My first Goodreads review ... “Recovery Community is a ferocious and urgent collection of poems of the harm of addiction on the self and others, helplessness, sickness, injustice, life, youth, love and the arbitrariness of death. What stays with me above all else after having read these poems is the emotion: anger, frustration, grief. The yawp sounded over the roofs of the world. Recovering Community is a timely collection.”

Even if you can‘t go out into the community, you can bring the community to you #RecoveryCommunity wherever you buy books

Hi everyone, it‘s been a while, being a physician has taken an increasing toll in recent months but at least I have this little ray of sunshine to show for 2021 so far! Out this weekend wherever u buy books #recoverycommunity

Christmas 2020 🤗🕺😎

I think this is the best book title I‘ve seen in years - audacious, funny, contains things I love (vampires, book clubs, slaying) - so I just had to read it!! What book titles screamed out READ ME READ ME READ ME to you in recent times?!?!!!

Highly
Recommended
Young Female Physician
We will be sharing ‘a stage‘ on December 3rd

https://www.cpd-umanitoba.com/events/poetry-and-a-medical-life-a-reading-and-con...

“These odors are like flung harpoons” 😍

What a great premise 🕺 from Karen Russell (she wrote Swamplandia a few years back) #sleep donation

As I start the pre-reading, reading and re-reading for my next next book I predict these four titles will be central to my task, and I am reminded of that T.H. Huxley quote that reminds us to always be prepared for, ‘The slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact‘; such is the risk the poet accepts...

After recent reads about various black, queer, African, female protagonists it may seem odd that my next book veers hard south & white but I have long coveted Peter Guralnick‘s definitive two-volume treatment of Elvis and this is a 500pp beast that needs taming sooner rather than later. Wish me luck, I‘m goin‘ in 🦸🏼

‘Sometimes love and guilt taste the same‘
Quite brilliant

Damn fine poetry from Canadian / South African writer, Klara du Plessis, also check out her debut Ekke

New poetry new poetry new poetry 🤗😍
Kate Sutherland (grab her Beasts of the Sea if you can)
Ian Williams (2019 Giller winner for his first novel)
Ken Babstock (vanguard of Canpo)

Out next month with Mansfield Press
Available to pre-order on A#*z#n now
Not a fan of the corporate chokehold but international orders may be otherwise difficult...alternately contact me through www.conormcdonnell.ca and I‘ll try to get it to you in a more eco-indie-friendly stylee
🤗🙏🏻😱

You've heard the hit song "Come and Get Your Love" in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, but the story of the band behind it is one of cultural, political, and social importance. Created with the cooperation of the Vegas family, painstaking steps were taken to ensure the historical accuracy of this important and often overlooked story of America's past. Redbone provides a voice to a people long neglected in American history.

Just began The Death of Vivek Oji last night (after careful selection of bookmark 🤓) and I‘m already swooning at the beauty and of Akwaeke Emezi‘s words unfolding in front of me 🤗

I loved NK Jemisin‘s The City We Became and cannot wait for the next instalment. Took me two weeks to read it with continuing to treat patients through a resurgence in COVID numbers which I balanced by going to bed early many nights to get my reading in🤗
As per usual I now have to chose my next bookmark before choosing which book I dive into next 🤓

Can NOT believe that Jeff Lemire will be appearing virtually to help cohost our Book Club tomorrow night!! Sweet Tooth Volume 1 is the chosen book and I cannot recommend it and the whole series highly enough 😍

My wife keeps telling me my Book City bookmark looks like a parking ticket. But I guess they‘re the same thing right? If it doesn‘t move within a certain time you need to move it along or suffer the consequences, in this case not know what‘s coming up on the next page of NK Jemisin‘s magnificent The City We Became 🤗

Just started this beast of a book. My first NK Jemisin but I think I‘m gonna love it

Highly recommend this book about a weekend in the life of a gay black biochem grad student to all non-gay non-black people who work in academia and have non-white non-binary friends. This book doesn‘t so much tell you what it‘s like to be him as it tells you what it‘s like for him to live in the same world as me, you, us, them. Says nothing to me about my life? Good, cos it says everything I don‘t know about his ✊🏿

Sachiko Murakami‘s latest poetry collection, Render, is a fierce unflinching face-off with the blank pages of trauma addiction recovery and miscarriage. Every poem is a battlefield, every sentence a line in the sand 🙏🏻

Such an important work in Canadian poetry. Do people outside Canada know of this poetry collection which describes a mythic community in Black Nova Scotia? Since its publication in 1990 it has inspired an acclaimed radio-play, a popular stage play and the feature film, One Heart Broken Into Song. Highly recommended ✊🏿

This
Wonderful
Book
🤗😱
Read it in one day, almost one sitting but me bum got numb 😂
Immediately goes on to all time list
5/5 from one of Ireland‘s best writers of the 21st century
Follow Kevin Barry closely

Just finished Straub‘s beast of a book, took 12 days to read but increasingly I found myself going to bed earlier each evening so I could spend more time with Tom, Del & Rose as they struggled to escape Collins‘ mindf*#ery of a construct that is Shadowland and all its slippery citizens 🎁🤔😯

Wow! The first 40-50 pp are a little slow and the shifting narrator is a little disorienting to begin with but the characters are steadily fully drawn and Brooks ratchets the tension both believably and excruciatingly. Excellent study in social dynamics, eco-folly and our ability nèe need to explain-mansplain rising danger and impending doom in order to not lose face. First zombies now this, what he will do with vampires? Highly recommended

So excited that film adaptation of The Devil All The Time hits Netflix next week, one of my fave novels of this century/millennium to date

For fans of 300 (either the movie or the graphic novel, they‘re both great) you really should check out Frank Miller‘s OGN Xerxes, it‘s a beautiful thing 😍🤯✅

Oh my, George Elliott Clarke‘s Whylah Falls

Sometimes when I finish a book I kiss it and say thank you. On finishing Zadie Smith‘s Intimations this morning I hugged it to my chest and had a stupid little middle-aged cry sigh

Excellent little graphic novel. Almost entirely an Irish production (the three main contributors are Dubliners) that tells a haunting story of the all too real practice of gangland slayings that are dumped in the wilds of the Wicklow mountains. Don‘t let my blurb put you off, it‘s well rendered beautifully drawn and holds an ethereal otherness that elevates it above typical sweary (of which there is a lot) Guy Ritchie tasty boys 👍🏻🇮🇪👍🏻

This is a rarity. Woodman would hunt down 19th Century school exercise books in Italy and add her photos and unrelated captions to reveal an unexpected disjointed yet oddly appropriate narrative. Quaderno is the first such notebook to be published by her estate (she only made six in her short life) and is yet another document of a remarkable artist fully formed in vision and voice before she turned 20. More to be released piecemeal by her estate

It arrived
😍

Mark Lanegan, ex Screaming Trees singer, sometime member of Queens of the Stone Age, solo artist and raconteur delivers one of the most harrowing ‘my life and music‘ memoirs I‘ve ever read including a 35 page chapter describing a European tour that sees him hunting down drugs in three different countries, getting robbed, going into the DTs and seizing on the streets without nary a mention of music song or performance

Terrifying

“Three greasy brother crows wheel, beak to heel, cutting a circle into the bruised and troubled sky, making fast, dark rings through the thicksome bloats of smoke”

A lil over 30 years ago I crawled into bed with this book at 6am having spent the night carousing with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in Galway, Ireland. I read that first line, smiled to myself knowing I would love this book then got up and sat med-school exams. I wasn‘t wrong 🎤👨🏼‍⚕️

I have coveted this awhile now, Mary W. Shelley‘s Frankenstein with illustrations by original Swamp Thing co-creator, Mr. Bernie Wrightson 😍

“Some boys aren‘t born
they bubble up from the earth‘s crust”

Kaveh Akbar‘s first poetry (chap)book. Get past the horrible cover and dive into the poetry of ghosts and regrets

A Chair. From Simon Armitage‘s latest collection, The Unaccompanied. He is one of three writers responsible for my being a writer; his style is so deceptively simple that on reading his collection Seeing Stars I thought, ‘I can do that‘ 🙄
HIGHLY recommend his recent collected works ‘Paper Aeroplanes‘

Maybe I shouldn‘t add books I have yet to read but Zadie Smith‘s latest collection of essays, written and published since lockdown began, is next on my list. I can‘t wait to ‘rejoin‘ her for a while to the extent I‘m probably speed-reading my current book, sorry Mark Lanegan 😘

Through the invention of the Junebat — a contradictory, evolving, ever-perplexing creature — Stintzi is able to create a self-defined space within the poems where they can reside comfortably, beyond the firm boundaries of the gender binary or the plethora of identities gathered under the queer umbrella.

As the speaker of the poems begins to emerge from their depression, the second wing of the book tracks their falling in love

4.5 out of 5
This is his only book of poems, published in 1973. A year earlier his parents died, a year later he shot himself. Obv heavily influenced by Sylvia Plath‘s Ariel, this is nevertheless a haunting homage to death in many forms, the most striking being a lady in ancient Egypt describing her embalming as a seductive preparation for eternal beauty
Read more @ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69134/the-rebirth-of-a-suicidal-genius

What a way to finish a book you love (for the third time) ... “They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.”

#poetrymatters
Spend time with this lady and her award-winning 2020 collection, Roxanna Bennett‘s Unmeaningable is technically adept in use of sonnets and arresting in image language and the fracturing recasting of what poetry can be

So happy I picked this up, waiting near the back of this book was an arresting photo by Francesca Woodman whom I never heard of before. Have ordered two of her books from one of my fave used bookstores (Kennys in Galway) and they can‘t get here quick enough. Future Woodman-related blurbs to come

Maybe I need to read one book at a time