Reviewed by Jeffrey-Michael Kane

The Land Is the Ledger

Reading the Bible on Turtle Island does not ask whether Indigenous perspectives belong in biblical interpretation. It asks whether the Bible, as received by the Canadian church, has ever been properly placed—set down on this particular land, read in the presence of the peoples who were already here, held accountable to the covenants that were broken in its name.

H. Daniel Zacharias and T. Christopher Hoklotubbe bring specific credentials to this question. Zacharias is Cree-Anishinaabe/Métis, raised in Winnipeg on Treaty One territory, now Associate Dean at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia. Hoklotubbe is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, a professor at Cornell College in Iowa. Both are faculty for NAIITS, the first accredited Indigenous-designed theological institute in North America. They are not outsiders proposing a thought experiment. They are insiders proposing a return.

The book’s methodology is what the authors call “Turtle Island hermeneutics”—a reading practice rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing. They structure the work around the metaphor of the Big Drum, which calls people together for ceremony, and the Circle Dance, which moves communally rather than linearly. In interviews, they describe their collaborative writing process as “theological jazz”: passing prose back and forth, improvising on biblical themes, allowing insights to emerge from encounter rather than extraction. The approach is deliberately non-systematic. It resists the tidy categories of Western biblical scholarship in favour of something more relational, more rooted in story and place.

This could easily become sentimental. It does not. The book’s strongest moves are technical, not atmospheric.

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Consider their re-translation of Genesis 2:15. The traditional English rendering—God placed Adam in the garden “to till it and keep it” (RSV/NRSV)—positions the human as manager, overseer, agricultural executive. Zacharias and Hoklotubbe argue that the Hebrew is better rendered “to serve and conform oneself to” the land. The shift is small but seismic: the human is no longer master of the garden but its humble kin, shaped by the place rather than shaping it. This is not mere interpretive license. It is a defensible reading of the Hebrew, one that simply sounds different when heard on Turtle Island, where “dominion” has meant something very specific and very violent.

The authors build a series of such reframings, each placing a biblical text alongside an Indigenous experience and asking what resonance emerges.

Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness become a Vision Quest—a ceremonial practice of fasting, solitude, and openness to spiritual direction that is native to many North American peoples. The Holy Spirit descending as a dove becomes, in their reading, an “enfeathered” God, continuous with Indigenous understanding of birds as spiritual messengers. This is not syncretism in the pejorative sense. It is a claim about continuity—the recognition that the Spirit was present on this continent before any missionary arrived, and that the forms of that presence might look like what Indigenous peoples have always known.

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The most striking parallel is also the most uncomfortable. The authors read the story of Naboth’s vineyard—in which King Ahab, with Jezebel’s help, arranges the judicial murder of a man who refuses to sell his ancestral land—through the lens of the Doctrine of Discovery and the broken treaties that followed. Naboth’s crime was refusing to treat land as a commodity. His punishment was death and dispossession. The application to Canadian history is not subtle, and the authors do not make it subtle. They name the Numbered Treaties. They name the legal architecture that permitted the seizure of Indigenous land in the name of Christian civilization. They ask whether the church that carried the Bible to Turtle Island has ever reckoned with the fact that it also carried King Ahab’s logic.

Similarly, the Babylonian Exile becomes a lens for understanding the Residential School system. Both involve forced removal from ancestral land. Both involve the deliberate suppression of language, ceremony, and memory. Both produce a literature of lament and survival. The parallel is not exact—no parallel ever is—but it is productive. It asks the Canadian reader to consider what it means that the Bible contains its own archive of displacement and forced assimilation, and whether that archive has ever been read honestly in a country that produced the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Not every move in the book lands with equal force. The reading of the Atonement alongside the Sun Dance ceremony and the story of Corn Mother—both involving sacrificial suffering for the sustenance of the community—is suggestive but insufficiently argued. The book gestures toward equivalence without establishing its terms, leaving the reader to supply a theological bridge that the authors do not fully construct. The structural resemblance is real — all three narratives turn on suffering that sustains — but the authors do not pause to ask whether the mechanics of sacrifice are commensurable: whether the once-for-all logic of Pauline atonement and the cyclical, communal logic of the Sun Dance and Corn Mother can bear comparison without flattening each other. This is precisely the move most likely to alarm the book’s evangelical readership, and it is the one place where the authors offer neither the theological scaffolding to follow nor the exegetical argument to refuse. This is inevitable in a work that covers so much ground, but it leaves the reader wanting more rigour precisely where the stakes are highest.

The book is also, frankly, a challenge to its own publisher. IVP Academic is an evangelical press, and evangelicalism has historically been suspicious of anything that looks like religious syncretism. Zacharias and Hoklotubbe do not flinch from describing smudging, sweat lodges, and pipe ceremonies as valid spiritual practices—not merely cultural artifacts to be tolerated, but genuine encounters with the divine that preceded and may yet inform Christian faith on this continent. That IVP published this suggests a shift in evangelical self-understanding, at least at the academic margins. Whether that shift reaches the pews is another question.

For a Canadian audience, the book’s central provocation is simple and difficult: God was already here. The Creator was present on Turtle Island before 1492, before Jacques Cartier, before the Jesuits, before the Indian Act. The Indigenous peoples who lived on this land were not waiting in spiritual darkness for Europeans to bring the light. They had their own encounters with the sacred, their own covenants with the land, their own ways of reading the world as a text. What Zacharias and Hoklotubbe propose is not the replacement of the Bible but its re-placement—setting it down again on ground it never properly touched, reading it in the presence of peoples it was used to silence, and asking whether the church that carries the Bible to Turtle Island will answer for the distance between what the text commands and what was done in its name.

This is not comfortable reading. It is not meant to be. The authors are gracious but unsparing. They write as people who love the biblical texts and have been wounded by its misuse. They write as Indigenous Christians who have had to fight for the recognition that those two words can belong together. And they write as scholars who believe that the technical work of translation and interpretation is never neutral—that every rendering of the Hebrew, every choice of metaphor, every reading strategy carries a politics and a theology, whether we admit it or not.

The land, they suggest, is also a ledger. It keeps its own record. And sooner or later, every interpretation answers to what is written in the land.

J.M.C. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). As an ASD-1, he writes from this learned experience. Kane won the 2025 Ellis Prize for non-fiction, was a finalist for the 2025 Welkin Prize for Fiction and received the Reader’s Choice Award, was Shortlisted for the 2025 Letter Review Prize for Short-Fiction, named a finalist in the 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His prose work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Minnesota Review, New Ohio Review, Plough, Vita Poetica, Dappled Things, and Others. He lives in New Orleans with his family where he works as an attorney.

H. Daniel Zacharias is Associate Dean and Professor of New Testament Studies at Acadia Divinity College (Acadia University), Nova Scotia. He holds a PhD in New Testament Studies from Highland Theological College, University of Aberdeen. His scholarship focuses on the Gospel of Matthew, early Jewish and Christian interpretation of Scripture, and Indigenous hermeneutics. He is also affiliated with NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community and is the author and editor of multiple academic works in biblical studies.

T. Christopher Hoklotubbe is Assistant Professor of Religion at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. He earned a ThD in New Testament and Early Christianity from Harvard University Divinity School. His research centers on early Christianity in its Greco Roman context, the Pastoral Epistles, and Indigenous biblical interpretation. He serves as Director of the Indigenous Theological Circle and as Coordinator of Graduate Studies for NAIITS.

Reviewed by Jennifer Nundal

Abigail Favale, academic, theologian, and autobiographer, has published her debut novel through Ignatius Press. Our Lady of the Sign is a semi-surrealist work centred on the story of an atheistic college professor, Simone Stark, who embarks on a journey to visit the far-flung town in Idaho where she spent her adolescence. There, contemplating the need for an abortion for the second time in her life, she experiences a series of demonic encounters while reuniting with the figures of her past. These disquieting events, which constitute the majority of the novel, guide her on a journey to the discovery of true freedom.

“Yes.” The word rises easily from within her, up from under her heart. She says it again. “Yes, I promise. Yes.”’

This resounding ‘yes’ is the note upon which the novel ends, echoing the Marian fiat in keeping with the deeply Catholic tone of the entire book. The novel aims to draw the reader into Simone’s conversion as she gradually relinquishes her attempts to control the direction of her life through an abortion and an affair with a past lover; these are superseded, ultimately, by the final abandonment of herself to a burgeoning new existence, which will bring with it a child, shared with her boyfriend Peter who awaits her back home.

The subject of conversion is undeniably a beautiful one, and has been meaningfully explored by Favale in her autobiography Into the Deep (2018); however, here as the theme of a work of literary fiction, it fails to convince. The preponderant issue lies not so much in the quality of the prose—Favale is a competent writer—but rather the medium in which she has set out to elucidate her particular vision of a Catholic theological anthropology. This rich theological framework, expounded upon by Favale in her academic work The Genesis of Gender (2022), and the conversion story so powerfully told in her autobiography, appear again in Our Lady of the Sign as the heart of the novel. Here, however, the message of conversion and the call to explore more deeply the physical and spiritual dimensions of femininity are far less compelling when woven into this fairly transparent fictional narrative. Of course, literature is more than capable of conveying a worldview or belief system to the reader; great fiction, nevertheless, ought first and foremost to transport the reader into its own world—a world very much like our own, or perhaps not like it at all—before releasing them, hopefully changed, back into their own. “In Our Lady of the Sign, one feels oneself jolted back and forth continuously between the events of the narrative and a university classroom in which Favale qua academic is lecturing. In other words, in failing to leave her own academic voice out of her novel, she also fails to create an entirely believable fictional world in which the reader can lose herself. One is prevented from having any chance of becoming absorbed in the story due to an excessive number of intellectual guideposts.”

“Perhaps this was the moment, the call to adventure, that initiating moment of the hero’s journey. She’d taught it so many times in Lit 101, that archetypal narrative pattern that appears in every culture, every great story: the hero’s journey. And it begins with the call to break out of the confines of ordinary life, and into something more. Many try to resist the call. The risk is too great. What will be her answer?”

It is not altogether easy to express the impression left upon the reader by excerpts like this one. The transparent foreshadowing feels ungainly and rather didactic. In her essay, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” Zadie Smith summarizes the ends of fiction as having much to do with empathy, and the writing of it as being an exercise in a fascination with—and presumption about—that which is other than us. In other words, writing fiction involves the creation of characters quite possibly as unlike the author as can be, but with stories which draw on the wealth of emotion which is the inheritance of all human beings. It is in the feeling of human feelings, felt on behalf of another, that the power of fiction consists. Smith argues that our current culture challenges this view of fiction as empathetic, speculative, and other-oriented, and rather asks the writer to refrain from pretending to understand others, and to write instead only about herself, or someone very like herself.

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The character of Simone shares undeniable parallels with the author herself. An unbelieving feminist academic, unsatisfied with her life, finds herself in a push and pull romance with the allure of Catholicism: this is Favale’s story as much as it is Simone’s. Hence, it is as difficult to argue with this novel as it would be to argue with Favale about the genuine sincerity of her own story. How can one say she is wrong, or challenge her assumptions, when she knows this story through and through? It is thus that the reader finds herself in a position where, while she cannot disagree with the neatness or plausibility of the story, she does not, to once again draw upon Smith, “believe in the imaginary people… placed in these fictional situations.” The story does not grab, nor is it truly open to the reader’s unique and intimate interpretation and relationship to it; like Favale’s non-fiction, it feels factual even in its sentiments. It is fruitless to argue with such facts, but one also feels nothing for them. Consequently, the novel fails to argue itself into the reader’s heart, as all great fiction is wont to do.

“Virgin and mother at once, she thinks. An impossible ideal. She remembers her graduate seminar in medieval literature, the cult of Mary, her professor’s conviction that Mary was a male fantasy, brilliantly concocted to control women while seeming to elevate them.”

Again, the reader is jolted from the narrative. The purpose of such passages feels purely instructive, spelling out repeatedly an unambiguous message intended for the reader. Later in the novel, a page-long description of an icon of Our Lady of the Sign drives home the novel’s imagery and message again, with rather a heavy-handed force. Ultimately, one cannot escape the feeling that even the reader’s intimate, deeply personal reaction to the characters and ideas in the book has been preordained and must thus be carefully directed throughout. In her eagerness to share her convictions, Favale seems to have sold the characters of her story short; often, they feel more like mere tools employed in the delivery of her message than real, living people. Herein lies the fundamental flaw which prevents Favale’s novel from being a great work of fiction, as worthwhile as it may be in its many components.

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It is necessary to conclude with the admission that this novel was difficult to review. Favale is here, as in all her works, a clear thinker with a genuine talent for writing. Her gift for centering an intensely female experience in a Christian context is no small thing, and is much needed in our times. Should she continue to write novels, confessional or otherwise, it is only hoped that she might more completely abandon her academic proclivities and engage more boldly with that which is unlike herself, allowing for a fiction that truly transports without reservation.

Jennifer Nundal resides in Langley, British Columbia.

Abigail Favale, Ph.D., is a writer and professor in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. A Catholic convert with an academic background in gender studies, Abigail writes and speaks regularly on topics related to women and gender from a Catholic perspective.

Abigail’s memoir, Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion, traces her journey from evangelicalism to postmodern feminism to Catholicism. Her essays and short stories have appeared in print and online for publications such as First Things, Public Discourse, The Atlantic, Church Life, and Potomac Review. She was awarded the J.F. Powers Prize for short fiction in 2017. Favale lives with her husband and four children in South Bend, Indiana.

Reviewed by Mike Bonikowsky

When I was young, I used to write poems almost every day. Everything I saw inspired me. Everything I felt, I wrote down. Around every corner some new sight or feeling or experience would grab me and inspire me to write a few lines about it. I felt it so strongly that I was likewise assured that others would want to read these poems, so I would share them, submit them, publish them. I wrote poems like a bird sings, at least in regards to volume and frequency.

I don’t do that anymore. As I get older and my life slows down and the new experiences that used to inspire me become fewer and farther between, so too has my poetic output slowed. The big events of my life have already occurred and been duly chronicled in verse. The things I see and feel I have seen and felt before. Those poems, I tell myself, have already been written. Nobody wants to hear it again.

“This May Be The Year”, by Carol Giangrande, is a much-needed reminder that I am wrong: Wrong about how I see my life as I enter its second half, wrong about the function of poetry.

Giangrande writes poems about everything. She writes poems about getting her hair cut. She writes poems about what she sees on the news. She writes poems about dead friends I will never meet. More than anything else, she writes poems about birds. Her sharp, staccato free verse, never more than a few stanzas long, cries out like birdsong in all its forms. There are dawn-choruses here, and evensongs. There are cries of pain, many of them, that cut through the silence like the scream of the red-tailed hawk. There are little hymns of anger and of loss. There are celebrations of the everyday, and chilling portents of the end to come. In the titular poem, which describes the failure of the natural order as symbolized by a mother hawk seen on a webcam who has failed to lay an egg:

Online,

Around her head, an aureole of sun,

Feathers darkening the wide screen

Body large with waiting for whatever comes.

Not every bird-poem is an apocalypse. Most are just encounters with birds Giangrande has clearly loved and been moved by the sight and sound of, not earth-shattering experiences with rare birds, but just ordinary birds doing the ordinary things that birds do. As her truly lovely self-description by the titular bird in “Kingfisher” concludes:

My eggs are sunlit, my young a dazzle

Of longing and hunger. Each spring breaks open

Into summer’s ripening. Then and now,

My wings are streaked with sapphire rain.

My body is silk on the wind.

In reading these poems, it is made overwhelmingly clear to me that Giangrande is wiser than I am. In this collection, Giangrande shows me what I have forgotten: There are no ordinary birds. There are no ordinary events in a human life. Every bird, every person we meet, every day in every life, is a miracle. Every bird contains within it the whole of the sky. Each piece is an irreducible part of the whole. Poetry is not the capturing of the extraordinary, but the natural human response to the true reality of the human experience. It is the absence of poetry that is unnatural, extraordinary. We are meant to make art as the birds sing: constantly, naturally, unconsciously. It is part of our function. We are meant to live as the hawk she describes in “Rusty”:

He lives in the grip of his soul’s needs;

food, nest, and safety,

gives me his presence,

gift enough.

Giangrande knows that the moment is all we have, that the rest is an illusion. We, no less than the birds, are given our daily bread and no more. In a sense the birds she sees are her daily bread, her little ration of beauty to sustain her in the grey and dying city that serves as the backdrop for so many of her poems. Giangrande has the gift of recognizing and accepting her ration, and then fulfills her poet’s vocation by transubstantiating it into something that can sustain her audience.

The poems that comprise the first part of the book, entitled “Birdmind,” celebrate beauty and anticipate heaven. The next three sections, “Breath of Ghosts”, “Memory’s Shadow”, and “In The Long Grass,” provide contrast by sinking deep into the grim and grey world of humanity. They are primarily poems of mourning: Mourning a presence that should be enough but never seems to be. Mourning for dead and dying friends. Mourning for the natural world and the violence visited upon it. Mourning for the fatal bent of history.

There are poems about mass shootings, about the Covid-19 pandemic, about the long shadows of the Holocaust and 9/11, about sexual assault, and the Syrian civil war. Birds fly in and out of nearly all of these scenes, although they are no longer the focus. They are there, high above, still singing, reminding us of what we have forgotten, how we got into this mess, and maybe how we will get out of it again. There are hints of hope here, but only hints and only for those with ears to hear and eyes to see, as in the final stanza of “Red-Tails Over Gotham”:

How they care for their young,

Nestle them close against the night,

Cries of the enormous city

Stilled under their wings.

Christ, the mother-hen is here, among the hawks, gathering Jerusalem under his wings, if we can see him. But that is no guarantee.

If I could take fault with any aspect of Giangrande’s collection, it would be this scarcity of hope, the air of fatalism that infuses most of the poems. While it is less present in “Birdmind,” it seems to grow as her focus leaves the birds and settles on the world around her. The birds in her poems are free because they cannot look beyond “the grip of their soul’s needs,” to use her lovely phrase. We are not so lucky. We are cursed with understanding, with the knowledge of good and evil. The best we can hope for, Giangrande seems to say, is to temporarily forget ourselves in imitation of the birds, a brief holiday from the anxiety that is our true and natural state. As her collection ends in the final stanza of “In The Long Grass,”

Four million years before the sun goes out.

Today we rest in the long grass.

This is a chilling note to end on. I, as I am today, find myself longing for another word, another coda from her, something with more hope than this. Perhaps this is because I see so much of myself in Carole Giangrande. She loves the world she sees, and because she loves it she is afraid. She sees the end coming, and she is not wrong. She is trying to keep one eye on the birds, and one eye on the news. But the birds are miracles of subtlety, and the news doesn’t play fair, and it is clear which is coming to dominate her inner eye. I can’t judge her for this, for I have had the same experience. It is to Giangrande’s credit that she does not invent what she does not observe herself, and I applaud her courage in staring into the abyss, but I find myself wishing the seer had read brighter portents in these dark days. This is my weakness, however, not hers.

What Giangrande does see and understand and makes her thesis, is that to be human is to make art as a gift to others, of one kind or another, even if that art is just the effect of our presence on the mosaic around us. The poems in This May Be the Year are by their very existence a call back to this essential function of humanity, one I personally very much needed to hear. We do not make because we are paid to do so, or because we have been given the title of artist, or because we have been given a platform to do so, or because our Voice is Important. We make because we are not fully human unless we are doing so, as the birds are not themselves without their song.

Carole Giangrande has given generously of herself in this collection, of her joy and pain. She has held nothing back, and if nothing else I feel that after my time spent with this collection I have come to know a human being I did not know before, and that in and of itself is priceless. Giangrande has fulfilled her vocation as poet, and inspired me to do likewise. She has kept the promise she makes to the bees, and to us, in “Worker Bee”:

I tell them I will try my best

To bring them joy…

That I am only a helper,

That the round world ripens like a berry, even

In the midst of death,

That we hover inside

The same mysterious hope.

Mike Bonikowsky lives in Dufferin County, Ontario where he works as a caregiver. He is the author of Red Stuff and The Shepherd of Princes, both published by Solum Literary Press.

was born and raised in the New York city area, and came to Canada to study at the University of Toronto. She’s worked as a broadcast journalist for CBC Radio, a Writer-in-Residence and as a teacher of journalism and political science, and she’s given readings at Harbourfront, Hart House and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her fiction, articles and reviews have appeared in Grain, New Quarterly, Descant, Canadian Forum, Matrix, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and Books in Canada. Her poetry has been published in Queens Quarterly, Grain, Spiritus, The New Quarterly, Braided Way, Mudlark and Prairie Fire. Her essays have appeared in Eastern Iowa Review, EcoTheo Review and Antigonish Review. She’s married and lives in Toronto where she enjoys birding and photography.

Reviewed by Liv Ross

Josh Nadeau is a Christian artist based out of western Canada. His artwork blends the American Traditional style with deeply symbolic imagery akin to ancient Christian iconography. His work does not reject contemporary design in favour of ancient tradition, but seeks to blend the two. Each post on his Instagram page – Sword and Pencil – is packed with details pointing to deeper spiritual realities, and the captions explore those realities in simple and spare sentences.

While Nadeau makes careful use of clean lines and simple colours, he does not use his art or platform to paint a fluffy, organized, and ultimately declawed picture of Christianity. Wild animals and wild men with swords, blood, and skulls often make their appearances. This art fully presents both Resurrected reality and the wild stories of the Old Testament prophets and the hill of Golgotha that got us there. His images take several cues from historic church traditions. These are ancient images and ancient truths depicted in his own particular way.

In February of 2025, Nadeau added ‘author’ to his resume with the publication of his first book Room for Good Things to Run Wild. While the tagline reads “How ordinary people become everyday saints,” it is not a step-by-step guide of do’s and don’t’s. He tells a story. Through the book, Nadeau takes us through his own Dantean journey from the heights of material success, into the jolt of spiritual sickness, and down through the gates of Rock Bottom — to ascend, ultimately, the difficult, slow spiral back upward.

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The book opens with the angel’s provocative question from the Gospel of Luke: “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” Here, the angel asks Mary and her companions why they search for Christ where he is not. Whereas the women were seeking Christ in a tomb, Nadeau seeks to find him in a 5:00am double of bourbon. Like the dark wood with which Dante’s Inferno begins, Nadeau opens with darkness and a jolting awake to realize that something is very wrong. He has the familiar veneer of a successful career in finance, a marriage, a church community. His inner life, however, is overrun with darkness. With rage. Disconnection. Pain. He develops a dependence on alcohol to keep the surface smooth enough to maintain the image.

A familiar story, Nadeau isn’t telling his version because it is somehow different or special. I suppose that every single one of us has fallen into our moment of waking up in the dark wood. We all recognize the dissipation and disappointment of a daily life nowhere near the abundance-filled promise of Christ. We all have our vices that we turn to in order to get by. Josh’s story is not new, and the way he tells it really isn’t new, either. This might seem like a critical observation when newness and novelty is a major selling point; however, I came to know Nadeau’s work through his careful use of modernized art styles influenced and informed by ancient iconographic practices, and found that he uses this same method in his writing. Using parallels, he brings in saints and writers from across history to help him as he journeys through his personal inferno and purgatorio. G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis take their turns filling the role of Virgil. There is the cyclical nature of his journey, traveling around actual and metaphorical mountains and facing both trials and triumphs. He even passes out a few times in a very Dantean fashion.

There are other allusions to stories, some ancient like Christ’s parables or The Way of the Pilgrim, others less so like Dostoevsky and Steinbeck’s novels, and even those revolving around popular figures such as Rocky Balboa. All of these are woven together along with personal sketches of pastors, therapists, friends, and his wife, Aislinn. The old and the new come together.

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Another element to note is Nadeau’s use of physical movement throughout his narrative. While the Christian journey is not simply a spiritual one, it can be easy to tell a personal redemption story that deals with great spiritual change and limits physical involvement to, “And then I stopped drinking.” Nadeau frequently uses walking, biking, hiking and boxing to keep the physical and metaphysical tied together. It is a moving story in a fairly literal sense. Important questions are asked on a bike ride to work. Epiphanies are reached on a walk to the grocery store. Truths are retrieved on a hiking trail to an Irish abbey.

He notes speed, effort, colour, temperature, and discomfort as carefully as he notes his thought processes, all of which lead to some very beautiful passages: “The brush is thick here, and it’s that same burning-rust colour, alive against the cobalt sky and frothing river, against the golden fleece and hazel antlers of the stag.” And it leads, too, to some rougher ones: “it’s a short walk up the street, unlocking the door beside the restaurant entrance, walk up the entryway stairs, open my apartment door, grab a trash can, and head to my room.” Nadeau tells an embodied story that matters because it is inextricably set in the real world we inhabit in our very real bodies.

Weaving our way back to the tagline, “How ordinary people become everyday saints,” readers may find it to be a little bit misleading. There is no 12 Step Program offered, and Nadeau makes clear throughout that his story is not offered as a blueprint. (Which is comforting. The re-direction of his life was cemented by a several month trip to the UK. I feel it’s safe to say that this is not reliably replicable for many people). The book functions more like a testimony to the fact that ordinary people can become everyday saints. Testimonies are for encouragement rather than instruction. The Lord knew what Nadeau and his wife needed for them to walk more closely with him, and he opened that way. I never got the feeling, while reading, that Nadeau advocated for crossing oceans, or even crossing denominations in order to find a closer and satisfying relationship with God. What I did find was another person who recognized the same need that I felt, and who was coming from the same waters that I swim in. Stories of saints throughout church history are wonderful and necessary, but can sometimes seem far removed from the world we walk in now. To have someone generously share, not only the ins and out, but the ups and downs of this journey to sainthood, in the same age with the same temptations, distractions, divisions and rumours of wars, it is encouraging.

I do want make a final note, which is that I was pleased to see that in making his way into the written word, Nadeau did not leave behind his artistry that first drew me to his work. His visuals are woven into the book with pictograms for both section and chapter headings. Each section, or Act, is ended with a liturgical prayer and visual compendium of images for the events and observations covered in the section. These build upon each other across the book into a final, comprehensive splash page. It is filled with his signature clean lines and contrasting colours. The boldness grabs your attention, and the intricacy invites you to stay and contemplate.

is an urban monk, a poet, and essayist writing in and from the Ozarks. She serves on the Traces Journal editorial team as Reviews Editor for Poetry. In addition to writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, music-making, and mischief. She has been published in Fare Forward, The Front Porch Republic, Silence and Starsong, Solum Journal, and VoeglinView.

is an artist and author from the West Coast of Canada. He has appeared on numerous podcasts, written articles for magazines and websites, and has created art for Jordan Peterson’s History of Western Civilization, as well as churches, musicians, and other organizations, like The Chosen, Searock, Vuvivo, and the Daily Wire. He has his Undergrad in Physics, a Master’s in Theological Studies, and a doctorate from the School of Hard Knocks. He is a husband to Aislinn and a father to Ransom. He spends his days reading, writing, bouldering, and trying to enjoy every good and perfect Gift. Josh is the founder of Sword and Pencil and Every Day Saints.

Reviewed by Brittney Congleton

The titular kingdom in Daniel Cowper’s most recent work, The Kingdom of the Clock, is a sprawling, beautiful, treacherous, and coastal metropolis. It is a city much like Vancouver, rendered as a modern-day Babylon and cast along the edge of an unnamed ocean; its orderly, massive, mechanical sheen stands in stark counterpoint to the wildness of the natural world which lies just beyond its borders.

Switches click. Wheels spin. In stacks 
of glass and steel five million citizens

still sleep. Dawn nears. Clocks will mete out time 
in twenty-fourths, measure moments

by the pace at which hearts beat 
and break ...

Cowper’s book is an elegant, offbeat gem, a work which strikes a balance between the urgency of a gripping narrative and perceptive, piercing lyricism. It is a novel in verse which spools out its tales of the dangers and distractions of contemporary urban life in lean, taut couplets whose compressed lines yield a vivid, kaleidoscopic view of those unmoored and lost in the disorienting, savage swirl of the modern city. The book’s interconnected storylines follow an impressive range of characters across a twenty-four-hour period; among its many subjects are lawyers and artists, boat captains and baristas, fraudsters and scammers, retirees and roofers. They live in gleaming modern condos with seaside views, in pseudo-hippie art communes, on board the floating decks of boats, and within the walls of refurbished, backyard storage sheds.

The book documents the city and its many characters with the soberness of journalistic detail, yet it is driven by an inner narrative propulsion and infused with lines that zip and swoon and sing with the music of the best, and most precise, poets. Cowper parcels out the storylines of his characters in condensed episodes reminiscent of vignettes: a homeless man nearly drinks himself to death on Shaoxing rice wine in a cedar hedge, a father and son guide the corpse of a dead seal from the beach out to sea for a proper burial, a penniless artist tries to save her winged wax sculptures from the clutches of a greedy landlord. As the narrative unfolds, we see Cowper pull strands such as these back up to the story’s surface, their subtle reappearance revealing them to be threads tied to a much larger, ornate tapestry.

Some of the city’s citizens have bought into the illusion which the kingdom offers, namely, that submission to this artificial construction of time and money and desire will yield wealth and immortality. Others are less certain, uncomfortably tethered to the cityscape, occasionally aware of the pull towards more natural ways of living which beckon from beyond the kingdom.

...list the house and buy
nothing grand, A clearing at road’s end,

with hens for Meghan to guard from mink and coyote,
with cherry trees to pick. A produce stand

by the highway - even just a dropbox with a jar...

This simpler, wilder, and more primal form of life is yearned for by a number of Cowper’s characters, who are seeking a respite from the cold, calculated logic of laws and business acumen, from the lure of casinos and the pallid spectres of drug addiction, homelessness, and suicide. Kingdom of the Clock posits that we have taken on a way of life that is unnatural, that aligns itself with artificial spaces and cycles which are driven by ledgers and overseas bank accounts rather than the sun and the moon and the seasons.

We remember, we remember! Clocks 
have revived our memory of rocks

ticking downstream;

...What’s it all for if not to leap
upstream to the slopes where firn snows sleep?

It is those who exist on society’s outer edges or who possess an artist’s eye who grasp that something is amiss amid the seas of concrete and the steel edifices dotting the skyline. They may paint it, sculpt it, write it, or drunkenly preach it on the city streets, but Cowper’s outsiders and artists bear witness to the truth that we cannot escape the natural rhythms of this world, and that despite our thieving and drinking, our recklessness and selfishness, we also cannot escape our need for the naturally embedded desires for love, companionship, and, especially, forgiveness, even as we struggle to accept them.

...Ken bows his head. 

Glen knows he’s praying -

                                                    It’s such a waste, 
Glen thinks. If I’ll always relapse, go back

to sin, isn’t it a sin to let them try 
to trust me again?

...Glen turns his head

to the wall, but Ken kneels by his side 
till his brother’s asleep.

This is the tension which drives Kingdom of the Clock, where atonement is longed for but grace is uneasily accepted. Cowper has crafted a conflicting mosaic of hours, an acknowledgement that renewal is just a day away, if we can see it, and that the prevalence of sinners does not disprove the urgent need for saints. Any chance for salvation and reconciliation will demand we exist in a state of true empathy, where we dispense with our selfishness and fear, and have the courage to confront both the best and the worst of ourselves. Cowper’s work prods us to tacitly acknowledge that without a disciplined mindfulness and a

sense of purpose, modern life can quickly become a ruined, wrecked hull, and if we are to right the ship, or find a way off it, we must be brave enough to ask, as many of Cowper’s characters do as one of the book’s central motifs, “what’s it all for?”

Britt Congleton holds degrees from Asbury University and KU Leuven. He is an English Instructor (Adjunct) at Midway University, and is currently developing several short stories of his own.

Daniel Cowper’s poetry and critical writing has appeared in numerous publications in Canada, the US, Ireland, and the UK. His poems have been collected in The God of Doors (winner of the Frog Hollow Press Chapbook contest) and Grotesque Tenderness (MQUP, 2019). His latest work is Kingdom of the Clock, a novel in verse about urban life. He is a contributing editor with New Verse Review, and lives on Bowen Island with his wife Emily and their children.

Reviewed by Bret van den Brink

A Gate to an Echoing Green: A.F. Moritz’s Great Silent Ballad

I find myself uncertain about how to begin my review of A.F. Moritz’s poetry collection, Great Silent Ballad. Quite simply, it is beautiful. I want my opinion about that to be clear before I move on to what follows, since, to give my review a definitive scope, I have decided to focus on the role of poetic echo in the collection. Such a focus is, perhaps, perilous. As Northrop Frye wrote in his Anatomy of Criticism, “Demonstrating the debt of A to B is merely scholarship if A is dead, but a proof of moral delinquency if A is alive,” and, since Moritz is very much alive, I suppose I am putting my moral delinquency on full display in what follows.

Some poets are sensitive when one brings up their poetic debts, but I suspect Moritz isn’t among them. He is not afraid, on occasion, to wear his echoes on his sleeve, as it were; John Milton and William Blake are all but summoned by name early in the collection in the poem “Beyond.” A creative indebtedness to Wallace Stevens is signalled by the allusion to “Anecdote of the Jar” in the opening of “There Is Still.” Reading the collection as a whole, I have the sense of reading someone with a deep possession of the wide range of the English lyric (additionally, there are allusions beyond my ken to works in other languages). I do not mean that Moritz’s poems are derivative, much less that they are unoriginal, but that they are written by somebody who might say about the whole tradition of English lyric what Petrarch said about Virgil, Flaccus, Severinus, and Tullius: “I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow” (Rerum Familiarum Libri). Such possession enables, as John Hollander describes in The Figure of Echo, “a way of alluding that is inherently poetic, rather than expository, and that makes new metaphor rather than learned gestures.” The margins of my copy are scrawled with the names of those I heard echoed: Shelley, Tennyson, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, among many others. A Romantic, in a broad sense of Romantic, undersong hums palpably throughout the collection, as it deals with its subject of belief and unbelief, of love and society, and of the role of the literary arts.

The collection explores this subject matter, itself of great interest, with great energy. I find myself driven from line to line and poem to poem with an onward force, which is sometimes strong and sometimes gentle, but always present, and always new. In “July Mountain,” Wallace Stevens tells us that we live “[i]n an always incipient cosmos”: such, I believe, is the cosmos in which Moritz’s collection lives, and moves, and has its being. In its opening lyric, Moritz expresses the

longing

For a beginning that is not a longing

To begin, a dawn to be dawn not dawn’s herald.

It is an audacious desire, perhaps, to be the sun itself and not the morning star; Milton’s Satan expresses something like it in the opening of Paradise Lost’s fourth book, but there is nothing Satanic in Moritz’s expression. There is too much goodness, too much hope for that.

In Great Silent Ballad there is a persistent sense of a doorway opening before us, welcoming us to pass through. These passageways, I believe, are High Modernist in origin, related in part to those of Stevens and Eliot, such as the former’s “gate / To the enclosure, day” in “The Rock” and the latter’s “door we never opened / Into the rose-garden” from the Four Quartets. Thus, in Moritz’s “Dancer Speaking,” the speaker says,

I wish we could pass away

into the moonlight beyond the doors

open to a deserted garden.

This movement into or through something just further ahead is one of the essential movements in the collection’s poems, but there is a contrary movement as well:

but we go back

to the browning rind,

home, arguing, our doors slamming.

That “browning rind” is reminiscent of Keats’s celebration of process in “To Autumn,” but with the quarrelling and the slamming of doors one senses that the Keatsian ripeness has passed to rot, the lovers becoming like Stevens’s “Two golden gourds distended on [their] vines,” which, “Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque” (“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”).

This troubled ripeness returns in “Word and Silence: After Neruda,” where the speaker claims, “My hands in this emptiness gather / bunches of grapes.” The poem beautifully evokes the Johannine Logos, “the Word was made flesh” (John 1.14), who promises water which quenches all thirst and springs “up into everlasting life” (John 4.14). The poem enacts a delicate dance of faith and doubt, and one senses, just over the horizon of the poem, the presence of something like Stevens’s sense of destitution in “The American Sublime”:

The spirit and space,

The empty spirit

In vacant space.

What wine does one drink?

While Moritz’s poem ends without knowing “who” is “picking petals” from “the silence on high,” one feels that somebody is there, dwelling behind, or perhaps within, the silence, just as there are bunches of grapes to be gathered in the emptiness. Sacramental possibilities endure, and when one reads of the speaker reaching out their “hands” to “gather” the grapes of sacramental wine, one hears an echo of Emily Dickinson: “The spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise.” (Moritz will use the first line of the same lyric, “I dwell in possibility,” to open “Householder” later in the collection.)

Instances of echo, loud or faint, conscious or unconscious, abound, and while I would not find it tedious to go on and on, I suspect that such elaborations would bring me beyond the scope of a brief review. Some of the poems touch me so deeply that I find myself unable yet to articulate their impact: “The Baptist” from towards the end of the collection is among them. The last poem of the collection, “Elsewhere,” pains and bewilders me. To close, allow me to quote from “After Tagore”: “O my friend. O my belovèd. My door / is open. Don’t pass by me like a dream.” Reading lines like these, I feel the weight of literary history, the sense of an echo that I cannot quite place.

Tennyson uses the phrase “O my friend” in both In Memoriam A.H.H. and The Princess. But there seems to be something more, as when Whitman transmutes the spiritual eros of the Song of Songs into intimate gesture, as though he would embrace his reader. Pondering over such lines, I feel as though a door is opening before me, and though I cannot say what lies beyond, I have a strong urge to cross the threshold and find the place from where the echoes come.

Bret van den Brink is a literary critic, amateur poet, and dabbler in theology. Some of the sundry venues that have featured his scribblings include Notes and Queries, Radix Magazine, Traces Journal, The Robert Graves Review, [spaces], The Merton Annual, and Christian Courier. He co-hosts the podcast Mandatory Media, and he is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Toronto.

A. F. Moritz has written more than twenty books of poetry, most recently, Great Silent Ballad (2024), As Far As You Know (2020), and The Sparrow (2018). Moritz served as the sixth Poet Laureate of Toronto from March 2019 to May 2023. He also served for more than a decade as the Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at Victoria University at the University of Toronto. Moritz has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, inclusion in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. He is a three-time nominee for the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry (Rest on the Flight into Egypt, The Sentinel, and The New Measures). He was the winner of the ReLit Award for poetry in 2005 for Night Street Repairs. His collection, The Sentinel, a Globe and Mail Top 100 of the Year, won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize. And Great Silent Ballad received the 2025 Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize.

Reviewed by Celia Jordan

For many, the idea and practice of carnival are foreign concepts. There are, of course, some exceptions. Mardi Gras celebrations continue to be a favourite holiday in places like New Orleans, for example. But by and large, secular societies have dispensed with the hurly-burly festivals – those nights of role-reversals and chaos that have served their societal purpose in both the East and West through much of history.

Scholars have offered explanations of their disappearance. A central theory, articulated by Charles Taylor, among others, is that our society cannot admit chaos as an active principle. We are deeply unsettled by it, and so we pretend it does not exist. Our lawns are manicured, our slaughterhouses out of sight, our vagaries sanitized and psychologized.

Alfred Nicol’s latest volume of poetry, After the Carnival, forbids us the luxury of ignoring the chaos we have cast to the margins. The collection’s premise is that chaos lurks in everything – the banal is tinged with the grotesque; the quotidian is anything but casual. Needless to say, these poems are not “sweet-smelling flowers” held out for our delight; the overall tone of the work, at least that carried by its subject matter, is heavy.

The collection’s opening poem warns us that the path we are on doesn’t “tak[e] [us] very far. / It only brings [us] back to where [we] are.” Well, ‘where we are’ in the pages that follow is more often than not a frightening place: the mind of a troubled murderer, the home of a child-killer, the thoughts of the lonely and isolated.

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And yet, the darkness that either colours or flutters in the corner of every poem does not feel oppressive. This, I think, we can attribute largely to Nicol’s effective use of form. Readers already familiar with his work will find in this collection all the formal artistry and playfulness they have come to expect from him. His language and lines are often exquisitely crafted. But here, the reliable structure and lightheartedness of his verse is working overtime: the juxtaposition of the Puckish rhymes and rhythms with the unsettling subject matter is strangely provoking.

In “Nuclear Option,” for example, the speaker asks us to consider writing the names of everyone we’ve ever known on a paper, which we are then to consign to fire. We will see, on that paper,

mixing with men of poison minds
the man of conscience in his cell.
Oblivion accepts all kinds.
Farewell. Farewell. Farewell.

The terror of oblivion, the fear that everything will go up in smoke and no auguries will be read from the ashes, is ostentatiously absent from the tempo of these lines. Form and content are at odds in a way that is both unsettling and, as we continue to read, reassuring.

It is difficult to name exactly what about the tone of many of Nicol’s speakers keeps us from sinking into despair. After all, it can sometimes feel that we are on a merry-go-round in a fairground of unease. It starts gradually in the first of the book’s six sections, All the World There Is. Here, only moments catch us off guard. In “A Notable Catch in a Tourist Town,” the tuna hauled in by a fishing boat draws the attention of bored seaside tourists, who gather round for the excitement of “food outside of fridges,” which “breathless, … still can bleed.” The poem ends with a young boy who “cuts through the crowd and thrills / to catch a glimpse inside the gaping gills.”

Through his penetratingly honest gaze, Nicol continues to reveal to us what lurks inside the “gaping gills” of ordinary life. In “Stay At Home Advisory” – a quarantine poem – the speaker asks us to pity the perpetual recluses, those who have always shunned the society and companionship we so desperately missed during the pandemic. The poem ends,

But those you pity may well ask,
estranged, Was it not ever thus?
Who goes outside without a mask?
So what is quarantine to us?

Who goes outside without a mask? The carnival is not contained, nor an extraordinary measure. We wear our masks of normalcy to hide the carnivalesque behind. Just as in many traditional carnivals, where revellers would wear animal masks, it is often the animals in Nicol’s poems that alert us to the reality that we – wilfully or otherwise – miss.

In “Blizzard,” when his dog drags him outside during a storm, the speaker notices the austere beauty of the night. He muses, “all the world there is / under the nose of dogs who drag their fools / from here to there.”

The speaker in “Blizzard” labels himself the fool; this is a uniquely fitting title for many of the speakers throughout the volume, and it is the spirit of the jester that enables both the frightening confrontation of our hastily hidden hypocrisies and the ability to handle it without self-pity or despair. It is the jester’s spirit that sings, “Farewell. Farewell. Farewell.” It is the jester’s teasing role-playing, pretending to take on the view of the masses to expose their lunacy, that reigns in the voice of “The Man in The Middle.” Of the figure held up by the crowd as a hero, only to be turned upon when he fails to tow the line, the speaker enthusiastically incants,

We're not apt to thank him.
We'll spank him and yank him
and toss him in pieces on
top of the heap.

Even in the poems that are not in this ironic, half-mocking mode, there is the jester’s refusal to commit to a side: truth demands that neither despondency nor triumph be given too much ground. It is hard to gaze honestly at things and not sink into silence. At times, it is a silence that brushes despair – an inability to find comfort because the horror or senselessness or utter banality of the thing makes all action meaningless. At other times, the silence is revering, an homage we pay to a beauty or goodness that absolutely surpasses words. The value of Nicol’s poetry is the persistent striving towards silence that is neither of these things, while acknowledging both.

We do not sense in Nicol’s verse a spirit that takes refuge in the little miracles of beauty that surround us – the flower opening towards the sun, the intricacy of the bee’s activity, etc. This is not a volume that marginalizes despair by dwelling on the quiet abundance our distracted eyes miss. Rather, it is everywhere, rushing into his lines, threatening to burst the project at its seams.

“The Surface,” whose epigraph is a quotation from Sartre, begins, “There is an emptiness in everything, / like the shade cradled in the crescent moon.” Nicol wields his imagery masterfully here and throughout the poem to evoke the sinking hopelessness that comes when the abyss starts to show itself in everything:

another shade that walks the streets alone,
past windows—yes, the windows too are blank,
where people dwell inside their separate lives,
huddling there like money in the bank—
to where the river sheathes its glinting knives.

We could note many things: the conversational tone, the allusions to Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the effective use of rhyme, and the lack of self-indulgence when confronting the void. The poem is unrelenting, but it does not yield itself to the “néant” altogether. The final lines are ambiguous: “The tides have seized; the stillness is unreal. / The surface poses as a sheet of steel.” It is not an absolute assertion – “poses” plays an obfuscating role. Is the water really, devastatingly a sheet of steel? Or is it merely appearing so to this speaker at this time?

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The opening image of this poem is echoed in “His Eyes Rest on Julia, Sleeping.” Instead of the crescent moon that cradles shade, here it is “the hollowed stone that cups the rain.” Unconscious of itself, this stone brings comfort and coolness to the speaker, who proceeds to list other phenomena whose beauty or enjoyment is not for its own sake but for ours. The poem ends, “So love, that turned this world and gave it shape, / has need that I should keep watch through the night.” This, too, is a close that thwarts easy interpretation – “need” is a heavy, unromantic word that might be read as vainglorious: love does not exist unless I notice it. The poem’s title also renders the final lines ironic: a man gazing at a woman asleep is now almost always freighted with some uncomfortable undertones. And yet, through this, there is a sincerity to the sentiment, and an honest reminder that we pay attention to the beauty of this world; a recognition that it is not fully itself unless its succour is accepted.

Nicol’s ease with ambiguity carries through right to the end of the volume. The last poem, “Gibbous Moon,” nearly quivers with the anxiety of insufficiency, as it articulates the human experience of receiving half-comforts, barely enough to survive the corrosive effects of time and pain on the soul. The speaker catalogues images (in a way powerfully reminiscent of Herbert’s “Prayer I”) for the “unheralded” gibbous moon that appears in the sky “too late, / if not too soon”: a lopped mushroom cap, unfinished handwork set aside, a moth-eaten lace doily, and - my favourite - “age-spotted face obscurely seen / peering through a storm door screen.” The catalogue ends with this final image:

thin wafer vagrant souls are fed,
wholly insufficient bread
we bless and break, and multiply.

There is no absolute turn of confidence towards God or the Eucharist and its redeeming power. There is not, even, the assertion that God multiplies our efforts. We are the ones multiplying. The pause between “bless and break” and “multiply” is important. We are blessing and breaking the “wholly insufficient bread,” and then comes the multiplication. What are we multiplying? Ourselves, according to the commandment; our efforts; our works of art? In any case, everything is tainted by the inadequacy of the bread, and yet we continue. The very action of multiplying speaks of acceptance and of hope.

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After the song and dance, what is left? An insufficiency we must pick up. Nicol invites us to reckon with the chaos we would rather avoid - and to act anyway. These poems are not ones to pick up when looking for the kind of galvanizing inspiration towards noble deeds and moral struggle that you might find in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, for example. As his speaker says,

We don't invite the epic muse to visit.
Heroic figures make a lot of noise.
Who needs another lliad? Not me.
That sort of thing plays better on TV.

No, this is a work to pick up and draw great comfort from when the leering horror of life peers at you through the chinks in your routine. When they will not stop staring, and the foundation is threatening to crumble beneath you. Nicol, with irony and the lightest touch, does not divert you from the ugliness - he delves right in, he doubles down. But neither does he drop the obligation to be sustained and to multiply. After the carnival, bleary-eyed and head aching, we stumble to greet the sun.

Celia Jordan earned her Master's degree in English Literature from McGill University, where she wrote her thesis on figurations of sin in the poetry of George Herbert. She now lives in Montreal, and continues to work on her own poetry. When she's not writing, she works in art acquisition and as an administrative assistant for an Ontarian non-profit that ministers at the intersection of theology, ecology, and the arts. Her current idea of a hobby is (very slowly) painting a wardrobe in the Tyrolean style. 

Alfred Nicol, who worked in the printing industry for over twenty years after graduating from Dartmouth College, published his first book of poems, Winter Light, in 2004. His other publications include Animal Psalms, Elegy for Everyone and Brief Accident of Light, a collaboration with Rhina Espaillat. Nicol’s translation of One Hundred Visions of War by Julien Vocance, has been called “an essential addition to the history of modernist poetry.” His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Hopkins Review, and in many anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2018 and Contemporary Catholic Poetry. His translation of the lyrics to "Győzelemről énekeljen," were used for the official anthem of the 52nd International Eucharistic Congress, convened in 2021 by Pope Francis in Budapest. As part of the music-and-poetry ensemble The Diminished Prophets, Nicol has performed melopoeia for over twenty years with Espaillat and classical/flamenco guitarist John Tavano. In recent years, the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival has commissioned several works of poetry for its annual event. Nicol lives in Massachusetts with his wife, the artist Gina DiGiovanni.

Reviewed by Katie Schmidt

The opening of Montreal poet Domenica Martinello’s second poetry collection, Good Want, feels like we’re about to witness a knife fight with morality. Before the poetry begins, the collection throws down the gauntlet to sanctity. The cover depicts a crowd of saints in the style of icons, but whose golden halos block each other’s views. These figures are given no spatial reverence but are crowded together like a sea of concert goers shifting from foot to foot, giving each other side eye or looking off into the distance. None are offering us a tonsured intercession to God, but are looking a little bored, a little tired.

This book will not be concerned with genuflecting to the divine, this cover promises; a promise reinforced by the opening epigraph from the American poet and essayist, Mary Ruefle, “I have often thought god needs prayers to remind himself he is important, and still matters. Without our interceding glances, what would he be but a shrunken head on the end of a thread in a museum of ideas?,” and the epigraph to the first section from the New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird “You do not have to be good./Being good isn’t even the point anymore.”

It would be easy to think from this introduction that Martinello is going to offer a treatise on why virtue and God are outdated concepts; yet instead of being a persuasive offense against morality, the work reads far more interestingly as a defense of the infinite desirability of the physical world.

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In 2010, Philip Pullman, the renowned young adult fantasy writer, published a book called The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which aimed to debunk the gospel stories through a humanist retelling with all the arch smugness of an older brother telling you Santa isn’t real and you were stupid to believe he was. It was the most boring book I’ve ever read.

Martinello’s collection couldn’t be further from taking this angle; rather, it presents a bracingly honest struggle against the restraints on desire, not merely sexual desire, but a desire for the particularity of being human. The poems range from stories of growing up, of economic want, of the shadow of academia and religion, to explorations of the psyche, guilt, pain, and a strange homage to Mary Oliver.

Her work is confrontational, challenging the history of interpreting desire as something to be suppressed, something innately sinful, but her project is not one of rejection. In the opening poem, “I Pray to be Useful,” the speaker walks up the stairs of an oratory–perhaps like the formidable St. Joseph’s Oratory of Mount Royal in Quebec–and says:

Each moment is a new
bead to balance on,

and each bead felt
wrongly sumptuous
as I prayed to want less.

The poetry wrestles with this problem of the “wrongly sumptuous” world. How can we want less, and how can it be wrong to want less, when the world is made with such profound, delicious detail? The poem ends with the impossibility of curtailing this hunger for the world: “Like my hands,/ my hunger never/ hardened over.”

What the poet defines as want and its proper object is not a delineation of hierarchies, or proper modes of desiring, but an inclusive, expanding, borderless hunger, like the lusty inclusivity of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. In the prose poem “Butter Receptacle,” Martinello enumerates,

I like the admin work, I like zip-locking, the ad libbing, the
serenades at nap time, killing a game of charades, feeding two
birds with one scone, letting the cats keep their skin, finding a
way, breaking capsules on my face, disappearing veins, the oil
pull, the masking, the flushing, the versatility of mould, its
flirty fuzz, black or white, wet or fluffy, spores, s’mores by
the radiator,...

The poem is an unlikely abundance: a sonic romp, jamming together unlike ideas, which depict the quotidian as a sensuous feast, mould bumping into s’mores. The speaker desires the intense particularity of everything, the minute detail of the ordinary, down to the playful mundanity of idioms. The power of the poetic voice in this collection lovingly and unflinchingly details the physical world, standing in defense of wanting what the poet calls in the titular poem, “Good Want,” “generic.” Martinello’s incredible ability to elevate what is “generic” to the level of aesthetic delight gives the poetry its most persuasive quality.

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Martinello’s poetry often achieves its richness through surprising comparisons to and about the body, food, and the earth. For example, in the first poem of “Vague Feast or, six sestets one silent,” these images intermingle:

there are many things I want
to do with a paring knife:
unburden the world of its softness,
disrobed in one endless uncoiling peel.
pears are winter fruits, I am
too, whatever you think that means.

The collection is replete with these images and they serve both as reminders of the fleshiness of the body–that we are not just big brains or incorruptable souls wearing an unfortunate but irrelevant coat–as well as elevating the physical world to the level of the artistically significant in a way that doesn’t abstract it but further emphasizes its physicality. “Power Ballad (Hymn)” addresses this use of language directly:

My body is
a metaphor
of the body
as a landscape
cluttered with loaves
and fish in baskets.

I’ll never be
conceptual.
I am one

with the masses.

The body is a metaphor of the body as a metaphor. The physical is always given priority as the purveyor of meaning. The poems often dwell on the body, celebrating its unromantic reality:

I lock fingers with myself, preteen. I offer up the underwire. I
bounce and supple, drag and drop the pretense, steal. My fanny
pack is plump, I smell all pungent and powdery.

("Circling Back")

As readers, we are never allowed to escape into the comfort of the abstract but are always smashed back into the earth, as though the poet is holding our faces to the dirt, to the flowers, to a sweaty armpit and telling us to breathe deeply. One of the most striking parts of Martinello’s work is how genuinely funny it is. After my daily online wash of blandly relatable content, this collection kept surprising me with its clever bawdiness and cheeky metaphors.

Then again
why does everything need to say something
The hot doctoral candidate in my head
says, Why not
in that perfect existential tone
He trilingual, cunnilingual, knows how to cook
in that accomplished, undomestic way

("In Bad Dream")

Carried through these poems, though, is a current of past and present episodes of violence, shame, and guilt. In light of this suffering, the poems wrestle with the usefulness of goodness, prayer, and even writing poetry. “Good is what happens/ when you stretch God too far.” the speaker says in “Good Want,” and in “Asking for it,” says,

Poetry often feels to me like
clicking the beads of a rosary.

It’s not hurting anybody, I guess,
but that doesn’t make it virtuous.

The speaker is ambivalent about the usefulness of goodness, morality, and poetry in the light of experienced suffering, of shame, guilt, and frustration, and she desires freedom from these constraints: “I am the caretaker of good and bad/and I loosen their reins.” (Good Want). Yet, this ambivalence manifests not in a persuasive rejection of morality, but as the struggle of reaching towards an antidote to suffering. In “Little Light,” a poem about the speaker’s expectations for grandeur in the world, she says,

I thought there'd be a film,
some protective coating.

Yet I stand in my life,
a raw sunburned nerve

The surprise and delight of the language of Martinello’s collection seems to reach for being this “protective coating,” the resplendent depictions of the unlovely physical world help to make meaning out of the mundanity and painfulness that comes along as part of existence. As the speaker says in “All the Trimmings,” “waste not your wanting.” The poetry seems to be turning desire into an enchantment of the world.

Desire is not only erotic lust or greed but love for being alive, being a human, a body, flesh in a fleshy world. The speaker is peering at everything, the garbage, the rashes, the dirt, and saying this too is lovable. It is no wonder that the speaker finds a poetic companion in Mary Oliver, who explored the themes of the sacredness of the natural world.

The collection both praises and struggles against Oliver, especially the themes of her famous poem “Wild Geese.” This poem depicts a loving, accepting relationship between the natural world and the creatures in it, and the desires of humans are peacefully accepted: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” And yet, Oliver’s work seems to find peace too easily for Martinello, lacking the darker material realism of her own work.

In fact, Martinello’s descriptions reminded me more of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose attention to the bright and gritty particularity of the world uncovers hidden richness, like in “God’s Grandeur”:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. 
     It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; 
     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil 
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? 
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 
     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; 
     And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil 
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

Reading Martinello’s collection, I cannot help feeling her rich poetic vision as having a devotional quality, perhaps not towards God but towards the intimate detail of the created world. The collection takes us far away from the quiet, lifeless frames of saints and into the noise and wreck of the world they once inhabited. Where to desire is not to sin, but to be drawn deeper into the world.

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Some desire is for the stuff of beauty, some for real need of food and sleep, some for the ordinary, for scraps, for refuse. “Waste not your wanting.” In the world of good want, it is impossible to escape want and impossible to see it as a sin. It is the tether that holds us to the material world, and the material world is merged with the psychological, the spiritual, and the literary. There is no separating them, there is no escaping from the body into the abstract. We are jolted through the unlovely world without the respite of romanticization or idealization. And yet this world is made richly tangible, refuse is made delicious, lovable, desirable. We are at once having our eyes pried open to the stuff of the world, and that world being offered to us as a gift like happily steaming shit on a silver platter.

Katie Schmidt is a writer, editor, and artist from Ontario. She holds a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale University and a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Writing & Rhetoric from the University of Toronto. She is co-poetry editor at Traces Journal.

Domenica Martinello holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Deena Davidson Friedman Prize for Poetry. She currently lives in Montreal.

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In life, as in poetry, our paths are always constrained—by outside forces and by our own choices. To choose one direction is to reject an alternative, even if we seem to be taking an approach that is more free and uninhibited. We must either submit to the constraints of our own desires or look to an external framework to guide our path. But much of our culture’s stance is to view any constraint as a threat to freedom. Limits and traditions are for puritans from backward societies of the past, says conventional wisdom—or, in the words of Elsa from Frozen: “No right, no wrong, no rules for me—I’m free.” Against these postmodern headwinds, Ottawa-based poet Jesse Keith Butler offers a very different type of liberating message:

The law has life. It’s more than normative.

It is a gateway, opening to offer

a wide abundant space in which to live.

Butler explores this theme throughout his debut poetry collection, The Living Law. In a recent interview with Brian Brodeur in Literary Matters, A. E. Stallings noted, “Constraints are freeing in themselves, […] as formal poets and avant-garde poets tend to agree. They free you from feeling that you are entirely in control.” Butler’s work illustrates this truth through both the subject matter and the use of poetic form, pointing toward a deeper kind of freedom that can be obtained by submitting to limits beyond oneself, instead of the superficial “freedom” of following one’s own fickle whims. These finely crafted poems cover road trips across Canada, a night of whiskey drinking with a buddy in an old church belltower, the joys and agonies of parenthood, and the inner lives of the Biblical patriarchs. Throughout, Butler renders relatable human experiences while displaying a strong grasp of the capacities and opportunities to be found within the limits of traditional English metre and rhyme.

One exemplary highlight is “Lightning Strikes Churches,” which was selected by Dana Gioia and Mary Grace Mangano as the 3^rd place winner in the Kierkegaard Poetry contest (appearing in the Homage to Søren Kierkegaard anthology from Wiseblood Books as well as Dappled Things). Use of the refrain “When lightning strikes churches” in each stanza necessitates four different end rhymes for “churches”—but rather than limiting the poem’s effect, this constraint yields striking imagery, including pigeons that “burst from their perches / and soar in the churchyard’s blank sky,” and a ship that “leaps and lurches / then leans to the unsighted shore.” The poem rolls through symbolically charged images that simultaneously offer a harrowing challenge to spiritual pride and complacency as well as a stark beacon of refuge and hope for the humble. 

“Lightning Strikes Churches” demonstrates Butler’s fine ear for the music of language, conveying meaning through the sense and sounds of the words. Many of the poems in this collection beg to be read aloud, and this one is no exception. Here is the third stanza:

A church is a monument, far out of fashion,

that clings to the crumbling brink of the land,

a ritual built between Isaac’s cold question

and Abraham’s trembling hand.

When lightning strikes churches

it surges with light

and restlessly searches

for faith formed unbent in the night.

Also “far out of fashion” is the poem’s use of trisyllabic metre (amphibrachic or anapestic, depending on how you prefer to scan), which has become rare in contemporary poetry but figures prominently throughout The Living Law – around a quarter of the poems in the book use some type of strict or loose triple metre.

While the iamb has long been the dominant pulse in English poetry, over the last century the trisyllabic feet were further demoted, being largely consigned to the realm of light verse or inextricably linked to passé styles from prior eras. Butler shows no qualms employing triple metre in highly serious poems, including the title poem which kicks off the collection as well as “Lightning Strikes Churches” and “Villanelle of the Elect.” Many of these trisyllabic poems that tackle weighty material retain a gravitas through judicious application of metrical variation: “The Living Law” has an iambic refrain at the end of each stanza, “Lightning Strikes Churches” uses mixed lines of tetrameter, trimeter, and dimeter, and “The Lawgiver” is based on a loose tetrameter with significant metrical variation and substitution.

While the use of trisyllabic metre is noteworthy, Butler also displays skill across a variety of other metres and forms. “A Strand of Sound” and “The Red Sun Rising” use fourteeners (iambic heptameter), another “anachronistic” form that can prove effective in the right hands. There are also plenty of conventional iambic poems, including several Petrarchan sonnets. Butler even sprinkles in some free verse and prose poems, which provide nice variety—though it’s clear the more formal work is Butler’s wheelhouse. His use of rhyme is also nimble, both as he employs prudent slant rhymes and when he sticks to true rhyme. Though most of the book is unabashedly written with regular rhyme and metre, the frequent use of bespoke nonce forms lends a freshness to the work, and sometimes even hides the complex formal structures that undergird many of the poems.

“The Lawgiver” exhibits such intricate layers of form and meaning, and is worth noting as the longest poem in the collection. In addition to the loosely anapestic metre mentioned above, it also follows a relaxed rhyme scheme (axxa) and makes ample use of alliteration, gesturing toward Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. Separated into twenty-two sections arranged as an acrostic on the Hebrew alphabet, it mirrors the structure and content of Psalm 119 (118 according to the Septuagint/Vulgate numbering), while also tying in various scenes and events from the life of Moses—and as if that wasn’t elaborate enough, the sections contain sequential allusions to the Ten Commandments. But even if all these subtleties aren’t noticed by the reader, the work remains a compelling meditation on the law, using Old Testament stories and characters to reflect on the abundant life to be found in the sometimes inscrutable but ultimately secure scaffolding of God’s word. In the poem’s conclusion, Moses takes comfort in being found by the Lord, “a lost sheep searching for shelter / On the long leeward slope of your steep windswept law.”

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Mountains are important images throughout the collection, from Mount Sinai where the Mosaic law was received to present-day experiences among the majestic Rocky Mountains. There are also recurring scenes of the sprawling Canadian landscape, epic and imposing, eliciting responses of awe, isolation, and regret. Vivid sunrises and sunsets also figure prominently, sometimes bringing crushing, radiant revelations (“The Return”) and sometimes, quiet reflections in simple moments. “Sunrise Over Crow Puddle” is worth quoting in its entirety, to appreciate the evocative imagery and gentle whispers of rhyme.

Sunrise Over Crow Puddle

When dawn reaches rosy fingers

between the criss-crossed tree branches

along the street that meets our house,

she swirls her colours through the water

that’s puddled in our sagged cul-de-sac

like an artist washing paintbrushes.

Here a local crow comes back each day

bringing his breakfast of garbage to eat:

perhaps discarded sandwiches

or a desiccated mouse.

And watching, I almost forget to finish

my coffee. Somehow, I’m always surprised

to discover the subtle range of richness

an unremarkable moment can hold.

In all the houses down our block

the neighbours bustle about their business

as this crow gulps down his carrion

from a chalice of rose-gold.

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Travel is also a recurring motif, as Butler gives us depictions of long drives across modern Canadian highways (“Highway 17 Revisited”, “The Lonesome Blues”) and the journeys of the patriarchs in the book of Genesis (“Hospitality”). The travellers within “the long mysterious arc of transit” are sometimes led on by boredom or aimless yearning, sometimes filled with anguish and regret. Often the wanderers are questioning and seeking transcendence, searching for clarity and solidity in the midst of external and internal instability, uttering prayers such as, “Anchor my grand / illusions to your stubborn facts a while.”

The overarching theme of the “living law” is clear in the poems featuring stories and characters from the Pentateuch, but a more subtle line can also be drawn from the Decalogue to the Logos – the ultimate incarnation of the living and active Word of God. Although Christ is not often addressed directly, his name is invoked obliquely in “Mid-Lent,” a deft Golden Shovel on the Paschal Troparion (“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death…”), and his presence is frequently implied in references to resurrection. There is a thread of tentative but sure hope in the sprouting of new life, as we wait with “expectant ears pressed to a tomb” (“Hymn #735”). The final poem, “The 613” (referring to both the putative number of commandments in the Torah and also the area code for southeastern Ontario), closes on a hopeful note:

And I will grow to thank the living law

which forced my will, and held me here to glimpse

this inward-spreading spring: the heart’s slow thaw.

The collection also has a streak of humour, such as a witty epigram based around a palindrome (“Nepotism also slams it open”) and a sonnet lampooning the pomposity of a self-serious author (“The Writer’s Retreat”). Some poems take on modern social ills (“Against Granville Island,” “The Satellites That Serve Us”), often through heavy use of irony—and to Butler’s credit, he tends to include himself within these ironic critiques. Other highly musical poems riff on lines from William Blake (“Hold to Mercy,” “Rock on rock on Voltaire Rousseau") and old country/folk tunes (“The Vengeance of the Tennessee Waltz,” “The Hammer That Killed John Henry”). While the book is predominantly characterized by weighty themes and spiritual profundity, the inclusion of these more eclectic pieces offer variety that may appeal to some tastes. Butler clearly shows a wide range, and when taken as a whole the collection maintains a cohesive and distinctive quality.

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Among the most moving pieces are the deeply personal poems about family, expressing the devotion and loyalty of these bedrock relationships in a way that is honest and relatable. “The Boatwright” is a touching elegy for the poet’s brother, and “Too Much Morningtime” is a tender reflection on his young son’s exuberance. “The Life We Chose” is a beautiful love poem to his wife, written from the trenches of parenthood amid the literal constraint of sleeping arrangements with little kids, which also ties back into the collection’s central theme of the freedom and possibility to be found in acknowledging and accepting limits within the “long cascade of choices” that necessarily defines a life—a sentiment that will resonate with any parent, as well as any poet who chooses to work in form.

We’ve made our choices. What we chose

is this. We’ll see what this can be

with time and love. Tomorrow is

our ten-year anniversary.

Life moves so fast, but it’s immense.

It’s rolled out like a long cascade

of choices, sometimes packed so dense

we’re not quite certain which we’ve made.

But here it’s brought us—to our sons,

and to this hollow, dragging night.

Some choices you don’t make just once—

you choose and then you hold on tight.

With his debut, Butler joins the robust tradition of poets demonstrating that there is still much beauty and meaning to be mined in contemporary manifestations of metrical, rhymed verse. These poems are memorable and speak to universal truths, offering a welcome entry to readers who are less immersed in the poetry world and may be put off by more prosaic, ephemeral, or esoteric varieties of poetry. Butler’s work is both accessible and rich, and in The Living Law, he probes the depths with poems that sing.

Steven Searcy is the author of Below the Brightness (Solum Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Commonweal, The Windhover, UCity Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and four sons in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Jesse Keith Butler is an Ottawa-based poet who recently won third place in the Kierkegaard Poetry Competition. You can find his poems in a variety of journals, including Arc Poetry, Dappled Things, Blue Unicorn, On Spec, and The Brazen Head. His first book, The Living Law (Darkly Bright Press, 2024), is available wherever books are sold. Learn more at www.jessekeithbutler.ca.

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In her exploration of family roots and the refugee-immigrant experience, Mennonite-Canadian poet Connie Braun observes that “it is in the nature of a question to grow, not to make small. Answers are a different matter. If this is so, questions are the crux of faith. And faith is expansive enough to hold doubt.”1

If it is in the nature of a question to expand and hold doubt, then poetry offers us linguistic space for this growth. Poems rarely provide answers: they simply develop an idea. Poems dilate our doubts, give breath to our questions, and yet leave us with the comfort that the question has at least been explored. Braun helpfully reminds us that holding space for questions is an act of faith: if so, then writing poetry is a similarly faith-filled act.

It is appropriate, then, that in Sarah Klassen’s latest collection, the first poem, “Rise and Go,” recalls Abram wondering who he is and where he is going while continuing to walk forward in faith. This opening poem is followed by a full collection exploring the loud silences of family trauma, unspeakable acts of violence ripped from headlines, the questions raised by mute paintings, and thin, quiet moments of hope in biblical and familial characters. Klassen’s poems give voice to—and expand on—our silent doubts and questions. 

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Born in Winnipeg to Russian-Mennonite immigrants, Klassen has spent decades garnering praise and awards in Canada for her powerful reflections. Now, she reshapes our vision of the world through years of faithful imagination in this latest collection, New & Selected Poems. 

Editor of the collection, Nathan Dueck, has shaped this latest volume through an insightful arrangement that invites Klassen’s readers—both seasoned and new—into her lifetime of work. For readers coming to Klassen for the first time, Dueck helpfully groups Klassen’s older poems into nine thematic sections with a final tenth section of new poems. The final section reveals Klassen’s continued strength as a poet who is adept at superimposing the sacred on the secular.

The first nine sections are each named for one poem that in some way highlights the theme of the grouping. As a new reader of Klassen’s work, I found some of the material heart-wrenching and familiar. Similar to many Canadian readers, I share Klassen’s broken but powerful connection to war-torn Europe via the grandparents who fled tragedy. Like Klassen, many of us have ancestors who fled to Canada, carrying trauma with them as they fought the stubborn fields of frozen prairie winters. Klassen’s poetry is often steeped in prairie landscape and family history, giving shape to the particular experiences of her Russian-Mennonite ancestors who left behind the “scent of apricot blossoms” (“Collector”) and arrived in an earthly Promised Land “that wraps itself like glue around your Russian / boots” and never quite lives up to its promise (“A brief history of Edison Avenue”). Readers of Canadian poetry will be accustomed to themes of loss and homesickness, perhaps now more than ever. Indeed, Klassen’s poems are both explicit about her particular ancestral trauma and just as aware of the universality of such experiences in Canada where “immigrant women craving columbine, / anemone, delicate coral bells” are set against a “snarling” pick-up driver in the poem “On guard.”

The familiarity of these motifs, though, belies the fact that Klassen’s collection is strikingly original and complex. The eponymous poem in the first section, “Rewinding Time,” offers an elegiac meditation on the death of the poet’s father, contextualizing his life in both the events of a closing century and the lives of his ancestors. What makes this poem so remarkable is the intertext it leans on to reconcile the passing of a parent. Klassen’s poet-speaker turns to Thomas Hardy’s late-Victorian poem, “The Darkling Thrush,” which is a work marked by Hardy’s recognizable irony. Klassen uses Hardy’s elegy for the “death” of the nineteenth century to probe the nature of hope, reusing lines from his poem and linking her father’s music to that of the thin song of Hardy’s thrush. Yet unlike the speaker of Hardy’s verse, whose macabre vision can only see a sky lacerated by the bine stems that shape his view, Klassen’s speaker is not “unaware” of the hope once found in the frail song of her father’s harmonica. 

Stumbling upon Hardy early in Klassen’s collection was a gorgeous surprise: not only because Hardy’s work has been my lifetime companion, but because the intertext prepares readers for several of the poems that engage with a varied collection of artists. The third section, Artist and Medium, opens with a lengthy contemplation of Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem and the complexity of scriptural blessing. Subsequent poems like “What the boat carries” and “Fiction” explore the questions raised by mysterious paintings and highlight Klassen’s comfort with uncertainty. Central to this section, the eponymous poem “Artist and Medium” turns to seventeenth-century Mennonite poet and engraver, Jan Luyken. With more certainty, Klassen’s speaker meditates on Luyken’s copper etchings for the devotional classic, Martyrs Mirror. The speaker here considers Luyken’s choice of etching over poetry to express the “triumphant dying” of the martyr: “Jan chooses a needle and begins / dribbling acid on a copper plate . . . He tries defining / faith.” Klassen’s poet, who also tries “defining faith” in many poems centred on ​​family members or biblical figures, would recognize the struggle to capture the near unthinkable action of choosing a violent death in the name of faith. 

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Klassen’s imaginative engagement with artists of other media is arguably central to her poetic ethos. If, as Connie Braun suggests, “the nature of a question is to grow,” then Klassen seems aware that it is in the nature of her own poetry to ponder the same questions other artists have pondered—expanding on and dilating their wondering. The tenth and final section of the volume turns to her new poems, and the second of these new poems may well exceed her previous ekphrastic engagements by its surprising juxtaposition.  

In “Dawn: A Triptych,” Klassen creates a poetic altarpiece by bringing together three artworks illustrating scenes from the life of Christ. The combination startles: two frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel by fourteenth-century painter Giotto di Bondone flank the disruptive centrepiece, Golgotha, by Expressionist Edvard Munch. 

In the first poem based on Giotto’s Nativity, the poet wonders with the painter what Joseph might be worrying about in the bottom left of the frame. Commas, colons, and periods punctuate the lines of the poem, the caesurae imaginatively mirroring Joseph’s hesitancy in the listing of possible fears for the new baby.

Then, in the turn to Munch’s Golgotha for the middle “panel” of the triptych, the poet describes Munch’s Christ “as if suspended from a stretched out cloud / that is the hand of God.” The first part uses layered sibilant sounds that hint at the hiss of evil that has placed Christ there; yet the “cloud” at the end of the line runs over into the next, bringing together “cloud” and “God” in an imperfect rhyme. For the poet, Munch’s cloud implies that God is hidden but near. In the end, the speaker sees the cloud as the painter’s symbol of possible hope: “As if he believes, or wants us to: / soon the day will dawn.” 

In the final third of the triptych, Klassen’s speaker returns to Giotto’s Resurrection and hovers over Mary Magdalene’s confusion when Jesus famously refuses her touch in John 20:17: but there is less uncertainty here. Giotto’s painting captures the moment just before Christ vanishes and everyone else awakens; Klassen’s poet imagines the moment just after—one full of movement where “guards will wake and run their eyes. / The angels will unfold their wings and fly” and Mary will “rise and run” to share the news of the resurrection. To finish her altarpiece, the poet reminds readers that good news is always about to break loose.

Arguably, “Dawn: A Triptych” and the other ekphrastic poems show Klassen at her most faithful as an artist, engaging not only with other media but with the vocation of the artist as co-creator. Painter and writer Makoto Fujimura writes of the artist’s sacred role in caring for culture: “Proper stewardship,” he reminds us, “is part of our poetic responsibility to creation.”2 As a poet-steward, Klassen often attends quite literally to the connection between generative, creative work and the created order. In her poem “Genesis,” for instance, Klassen contrasts three gardeners: her mother, a friend, and a poetic persona. In the cold of March, her mother planted vegetable seeds and tended to her prairie garden—seeds that brought both nourishment and hope. By contrast, her friend settles further into the couch in March, “lost in glossy / Homes and Gardens, stuck between seductive pages,” and dreams of “plump tulips.” Lastly, Klassen’s poetic persona daydreams somewhere between the generative, hope-filled planting of her mother and the aesthetic consumerist desires of the magazine gardener. In her musings on the coming spring, the poet dreams of both the “apple shining on a pristine tree” and the “the serpent coil[ing]” nearby. In her poem named for creation, Klassen reminds us of the hope inspired by a generative calling and the shadow of empty aestheticism that tempts both gardener and artist alike. 

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In her ekphrastic poems, gardening poems, and some “still life” poems, Klassen is a poet for all artists. She shapes and creates using her own medium of language, but seems constantly aware that she is participating in the work of all artists made in the imago dei. In her poem “The potter,” Klassen imagines a group visiting a pottery studio and watching the artist shape her material: “we cluster / like commas around the woman at the wheel. / Her foot moves up and down. Hands cup the clay, / centring, altering, coaxing it upward . . . The matter in the potter’s hand / gain’s shape.” Readers of Klassen’s poem cluster likewise around the poet who shapes, through punctuation and steady hand, the raw material of the world into a work of art. Like the potter of her poem, Klassen creates with confidence and tentativeness, remaining open to rearranging and reshaping her clay as she receives fresh vision. 

A fresh vision appears, appropriately, in the final poem “Aubade”—a hymn to the morning. No elegy or evensong marks the conclusion of this new collection of poems. Rather, the collection ends on a note of hope and promise for a faith-filled poetic vocation: “My wayward compass is recalibrated: / the needle comes to rest at its magnetic north.” As she surveys the minutiae of her morning, the speaker shows us that sacred direction can be found in the poetic details of the everyday. Through Klassen’s collection of poems old and new, personal, occasional, ekphrastic, elegiac but always devotional, readers, too, find their vision recalibrated to its “magnetic north.”

Melanie East has a bio that will appear here.

Sarah Klassen was born in Manitoba in 1932. A Winnipeg English teacher for many years, she also taught in Lithuania and Ukraine. Her poetry has received two National Magazine Poetry Awards, one silver, one gold. In 2017 Sarah Klassen was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, and she has won a Word Guild Award, a Canadian Authors Association prize, and a High Plains book award. Her published work includes eight poetry collections and four books of fiction. Nathan Dueck is the author of three collections of poetry, king's(mère) (2003), he'll (2014), and A Very Special Episode (2019). Raised in Manitoba, he did his BA and MA in English at the University of Manitoba, and in 2009 received his doctorate from the University of Calgary. He teaches English and Creative Writing at College of the Rockies in British Columbia. His next book is the creative memoir 1979-, to be published in fall 2024.

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In the late aughts and early teens, post-apocalyptic stories became a cultural trend, and I got caught up in it. I made my way through countless end-of-civilization narratives. Zombies, warfare, vampires, disease, famine – whatever the cause of the downfall, it was all interesting to me. As I made my way through the films, books, and video games, I noticed that all of the societies formed in the aftermath of these imagined devastations were terribly broken. It was as if these storytellers could only imagine that the strong and the exploitative would survive. In a post-apocalyptic world, there would be no room, no hope, for anyone else. I could not find one story where kindness and care for “the least of these” was entertained, let alone allowed to prevail.

Later, I discovered The Road by Cormac McCarthy, whose main character wrestles with generosity and goodness even as he is surrounded by hostility. Similarly, the video game The Last of Us imagines a compound in Jackson, Wyoming, where gentleness and openness prevail within its walls if not without. However, in Mike Bonikowsky’s 2024 novel, The Shepherd of Princes, I finally found these principles taken further and set at the heart of the story.

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The Shepherd of Princes chronicles the fate of a village built around the care of the physically and developmentally disabled. A young man, Micah Gault, is born into the life of helping to care for this flock. Through the character of Micah, Bonikowsky captures the difficulty of genuinely loving persons who can be, at times, hard to love. Affection and frustration vie for supremacy, and the tension is compounded by the villagers’ existence in a world deprived of many modern comforts and necessities, such as electricity, running water, and medicine. The community, called The Fold, is distant from help and lacks the infrastructure to receive even basic goods from outside sources. Everything must be found in and recycled from their immediate surroundings. 

In the first half of the novel, Bonikowsky deftly weaves the contradictory strands of beauty and hardship. He writes, for example, “Each new morning found two scents fighting for possession of the air: the morning’s fresh bread, and the last night’s accidents.” In a single sentence, he neatly frames the sense of provision and waste. I was familiar with Bonikowsky’s poetic chops, having already read his earlier volume of poetry, The Red Stuff, and was pleased to see his skill equally applied to prose.

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There is a beauty and a simplicity to life in The Fold, but the challenge remains to care for those who cannot care for themselves. Bonikowsky approaches the difficulty and frustration Micah faces with the assuredness of someone who knows something about what he writes. For every beautiful vista and every moment of genuine connection, there is an answering moment of soiled clothing or violent outbursts that must be handled carefully. Micah both loves his life and longs to be free of it. Bonikowsky makes it easy to understand the young man’s conflicting feelings.

Having grown familiar with the tensions at the heart of The Fold, midway through the novel, we learn that signs of electricity appear to be returning to a nearby city. Micah is chosen to venture out in search of help for The Fold. And so we follow his crossing of the barren lands between The City and The Fold and witness the work he must do to earn his way into The City for a chance to plead his cause. Along the way, he meets a lonely young woman named September Burrows, who warns him against holding too much hope for what he will find there. She has seen her own family torn apart because most chose the stability of The City over loyalty to an elderly family member who could not contribute enough to find a place there.

Within a few days of arriving, Micah discovers the truth of September’s words. The City is organized as a setting where only the strong or worthy can find a place. Refugees must work to earn food and entry. Quotas must be met. Given Micah’s intelligence and bodily strength, prepared as he was through long years of service and labour, he makes his way through the tiers quickly, and gains notice and acceptance of the people in charge. He finds that he fits in well, and enjoys the privileges that his capabilities earn him. It is not as if his contributions went unnoticed in The Fold, but The City rewards him in far more tangible ways. He also finds that the people he meets there, although different from those at home, are kind and supportive. He even connects with Sarah, a young woman nearly his age, who seems enthusiastic about his arrival. This connection takes him even deeper into The City where he eventually learns of the sacrifices made to ensure the stability and progress of its rebuilding efforts. 

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The Shepherd of Princes is an overtly Christian novel. The founders and Shepherds of The Fold bear a resemblance to monastic orders, and Christian beliefs inform the subtext of many of the characters’ conversations. As such, it would have been easy to strawman The City and its denizens as evil and irredeemable, but Bonikowsky took the time to convey the struggle and fears that plague both societies. Ultimately, he writes a story about the Wisdom of God and the wisdom of man, rather than a story of good versus evil, or spiritual versus material. This is a far trickier and more nuanced tack, and I feel that Bonikowsky mostly succeeds.

Although the chapters that record life in The City lack some of the depth and texture of those that explore life in The Fold, The City’s citizens are not dashed off as careless caricatures either, as we discover that the primary motivation behind their ultimately immoral actions is not mere greed or power, but fear. Bonikowsky allows narrative sympathy for The City’s inhabitants, who make bad decisions for the right reasons. This sympathy, however, can only stretch so far. Neither the place nor its people, had the same depth as The Fold.

But perhaps I am wrong. As the passage quoted earlier demonstrates, life in The Fold is characterized by darkness and light, waste and provision – a sort of literary chiaroscuro that provides the depth The City lacks — The City that sought light without darkness, provision without waste. How could such a place be anything but flat and rootless?

God could have written a story where our personal and global dawns need no preceding darkness, but he didn’t. Better theologians than I have tried to answer why that is. I do not think Bonikowsky gives an answer here either, but what he does is show us what we can do with the tale in which we find ourselves. And isn’t that what the best stories are for?

Liv Ross is an urban monk, a poet and writer, a birder, and a student of Christian Spirituality. She has been engaged in creative writing more or less consistently for two decades, and her primary mediums are essays and poetry. When she’s not writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, and mischief. She has been published in The Way Back To Ourselves, Silence and Starsong, Solum Journal, The Amethyst Review, andVoeglinView. She can be found on Instagram @liv_ross_poetry, twitter @je_suis_liv, or her substack, https://substack.com/@theabbeyofcuriosity.

Mike Bonikowsky lives in Melancthon Township, Ontario, with his wife and kids and chickens and rabbits. He works as a caregiver for men and women with developmental disabilities. In 2022, he published his first book of poems, Red Stuff, with Solum Literary Press.