Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Samuel Wise
I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid
Adam Haiun’s debut poetry book, I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid, attempts to break down the cubicles of the world, to vindicate the forgotten voices howling anachronistically into the no-man’s-land of the “new nervous system.” His long poem is imbued with a computerized consciousness, like a mysterious malady that has deciphered the distances of desire and dreams, finding a known within an unknown.
Opening Ceremony by Laura Marie Marciano
Opening Ceremony, Laura Marie Marciano’s second collection of poetry, is a memory-mending confession, coming clean with the kind of clarity to prepare for the prospect of parenthood. The lines trace back one life, before the creation of another. By-gone moments bubble into propensity with the brilliance to vindicate them from the speaker’s steel-trap memory.
The Sacred Heart Motel
Between rootlessness and unquiet, Grace Kwan’s debut collection of poems, The Sacred Heart Motel, visits the dim private experience of lovers, strangers, visitors, and migrants without reservation or a master key. It is only fitting that the table of contents is entitled “directory”, for at the heart of the collection everything remains vacant – waiting to be punctured by nostalgia, memories, and reflections.
Between Composers: The Letters of Norma Beecroft and Harry Somers
Harry Somers was a prolific composer of various mediums, including stage productions, concert halls, film, and radio, and advocated for Canadian music internationally. Norma Beecroft was a prominent Canadian composer, producer, and broadcaster who received the Canada Council’s Lynch-Staunton Award for composition twice.
Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim by Jacob Wren
In Jacob Wren’s latest novel, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, an unnamed fiction writer with nothing to lose moves from his pent-up room, stepping out of the world of the imaginary and into the front line. Driven by an unpalatable reality exercising upon his imagination that his own country is providing arms used indiscriminately to bomb civilians and by an urge a Dionysian urge to document it.
Good Want: Poems by Domenica Martinello
Good Want reads as a road map through the wilderness of the suburbs. The homeward bound collection of poems lies, restlessly, between divine deliverance and blunt realness, serving as a careful witness to the small possibilities of suburban life. Going past the unhelpful road signs and visible limits of the pacifying predictability of suburbia, in a sweeping vision, the poems become a medium for personal revelations.
I Will Get Up Off Of: Poems By Simina Banu
I Will Get Up Off Of, the second poetry collection of Simina Banu is a one-location film equivalent of a book, as it brilliantly unravels on the treadmill of life, yet moves freely through moments of surrender and ecstasy. As the title suggests, it asks, “How does anyone leave a chair?.” Not being able to get up is not as easy as it sounds.
National Animal: Poems by Derek Webster
National Animal, Derek Webster’s second poetry collection, asks what it means to be a Canadian in a time of tremendous uncertainty and rapid dynamism. Acting as a kaleidoscope that illuminates the multiplicative aspects that form a national consciousness. It does not tell Canadians what they are or what they should be or reduce Canadian identity to any cartographical classifications. Nor does it call into question the beaver as the official representative of Canadian animals.
Sivan Slapak’s Debut Book: Here is Still Here
Sincere and intimate, sentimental and sanguine, Sivan Slapak’s debut book Here is Still Here, is brought together as a collection of sure-footed short stories. Isabel, the wanderlustful protagonist, embarks on a journey from Montreal to Jerusalem, from a middle-brow suburbia to a bohemian land of urgent possibility. Her curiosity leads her from one moment, lover, and longing to the next.
There is no end, no beginning: T. Liem’s Slows: Twice
Can contemporary poets maintain a sense of informality and inventiveness while expressing insight into the profound depths of the truth we so desperately yearn for? Can poetry reimagine sensibility while still being able to make sense? T. Liem’s latest book, Slows: Twice, walks on two stilts – one inviting the reader to question their most basic intuitions of what makes sense – and what breaks it.
Rediscovering the roots in Felicia Mihali's "A Ramshackle Home"
A Ramshackle Home is the inaugural work in Mihali’s extensive literary repertoire. Judith Weisz Woodsworth’s translation of Le Pays du fromage (2002) breathes new life into this novel, which has undergone its third transformation, originally penned in Romanian and later translated into French by the multilingual author herself. It is almost like an art form, being completely alone, isolated from the world, in quiet contemplation.
Back in the Land of the Living
Eva Crocker grew up in Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) and lives in Tiohti:áke (Montreal). Her debut novel All I Ask was long-listed for the 2020 Giller Prize and won the 2020 BMO Winterset Award. Her short story collection Barreling Forward was shortlisted for Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQS2 Writers and won the Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction and the CAA Emerging Author’s Award. Her forthcoming novel ‘Back in the Land of the Living’ was published in August 2023 by House of Anansi Press.
Nothing in Truth Can Harm Us
It is a reassuring thing, picking up the debut book of the latest Canadian novelist and discovering familiar themes with a passionate conviction that illuminates the truth that we cravenly seek in art. Colleen René is the latest protégé to come out of Concordia University’s creative writing program; her debut book – Nothing in Truth Can Harm Us, is written with immitigable clarity of the world of common experience.
Andrew Steinmetz presents: Because
It’s 1981, one year after the shock of John Lennon’s murder. Disco is dead, punk is making its smashing entrance, and it is the big bang of bands like: The Talking Heads, R.E.M, Television, and The Police. Rising out of the ashes of the ’70s, with calloused fingers and heads full of new-wave and punk hair flare, two brothers, Hombre and Transformer, form a band, and that band is called “Because”.
Our Lady of Mile End
The latest novel of Sarah Gilbert, Our Lady of Mile End, is a collection of seventeen interlinked stories that speak to the fabled and romantic neighbourhood of Mile End, Montreal, and Canada. The warm-hearted and well-meant book blends the overlapping inner lives of women, neighbours, strangers, the old generation, and the new, living in the ever-changing Mile End. Gilbert meticulously describes this patchwork of perspectives to expose the vivid heart of the area.
Exploring the debut novel of Montreal author David Connor
The highly anticipated novel by David Connor, titled “Oh God the Sun Goes,” fearlessly defies all conventions for debut books. It possesses a profound absurdity, an emotionally resonating quality, and a distinct sense of originality. The absence of the sun for an extended period remains an enigma, with its fate shrouded in mystery. Within the narrative, the exploration unfolds of what propels an individual through a world that lacks its focal point.
Exploring the Eclectic Art-Punk Vibes of Montréal's Band La Sécurit
Montréal female-led band La Sécurité highly-anticipated debut L.P. Stay safe! released this summer, it Is a spontaneous, danceable, and fun-packed ten-track album. Stay Safe! draws on a hodge-podge of various sources, often changing between punk, new-wave, and post-punk, often changing between genres on every song making their music wholly unique. The culmination of all these influences is what lead singer Éliane Viens-Synnott calls art-punk.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Samuel
Contact Samuel, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack