Arts that Flow as Stories from Our Landscape: Alberta
Edited by Jane Ross, Battle River Writing Centre, 2021
The latest anthology from the Battle River Writing Centre, a group of “collaborating writers… who live or have lived in the [central Alberta] region, or who come to the region for inspiration and fellowship,” this beautiful book of vivid paintings, poems and essays is a literary love letter to our province. As editor and contributor Jane Ross writes, “You hold in your hands an art-with-words book, for retracing intimate lost worlds. To read it you will need to think, feel and imagine. It deals with places little known to many… It is told in poems, reflections and stories [and] it is meant to be read silently by oneself, or alone and aloud to hear the words spoken, or aloud and listening in company with others.”
Prairie Girl Collective
by Madison N. Taylor, Natahna Bargen-Lema, Kayla McCutcheon and Danielle Richardson, Party Trick Press, 2020
An evocative e-book collection from a new digitally focused Alberta press, Prairie Girl Collective brings together the work of four poets from Alberta and Saskatchewan. Grouped around themes of girlhood, sisterhood, motherhood and womanhood, the collection features diverse perspectives and experiences spanning from youthful memories of growing up on the land to personal reckoning with past abusers. Lines in the opening poem, “Good Girl,” by Kayla McCutcheon, exemplify the whole: “I’m fierce and feisty,/ determined and hopeful,/ and full of the right amount/ of untamed rage.”
