Eleventh Toe

Olga Costopoulos teaches English at the University of Alberta.

Julie Roorda’s first collection of poetry both delights and
disappoints. Many of the poems read like prose broken into lines for no
particular reason, a problem exemplified in “They Will Find”:
“Microscopic skin cells / beneath my fingernails / one long, light
brown hair / in your sock drawer.” Indeed, many of the poems have
strong narrative qualities and would work better as prose poems if their
subjects were of genuine importance. Poems that do work as poems include
the four-stanza “Purdah,” a powerfully understated expression of two
women’s worlds, so close physically yet culturally at opposite ends of
the firmament. There is also a rather clever sonnet with the unlikely
title/subject “Pessimist at an Air Show.”