A Grave Man

The September Quill & Quire is out of the gate with the first review of Michael Lista's The Scarborough. Micheline Maylor is wowed ("technically brilliant, precisely researched, and formally astute") but is also struck by the poet's "concentrated eye on evil":

Right from the devastating cover image, Michael Lista’s The Scarborough is rife with craft and cultural implication. A VCR-tape masks a grinning skull with a sickly smile evoking Shakespeare's Mercutio: “Ask for me / tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” The visual rhetoric is only the first indication that the poetry collection, which takes place on the 1992 Easter weekend of Kristen French’s disappearance and murder at the hands of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, will layer metaphor, geography, psychology, mythology and pop-culture... Lista’s intentions are not to mollify or explain, but to catalogue and signify an ugly time and place in Canadian crime history with the precision of the obsessed.