Welcome!
Northern Poetry Review is an online home for poems, reviews of poetry books, articles and interviews, with emphasis on Canadian poetry. Reviews are meant to be honest but diplomatic.
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Poetry submissions
Please don’t send poetry submissions, as poems are solicited by NPR. This is volunteer work in addition to many other obligations, and unfortunately reading many poetry submissions is simply not an option.
Reviewers
Please do contact NPR if you have an interest in reviewing for the site.
Publishers
Publishers will be requested to send a book directly to a reviewer, when a review is arranged. NPR encourages a limited number of reviewers to generously donate their time, while trying to keep in mind the number of books that deserve recognition here. Again, your patience is appreciated.
Editor
Alex Boyd writes poems, fiction, reviews and essays, and has had reviews and articles published in magazines and newspapers such as Books in Canada, The Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire and on various websites such as The Danforth Review and poetryx.com. His award-winning book of poems Making Bones Walk was published by Luna Publications.
Associate Editor
Alessandro Porco is the author of two collection of poetry: Augustine in Carthage, and Other Poems and The Jill Kelly Poems. He’s also the editor of the forthcoming critical study, Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey. Currently, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Porco is completing a dissertation on hip-hop and postmodern American poetry. He writes “In Extremis,” a hip-hop-focused column, for Maisonneuve Magazine online.
Associate Editor.
Lori A. May is a poet, novelist, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications such as Rattle, Two Review, and The Writer. She edits The Ambassador Poetry Project and Poets' Quarterly. Stains: Early Poems is now available, in addiction to three chapbooks of poems -- please see her site for more details.
Featured Interview
Rob Winger
Interviewed by Alex Boyd
Ten years ago we worked together at Chapters, and here we are in 2007, both of us with first books published this year. Aside from feeling I'm getting on a bit, I remember a poem of yours where you talk about carrying around The Collected Works of Billy the Kid on your back as though "an extra muscle"; did it help inspire this collection about another historical figure?
Yes, I remember that old poem, too. And, yeah, you're right: Ondaatje's early work made a big impression on me back when I was a wide-eyed, and under-read undergraduate student. I'd never heard of an author re-shuffling or re-inventing history, and had never read a contemporary longpoem before. I'd also never seen an author approach historiography or history as...continue reading
Featured Review
Seaway: new and selected poems
By Todd Swift
Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift's 'Seaway' is both a 'greatest hits' collection for those who've already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. Swift, after all, has been a tireless champion of a distinctively cosmopolitan, open-minded, post-modernist strand of contemporary writing for quite some time and his work as an editor and ferociously scrupulous blogger in Budapest, Paris and, latterly, London has all too frequently occluded his reputation as a poet with a singular ability to be simultaneously learned, playful and profound...continue reading