Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia. He is the
co-editor of It’s Still Winter, an online journal of contemporary
Canadian poetry and poetics, and Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Writing Class is a most exciting anthology—the best Canadian anthology
I’ve read in at least five years. It is at different times daring,
witty, experimental, obscure, frustrating, engaging, and varied. In
fact, it is most of these things most of the time. It contains work by
poets who are not short-story writers in disguise. Here are writers who
engage with ideas, wrestle with language, and follow their own unique
paths. Good work, Kootenay School. Why hasn’t your faculty been
snapped up by our more prestigious English departments to freshen up
their creative writing classes?

One caution: if you are not seeking diatribes about “the Socreds ...
as BC’s official branch

of the Thatcher–Reagan axis” and other time-warped stuff, skip the
introductions—47 pages that could have been given over to more poetry.