Reviews
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Foreword Magazine Review
AUTOBIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR Trust the Bluer Skies : Meditations on Fatherhood paulo da costa, University of Regina Press Softcover $24.95 (256pp) 978-0-88977-995-2 paulo da costa’s heartbreaking memoir Trust the Bluer Skies is a bittersweet ode to memories of lost times and places. The book explores da costa’s relationship with his four-year-old son, Koah, during a months- long, pivotal trip from Canada to da costa’s birth- place in rural Portugal, undertaken in an effort to expose Koah to his heritage and extended family life. The book is intentional in considering how traditions are passed from one generation to another, as from a loving father to his son. In Portugal, da costa…
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Review of Bluer Skies by Lindsay Wincherauk
audio and written review – click to view
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The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories by Paulo da Costa
Book Review in Prairie Fire Jul 25, 2018 The author’s subtitle, “60 Sudden Fictions,” illuminates much of what a reader experiences in delving into Midwife of Torment: having entire life-narratives sprung fully grown upon the sensibilities, like Athena’s delivery from her father Zeus’s head to relieve a massive migraine. Spread out among six sections, da Costa’s fictions vary from mere flashes of life, mostly as tormented as the title suggests, to fleshed-out nightmare conflicts. These fictions never occupy more than three or four pages of the collection, yet some require days of mulling to decipher their word-codes. Luckily, the undertaking yields deep-seated surprises and sometimes sheer delights, and turns out…
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Enclosures
Check out this podcast from Reckoning Magazine where the editor Michael DeLuca talks about my essay Enclosures. You can read the complete text too or download the podcast to listen at your leisure … whenever and wherever . Enjoy! Podcast Episode 18: Enclosures https://reckoning.press/?powerpress_embed=3058-podcast&powerpress_player=mediaelement-audio Today I’m going to read you an essay by paulo da costa, “Enclosures”, from Reckoning 6. I think of this piece as a new perspective in an ongoing conversation that started, for me, with Kate Schapira’s essay “On Political Change, Climate Change, and the Choice to Not Have Children” that appeared in Catapult in 2017, and my editorial piece in Reckoning 2, “On Having a Kid…
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James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction
WGA CNF Award HR Winners of the 2020 Alberta Literary Awards The Writers’ Guild of Alberta is pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Alberta Literary Awards. This year’s award winners were announced in an online video release on June 4th. The video is available to watch on our Facebook page and YouTube channel. This celebration marks the 38th anniversary of the Alberta Literary Awards and brought together writers from across Alberta.The Alberta Literary Awards were created by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta in 1982 to recognize excellence in writing by Alberta authors. This year, jurors deliberated over 220 submissions to select winners in the following eight categories. James…
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Canadian Writers Abroad – reviews Midwife of Torment
The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories, Guernica Editions: 2017, 202 pages. Reviewed by Irene Marques Calling Us into Seeing and Being More: “Me” and the World The Midwife of Torment & Other Stories by paulo da costa is a book of short stories, or sudden fictions [under 1,000 words], divided into six parts: “Affections,” “Slowness,” “Aqua Libera,” “Beneath Our Beds,” “Force” and “Fathers.” In this collection, we find provoking thoughts unveiled slowly in an incantatory, lyrical language, revealing our deepest yearnings, frustrations, losses, insufficiencies, and happiness(es), too. His work makes us see, feel and be more: to have profound insights into our lives and the world; to understand…
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Short-listed for the James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction
The creative non-fiction “Learning to Shave, Learning to Leave” originally published by The Fiddlehead, has been short-listed for an Alberta Literary Award. Congratulations to all the finalists. James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction Paulo da Costa (Calgary) — “Learning to Shave, Learning to Leave” (The Fiddlehead) Jennifer Bowering Delisle (Edmonton) — “Abracadabra” (The Forge) Omar Mouallem (Edmonton) — “Billionaires, Bombers, and Bellydancers” (The Ringer) The Writers’ Guild of Alberta is excited to announce the finalists for the 2020 Alberta Literary Awards and Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Each year, the Alberta Literary Awards and the City of Edmonton recognize and celebrate the highest standards of literary excellence…
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Obligatory reading for the North American Luso Diaspora – impressions by Diniz Borges
Diniz Borges on Beyond Bullfights & Ice Hockey (essays) Just began to read this new book of essays by paulo da costa. The first essay is amazing. Paulo is a great writer. The title of the book is great. Indeed, beyond some of these stereotypical cliches that we slap in the Portuguese experience in North-America. Paulo writes from a Portuguese-Canadian experience, not very different from ours here in the US. I will continue reading this great book of essays and it will be, I’m sure, one of future articles for the Portuguese language press in the US and in the Azores. Congrats to Boavista Press for the publication. Acabo de…
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The Cartography of Being – by Nuno Judice – Reviewed in The Malahat Review
Nuno Júdice, The Cartography of Being, translated by Paulo da Costa (Victoria: Livros Pé D’Orelha, 2012). Paperbound, 126 pp., $17.95. Poetry Review by David Swartz Nuno Júdice’s poetry is dense, rich, lyrical and, above all, philosophical. It expresses a philosophy that equates poetry with every aspect of life, and a portrait of the poet in the act of self-creation through the making of poetry. In The Cartography of Being, Paulo da Costa’s selection and translation of fifty-one of Júdice’s poems written between 1967 and 2005, presented side by side with the Portuguese, captures the flow, rhythm, cadence, and overall meaning of the poet’s original creations. Júdice is…
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Malahat Review – Seamless Stories Haunt
The January 2014 issue (#185) of the University of Victoria’s Malahat Review features a review of The Green and Purple Skin of the World. Fiction Review by Norma Lundberg The Green and Purple Skin of the World: Stories by paulo da costa (Freehand, 2013). Paperbound, 208 pp., $21.95 The sixteen stories in this collection proceed so seamlessly a reader might initially suspect them of being slight—a smooth skin of words, a faint echo from the title. But just as our skin is only the surface of our complex bodies, these stories are alive with characters in their own complicated worlds. They slowly enter the reader and haunt…