ISSUE 26

  • Amatoritsero Ede

    Amatoritsero Ede

     

    A Coup détat or Couplet?

    A coup d’état is supposed to be an illegal, violent ransacking and toppling of a noble government that has been legitimized through a popular ballot, whose usurping force equally ought to issue from an … Read the whole text

  • George Elliott Clarke

    George Elliott Clarke

     

    On Writing J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence)

    Forbidden any right to write or speak to countermand
    Stubborn, deliberate curses—the catcalls and Calumny,
    I recalled Benda; I thought of Céline (or Louis-Ferdinand
    Destouches)—polemical, cynical, his bravura ellipses

    Turning every passage … Read the whole text

  • Helen Walsh

    Helen Walsh

     

    The Screen, the Literary Stage, and the Boardroom  

    (Scholar-Poet, Amatoritsero Ede, in conversation with Helen Walsh, Novelist and Literary Activist) 

    Amatoritsero Ede: It is great to finally have this conversation with you. I would like to begin at … Read the whole text

  • Angela Sorby

    Angela Sorby

    The Heist

    Transportation’s tough,
    if you want to be transported:

    the blockbuster museum’s hush
    is uniform, like sand. 

    Adjust the audio tour,
    and behind the curtain

    of information hiss
    streams of static—

    what’s art but marked
    exits, the urge to … Read the whole text

  • Helon Habila

    Helon Habila

    On Biyi Bandele

    Since his unexpected death on 7 August 2022, a lot has been written about Biyi Bandele’s life and work by colleagues, friends, family and fans. How he started his writing career as a precocious 14-year-old, by winning … Read the whole text

  • Moses E. Ochonu

    Moses E. Ochonu

    Recollections on Nigerian Masculine Discourses

    I am uncomfortable with the uncritical transposition of Western social taxonomies on African societies. I’ve never fully bought into the notion that Nigerian maleness can be accurately characterized with or contained in terms such as … Read the whole text

  • Elizabeth Tavella

    Elizabeth Tavella

    Poetry Review 

    Teardrops on the Weser
    by Amatoritsero Ede
    Winnipeg, MN: Griots Lounge, 2021
    64 pp. $20.99

    With Teardrops on the Weser, Amatoritsero Ede guides his readers on a transformative journey across landscapes and memories bringing to the surface … Read the whole text

  • Giovanna Riccio

    Giovanna Riccio

    Fiction Review

    The Artist and the Assassin
    by Mark Frutkin
    Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2021
    213 pp. $19.95

    The Wordsmith and the Half-Fallen Angel

    In The Artist and the Assassin, Mark Frutkin has penned a page turner of lyrical imagination … Read the whole text

  • Mark Frutkin

    Mark Frutkin

    Poetry Review 

    J’Accuse . . . ! (Poem Versus Silence)
    by George Elliott Clarke,
    Exile Editions,
    198 pages, $26.95

    Some poetry whispers. Some poetry shouts. This collection of poetry shouts out loud, with great creative skill. And it shouts for … Read the whole text

  • A. F. Moritz

    A. F. Moritz

     

    Poetry Review 

     Canticles II (MMXIX)
    by George Elliott Clarke
    Guernica Editions,
    2019. 505 pp.
    ISBN 978-1-77183-409-4
     
    In a 2022 text, George Elliott Clarke calls his Canticles series “an expected six-volume epic…that begins with the survey of two … Read the whole text