A symbolic victory is still a victory.

Donna E. Smyth - adventures with words; she is always doing something new and unique. Beginning with her visceral morality, her stories are startling, nerve wracking, provocative: she combines Angela Carter's beautiful style with Patricia Highsmith's malevolent atmospheres. Smyth shatters clichs and dismisses mere sociology. She knows that pleasure is besieged by terror. She tells us what we don't want to know, but need to know. Smyth's writing disturbs us, enrichingly, because truth can never be at peace with language.

Boxing remains an important living metaphor of the struggle for equality.

The only good produced by the disappearance of Africville was the appearance of a conscious black nationalism … In this regard, Consecrated Ground is the heir of fierce, vengeful, and epic activism.

A rural Venus, Selah rises from thegold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweepspetals of water from her skin. At once,clouds begin to sob for such beauty.Clothing drops like leaves."No one makes poetry,my Mme.Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,"I whisper. She smiles: "We'll shape it withour souls."Desire illuminates the dark manuscriptof our skin with beetles and butterflies.After the lightning and rain has ceased,after the lightning and rain of lovemakinghas ceased, Selah will dive again into thesunflower-open river.

Sports are never just sports, we all know that. You're always carrying the flag in some way, shape or form.

I suppose the "dilemma" might come up if I see a black athlete from the U.S. squaring off against a white Canadian athlete. Who do I want to identify with? I certainly will not and cannot say that race determines how I see competition. I'm certainly aware of how race plays into the way others see and portray competition some times, but I don't have to invest in it that way myself. Unless it's boxing.