Tessera – Winter 2003

The blood red cover announces this volume’s theme “Blood/Le Sang,” as well as this Canadian journal’s bilingual presentation. The Canadians are leaders in feminist writing that crosses “the boundary between creative and theoretical texts,” and this issue’s introductory essay by editors Martine Delvaux and Catherine Mavrikakis is an excellent example. This exciting work links personal story and reflection, ideas about the meaning of “blood relations” and the language and uses of blood from writers and philosophers and religious texts, and explores the meaning(s) of “blood” in advertising and social interactions (“Blood. It’s in you to give” – from the Blood Services of Canada). Alternating between French and English, Delvaux and Mavrikakis’ piece sets the stage for the essays, poems, other prose texts, and artwork that follow.

The blood red cover announces this volume’s theme “Blood/Le Sang,” as well as this Canadian journal’s bilingual presentation. The Canadians are leaders in feminist writing that crosses “the boundary between creative and theoretical texts,” and this issue’s introductory essay by editors Martine Delvaux and Catherine Mavrikakis is an excellent example. This exciting work links personal story and reflection, ideas about the meaning of “blood relations” and the language and uses of blood from writers and philosophers and religious texts, and explores the meaning(s) of “blood” in advertising and social interactions (“Blood. It’s in you to give” – from the Blood Services of Canada). Alternating between French and English, Delvaux and Mavrikakis’ piece sets the stage for the essays, poems, other prose texts, and artwork that follow.

Given the consistent quality of the work in Tessera, it’s difficult to single out only a few authors or pieces for special mention. “Marrow: 1-9” (a work that explores family violence and racism from a child’s perspective) by Melissa Jacques is the sort of prose-poem-essay-sudden fiction hybrid that I hope to find in journals like this one. “Blood Courses Through the Veins,” a poem by Nancy Viva David Halifax offers a lyrical contrast to the more academic writing, but seems entirely natural alongside it (“Thoughts course / through these veins / one deep cut and / the earth will rise to meet her.”) David Biale’s essay, “Does Blood Have Gender in Jewish Culture?” presents meticulous scholarship and wholly readable prose. If it seems that more than 200 pages on the “blood theme” could become difficult (family relationships, vampire literature, the blood of violence, considerations of the body), it’s true. This is often dense, slow, intense reading, all of it worthwhile, but all together these texts can be overwhelming. These pieces demand and deserve the most careful and discrete kind of reading. [Tessera, Women’s Press, 180 Bloor St. West, Suite 801, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S2V6. E-mail: [email protected]. Single issue $20.00. http://womenspress.ca/] – SR