Boom Time, Tar Swan and Prologue for the Age of Consequence
Garth Martens’s debut performance, in his 2014 book Prologue for the Age of Consequence, set a poetic template, hammered together with a framer’s hammer and a carpenter’s level, for [...]
Sid Marty
Sid Marty
Vistas of the West: Poems and Visuals of Nature
Vistas of the West is a well-designed, attractive hardback that may grace the coffee table of many a western home for years to come. It would make a good gift to mail to any puzzled easterner who [...]
Blackfoot Country
Publishers and authors have the right to define their books by genre as they please—a book of poetry in this case. But to my eye and ear, the text of Walter Hildebrandt’s Blackfoot Country is [...]
Part 1: A Tribute to Charlie Russell
Charlie Russell loved to fly, and he seldom phoned first those times when he would fly his Kolb ultralight airplane north from Hawk’s Nest ranch on the boundary of Waterton Lakes National Park, [...]
Firewater:
One of the many Canadian communities hit hard by the ongoing fentanyl debacle is Standoff, Alberta, headquarters of the Kainai (Blood) First Nation, where a state of emergency was declared in [...]
How I Did Not Try to Kill Andrew Suknaski
Andy, late lamented friend, celebrated author of Wood Mountain Poems, The Ghosts Call You Poor and many other texts: you were too frail and too medicated, the last time I saw you alive, to chew [...]
The Banker and the Blackfoot: A Memoir of My Grandfather in Chinook Country
John “Jack” Cowdry, the author’s grandfather, first came to my attention in L.V. Kelly’s Alberta ranching chronicle The Range Men (1913). The Cowdry brothers were the first bankers to set up shop [...]
In Praise of Protest
On January 24, 2012, the Stop Castle Logging protest had been underway for 13 days in temperatures down to −35 degrees and a wind-chill reaching −45. Alberta Forest Service (AFS) had served [...]
Spin, Baby, Spin
Power outages are not rare here at the foot of the Livingstone Range north of the Crowsnest Pass, thanks to summer electrical storms, ice buildup in winter and west winds that can gust (where I [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
Missing Answers
On February 23, 2021, something amazing happened—almost a miracle, as far as I’m concerned. I got to ask Premier Jason Kenney a question during a news conference (about the upcoming legislative sitting). Before that, the last time I’d been called on to ask a question was December 18, 2020—67 days ...
The $120 Billion Question
The Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) has lately come under intense criticism. The Kenney government’s changes to the Crown corporation’s mandate in 2019—the transfer, without prior notice, of several public pension funds to AIMCo—alarmed pension fund members who worried about ceding control of their pensions and were unsure about AIMCo ...
My Mother’s Story
My mother was a refugee, and Canada was her refuge.
My mother died this August, a few days before her 81st birthday. And as I sat down to write her eulogy, I kept thinking about the confluence of events that brought her to Alberta, and about Alberta’s legacy as a home ...