Tag: Poetry

“Connected through slow repetition and relation to the land, each act suggests a patient and rhythmic sort of seeking.”

By Mielen Remmert

Border Crossings, February 2024

Notions of ploughing, wayfaring and mudlarking are central to Critical Fictions (ARP Books, Winnipeg, 2023), the new book by artist, writer and curator Hannah Godfrey. Connected through slow repetition and relation to the land, each act suggests a patient and rhythmic sort of seeking. To meander and trace the steps of another, to slowly and painstakingly turn the soil and sift through the time-worn foreshore of a riverbank are all processes that both recover meaning and make it anew. 

[Read the Review at Border Crossings]

While criticism often carries the weight of having to be (or trying to be) right, Critical Fictions tries only to be with.

By Emily Doucet

The Brooklyn Rail, May 2023

Hannah Godfrey’s Critical Fictions circles the work of five artists. Derek Dunlop, Kristin Nelson, Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, Andrea Oliver Roberts, and Logan MacDonald, are all, as Godfrey points out, queer Canadian artists working with abstraction and the body, critiquing hegemonic power structures “with wit and pathos.” The book is composed of discrete groupings of critical essays, poems, and stories “for” each artist rather than “about” them. This distinction between prepositions is central to the amalgam “critical fictions” offered in the book’s title. Godfrey’s critical texts are imprints of her relationships with the artists and artworks that pepper the author’s fictions, evidence of exchange rather than pure exposition. By writing against the erasure of thinking alongside, Godfrey positions the artist as a narrative accomplice. [Read the review.]

Permanent Carnival Time is the best book of poetry I’ve read over the last few years. I mean it. It’s really excellent.

By Ryan Fitzpatrick

The Capilano Review, April 17, 2023

When TCR floated the idea that I write a review that would come out alongside their “Bad Feelings” issue, I told them I wasn’t writing reviews, ironically because of some bad feelings I was having. After some arm-twisting, I said I would only write a review of something that I cared about. I needed an antidote to all the bad feelings I was feeling about reviewing. So, I decided to review Winnipeg poet Colin Smith’s recent book Permanent Carnival Time, which is the best book of poetry I’ve read over the last few years. I mean it. It’s really excellent. But it’s also appropriate for TCR right now because Permanent Carnival Time, despite its fun time of a title, is obsessed with bad feelings. Bad feelings saturate this book, but we’ll get to that.  [Read the review.]