Recent Blog Posts

Review: R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface

June Hayward wants what Athena Liu has: a spectacular, high-flying career as an author. Despite both women coming out of Yale and releasing their debuts at about the same time, June is bitterly aware of her relative obscurity. Athena dies in a sudden accident, leaving behind her manuscript of her next novel about Chinese workers who were exploited and maltreated during the British war effort in World War One. Even in its draft form, unseen by anybody else, it is a brilliant work. June takes Athena’s manuscript and reworks some of it before presenting it as her own, published under the name “Juniper Song.” Song is a legal middle name provided by her whimsical mother. If it conveniently also suggests a Chinese background that June doesn’t have, so be it. Athena’s wild level of success is suddenly in June’s hands. As Yellowface unfolds, June proves the extent to which she is willing to lie, threaten, and bully her way into holding onto that success.

Review: Darren C. Demaree’s a child walks in the dark

The dedication to Darren C. Demaree’s latest poetry collection, a child walks in the dark, reads simply, “For my family – ” and family, particularly fatherhood, is woven into every single poem in the book. Each work is a retelling of something Demaree’s speaker tells his children, whether his daughter, his son, or both at the same time. It would be easy to resort to vague lessons or aphorisms, but the speaker brings a moving vulnerability to every message, and turns those fragments of parenthood over to the reader.

You Asked Cleo, and She Answered

After hounding Instagram followers, friends, acquaintances, Tinder matches, etc., I (Cleo) accumulated inquiries for the column. Now, I’m taking to the media and giving you advice!

Vilhelm Hammershøi: The End of Waiting

Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi was known to be shy, quiet, reclusive, and never quite keeping pace with the revolutionary movements of his time. His interiors are so subdued that they stand out on gallery walls when surrounded by paintings of his contemporaries, most of which are blossoming with colour.

His art, however, didn’t always have a place on these walls.

Review: The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

In the blueberry fields of Maine in 1962, a four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl named Ruthie goes missing. Her family, who annually travels from Nova Scotia to Maine to harvest the berries, searches frantically for her, but no trace is found. Ruthie’s older brother Joe was the last to see her and is deeply affected for the rest of his life by her disappearance. As an adult man now suffering from terminal disease, Joe narrates much of the novel and describes how the family survives in the absence of Ruthie.

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It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified

– Friedrich Nietzsche,

Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik

Recent Supplements

146.2

I carry the morning on my back / like a mother carries three children at once

147.1

If I saw Jesus on the street I’d probably cross at the lights / Just to be sure

147.2

there is only a difference in sequence / between sacred and scared

canada’s oldest literary journal

Acta Victoriana

Acta Victoriana is the literary journal of Victoria College and the longest running university student publication in Canada. Since its founding in 1878, it has maintained a legacy of artistic excellence and boasts alumni such as Margaret Atwood, George Elliot Clarke, and E. J. Pratt.

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