Losing Languages By Paige PierceBlurb, 2025158 pagesISBN: 9798331170066$26.99Reviewed by Emily Brandstaetter   Losing Languages by Paige Pierce is a poetry collection about loss, grief, and the relentlessness of love. The book is divided into three sections: “All that I have lost,” “All that I have loved,” and “All that I have learned.” It moves from the immediate aftermath of loss or trauma and a vocabulary of mourning, to the many faces of love, to conclude with revelations about self-discovery and hope.   The book is dedicated to Pierce’s late grandmother and shares fond memories she cherishes beyond the ache and sorrow: “the shadow of your essence.” Pierce’s graceful imagery explores…

November, NovemberBy Isabella WangPoetryHarbour Publishing, 2025103 pagesISBN: 9780889714847$19.95Reviewed by Bri Hepner   November, November is a meditative collection of poetry that addresses grief, memory, mortality, and poetic inheritance. Many of the poems read like intimate and confessional letters to lost poets and mourning friends. The point of view moves from personal suffering to collective loss, at once contemplative and vulnerable. The book is structured over several “passages” spanning Novembers that chart the death of a mentor poet, Phyllis Webb, the authors cancer diagnosis and treatment, and her recovery and reflection. Webb writes that “poetry isn’t / just in the song of the grieving / but right now it sings /…

Encrypted by Arleen ParéPoetryCaitlin Press, May 202583 pagesISBN 9781773861647$20.00Reviewed by Elke Sorensen   Arleen Paré’s 10th poetry collection, Encrypted, details her 19-year-old grandson’s bouts with severe depression, anxiety, and a video-game addiction after he moved into her basement in September 2020 to study Computer Science. Due to his mental health challenges, Paré’s grandson dropped out of university. Paré turned to poetry to write poems to him, about him, and for him and others fighting similar battles. The collection, which is referred to as one long poem in the acknowledgements, is strung together by epigraphs from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his work The Rime of The Ancient Mariner. The epigraphs work…

Manahil BandukwalaPoetryBrick Books, 202499 pagesISBN: 9781771316347$23.95Reviewed by Tara Wohlleben Heliotropia is Manahil Bandukwala’s second book of poetry, exploring love, distance, and home across five sections. While heliotropism describes how plants move in relation to the sun, Bandukwala explores how we move in relation to love. In the preface to the book, the poem “Season of Sunflowers” introduces the importance of patience: “how precious seconds are, and thirds, and//fourths, and so on. There is rarely lasting love/in a first.” The first section covers “Seventeen Months of Distance” with one poem per month, each with an epigraph related to love, longing, or distance. Here we live in “This universe where fear collides/with…