In her remarkable second collection, Elee Kraljii Gardiner chronicles a health crisis, from sudden onset through slow recovery to healing (she suffered a mini-stroke, which was caused by a tear in the lining of an artery). The Vancouver poet makes viscerally palpable the rupture of perception (the “jumbledness within,” as she puts it). LockhartMansfield Press, 78 pages, $17Observant and illuminating, D.A. It opens with anecdotal poems about local haunts and memories of his youth and then shifts to the American Midwest, where the focus expands to cultural history and the impact of European settlement. But he also expresses the tension between industry and the natural world, as in the resonant image of a neon sign that “bleaches out the horizon/and expanse of stars beyond.”

Source: thestar March 07, 2019 15:56 UTC