“Wow, you really kicked Nature’s butt,” that’s what a friend told me after we finally tamed our rear garden. It was wildly overgrown. There were gooseberry shrubs, a swath of ostrich ferns, Manitoba maple saplings, and half a dozen other weeds that thrive on neglect. I love gardens. I love admiring gardens from afar. They […]

What’s a chapbook?  I hear that a lot.  That’s because I’m trying to write one.  The straight answer is: Something a touch shy of a book, usually a stapled booklet with 24 pages or fewer.  The more inspired thing is to call it an appetizer: A work that can be consumed at one sitting, provides […]

Ottawa author Kanina Dawson’s poetry collection Masham Means Evening, which is based on her experiences as a master corporal with the Canadian military in Afghanistan, doesn’t invite a tepid response. “Dawson grabs the reader full frontal and screams – here it is, the face of war, have a bite.”  That’s how poet Michael Dennis describes it.  Tepid?  Not so […]