil and water, I found them both utterly relatable and endearing in their own ways.Continue Reading Catch My Drift by Genevieve Scott

In 1956, Enman Greene takes his twelve-year-old daughter Penelope out for lunch at a Halifax fish ’n’ chip shop. She believes it’s for her birthday, but Enman has actually brought her there to reveal a secret: the truth about Penelope’s mother.

Once Enman begins his story, A Circle on the Surface (Vagrant Press, forthcoming in 2018), the fifth novel by Nova Scotia author Carol Bruneau, sweeps back to 1943 and the fictional Nova Scotia town of Barrein. It’s a time of great uncertainty, not only because of the war that looms over the lives of the town’s inhabitants, but because of the turmoil brewing between Enman and his new wife Una.

Una and Enman have moved to Barrein to care for Enman’s elderly mother. Una doesn’t like small-town living, however, nor does she like being caregiver to her mother-in-law, a role which has been thrust upon her largely by default. To escape her growing unhappiness, she spends much of her time wandering the beaches alone, where she encounters a mysterious stranger.Continue Reading A Circle on the Surface by Carol Bruneau

I’d forgotten Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is about religion. What I remember from the book, what most readers likely remember, is that eleven-year-old Margaret desperately wanted her period. For anyone who has had a period—for one year, ten years, forty years—that plot line is so off-the-charts bizarre it’s unforgettable. But the reason Blume’s book was passed around the school yard in the 1970s was not so much that Margaret wanted her period but that she and her friends actually talked about periods, as well as boys, bras, puberty and sex. Few people, youth or adults, spoke openly about such topics, very few about menstruation.

Almost fifty years later, Margaret is still in print and still touted by some as the guide to puberty. So how far have we progressed in terms of open discussion of periods? How much has changed in terms of books we can share, books that start conversations, answer questions, portray common experiences? Not far and not much, I say. Or I did say—until Gush.

Continue Reading Gush, edited by Rosanna Deerchild, Ariel Gordon & Tanis MacDonald