A Review of Anna Yin’s Breaking into Blossom by Renée m. Sgroi tinyurl.com/d9zd6h3d "Overall, Anna Yin’s poems in Breaking into Blossom offer a portraiture that blends the seemingly mundane with the sublime….”

Thank you to @chrisbanks6625.bsky.social for this thoughtful analysis of Isabella Wang's new poetry collection, November, November: "a brave, risk-taking book pushing a reader to think about poetic structure, of love and loss, of time left..."

I wrote a review of Long Exposure, a book length poem by Stephanie Bolster out this Fall with Palimpsest Press. tinyurl.com/y762dwzu I've always shied away from writing about long poems but this one felt like a long book-length ceremony of witnessing. Anyways, here it is!

Pearl Pirie looks at Mahaila Smith's Seed Beetle out now with Stelliform press! tinyurl.com/bdeckfxr "Verbal terraforming is visible in Seed Beetle. It brings to focus how everything we say in the present is also building the future…”

Anna Swanson, The Garbage Poems the-wood-lot.ca/2025/09/25/a...

New review of Isabella Wang's November, November out this Fall with Nightwood Editions. tinyurl.com/ytxzb6uc

A new essay about the popularity of the personal lyric poem and not becoming too complacent with its limitations. the-wood-lot.ca/2025/09/12/c... Check it out!

New review of Guy Elston’s The Character Actor Convention out this Fall with The Porcupine’s Quill. tinyurl.com/4j2v7v6x "Honestly, I think The Character Actor Convention by Guy Elston out now with The Porcupine’s Quill is a fine debut from a promising new voice in Canadian Poetry.”

New review of Paul Vermeersch's latest poetry collection NMLCT out now with ECW Press this Fall. tinyurl.com/mum7x9f9 "There is rigour and tension in these 16 line, formally-constrained poems, but also a sharp, restless and original consciousness that is the nucleus of this whole poetry collection

New review of Robyn Sarah's latest poetry collection We're Somewhere Else Now out from Biblioasis this Fall. the-wood-lot.ca/2025/09/07/h...

I wrote an appreciative review of Karen Solie's book WELLWATER out with Anansi press in Canada.It's a great book shortlisted for the 2025 Forward Prize! tinyurl.com/3ma7k826 Check it out!

Hey I wrote about Social Media and "Cringe Culture" and Ocean Vuong being smart over at The Woodlot - Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays. Here is the link: tinyurl.com/73untpjf

One of my poems over at OnlyPoems.net

Another new poem by me.

Tim Bowling's collection, In the Capital City of Autumn, has been shortlisted for The Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry! Congratulations, Tim! www.wolsakandwynn.ca/news-blog/ti...

I wrote a mini-essay about a Canadian poetry collection I really love which is Kevin Connolly's Xiphoid Process from 2017. tinyurl.com/ef7v6hvv “ I love the poetry collection Xiphoid Process, for not only what it says, but what it tries to say…”

Woke up and wrote a little bit this morning about the poetry of New Brunswick poet John Thompson. tinyurl.com/3j59zf5p I looked specifically back at his debut collection At the Edge of the Chopping there are no Secrets.

Hi Canadian poets, just a heads up that EVENT magazine (where I am poetry editor) is open for poetry submissions right now until the end of the month. Send in your good stuff! www.eventmagazine.ca/submit/

the above/ground press 32nd anniversary reading/launch/party! August 7 at RedBird, robmclennan.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-...

Again, just a general call for essays by Canadian poets. They can be personal, poetic, something in-between, from established older writers or MFA students, whatever the case may be. Send queries to [email protected] and I am sure we can work something out.

Wrote a blog post about poetry, addiction and winning a national magazine award for my essay “Black Hammers Falling” wp.me/pfEyTX-kV

A reminder we are always looking for essays by Canadian poets who want to write something personal or poetic, a craft essay or an essay about family, or writing about competition or aging or or or….. just DM.

I just won in the category of Personal Journalism a National Magazine Award for my essay “Black Hammers Falling” first published in The New Quarterly.

Thank you to Kate Rogers for writing a review of Speech Dries On The Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health out with The Porcupine's Quill for The Woodlot! What a cover too! the-wood-lot.ca/2025/06/02/s...

Christian Bök has graciously allowed The Woodlot to publish an excerpt of his new book My Works, Ye Mighty. I have published the essay both as a slideshow (so readers may see how the images and text work together in the actual book), and in essay form. tinyurl.com/4vvsze9h

Matt Rader and his graduate students in the MFA Creative Writing Program at University of British Columbia Okanagan have written a collective essay about Canadian Poetry--and what that phrase means--and have graciously allowed me to publish it!

Lau doesn’t offer any easy answers, but the poems in this collection are tightly controlled, the images exacting, and they precariously balance the poet’s life experiences against the backdrop of ecological and human disasters we all face..." tinyurl.com/352p9sns Check out my review at the link!

Just published a "Thank-you!" for reading and a little digital chapbook of new poems by me on The Woodlot - Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays for anyone interested. the-wood-lot.ca/2025/04/26/t...

Added a donation button at the bottom of the Woodlot website. It costs $250 a year to maintain the current site which I am happy to pay, but any one time donations of $5 would be appreciated.

Reupping this essay given no Canadian poets are on the shortlist. the-wood-lot.ca/2025/03/20/g...

"In Lost Signal… …Hutchinson is not just twisting knobs on the various humanitarian and environmental crises we face in this collection, but on language itself..." tinyurl.com/mtjv5tvb

I only have two more Spring Canadian book reviews to come. One for Chris Hutchinson’s Lost Signal and Evelyn Lau’s Parade of Storms. If anyone feels like taking a close look at a Spring Canadian poetry book in a review for the Woodlot, just DM me!

"It strikes me how these ‘remixes’ work in this collection is that the poet Rogal is taking a melody made up both of notes and words he has heard (think well loved classics and deep-cuts), and then reimagines them as human poetic monologues." tinyurl.com/scbdpprj

I really enjoyed Natalie Lim's debut poetry collection Elegy for Opportunity out with Wolsak & Wynn this Spring! Especially the title poem! tinyurl.com/fwdra8xu Check out the review after the link!

I really can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed Tolu Oloruntoba’s brand new poetry collection Unravel, which I tried to break down in a long review, but there is so much more I could say it. He is a poet’s poet. tinyurl.com/549xdtbn Check out the review at the link!

"I wanted the city to feel full, with the stories all somehow connected; each character to feel real; I wanted each character’s problems to matter…” Check out Daniel Cowper's wonderful essay about writing his novel in Verse Kingdom of the Clock! tinyurl.com/yc3chckz

I don’t usually read verse novels but I’m glad I read Yvonne Blomer’s Death of Perspephone: A Murder out with Caitlin Press, if only to remind myself poetry is written in a polyphony of voices, an array of forms and structures... tinyurl.com/bdzhd3u3 The full review is after the link!

stephanie roberts writes in UNMET, “we don’t yet know what we will be made of”, but this fantastic book is a piling on of surprising images and poetic structures and creative desires allowing reader and poet the opportunity to… …reaffirm there is beauty and wonder in the world. tinyurl.com/27k6yj82

The second Spring poetry review for The Wood-Lot is D.A. Lockhart's Commonwealth which is "an unabashedly lyric collection of poems, and lyricism to do well requires two things: paradoxically stillness and restlessness – and in “Commonwealth” you get the complexity of both." tinyurl.com

My first review for Spring is Nick Thran’s Existing Music out with Nightwood Editions. It’s a poetry collection that “riffs expertly on pop music, small talk, clouds and dead poets, as if searching for the tone or the melody that the lyric imagination might take a little comfort in.”

Tanis MacDonald on National Poetry Month! the-wood-lot.ca/2025/04/01/n...

I was rereading Matthew Zapruder's Why Poetry, and wrote a little something to think about this morning. the-wood-lot.ca/2025/03/23/t...

I'm off work this morning (taking my personal day) so I wrote about what is coming in April at The Woodlot - Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays and why I still believe in a National Poetry Month. the-wood-lot.ca/2025/03/17/i...

Two weeks to go and then Poetry Month! I have poetry reviews to go on new Canadian poetry collections out this Spring by Nick Thran, Stephanie Roberts, Stan Rogel, Tolu Oloruntoba, Chris Hutchinson, Yvonne Blomer and DA Lockhart. Hoping to review new Evelyn Lau and Natalie Lim collections too!