Thankful for the kind attention and consideration Danielle Janess gave my book in her review in the Malahat Review. I’ll hold back on my thoughts on it but I’ll say I’m really happy to someone read and think so deeply about what’s going on in the book.
Here’s how it starts:
“If reading the poems in Raoul Fernandes’ debut collection Transmitter and Receiver leaves you feeling as if the speaker could be your friend, as if “in a neighborhood in East Vancouver on a rainy evening near the beginning of summer” you could share “a couple of cans of ipa,” it could be the effect of the humility that characterizes this book. This humility, an unpretentious regard for the inner lives of objects and persons, is communicated by the speaker in, at times, an almost childlike tone for its sense of wonder and associative leaps. One might imagine the mind of these poems as a prescient grade-schooler who, taking the hand of the reader, leads her on his own familiar walk, introducing every being and non-being along the way.”
Raoul Fernandes 