It seems curious that Canadian literature has suffered this book to live. About halfway through Michelle Butler Hallett’s novel Deluded Your Sailors, one of these titular sailors (in the early 1700s) inflates and deflates a passage of poetic description: On deck, Walters got jovial and told a story about calenture, a fever that struck in […]
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Assdeep in Wonder (Christopher Gudgeon)
Christopher Gudgeon’s Assdeep in Wonder weds a raw, intense emotionalism to a wry, detached cynicism. Gudgeon effects a lot through his overarching tone, and it is easy to see some of his tactics at work in “The Causes of Hetereosexuality”: Scientists have looked, but cannot find, the biochemical factors that underlie heterosexual attraction […] […] […]
The Logogryph (Thomas Wharton)
Something between a novel and a collection of short stories, The Logogryph is presented as a series of texts ranging from a brief survey of the literature of Atlantis to a tale of dueling margin-scribblers. Independently, each tale is a remarkable stand-alone work, wound together through the framing narrative of a young boy who falls […]
The Scarborough (Michael Lista)
When Kenneth Goldsmith appeared on The Colbert Report to promote his book Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Stephen Colbert stated that reading the book (which consists of conceptual poems transcribing live news reports of events ranging in scope from the death of John Lennon to the World Trade Center attacks) felt vampiric. Goldsmith denied the […]
Sad Peninsula (Mark Sampson)
“Yet how would death come now, if Japan surrendered tomorrow? Or the day after that? Was time not running out for death to slip into her stall and carry her away?” This is the worry of Meiko (her real, Korean name is Eun-young), a Korean “comfort woman” — one of the sex slaves of the […]
Fractal Economies (derek beaulieu)
derek beaulieu’s Fractal Economies is less of a collection than a cross-section. It collects only a fragment of beaulieu’s extensive forays into concrete poetry (poetry in which the physical form of the poem is foregrounded, and its meaning or content is relegated to a lesser position, or absent altogether), instead of being comprehensive. beaulieu’s work […]
Seven Good Reasons Not To Be Good (John Gould)
Seven Good Reasons Not To Be Good, John Gould’s first novel is a disappointing debut given the excellence of his earlier collections of short fiction (especially Kilter: 55 Fictions, a finalist for the 2003 Giller Prize, and an outstanding book). Though his short fiction packed a lot into a small space, Gould doesn’t seem to […]
Tell Them It Was Mozart (Angeline Schellenberg)
Angeline Schellenberg’s Tell Them It Was Mozart, her debut collection of poetry, concerns raising children on the autism spectrum. The Winnipeg author explores broad topics such as the conflicting and complex emotions of parenthood and how the responsibility of the situation, and its demands, intersect with the differing demands of other aspects in the modern world. […]
Son of a Trickster (Eden Robinson)
The first book of a trilogy, Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster focuses on the tumultuous everyday life of Jared, a sixteen-year-old struggling to survive his family. His parents are separated and strung out, and his mom is downright dangerous (an odd mix of neglectful and overly protective). He keeps himself drunk or stoned just […]
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Margaret Atwood)
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, from CanLit icon Margaret Atwood is a provocative but sometimes frustrating collection that gathers lectures, reviews, and other writings (including short stories and a novel excerpt, but mostly non-fiction) that relate, in some fashion, to the genre of “science fiction.” “Science Fiction” in scare quotes because what […]