A Cocktail of Criticism: Reconsidering CanLit Review Culture // Klara du Plessis

As part of our guest-edited month “Roles and Functions of Criticism: Comments on our Review Culture," author Klara du Plessis examines the social world of CanLit Review culture.

In small press CanLit culture, or in the CanLit poetry scene more specifically, reviews are sometimes afforded idealistic roles thatthey no longer aim to fulfill. Reviews aren’t a promotional tool to impressively spike book sales. Reviews aren’t public attestations of trust by a celebrity critic or mainstream publication. Above all, reviews aren’t a summary of value judgments. I can’t personally think of a single instance of purchasing a book after reading a review. I can’t think of a single go-to reviewer who I trust to return to unquestioningly for book recommendations or who reviews consistently enough to deserve that level of discipleship. Reviews that brand a book as good or bad lose me in the moment of staking that claim. So what are reviews? And what is their use value? One tentative answer is that reviews are a way for books to socialize.Reviews are public proof of circulation beyond the more inward-looking process of individuals engaging with a book in private. Reviews are a textual, intellectual act of networking.

(My debut collection, Ekkewas fortunate to be reviewed a number of times by insightful writers and thinkers who took the time to engage in-depth with what the book is trying to do. At times, these reviews surprised me by foregrounding theses I hadn’t considered. I’d say that, for the most part, all these reviews were positive, with a questioning note here and there, but mostly enthusiastic in analysis. In preparation for my forthcoming book, HellLight Flesh, I recently reread the reviews, looking for relevant quotations for its back cover. Despite the positivity of the reviews, it proved unexpectedly difficult to find passages of direct praise—the reviews were interpretative, hermeneutic, consisting of arguments and experiential tangents.Rarely did they follow the formula “this book is good because...”)

Imagine a pile of books attending a cocktail party, dressed up in their beautiful new front covers. They talk to their friends, they make a few new friends, one book invites another book out for dinner, and one book feels less socially anxious than before, a bit more present, a bit more seen, with a modicum of belonging. In a sense, review culture is a microcosm of the live relationships between authors. TheCanLit poetry scene is arguably constituted of a fairly small group of individuals who often share intricate, interconnected personal and professional friendships. Moreover, the career of objective critic has been exchanged for poets writing about other poets’ poetry(here consider also volunteer or stipend-culture, and the scarcity of time and money). In a musical chairs-style shifting of roles, I have, for example, written numerous reviews about friends’ books or have reviewed a book by a poet who has also reviewed my book. Not quite an exchange economy, but definitely a reality of proximity, familiarity, and sharing of resources—poets orbit a tight nexus of an imaginary industry; the necessity for generosity and giving back to the literary community results in a quasi-reproduction of social circles in the socializing of books in their reviews.

(I’ve done a lot of reviewing over the years. I’ve reviewed repeatedly for Broken Pencil Magazine, Debutantes, Lemon Hound, Matrix Magazine, Minor Literatures, Montreal Review of Books, PANK, The Rusty Toque, Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, among other one-offs. At their best, reviews are gestures of commitment that someone took the time to read a book and articulate an understanding of it. Yet stripped of preconceptions of promotional rewards, celebrity status, and evaluative stamp, reviews become more closely aligned with essays. In fact, four of my reviews were recently compiled into a chapbook called Unfurl and designated as essays.)

To add a final twist, though, there is a weird ageism in review culture.Not considering the lag of a year or even two after a book’s release before the publication of some reviews, reviews favour the newcomers to the scene. Every spring and fall herald a whole new cohort of books, and once an author has moved from the release of one book to their next, chances for a review of the earlier book are very slim. People don’t review books that were released five, ten, twenty years ago. Instead, reviews mature into essays. As a book’s seniority in its social circle increases (and if it is endowed with aglow of luck), it also enters institutional settings—academics present papers about it, books are published about it, students study it and write term projects about it. In other words, young books receive review-essays and older books graduate to essay-essays. I wonder what would happen if reviews were rebranded as essays, if there were essays about new books and essays about books that have been around the block. Not only does this move suggest a slight democratization of critical language across generations of books, but it also implies a transparency of expectation—reviews are someone’s intellectual engagement with literary output, an energizing burst of insights, a sharing, one fragment of a conversation.

Klara du Plessis is a poet, critic, and literary curator. Her debut collection of multilingual long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and garnered much critical acclaim. Her second collection, Hell Light Flesh, is forthcoming Fall 2020 from Palimpsest Press. She lives in Montreal and Cape Town.

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