Month: June 2018

  RK: portrait By Dennis Cooley in of reticent through more We one, that’s the there’s is He the know that in him. then, But side can wrote glances the a no withdrawal, his We have The outrageous, in of guy, aslant, uncomfortable, Expansive. quiet, his or we shyly There essays—hunched, story. about of Kroetsch, duck of overflowing. have other that. we thumb the loud Kroetsch from point books, all He’s a pencil camera. that held who not to right, the then, the is, he’s often guy that, brevity than exuberant. in one what is. feast—what Kroetsch to almost...

Photo and copyright by George Webber Photography, originally published in AlbertaViews.   Kroetsch and Cars:  “Floor It” By Aritha van Herk You always drove cars the colour of asphalt parking lots.  They served as effective camouflage, impossible to find, quiet in their under-studied disguise, locum tenens for your breakaway, your constantly figurative departures. Your characters rely on cars as a device, use them to escape, use them to careen down endless highways, through roadblocks, up north. You wanted to be fond of hitchhikers, but knew they were vortexes of misdeed, the wrong side of the road and dangerous for...

Installment 25 features two poems by Lea Graham: excursions into meaning that meander toward etymology, history, memory, and association. “Wend” and “Calque” travel the back roads and back channels of language, constantly surprising and rerouting expectations in the process.   *** Wend: to direct one’s course; to travel, proceed 1. Forty years later in Mayflower, Arkansas, I wake from the dream where I am forever riding the Greyhound around hairpins, a car-sick kid next to a chain-smoking crone draped in a pink afghan. I’m eager for the mountain’s descent where the river begins to bottom out this drive, but stuck...