October 2021: A guest post by John Nyman on exploring whiteness in Canadian poetry.
November 2021: A guest post by Carl Watts on modes of reviewing in Canadian poetry.
December 2021: Shane Neilson reviews a wokester’s book as the wokester would have, had he not gone respectable for the year his book was out.
January 2022: Part 1 of a long essay on Rob Winger’s selection by Dionne Brand
February 2022: Part II of that long essay. (Total of both pieces, about 10,000 words)
March 2022: An essay on Best Canadian Poetry 2021
April 2022: A review of Bardia Sinaee’s Intruder, as ruined by Kevin Connolly.
May 2022: A review of rob mclennan’s Book of Smaller in his own style, as well as a parody of the 2022 Griffin jury deliberations
June-July 2022: Runaway Griffin Jury
What’s next? I play my cards close to my chest, this being the internet and all. Lots of fun though.
Subscription is $10/mo or $100 / year; each previous month’s content is scrubbed when a new month is uploaded. Sign up here, only paying subscribers can read.
In December, my friend Jim Johnstone published For the Living, a chapbook concerning . . . living persons! You can order it here.
In October, my friends at swallow::tale press published Revolutionary Doctrine of the True Faith. It’s WILD! And beautifully produced by Feyxuan who really knocks things out of the park, design-wise. Think of them when you’re book-ing! Order it here or if in Canada write me direct. Oh, and the chapbook was reviewed already at the mighty Wordgathering! My gratitude to Diane Wiener!
(1) Cross-Pollinations appearance on Feb 23, 2022 (C-P is a really cool poetry-world interface that is a collaboration between the Health, Arts, and Research Centre out of UNBC and the League of Canadian Poets.) Click here to view.
(2) Interview w/ Colleen Kitts of the CBC in New Brunswick on March 22, click here.
Hi there! I have a few unique book promotional things to tell you about for You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations, my newest baby due out from Goose Lane Editions in like a month or so!!!
1. Cross-Pollinations, League of Canadian Poets, reading w/ S.K. Hughes: Feb 23 2022, 6 pm ET, register here.
In this event, I’m doing something I don’t think has been done before. S.K. Hughes reads poems that are structured around their developmental stage of medical training, and I’m reading from an unpublished lyric essay that critiques the use of poetry in medical spaces from the perspective of practitioner and disabled bodymind, also from the perspective of developmental stage. It’ll be weird! What I’m reading is more poetry than essay. Do register on the link provided below! There’s lots here for both poets and medical types. And if you haven’t already, and might be so inclined, please do consider preordering You May Not Take.
I’m anticipating this event very much, for I’ve never been able to critique medicine to its face with poetry before, using twenty five years of a poetry practice to inform this argument: hey, medicine, you’ve got it all wrong. But it’s okay. Just let poetry be itself and everything will be okay.
2. “Articulating the Body: Ekphrasis in the Maude Abbott Medical Museum” is a McGill-based in-person event I’m running in conjunction with the Poetry Matters team. March 10 2022, 5-7 pm. Sign up here. Tell all your friends in Montreal!
3. March 24 2022, 8-10 pm EST. I’m participating at AWP as part of the “Rad Reading Series” thanks to Swallow::tale, Newfound, and ANMLY. Sign up using code on the sheet. My first big boy pants AWP reading, yay!
4. EAST COAST TOUR in late April! Details tba. IN PERSON
In August of 2020, Shane Neilson created The Negative Review on the e-newsletter program Substack. Acquiring more subscribers than he ever dreamed of for an esoteric site devoted to critical prose about Canadian poetry, Neilson delivered a detailed piece each month. He questioned “scandal” as currently constructed in CanLit, pushed back against shame politics, wondered why so many mediocre white Canadian male poets were releasing Selected volumes at a time of diversity in Canadian literature, and even dared to write a negative review about Dionne Brand.
The Negative Review (ShanCor Enterprises, 2021) covers/mentions the following writers:
Alden Nowlan, Northrop Frye, Sherrie Malisch, D.G. Jones, Margaret Atwood, John Moss, Russell Brown, Frank Davey, Barry Cameron, Michael Dixon, Smaro Kamboureli, Paul Barrett, Robert Lecker, Terry Eagleton, James Doyle, Sabine Milz, Sam Weselowski, Douglas Murray, William Giraldi, Lucy Alford, Matthew Zapruder, Rita Felski, Michael Lista, M. Travis Lane, Zachariah Wells, Jason Guriel, Carmine Starnino, James Pollack, Robyn Sarah, Dane Swan, A.F. Moritz, Jody Chan, Ali Blythe, John Elizabeth Stinzi, Manahil Bandukwala, Dennis M. Lewis, Eric Miller, Laura Moss, Karina Vernon, Aislinn Clare McDougall, Sarah Dowling, Gwen Benaway, Cassandra Blanchard, Nick Bradley, Nyla Matuk, Andrew Dubois, Marc di Saverio, Paul Vermeersch, Jay MillAR, Carmine Starnino, Dionne Brand, Canisa Lubrin.
The Negative Review contains the following essays:
Return of Thematic
We Shall Know You By Your Reviews: The Woke White Male and Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems
Spoiled Identity and the Frozen Now
Crito Revolta: On Marc di Saverio’s Crito di Volta (Toronto: Guernica, 2020)
The Missing Vision in the Visionary: Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995 – 2020 (Toronto: ECW Press, 2020) As Some Generic DystopiaTM.
He Doesn’t Look Like a Poet: On Jay MillAr’s I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You (Vancouver: Anvil, 2019)
Like My Dad, Rapping: A Review of Carmine Starnino’s Leviathan (Kentville: Gaspereau, 2020)
Dionne Brand is the Most Powerful Poet in Canada and No Negative Reviews are Permitted, This Message will Self-Destruct in Five Seconds Beep: A Review-Essay on Doomscrolling in Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk (McClelland and Stewart, 2019)
The Rebranding: Canisia Lubrin’s The DyzgraphXst (McClelland and Stewart, 2020)
Why Woke CanLit Twitter Matchmade Me and Holy Wild (Toronto: Bookhug, 2018).
The Protest is This Way: The Problem with Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Toronto: Coach House, 2020.)
The Neilson Ratings: A Big Lie Whites Tell Themselves So That They Can Hoard Social Capital Instead of Awards
If you’re interested in purchasing copies (only serious queries), then use the message function on this site. $500 per book, $1250 for all 4 in the series. If you are a Canadian university library, I’m afraid only one university per province will be allocated a copy (with one exception). I hope it was you!
The third in a unique series of critical texts by Shane Neilson, Marginal includes material intended for Margin of Interest (PQL, 2019), the author’s book of literary criticism on the English language poetry of the Maritimes. The work collected in Marginal is not secondary or inferior to the earlier PQL text, as Neilson intended the original to be a two-volume project. Marginal is a realization of that vision.
Marginal covers/mentions the following writers and makers: M. Travis Lane, Wayne Clifford, Peter Sanger, Milton Acorn, Alden Nowlan, J.J. Steinfeld, David Helwig, Anne Compton, George Elliott Clarke, EJ Pratt, John Steffler, John Thompson, bp Nichol, Hermenegilde Chiasson, and David Brewer.
Marginal contains:
Introduction
How Not to Represent a Region: Coastlines and Overfishing
The Backwards Sobriquet: A Review of New Brunswick at the Crossroads: Literary Ferment And Social Change in the East
Dr. Acorn, or: how I joined the Canadian Liberation Movement and learned to love the stern nurse fusion bomb sun
We Shall Know You By Your Reviews: The Woke White Male & Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems
Heroes & Legends: Finding John Thompson with Peter Sanger
Visiting Lane
Visiting Wayne Clifford
Crossing the Campus: Introduction to M. Travis Lane’s Heart on Fist
Clifford the Not-Sonneteer
A shared text is an act of friendship
Math, Satire, and Sense: David Helwig’s Seawrack
In Some More Distant Key: An Interview With David Helwig
Time-Grammar and Second-Order Witnessing: On J. J. Steinfeld’s Identity Dreams and Memory Sounds
Return to Scoudouc: A Review of Hermenegilde Chiasson’s To Live and Die in Scoudouc. Translated by Jo-Anne Elder
Rabbittown Press, David Brewer, Prop.
Obituary
Angelic Salutation
Idiosyncratic Notes on the Essays
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
If you’re interested in purchasing copies (only serious queries), then use the message function on this site. $500 per book, $1250 for all 4 in the series. If you are a Canadian university library, I’m afraid only one university per province will be allocated a copy (with one exception). I hope it was you!
The second in a unique series of critical texts by Shane Neilson, Personal Investments centres the author’s method of “bioreviewing.” Using this lens, Neilson brings books by writers into relation with his own subjectivity, offering unusual aesthetic commentary intermixed with his own experience. Later, Neilson focuses more squarely on prose, collecting together substantial essays on (mostly Canadian) novels and nonfiction.
Personal Investments covers the following writers: Jonathan Franzen, Marc di Saverio, Rimbaud, Christian Bok, Kenneth J. Harvey, Doug Glover, Peter Behrens, Darren Bifford, Czeslaw Milosz, Ian Dowbiggin, David Shields, Fanny Howe, Chris Gudgeon, Casey Plett, Michael Winter, David Adams Richards, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Terry Eagleton, Sam Harris, John Terpstra, Art Seamans, EJ Pratt, Alison Pick, Joshua Shenck, David Healey, Dawn Raffel, Steven Henighan, Stan Rogal, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jim Johnstone.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction 2. Part One: Adventures in Bioreviewing 3. Time and Fever 4. Freedom 5. Language On Holiday 6. The Festival of No More Words 7. Explosions: A Review of Douglas Glover’s The Life and Times of Captain N 8. Finnegan’s Wake in the Porridge Universe: A Review of Peter Behrens’ The O’Briens 9. Borrowing Magic: A Review of Darren Bifford’s Wedding in Fire Country 10. Review of Ian Dowbiggin’s The Quest For Mental Health: A Tale of Science, Medicine, Scandal, Sorrow, and Mass Society 11. David Shields and the Laziness Inherent 12. Coda: This is What I Wanted To Sign Off With 13. The Poetics of Plot: A Review of Chris Gudgeon’s Song of Kosovo 14. Zero Chronology: Notes on the Use of Time in Casey Plett’s Little Fish 15. Review of Michael Winter’s Into the Blizzard: Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead 16. Review of Alison Pick’s Far to Go 17. But Transcendence: A Review of Running the Whale’s Back: Stories of Faith and Doubt From Atlantic Canada 18. Review of David Adams Richards’s God Is: My Search for Faith in a Secular World and John Terpstra’s Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations 19. How bad is this book? Let me count the ways. A review of Art Seamans’ The Dead One Touched Me From The Past: A Walk With Writers Through The Centuries 20. It’s Not All About the Brain: A Review of Joshua Shenck’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fuelled his Greatness 21. Healey and Goliath: A Review of David Healey’s The Creation of Psychopharmacology 22. The Parodox I’m Really Pulling For: A Review of Dawn Raffel’s The Strange Case of Dr. Martin Couney 23. When Words Are An Anticlimax: A Review of Steven Henighan’s When Words Deny the World 24. Nice try, Doestoevsky: A Review of Stan Rogal’s bafflegab 25. The Story of Thee Hellbox Press: An Interview with Hugh Barclay and Faye Batchelor 26. Poetic Composition and the Implications of Scientific Theory: Jim Johnstone and Shane Neilson in Conversation 27. Idiosyncratic Notes on the Essays 28. Acknowledgements 29. Endnotes
If you’re interested in purchasing copies (only serious queries), then use the message function on this site. $500 per book, $1250 for all 4 in the series. If you are a Canadian university library, I’m afraid only one university per province will be allocated a copy (with one exception). I hope it was you!
The first in a unique series of critical texts by Shane Neilson, Retractable Devil Horns is an irreverently passionate account of Canadian poetry over the past twenty years. Following Judith Butler’s advice to “cherish the longer forms,” Neilson collects his more substantial ‘difficult’ pieces, many of which he deliberately suppressed for book publication due to the prevailing ideological climate in the humanities. In the first half of this text, Neilson reaches out to screaming Canadian poetry personalities, down-dresses many of the country’s big names, and attacks performativity; in the second, he thinks through books by talents like Carmine Starnino, Phil Hall, and Sharon McCartney in a more reflective (but no less engaged) manner.
Poets reviewed and mentioned in the series:
Jacob! McArthur! MOOOOONEY! Rafi Aaron. R.M. Vaughan. Lynn Crosbie. Paul Vermeersch. George Murray. Al Purdy. David Solway. Carmine Starnino. Peter Sanger. Phil Hall. Esta Spalding. Sharon McCartney. Marc di Saverio. George Walker. Luke Hathaway. Jim Johnstone.
Table of Contents
Poisonous Frame: A Review of Laura Ward’s Bad Press: The Worst Critical Reviews Ever! (B.E.S. Publishing, 2002)
Public Hanging: the Death of the Book Review
Harbourfront Pigs and Lipstick
Rules of Thumb for An Aspiring Critic
Pretending to be Great: Review of Rafi Aaron’s Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam (Niagara Falls: Seraphim Editions, 2006)
High School Confessional
Lyric, get thee to a nursing home, they’re showing cartoons in the dining room
Measured Advice from a Shrieking Personality
Reaching for Al Purdy: A Review of Beyond Remembering (Madeira Park: Harbour, 2000) and Yours, Al: The Collected Letters of Al Purdy (Madeira Park: Harbour, 2004)
Solway the Sad Balladeer: an Open Letter to the (Unofficial) Laureate of ‘This Sucks’
Critics at Large: A Review of Carmine Starnino’s A Lover’s Quarrel: Essays and Reviews (Erin: PQL, 2004) and Peter Sanger’s White Salt Mountain (Kentville: Gaspereau, 2005)
The Invisible Man Is In Your Caesura: Phil Hall Collaborative Collage w/ John Nyman
Introduction to The Pre-Poem Moment
My First Review: Esta Spalding’s Lost August: Poems (House of Anansi Press, 1999)
Eventual Development: The Poetry of Carmine Starnino
McCartney Sings the Blues
Recovering the Stars: A Review of Marc di Saverio’s Sanatorium Songs (Toronto: Cactus Press, 2010)
Beauty and Representing Mental Illness: A Review of Blackhood #1 (Comics are the Enemy Publications, 2017)
Interpreting the Interpreter of Dreams and Culture: Introduction to Sing to Me in the Cut (Victoria: Frog Hollow Press, 2015)
True Words in the Word Cloud: An Experiment in Collaborative Criticism
Idiosyncratic Notes on the Essays
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
The ethos behind the series is a tale told in the introduction. I won’t tell the tale out of school.
If you’re interested in purchasing copies (only serious queries), then use the message function on this site. $500 per book, $1250 for all 4 in the series. If you are a Canadian university library, I’m afraid only one university per province will be allocated a copy (with one exception). I hope it was you!
Unfit 1: Retractable Devil Horns, top Left; Unfit 2, Personal Investments, top Right; Marginal, bottom left; The Negative Review, bottom right.
In the next four days, I will describe each book starting in sequence, focusing on a book a day. First up is Retractable Devil Horns. Tomorrow! But for those who can’t wait, the pricing is: $500 per individual title (S&H included), $1250 for the set (S&H included).
Shane Neilson 