News & Extras
Shrinking Violets
Jul 17, 2012
Personally, I’m attracted to skinny books, the way they acknowledge the limitations on my time, my immersion in a culture dominated by 30-, 60-, and 90-minute story times. And the way they whisper “poetry” without actually saying the word. These benefits accompany Heidi Greco’s 120-page novella, Shrinking Violets.
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Hold Me Now
Jul 17, 2012
Hold Me Now is told from the point of view of Paul Brenner, whose son was beaten to death by a group of homophobic young men who came upon him running naked in Stanley Park. Although Stephen Gauer in the acknowledgments mentions a real-life source for his novel, he notes that his story deviates from […]
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Dying a Little
Jul 17, 2012
Don’t think that because Barry Dempster has published four books of poetry in three years you can slide your eye past Dying a Little.1 This book is exceptional – carefully structured, beautifully written without a false word, taking us face to face with illness, death and grief, and turning back at points, to life. By […]
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Small Change: Short Fiction
Jul 17, 2012
Perhaps there are some septuagenarians out there who remember George Amabile as a fixture of the folk-singing circuit, but mostly he is known as a poet and retired University of Manitoba English professor whose work has been published in such notable journals at The New Yorker and Harper’s. There might be others who recall him […]
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A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth by Stephanie Bolster
Apr 11, 2012
In A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth, Stephanie Bolster uses startling juxtapositions as a means for irony and to perceive the world from jagged, deconstructing angles. Although her milieu is urban, birds and animals, frequently from a zoo setting, inhabit her verses.
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The Odious Child and Other Stories/Shag Carpet Action/The Reverse Cowgirl
Mar 31, 2012
We have all likely heard the criticism that Canadian fiction is too aesthetically conservative: committed to realism, prudish, backwards-looking, and dominated by small-town settings. Our dominant author of short fiction, after all, is so identified with small-town Ontario that the rural countryside beyond Toronto is known as Alice Munro Country.
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