Leah Bobet

Two pieces of criticism live this week — one on the stylistic, speculative side of the ledger, and one literary novel around activism.

First, I’ve reviewed Manitoba author Garry Thomas Morse’s Retcon for Prairie Fire Magazine: a real kaleidoscope of film references, unreliable narrators, academic conspiracies, outright farce, and what we’re stashing underneath all this metaphor, anyways.

Second, a review of Jeff Miller’s debut Temporary Palaces for Plenitude Magazine: a novel about the ripple effect of one tumultous Occupy-style housing protest (and a whole lot of people sleeping around with each other/crushing/yearning/cheating) on two working artists’ trajectory out of one summer in early-2000s Ottawa.

More literary criticism double-bills due up shortly!

New poetry publication! “Biologists say it will take at least a generation for the river to recover (Klamath River hymn)” is included in Coach House Books’s On Occasion: Poems for the People, edited by Sina Queryas.

Release date is May 12th, and it’s available both from Coach House and most major booksellers!

The year’s winding up fast, so: Here’s what made it to print this year.

Poetry
“my mother asks why i do everything the hard way” in The Ampersand Review, January 2025.

“Biologists say it will take at least a generation for the river to recover (Klamath River hymn)” in Reckoning 9: creative writing on environmental justice, January 2025.

the silent treatment” and “he says write about death a normal amount” in Qwerty Magazine, May 2025.

“Sparagmos” in Up:Rising, September 2025.

Non-Fiction
“The Uses of Ideology: Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto“, Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice, February 2025.

“‘Sculpt raw materials that can receive the light’: A review of Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival“, PRISM International, February 26, 2025.

“Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community”, Spacing Magazine, Autumn 2025.

Hoping everyone has a restful and good holiday, and see you in 2026!

My copies of Qwerty Magazine’s No! issue showed up in the mail yesterday. It’s themed around refusal in a lovely nuanced way — all the places no to one thing is yes to another, and the tensions between them.

I have two poems in this: “the silent treatment” and sonnet “he says write about death a normal amount,” which is regrettably a little ripped from the headlines.

But I’ve also paged through the first four or five pieces this afternoon, and they’re great.

Issue is available now!

I reviewed a pair of very different climate books for this month — both live now!

for Reckoning, I reviewed Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto; one of the most contentious bylined reviews I’ve written to date. I went into this title thinking it’d be nice to explore a Japanese, Marxist-rooted approach to climate action, and how it inflects what you treat as necessary or possible. What we ended up with was mostly about how we treat each other in movement and emergency — and why it matters.

And up today: Kim Trainor’s brilliant climate poetry collection A blueprint for survival, reviewed at PRISM international.

There is so much here: For organizers, for climate people, for solarpunk people, for lovers of very structural poetry, for readers who see the potential of white space. It’s one of the most thoughtful, nuanced attempts I’ve seen at building a social vocabulary for futures worth having. I cannot recommend it enough; there are poems in here I want to write a thesis on.

Between them, they absolutely cover a spectrum of approaches; both available now.

The Ampersand Review is launching Issue #7 launch next week at Mississauga’s Hazel McCallion Central Library, and I’m going to be on the roster: reading (likely) my poem from the issue alongside a collection of poets, prose writers, and nonfiction authors!

Tickets are free at Eventbrite, and the reading runs from 6pm to 8pm on January 22nd, with time to chat, mingle, and pick up the brand-new issue. It’s a great lineup; hope to see you there!

Winding things up for the holidays — a little late, but definitively! Here’s what made it to print this year.

Poetry
“Rewilding” and “February Wool” in Prairie Fire: A Canadian Magazine of New Writing, Summer 2024.
“Refeeding” in The 2024 Rhonda Gail Williford Award for Poetry, 3rd Prize, December 2024.

Non-Fiction
“Love is a Place But You Cannot Live There”, Spacing Magazine, Spring 2024.
“Wifehood”, Room Magazine, June 2024.
“Not Anywhere, Just Not”, The Ampersand Review, October 2024.
“A Natural History of Empty Lots”, Rewilding Magazine, December 2024.

It’s a fairly quiet year, but 2025 is already scheduling itself in: so far, a lot of poetry, some local readings, and two reviews in the pipeline. Hoping everyone has a peaceful holiday, and see you in 2025!

Another publication this week: I have a capsule review of novelist and essayist Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes From Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places in this week’s Rewilding Magazine newsletter.

It’s a brief writeup, but an interesting and thoughtful book — and in good company with articles on museum exhibits, solar tech, reforesting even a front yard, and other truly nutritious stuff.

I came home last week to the good news that my short prose poem “Refeeding” has taken third place in this year’s Rhonda Gail Williford Award for Poetry, run by the International Human Rights Art Movement.

It’s part of a legitimately international roster of winners and honourable mentions, all focused on sincerity, vulnerability, and courage in the fairly perpetual work of a more just world. Which makes this quite deeply felt.

The poem, other winners, and finalists are all available as of yesterday on the award site!

Although I think it was just a matter of publication timing, this one fits: I’ve reviewed Ken Sparling’s short novel Not Anywhere, Just Not for The Ampersand Review.

If you want to be well and fully sent behind the sofa by a very quiet, small domestic novel, you have a friend in this book. To the point where I was late on this copy deadline because it unsettled me so badly and with such keen observational precision, and I can’t actually think of any higher praise for a book that’s so focused on communicating through structure and implication.

Available from Coach House Books and from Bookshop-slash-your local indies!