The first book review I wrote was on request. Helen Guri asked me to review her debut with Coach House, Match, in the fall of 2011. It’d barely gotten the attention it deserved, though things were beginning to seethe– CWILA formed around that time, pointing to the dearth of reviews of women-authored books in Canadian publishing. I was still in school, finishing my MA degree, and by default, Editor-in-Chief of echolocation, a tiny literary print journal put out by the graduate English department. Like so many of the tiny university literary journals, was run entirely on volunteer time, university grants and departmental neglect. All but two of the previous years’ staff had graduated. I’d offered to set up its new blog and found myself conducting the whole set-up. Lesson here? If I name it you might assume I’ve actually learnt it.
In June 2012, Match was nominated for the Trillium prize, and yet still hadn’t been reviewed. My review appeared in echolocation‘s Fall 2012 issue, and soon after it was reviewed in Lemon Hound, then Event and Arc Poetry in early 2013.
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Helen Guri, Match, Coach House Books, 88pgs, $17.95
I may be giving away the punchline before you’ve heard the joke when I reveal that Helen Guri intended Match to consist of love sonnets, where the love object is a blow-up sex doll and the sonnets bear only a vestige of its formal conventions. Guri divulged this to a recent audience, and my memory may be inaccurate– it’s possible that I extracted from her preamble the explanation that validated my own reading of Match. This experience of craving verification for our assumptions, however, lies at heart of Guri’s novel-in-poems.
