news | Monday October 20, 2025

ORACULE and Flying Red Horse in Canadian Literature

Scott Inniss responds to two Talon titles in Canadian Literature: ORACULE by Nicole Raziya Fong, a philosophical work that lives on the border of poetry and theatre, and Flying Red Horse by Dale Martin Smith a book of poetry about fatherhood and masculinity, and the conditions of whiteness that pressure those terms. Inniss looks at both books individually and also what themes and aims the two works share.

Of the works, Inniss writes “In both texts, poetry is not simply a vehicle of lyric self-expression but a mode of philosophical, intersubjective, and affective exploration. Both Fong and Smith construe poetics as a mode of questioning, with the interrogative as a prominent trope. … Although the language and tone are an intermixture of the meditative and the everyday, the concerns of the poems are widely phenomenological, existential, ecocritical, and anti-capitalist.”

Read the complete article here.