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From the archives

Boundary Issues

Have Canadians and Americans become the same people?

Who Controls North America?

Today, even the U.S. government is just one of many players

The Superpower Next Door

Bully for you — but at what cost?

Ruth R. Pierson

Ruth Roach Pierson taught women’s history, feminist and post-colonial studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto from 1980 to 2001, and European and women’s history at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 1970 to 1980. Since retiring she has published three poetry collections: Where No Window Was (BuschekBooks, 2002), Aide-Mémoire (BuschekBooks, 2007), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 2008, and Contrary (Tightrope Books, 2011). A fourth, Realignment, will appear from Palimpsest Press in 2015. She is the editor of the anthology of film poems I Found It at the Movies (Guernica Editions, 2014).

Articles by
Ruth R. Pierson

Omnium-Gatherum

March 2015
  I have only what I remember, Merwin writes, resigned not to a dearth but an omnium-gatherum of memories—whether amorphous and unloosed from time or firmly grounded and undimmed as though he’s again playing, in the re-entered past, the protagonist in the theatre of life.   From time to time mine ambush me as I walk down the street in full…

Vanity Fair's Lucian Freud

July–August 2013
  marathoning into the night — only so many brushstrokes left — terre verts mixed with umber — swift swipes of flake white   brushwork — deft and layered — smooth around the man’s shoulders — crusty and impassioned along the arms   every twitch of facial muscle — caught — every bulge of subcutaneous thigh-fat — whorled…

Cracks

June 2011
  Deadly germs, my mother believed, live in cracks – particularly those gracing diner and five & dime dishware. Sent back, to my mortification, any food, liquid or solid, served in a cup or on a plate marred by the tiniest hairline fracture.   So no surprise I’m driven to ditch the patched, the darned, the scotch- and…