This doesn’t happen often around here, but we are excited to welcome a poetry reviewer to our Power Q & A series. melanie brannagan frederiksen is the poetry columnist for The Winnipeg Free Press, to our series to speak to the review landscape in Canada.
Welcome, melanie!
Q: How would you like to see the cultural landscape around reviews and reviewing change?
melanie! Find out more about melanie here.
A: I’m coming at your question from the position of someone who has almost exclusively reviewed for non-specialist audiences: that is, for about the last 10 years, my reviews have mostly been published in the books pages of The Winnipeg Free Press, and since 2022, I’ve been the monthly poetry reviewer there. I’m also thinking specifically about poetry reviewing.
Newspapers were also where I first read book reviews: Every Saturday when I was an undergraduate, I would pick up a copy of the Globe and Mail, which at that time had a substantial books section. This isn’t in any way to discount literary magazines and trade publications, as well as individuals publishing reviews online or in newsletters. All of these are, of course, vital to Canada’s ongoing literary conversation.
I’m insisting on my own positioning as one answer to your question: I don’t think there’s one cultural landscape surrounding reviewing — or, more accurately, that landscape looks different depending on where you’re standing on the field. From where I stand, there are so few generalist publications that cover poetry regularly, and that informs my approach to the entire enterprise. From my perspective, there aren’t enough poetry reviews. Someone who writes in more specialist spaces would talk about the weakness in Canadian reviewing culture differently.
There are so many poets in Canada working to turn our culture and ourselves inside out in smart, complicated, and intricate ways, and someone just coming to poetry (someone who may have read some poems in English class; who doesn't know where to find a literary magazine; who, for whatever reason, can’t easily access their area’s artistic communities) might not know that.
Related to that — I think one of the failures of literary culture, in general, is that we assume that everyone who might be interested in books has a certain level of access to a variety of books and a baseline cultural knowlege about where to look for more and different ones. We assume people who are interested both know about and can access the conversations around books, and conversations that connect books to other conversations in the world. Newspapers and generalist publications can contribute to filling that gap: they did for me when I was growing up, but could that still be the case?
A last thought: Increasingly I return to the question not only of who has access to reading reviews, but who has access to writing them — which is not unrelated to the masses of under- and un-paid work that scaffolds so many aspects of literary culture in Canada, but encompasses too those who have been harmed by bad actors in literary communities or marginalized by class, gender, race, disability, or age. We need to reckon with all of these marginalizations in order to build a more just and more robust literary and reviewing culture.
About melanie brannagan frederiksen:
melanie brannagan frederiksen (she/her) lives and writes in Winnipeg, on Treaty One territory. She is the poetry columnist for The Winnipeg Free Press, the author of the chapbook poseidon's cove, athena's cave (Model Press 2021), and her poems have been published in various venues.