Our 2025 title The Cost of Living from Alan Bleakley and Shane Neilson is reviewed this month in the Canadian literary review The Woodlot.
Poet and writer Geoffrey Cook (Montreal, QC) makes a thoughtful and comprehensive assessment of Shane and Alan’s collection, deftly interpreting the many layers of this fascinating poetic collaboration.
This is a literature in which readers don’t just believe and emotionally invest, but through which they experience the contradiction between the lived world represented and the artifice of its representation.
You can read Geoffrey’s full review in the Woodlot here.
Thank you to Shane for alerting UK readers of Geoffrey’s excellent review, in a project that continues to delight in its transatlantic literary kinships.
And this is a book, ultimately, for all of us. In actualizing the ambiguity of metaphor, a poem can advocate hope.