With a title like Pressure Cooker Love Bomb, this collection makes the reader both eager and a bit hesitant to crack the book open (will it explode in our hands?). Sharanpal Ruprai’s new poems [...]
Chances are if Westerners today think of Nepal at all, it is likely as a destination for adventure trekking and climbing. Maybe the devastating earthquake of 2015 will come to mind. A few of us [...]
Fresh from the blazing success of last year’s Griffin-winning publication of Billy Ray Belcourt’s This Wound is a World, Calgary-based Frontenac House is justifiably proud of its annual poetry [...]
Cities, like dreams,” Italo Calvino once wrote, “are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and [...]
A brief introductory note by J. Mark Smith provides an explanatory framework for the poems in Jaspreet Singh’s first collection of verse, November: “November (1984) was the month of mass murder [...]
At least since novelist Frances Burney’s indelible account of the experience of mastectomy circa 1812 (pre-anesthetics), breast cancer has catalyzed a capacious library of writing by women. This [...]
I have always tried to avoid getting into arguments with Alberta premiers. After all, as a journalist it’s my job to question politicians, not quarrel with them. But sometimes premiers seem to want to get into arguments with journalists.
In 2006, for example, I got into a verbal tussle with then-premier Ralph ...
A decade ago, when Alberta was debt-free and staring at a $7.4-billion surplus, Premier Ralph Klein decided it was time to spread the wealth. He announced that every person who lived in the province—and, as it turned out, more than a few who didn’t—would receive a cheque for $400 as ...
On August 7, 2019, Premier Jason Kenney gave a press conference announcing his government’s progress over its first 100 days—“promises made, promises kept.” There’s no magic in “The First 100 Days.” It’s an arbitrary construct used by the media and political observers to measure how a new political leader is ...