Category: Book Reviews

Lyrical Authenticity by Klara du Plessis

The King of Terrors, Jim Johnstone. Coach House Books, 2023.

Cautious Praise by Lynn Davies

Lent, Kate Cayley, Book*hug Press, 2023.

In Lent, Kate Cayley’s voice is driven by doubt and occasional bouts of confidence. In “Falling,” she says matter-of-factly,

         I can’t find time to repair.

“Junkyard Apocalypse”: Uneasy Ecopoems, Unhomely Homes by David Huebert

Kill Your Starlings, Tom Cull. Gaspereau Press, 2023.

Editorial assistant Tommy Duggan reviews Back to the Land of the Living by Eva Crocker (Anansi, 2023)

Eva Crocker’s Back to the Land of the Living begins with our protagonist Marcy Pike moving to pre-COVID Montreal from St. John’s on a journey of self-discovery and newfound independence.

In A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen, Erin Noteboom merges her background as a particle physicist with poetry. She excavates intangible and indescribable moments from scientific experiments to blur lines between worlds that otherwise seem separate.

The Raw Light of Morning, Shelly Kawaja’s debut novel and winner of the $12,500 BMO Winterset Award in 2022 for outstanding literary work by a Newfoundlander or Labradorian, is at the same time a compelling story of domestic violence, poverty, and trauma, and a 1990s western Newfoundland coming-of-age character study of a young woman of remarkable resilience. This is Laurel’s story, and she is 14 in the opening scene, and forced to intervene to protect her mother from life-threatening violence.

Who can resist the title of this debut short fiction collection? Like cyclists in the eponymous event — a protest against fossil fuel consumption, among other things — Lisa Fishman’s 40 pieces, a collage of micro, flash fiction and narratives of greater length, flout convention. Vanity of vanities, the Pushcart Prize-nominated poet seems to say of the standard short story and its clothing/trappings.

I could think of no better way to begin this review than by diving immediately into the free-flowing, elusive, and mystical current that is Alycia Pirmohamed’s mind in her debut book, Another Way to Split Water.

The epigraph to Lisa Alward’s new story collection, Cocktail, is an epiphanic moment from Virginia Woolf ‘s To the Lighthouse, in which the artist Lily Briscoe strives to resurrect and memorialize her dead friend through painting her portrait. Moved to uncharacteristic emotion by a sudden realization of the brevity of life, Lily laments, “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world?

The natural disaster has been a trope in fiction (and movies) for decades. Usually what happens is that a group of strangers becomes isolated by an unexpected and massively destructive event. The ensuing drama chronicles the efforts of the unlucky individuals to cope with the challenges, dangers and deprivations they suddenly find themselves facing.