Leah Bobet

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!

Freshly back from the Communicating Climate Hope conference, I’ve got the news that Ansible Press’s Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction — which includes my experimental 1920s New York ghost story “Sunday in the Park With Hank”, is the winner for this year’s Prix Aurora Award for Best Related Work.

On top of that: The book’s up for the 2024 World Fantasy Award in the Best Anthology category — that’ll be settled in October.

It’s available in most ebook formats in print through Kobo, Amazon Canada, Amazon US, or worldwide through other providers. And: Big congrats to editor Stephen Kotowych, who put this whole thing together from Moment One.

Home this afternoon to find my contributor’s copies of the Summer 2024 Prairie Fire, with two new poems: “February Wool”, which is a lil’ bit of play about the physicality of memory and the lint balls on your sweater, and “Rewilding”, a short piece that’s half fat trumpets and half ecological menace and a third half Infernokrusher-esque bears and logging trucks.

The issue’s available now via their website and on newsstands, and contains this year’s contest winners too!

Something I’ve been quite excited about is on the horizon:

I’ll be giving a talk at UBC’s Communicating Climate Hope conference on the intersections between climate art, organizing, and how we tackle problems bigger than our heads with a modicum of dignity and joy. It’s called How to Play in the Emergency, if that gives you a sense of where we’ll be at that hour.

The list of other speakers — academic, activist, and artistic — looks deeply nourishing, and there are digital-only signups. It’s all open for registration until July 31st. I would love to see everyone there.

Spring has brought, among other things, contributors’ copies:

First, I’ve reviewed Jade Wallace’s poetry collection Love is a Place But You Cannot Live There for Spacing Magazine. It’s really rather perfect poetry for people interested in psychogeography, place, and the relationships between people and infrastructure and history and each other. It’s drawing on a lot of smarts while staying accessible, and it’s by turns haunted, sad, thoughtful, and really dryly funny.

I also review Barrie poet Caitlin McKenzie’s chapbook Wifehood for Room Magazine. It is hand-sewn, very deeply layered, and doing so much beneath a deceptively simple surface about relationships and how we vision and revision them.

More to come through the summer!