There are a lot of people in the world.  Billions. To make a national or even regional award’s shortlist is quite a feat, but to land on one for an international award is astounding; something fewer than 1% of people will ever do. In 2011, Jacob McArthur Mooney was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, which recognizes exceptional authors under 30, in all genres. Mooney is an award-wining poet with two collections and a novel in progress. His latest release is 2011′s Folk, which is what got him on this shortlist, alongside Orange Prize winner, Téa Obreht, the author of the international sensation, The Tiger’s Wife, and London’s Lucy Caldwell who made the list a second time. He was the only Canadian shortlisted.

“Throughout the book, short terse poems full of memorable phrases capture a sense of place and the lives of people coming to terms with their identity and communal realities.” – Dylan Thomas Prize Jury

It’s the strong, unifying concept in Folk that draws a reader in and holds them there. Its inciting incident is the 1998 crash of SwissAir Flight 111 off the coast of Nova Scotia, not far at all from Mooney’s bedroom window at the time. The collection is divided into two sections: Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, after the crash, and the modern day immigrant communities around Toronto’s Pearson Airport, where Mooney also lived for some time. It deals with motifs of identity and community; how towns, and the individual, react separately and together to, in his own words, “the psycho-cultural reorganization of what a small place means before and after being reframed by the sudden impact of such a massive thing as the death of 200 plus people.” Many of the book’s passages are subtle, understated commentary on the world’s and the townspeoples’ appropriation of the tragedy.

“Everyone can tell you where they were
when the world arrived. Everybody happened
to be walking their dog,
eyes on the ocean, 11
P.M. and raining.

Those who didn’t own dogs
went out walking their intentions

…. And everyone wanted to pose for their portrait. Everyone wanted
to figure.”

But it is the poems and passages that scale back from the community “we” to the narrator’s “I” that reveal an affecting personal affinity for the disaster.

“Newsprint on my hands
Drowned names smudged free and left to float
to foreign surfaces. A pen. A desk. The greying tape at the handle
of my Little League bat. Death gets into things like that.”

Quill & Quire’s review of Folk spoke of Mooney’s “unsettling poetic grace” throughout the collection, and I can say it was the most satisfying collection of poetry I read in 2011. The poems in Folk are compelling, confidently constructed, muscular in form, and tender in content. It’s also a collection of poems as accessible as it is insightful: if you’re not be an avid reader of poetry, but find Mooney’s concept intriguing, trust me and buy yourself a copy.

 What’s been a highlight or two for you and Folk this year?

Let’s see. I went to the Yukon for three months. I went to Europe for three more. I fell in love. I learned to bake. Folk has of course had its own adventures, too, but mostly we’ve been spending the year apart, after the launch and the readings I did back in the spring. We haven’t really been in touch much.

Making the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist technicality crowns you as one of the world’s best under-30 writers. How do you like that, and what’s your stance on literary awards?

It’s nothing if not ambitious, isn’t it? I will say this: I was honestly and unironically excited by the news, both for my own rotund ego and for the possibility of an expanded readership it gave the book. But let’s not kid ourselves; I live in a rich and youthful literary community filled to overflow with dazzling with young brains, and I’m lucky if I go out to a reading or a coffee shop and I’m the best writer under 30 at the bar, let alone the world. It all depends on the tastes of the jury, and I guess this was just my year. Next year it’ll be five other people’s year and then they can be the best writers under 30.

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really love by an Atlantic Canadian author.

Recent books? I’ll assume so. I liked Sue Goyette’s new collection quite a bit.  David Hickey is a PEI guy originally and I can definitely shout some love for his new collection, Open Air Bindery. There’s a lot of books on my must-read list right now, what with all the time I’ve been away, and chief among them is Mark Callanan’s second book, Gift Horse.

What about a book or two from people you’ve met up there in Toronto?

A pretty endless list, really, for reasons detailed by that “overflow of dazzling brains” line above. I think my favourite new collection of the year, and I say this having missed a lot of books I’d likely love, is Ken Babstock’s Methodist Hatchet. His life’s work, from Mean to now, is an incredible little object lesson in the tension and the joy of a constantly expanding aesthetic. Ken refuses to break anything down, to erase; he just wants to build and build and add and add, you know? People think his new work is too antic, too obscure, but that’s because they loved Mean too much and they refuse to let him move beyond it. If, say, Airstream Land Yacht had been his debut, nobody would bat an eyelash: the new collection is just a more assured, more politically and sociologically mature continuation from his last one. This is the thing people don’t get, everything Ken’s done is built directly on the husk of what came before it, with no clearing away or even any recommission. Starting from that intimate specificity of Mean and just building out, out, more and more and more. It’s like watching someone construct a pyramid upside down, starting with the tip on the ground floor and expanding out toward the base. It’s foolish and wasteful until you pause enough in your complaining to see the miracle present itself. That fucking thing actually stands. It somehow doesn’t fall over on the greedy dude who made it.

Your blog, Vox Populism, is fantastic, even if you’ve been understandably sidelined lately. Where do you think book blogs fit in, in the modern online world? Are they an alternative to straight-laced traditional media, or a distraction from them? And why write an unpaid blog instead of a paid gig? To write about whatsoever you want?

I’m not sure what blogs are. They’re not an antidote to anything, surely. I started Vox Pop to try and capture, in a semi-permanent place, the energy and vocabulary of informal conversation, by intelligent people, about ethereal things. I wanted the bar room rants and the overcaffeinated arguments that are the lifeblood of my sense of literary community to have a sort of sandbox where we could bounce things around between each other, where we (or sometimes just I) could be flippant, audacious, ignorant, impassioned, rude, all these things that get–quite rightly–edited out of official essays and reviews. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next with the blog. Doesn’t it seem, looking around at the poetry bloggers that are left, that’s it’s just become a bunch of gig announcements and reading lists?

Obviously, I’m partly responsible for that. I’m going to try and bring Vox Pop back this year though, in one form in another. Mostly, the blog has served as an instrument to make people I’ve never met feel confident in their hatred of me. And that’s a shame, because I imagine many of those haters are decent and committed people with whom I’d agree with on 95% of the world’s important topics. Blogs eat subtlety and poop out earnestness.

You’ve been away at the Berton House Writers Retreat in the Yukon. I’ve only heard good things about people who’ve been there. How was that?

It’s awesome. How could it not be awesome? It’s you, in a historically resonant cabin in the middle of a historically resonant small town in the middle of the most beautiful landscape in the country, for three well-paid months with nothing to weigh on your time except the books you’re reading and the book you’re writing. Nothing has been more comfortable since the womb. Well, maybe I’m saying this because I was there in the summer. It’s not quite womb-temperature there now, I understand.

Tell us a little about your novel-in-progress?

Sure. It’s about 400 pages long, and it’s set on The Earth, and it’s typed up in Times New Roman on 8.5 X 11 paper, and that’s all the information you’re getting until I finish it, Chad

You’re a graduate of the University of Guelph-Humber’s MFA in Creative Writing program. What’s one concrete thing you can say you took away from that experience.

Friendships with generous and intelligent people that I hope to hang onto forever, both among my classmates and my teachers. Also, time. Authors always say that grants are a form of time, they let you quit your job and take time out to focus on writing. I’d argue that an MFA program is a gift of structured time. It makes you throw your life away for a couple years, to push your tired old dreams and authorly pretensions to the forefront.

Also, I took my girlfriend away from my MFA experience. She’s not made of concrete, though. She’s made of skin and patience and something I can’t identify that always smells like lavender.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part is editing. I love taking something that I’ve cobbled together, or written down in haste, and begin pulling it apart, jostling it and making it uncomfortable. I love relineating a poem completely, on a hunch that the natural grain of the thing wants to be a sonnet, or all long couplets, or prose. First drafts are an emergency, really, you drop what you’re doing and tend to their intensity, but editing is where it’s at for me. I like to move things around in the quiet.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Sure, but why bother? I mean, there’s too few good book stores, too many shitty ones, and the wrong books get read by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. But my problem with complaining is this: my dad is a butcher. My grandfather worked odd jobs for forty years. They both would have been much happier doing something else with their lives.  There are many injustices afoot in the book world, and people have often said brilliant things about those injustices’ root causes, but I can’t stay invested in that conversation. I always find myself drifting back to the historical unlikelihood of my being able to spend this much time with something as beautiful and useless as a poem. It shocks me out of the minutia. Not to be a brute about serious and complex things, but I’m just too fucking lucky to care.

Maybe that’s Vox Pop’s problem. Maybe I can’t maintain the day-to-day grumblings of the blog when the above is my core opinion…

Folk is divided into two sections. Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, after the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111, and modern day neighbourhoods around Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Explain the origin and the concept of the collection to those who haven’t read it.

Okay. Well, it’s what you said, a two-parter. The throughlines connecting the two parts are in descending order of importance: airplanes, community planning, geometry, atheism, and me.

You were still living in Nova Scotia at the time of the crash in 1998, and it occurred quite close to your home. What lingered so much that you wrote about its effect a dozen years later, or, have you been working on this set of poems for quite  some time now?

I’ve been working on them on and off for a few years. The necessity of having to wrap something up for use in my MFA thesis spurned the decision to focus on the crash more directly. What I wanted to capture in the Swissair section is the tension between the diversity of individual expressions of grief and the homogeneity of the public face of that grief.  And that tension really becomes the tension of the book: How do you belong to something? How to you manage beholdenness,  in the context of being an individual?

Do you think people and places shape each other equally, or, do we shape our communities more than our communities shape us? How has being a Haligonian transplanted in Toronto affected your identity (if at all)?

Being a Haligonian gives me a place to cover myself in outsiderness when talking about Toronto. It’s a bit like being a Canadian when talking about, say, American popular culture. You can shield yourself away in a sort of truculent “we don’t do that back home,” stand separate when you need to feel superior to something. I love Halifax, love Nova Scotia, but life here is more all-in, it’s more naked and weighty somehow. I know that sounds awful and people who hate Toronto are going to love that answer, but so do I. I love this city and feel protective of it. But maybe that’s me being shaped by where I came from, even there. To be a Maritimer is to fall quickly in love, and turn on a dime to protect it. Or maybe it’s just me.

I love these four lines and could interpret them so many different ways. “Every night in winter / a forgotten million snowflakes fall / on the ocean and so all / they learn about is water.” What’s it like to write a poem, put it out there, and hear other peoples’ interpretations (or misinterpretations) of your work? Likewise, do past reactions – criticism, or praise of specific qualities — affect your mindset as you write a new poem? 

It’s great, you know, it makes the heartache of publication worthwhile. We have to take our individual readers so seriously, as poets, because there are so few of them. I try to read the critical work that’s out there, because I feel like it’s part of the process, part of the conversation. You need to scan over the adjectives a bit though, those words that get affixed to you, for better or worse, can start to pull you apart. My adjectives tend to be conspicuously tied to my being a younger person: lots of boyishness and brashness and (in the negative reviews) naivete. They’re words you use to describe kids. But I still think you need to look into the fire all the same, you need to read other people’s readings of you.

There’s a line in your book. “everyone / is nationless. Everyone’s a nation.” I think it’s fair to say there are very few things that unite me and the people in my neighbourhood. I think it’s fair to say PEI and Alberta are two very different provinces. So what makes a “nation” or country, beyond geographical borders? Anything?

This is a question of political sociology really. A nation is a geographical expression of shared history: linguistic history, ethnic history, religious history, whatever. A country is a self-governing political construct. Some countries are nations (France) some nations are not countries (Tibet) and we happen to live in one of the few countries that aren’t nations. I’m not being disparaging of Canada when I say that, I prefer our calmer acceptance of the truth (despite the occasional nostalgic hymnals from the Don Cherrys of the world) to the attempt to force the lie of nationhood on non-nations or supernational entities like what so often happens in America. America is my favourite country but it makes me cry a lot.

Ours is a post-modern country, and we should embrace everything that word post-modern encompasses. We should embrace the irony and obscurity of ourselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a culture, or lots of shared experience, it just means that we live less in our borders than everyone else. And that’s a good thing. There’s another poem in the book that ends on something like, “This isn’t patriotism. Maybe it’s the opposite, the decision to bend in the wind.” I could bend in the wind with others, I could be beholden to that gesture, within a crowd of fellow post-modernists. Who wouldn’t want that?

Whether writing for the stage, page, screen, or radio, Ed Riche has always been a wise and witty satirist, but with Easy to Like, he crowns himself the Atlantic Canadian king of satire by tackling open-ended questions of modern taste. As he knocks everything from Hollywood trophy wives to cheap tricks in winemaking to the inner workings of CBC, the satire flirts with slapstick humour, and the funniest thing about the novel is this: it’s all based in truth.

The novel’s protagonist, Elliot Johnson, is a “C-list screenwriter.” He moved to Hollywood to be in movies, but the industry turns him off and he falls more in love with Californias’s wine than its star-studded Hollywood lore. All he learned from the latter was that Hollywood wasn’t about good films so much as good-selling films.  “The important part of any program is that it is on somewhere,” he discovered, not that it was “good.” His agent encourages him to schmooze more,  and follow formulas instead of his heart, so to speak. So he winds up writing Hollywood drivel to fund a failing vineyard. The issue with his vineyard being that he refuses to cater to public taste there, too.

With both his screenwriting career and vineyard on the rocks, and enough personal problems to want to run away from, Elliot is convinced taking off to France will at least save his vineyard. He’s looking for a possibly extinct grape that he’s sure is the missing ingredient in his wine. But he gets waylaid in Toronto because his passport is about to expire. Long, funny story short, some well-connected folks conspire to keep him in Canada by arranging an interview with CBC, for the position of VP of English programming. He lands the job by dropping buzz words and playing into what they wanted to hear.

A lot of Elliott’s frustrations with the film and TV industries, with regards to catering to taste and marketability, translate to frustrations shared by authors/readers about today’s book industry. Most publishers, for example, pay attention to sales in deciding what they’ll publish, as if, because a book sold, it was loved by its reader. Not the case, raise your hand if many a buzzed book has let you down in the past, yet they associate sales with taste. Funny as this book is, there’s no nonsense when it comes to what’s being knocked, which adds poignancy to the punchlines. It’s humour helps sink the core of the novel even deeper into a reader, and gets you thinking.  He jokes about the “the ornate poetry of management non-speak” in CBC bureaucracy, but it raises the question as to whether or not the very purpose a company like CBC gets lost in its management, mandates, and regulations.

Easy to Like is spot on in what it conceptually takes on, sharper than a broken wine glass, wittier than the water is wet, and scathing in its portrayal of corporations who counterproductively kill their cause by striving to make films, TV, wine, or whatever, easy to like and sitting on bestseller lists. Elliot jokes of writing a screenplay called The Feinting Spell, about a “blue-balled teen who pretends to be a vampire to get girls.” A hilarious concept that would actually go gold in theatres right now.  But what’s funny on the surface raises serious, open-ended, philosophical questions on modern taste, and catering to it. It’s a fickle, varied, and ever-changing thing, public taste. And too many bigwigs cater to the lowest common denominator. What is the cost to quality art? Alongside that, Easy to Like raises another question about taste: does the well-informed wine lover really enjoy wine more than the unsophisticated palette of someone who claims to love a technically crappy bottle of wine? Is the pretentious hipster film buff really getting more out of an art film than a teenie booper at a Bieber biopic? Who knows, the author himself doesn’t claim to.

As a winemaker, Elliot contests that “the best winemaking is none at all.” He names his own wine 305 Locura Canyon Road because “that’s where it comes from and that’s what it should taste like.” Most  wine purists would agree that wine is about authenticity, and likewise, most good critics would agree any good novel is about authenticity. It’s another thing that stands out about this novel: Ed Riche was the right man to write this novel. He knows what he’s writing about here: he’s an oenophile, who’s written for CBC, and the screen, and has done considerable research and arm-bending to inform this blazing book. It’s also authentic satire: largely subtle mockery, based in truth, that makes a reader feel smart for liking and laughing at what was said. Consider the novel your companion in disdain for the way things are, and if you can’t change them, you may as well laugh at them.

By page ten I was fine calling him Atlantic Canada’s Rookie of the Year. The real goal of a 1st book is to show potential, and he scored that goal before the first chapter was over. Fitzpatrick’s language, wit, and honest portrayal us human beings dealing with love, loss, life, gonorrhea, aging, family secrets, and plain keeping our chins up is fearless, brisk as a Russian slapshot, and endearingly human. And his portrayal of St. John’s is refreshingly honest and spot-on too.

Some cities offer themselves up. Come on in and make it your town! Not St. John’s It is what it is, and if it’s not for you it will fuck up your life. Derek had seen it happen … Mullock Street, where Derek lived, bordered on the college grounds and was named for Bishop Mullock, the determined shepherd who had acquired the stones and erected the school. To Derek it seemed a fairly typical bit of St. John’s Lore. There was something arid and tyrannical in the city’s ongoing romance with its history.”

Conceptually, the novel cross-checks our romanticization  of love as a simple thing, and does not skate around the notion that there’s more to our family members than we need to know. It also pokes a fun-yet-poignant stick at the mid-life crisis. It’s a novel about a 41-year-old with a lot left to discover. His girlfriend has just walked out on him, and his half brother has just waltzed back into his life, stirring up some family secrets, forcing Derek to recalibrate his understanding of everything and everyone around him, himself included.

I was particularly impressed with his ambitious, successful weaving together of several plotlines, in such short spaces, as it is not something most writers could do without being jarring, and it has a way of keeping the reading experience fresh. Fitzpatrick’s a crisp sentence-level writer too, and there’s nothing more important than that in enjoying a book. No matter what aspect of Derek’s life he tells us about, he tells it in a way that makes you care. Lastly, he’s funny. There are a good few male Newfoundland authors right now, like Larry Mathews and Patrick Warner, who share a distinct, sharp-edged wittiness that this city must imbibe them with. In You Could Believe in Nothing, Fitzpatrick proves that there’s room for humour in melancholy, and poignancy in levity. Only a daring and talented writer puts those things in the same pot, and succeeds.

Firstly: This novel has been shortlisted for The Giller, the Man Booker, and won the GG award, and the Rogers Writers Trust Ficiton Award.

Secondly: Film rights have been sold to John C. Reilly, who’ll be playing one of the brothers.

Most Importantly: the novel is worth of all of this hype. It’s the best Non-Atlantic authored book I’ve read this year.

The Sisters Brothers is a fresh, fun new twist on The Western, and the best Wild West masterpiece since HBO’s Deadwood. It’s been years since I’d been that enthralled by originality and pleasure-to-read-ness. DeWitt forgoes the flashy CanLit diction I usually judge a book by; he favours an offbeat and unforgettable 1^st-person voice that lassoes your attention and puts you right in the cowboy boots of Eli Sisters, as he and his brother embark on a great misadventure full of plot, lively whores, one-eyed horses, and brilliantly rendered brilliant madmen.

Every time I’d lay the book down, I’d pick it back up and read another 5 pages. And another 5. It’s a true 2011 Must Read I’ll be pushing on people this year, and so far it’s the first Christmas gift I’ve bought. And I usually wait until December to shop. I blame Eli Sisters, who has my vote for best character of the year, the edgy, romantic cowboy with a big heart and battered horse that he was …

Throughout their journey to kill a man and steal his golden secret, the book is populated with a pile of temporary, wonderfully absurd characters, but none of them outdo the odd-pairing of the Sisters brother, Eli and Charlie. Charlie being a more callous, whiskey-soaked killer who sleeps with the women Charlie falls for.  But they’re bound by what counts more than whiskey, women, and gold: love, family, and memory. The book’s somehow as touching as it is absurd. And deWitt’s character development is subtle and impeccable. Everyone has their defining idiosyncrasies, like a boy whose head invited slaps, and Eli’s hilarious obsession with toothpaste

It’s cinematic, well-paced, and compelling. Saddle up if you haven’t already. These characters, and your interest in their actual and emotional journeys won’t wane once. That’s where deWitt really succeeds here, the consistently engaging narrative voice of Eli Sisters. I can’t promise you your money back if you don’t love this novel; but I do promise to think less of you as a fun-loving human being with a good taste in books.

Lastly: Funny deWitt used a tale of gold to produce literary gold. The wild success of this wild west tell marks a gamechaging moment in CanLit: pleasure to readedness is going outlaw, and might be the new sheriff in CanLitVille, over what has previously defined it, be that elegant diction or complexity of narrative structure. DeWitt’s challenged CanLit to a duel, and he’s won the world over.

Twice a month, Salty Ink Takes a Look at What’s Going on up in Canada, Profiling Some of Our Notable Canadian Counterparts and/or Books I’ve Deemed Worth Cheating on Salty Ink’s Mandate for …

In The Antagonist, Lynn crafts characters who’ll make the real-life people you know seem lifeless and unconvincing. Her peripheral cast in The Antagonist are spot-on works of comic genius who flawlessly fill their roles in shaping the grand plot of the novel. These include a Cougar-esque religious zealot and a jacked-up dad with a Small Man Complex trying to live vicariously through his goon-sized son.

It’s a novel about a man born big, and his sheer size has had an outside influence on his life. By 21, “Rank” had three violent stains on his life, all attributable, somehow, to his not knowing his own strength, or, others knowing his strength and using it to accomplish their own goals. Rank tried desperately to wash himself clean of that past, but nearing 40, he finds out his college roommate has written a novel that shines a spotlight on those very stains.

The entirety of the novel is one big rant from Rank to his old friend. It’s Rank trying to set the record straight. And turning himself inside out to do so reveals the life of Gordie Rankin Jr. In all its tenderness, sadness, hilarity, and absurdness, all memorably delivered by Lynn’s skilled storytelling, witty turns of phrase, and eye for what really defines a life.

“What you’ve killed is yours, forever — a trophy picked off from the landscape and hung up on your wall. So you can greet one another each day.”

Lynn authentically captures both the torment of Rank’s past and the torment of his old friend’s betrayal and false portrayal. Ironically, it’s through Rank’s shattering like an overfilled bottle of frustration and suppressed realities — over that summer-long series of emails — that helps him come to terms with his past.  Rank is not the bouncer his father made him be at his fast-food franchise, he’s not the lost soul in need of religious intervention, he is not a man destined for incarceration. He’s a nice guy, expected to be a bad guy, and in that sense, a representation of the power of other peoples’ perceptions in affecting who we become.

Over the course of her career, the headlines about Coady’s work have gone from “One of the best new writers in Canada,” or “One of the most lively writers in Canada” to simply, “One of the best writers in Canada,” because of a suite of trademarked traits.  Those traits have never been more alive in one of Coady’s novels as they are in The Antagonist. Here, they’ve clicked together and made an exceptionally vivacious Giller-worthy read.

As if to make up for her lengthy, somewhat hard-to-pronounce name, Jessica Hiemstra-Van Der Horst writes short poems that anyone with a heart will understand. These are very sensual, emotionally resonate poems, rendered with addictive diction and unpretentious, straight forward metaphors. She’s captures fleeting moments with well-calculated, well-spent words. Here’s a particularly short one, “Fingertips are for Touching.”

“Fingertips are for Touching”

Do I leave a mark on you
when I graze by your chair?
Children understand loneliness:
they sit in laps, cry
until they are empty

Every mark I make
on you, on canvas,
is a brush with infinity, hoping
two of us under covers
see each other without light

Every poem has that one clear and visceral line that makes the poem linger, like “I’m told our bodies are mostly water/but I tell you:  our hearts are ablaze.”

More importantly, to sell you on it, here’s some biographical notes on Hiemstra-Van Der Horst:

- Winner of the Malahat Review 2011 Open Season Award
- Finalist for the Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem
- Winner of Room Magazine’ Annual Poetry Contest
- … and she was shortlisted for Arc’s poem of the year contest for, “The Extraordinary Feat of Calling My Mother.”

“Simple words so close to real life, so accessible in their truth and so comforting in their unpredictable beauty. Truly poetry like we would like it to be.” -  Herménégilde Chiasson, Governor General’s Award-winning author of Beatitudes

I reviewed this one for The National Post. They happen to run the best book blog in the country, in case you haven’t heard of the Afterword.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/09/02/book-review-glass-boys-by-nicole-lundrigan/

Double Talk is the debut novel from a well-respected and multi-award-winning poet, whose poetry tends to look for meaning in places and things where there may not be any. In his fiction debut, he does much the same, but with subject matter less obscure than a fence post or a field of snow. In Double Talk, Patrick Warner takes a scalpel to the idea of marriage, and shows, with shocking precision, how easily dissected it is. Any expectations that, as a poet, Warner would approach this story with subtlety and metaphor are not there. The diction here favours piercing passages that, at their best, hit the reader like an emotionally resonant kick in the shins. There is less CanLit emotionality here, and more barb-wired honesty.

The story itself is a truthful look at the potholes any two people in love are going to hit along the way, until they break down, or patch up who they are to each other. Warner uses alternating chapters of third-person Violet and first-person Brian to show how differently two people can experience the same moment, hammering home the notion that there is no right and wrong in a lovers’ quarrel, just conflict. The fact these two characters, like any wife and husband, experience the same moment or point of contention so differently rings true to the philosophical dogma that there is no truth or reality, just our own perception and construction of a moment. In showing us that, Double Talk is one of the most potent he-said she-said novels of its kind.

Using alternating points of view offers up a well-rounded story of a marriage on the rocks, and lets the reader get to know both characters equally well, so they can choose sides, or better yet, see there are no sides, just misunderstandings, and  a pile of isolated moments stacking up like a barrier between them. And spanning the amount of time that Warner does here also speaks to another relationship conundrum: the malleability of identity. We change over time, not always together.

An interesting point in the architecture of this novel is that it is told somewhat in reverse, and also, that Warner chose to focus on universal moments that can knick and scratch a couple as much as it can bring them together. In Double Talk, a new baby wasn’t a glorified bonding moment, it was a wedge, both caustic and humourous in how Warner presents it. On one hand, Brian’s doing Donald Duck impersonations for their colicky child until he is dizzy and disoriented is quite funny. On the other hand, Warner showcases the ways they were neglecting each other because of the baby. Violet confesses to feeling like a “cowgirl,” fat and leaking milking, and with her libido deadened, she starts to wonder what her real draw is to Brian. Brian starts to rightfully resent her for making him feel more like a witness to her motherhood, than an active co-parent of their child. As the distance emerges between them, Warner uses how a subtle observation can go off like a bomb. Violet had always loved how he would only sing in front of her, until the day she came into the kitchen and he stopped singing and had a shy look on his face. That’s the kind of potent drifting apart that lovers can’t hide from each other, as time pulls them apart faster than they can come together.

Not that it’s as stark as I am presenting it, and that’s another skill here. Throughout the novel, Warner’s use of dark humour and aphoristic insights pair well with the universality to this story, and spares it from being maudlin, and also renders it distinct from similar stories.

Short Fiction by Gerard Collins

DUE OUT THIS MONTH

This is a compelling collection with everlasting images and a cloud-thick atmosphere. Collins excels in hooking his reader with a well-paced sense of impending tragedy, and the stories ring true to the irrevocability of isolated moments. He’s got a cast of convincing characters here, many of whom having been wrung through the wringer of small-town mentality. Collins knows the recipe of his own work: when to add nuanced comedic relief to a dark story, and when to add a closing line that clangs like a gong. These are these well-structured, well-paced stories that ride on a tension of some kind: a sense of looming or impending danger bait and hook its readers.

The sharpest images from these stories will sink in like a knife, and I take that as the sign of a dedicated, talented writer. If a reader isn’t feeling a story, they’re reading a lesser book. In one of the first stories — I won’t say which as this is a bit of a spoiler — a mother and daughter are parked at a cliff’s edge during a violent storm. The story of a petty teenage heartbreak is imbedded in the darker story of a man about to die in an ocean rig disaster, and that provides a rather great juxtaposition of what can feel catastrophic and what is catastrophic. As the teen in heartbreak sits in the backseat, her mother is at a cliff’s edge watching out to sea for a man who isn’t coming back. Collins doesn’t overdo it because these images, and how he frames them, are strong enough.

But don’t take my word for it. Stories from this collection have won several awards, and appear in an anthology or two.

Funny story about this book:

I was heading out of town to work on my new manuscript, over Labour Day weekend. I wasn’t planning on taking any reading with me, but Dan Wells at Biblioasis had sent me an ARC of this and Biblioasis seemed exceedingly behind this book, so I took it. I wasn’t expecting it to be so good. I found myself reading instead of writing, quite enthralled and impressed with the guy’s sentence-level writing and ambitious, often lengthy short stories. On September seventh, I wrote this quick review, from a cabin, figuring I’d give the book some more due attention when I got back in town. Next thing I know, two weeks later, the guy’s on the Giller shortlist and his face is everywhere you look in the literary world, and my at the time generous and glowing review that said things like “promising new voice” seemed weak, because he was an overnight literary rockstar on the cover of everything in the country. It turns out he’s a good, gracious guy, and we did some quick interviews, but I let places like The Globe and Quill go to town on him, and by the time they were done, me posting another feature on the guy seemed redundant. There was certainly no need of me talking about how good the book is, because who hadn’t heard of the thing? That kind of instant success — a first book Giller shortlisted before it’s a month old – is rare. In this case warranted.

But this post is for the people who didn’t buy it yet: Do.

One thing that did seem needless during The Alexander MacLeod Media Blast of 2010, was all the focus on who his father was. Paternity has nothing to do with literary prowess, and the irony is that they are pretty different writers. The apple may have fallen from the tree, but Alistair and Alexander are two very different apples, writing-wise. Green and red, or Granny Smith and Gala: each with their own distinctive qualities. Alistair seems known as a masterful storyteller, and the voice of dwindling cultures, whereas Alexander feels like part of the “new wave” of “the new writing” out of Atlantic Canada. His writing is clean, confident, and distinctive. His stories — urban and universal — are ambitiously constructed and all the more solid for it. In fact, Light Lifting features a story, “Miracle Mile,” that was a Journey Prize finalist — the Journey Prize being the country’s most esteemed award for short fiction. And it’s not even the best story in the collection.

He has a very compelling voice; I was drawn into the writing by a narrative hook sharp enough to keep me on the line throughout his longer-than-average stories. He takes you right in to the universal threads of various relationships in these stories. Like how work can bond the most eclectic groups of co-workers, as in the stellar title story, “Light Lifting.” In his structurally interesting and ambitious, “Wonder about Parents,” a real stand-out story, he tackles the strength of the countless tiny threads that bond a man and his wife, a man and his child, a man and his memories … as well as the history of lice, the mass panic of H1N1-like outbreaks, and then some.

There is a confident, distinctive, pleasure-to-read style in these stories, and a lot of surprising and apt lines in here too, like the description of a kid’s face after a fist fight, “[Blood] ran back towards his ears and up into his hair and down into his mouth in these long, long, spidery lines. It was like his face was a window and someone had thrown a rock through the middle of it.”

Light Lifting is an assured and promising debut, and hands down one of the best collections out of Atlantic Canada in recent years. It puts a new MacLeod on the scene, and the way I see it, from here on in, we’ll have to say, “Which one?” when someone refers to MacLeod’s writing.

And, is it just me, or is Biblioasis the country’s metal detector for short fiction Gold? Kathleen Winter, Rebecca Rosenblum, Amy Jones … Alexander MacLeod.

The title, Crisp, is taken from the title story “Crisp,” a story in which two brothers watch their father get burnt to a crisp in a car, and the younger brother takes up hurling rocks at the firemen who subsequently “service” their mother afterwards. It’s a fantastic, odd, and unforgetable story that short fiction champ Mark Anthony Jarman touted as “Weirdly enchanting.” Crisp would also be the right adjective to describe Gray’s luminous writing in these stories that “confront the unspeakable parts of memory, meditating on characters caught in isolation and struggling to make sense  of grief, disappointment, and the occasional dinner party gone all wrong.”

Quite simply put, R.W. Gray is a great and engaging writer, and this book ties with Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting as the best book of short fiction by an Atlantic Canadian in 2010. It’s certainly one of the best collections of shorts I’ve read in the last few years, and shuffles Gray into the fold of the country’s most exciting short story writers.

More than anything, there is a sense of loneliness and longing to connect in these characters, so well drawn, so taut, that the stories have the feel of two magnets held tauntingly close together. Giller finalist Eden Robinson endorsed the collection, referring to Gray’s stories being “Inhabited with damaged and dangerous characters, Gray’s masterful storytelling will haunt you.”

The Globe and Mail’s Jim Bartley referred to the opening story, “The Bends,” as a “lovely softly inflected flirtation with madness,” and it is another catching, memorable standout story in the collection. There’s something both visceral and ethereal that emerges from Gray’s diction and tonality and handle on what makes people tick and tock and tumble and fall down, and stand back up. Chiefly, in most of Gray’s stories, this is lust, longing, and desire, be it from a grieving widow attracted to her priest, or a straight man momentarily attracted to his wife’s ex.

More luscious than lyrical, and served up with a minimum of filler, these stories go down well and linger. If you’re looking for fresh, crisp, and engaging short fiction, this one is a pleasant surprise.

Far to Go (Anansi, 2010)
Fiction by Alison Pick

In Far to Go, her second novel, Alison Pick takes a widespread tragedy — the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia — down to the level of one family experiencing it, thereby concentrating these horrific events, and making them more deeply felt by readers. In capturing this slow-then-sudden change in one family’s life and country, through their eyes, the reader is taken on a dark journey with a family who could be any family — loving but with troubles of their own. Pick blends these troubles into the grander plot quite well, playing them off of each other.

During the stepwise collapse into the frightening signs of change as Nazis occupy not only their hometown, but the places to where they flee, Pick does a fantastic job of having all the main characters react differently to the changes around them, and their increasing inability to ignore them. The result is the reader siding with one family member’s actions and opinions over the other, thinking of what they’d do in these characters’ situation, and this further engages and immerses the reader into the story. The polarized reactions of each family member also serves to amplify the panic and claustrophobic chaos of their situation.

At first the Bauers hear stories and hearsay of awful events: and then a family friend is murdered within view of their living room window. Their little boy is roughed up and made to sit back on in school. The tension between Pavel and Anneliese over what’s best for their child gets to be enough to turn them on each other, showing how the splinter of external forces can get thick enough to wedge families apart in times like these, and that was a startling motif of the novel: How an external horrific event can sweep over a country and amend personality, bringing everything to the surface — from heroics to cowardice, and patriotism to racism — all in the same person, in varying degrees, and at different times.

Shameful acts of disgrace and the triumph of human spirit exist side by side in the same village. Of the Bauer’s hired help, one woman left, suddenly filled with contempt,and one woman stayed, feeling part of the family. But even she, the live-in help and main character, Marta, was at first almost swayed into thinking herself superior to the Jewish, which was a brilliant way for Pick to hammer home the startlingly possible mental shifts that events like this can (and did) evoke, particularly when one’s own safety is in jeopardy.

Far to Go also has an interesting narrative structure, effectively employed. The story of the Bauer family’s plight is interlaced with another: that of an at-first mysterious first-person narrator recounting his own harrowing, connected tale. It adds a great dynamic to the novel — it makes for a two-in-one novel — and the writing is remarkably distinct in these narratives: the writing in these 1^st-person chapters is particularly elegant and compelling.

Overall, the story is absorbing and heartbreaking, and terrifying. This happened. To real people. This is happening right now, in other parts of the world. One very effective technique Pick employed to dip her story in the flavour of time and place was to sprinkle in bits of untranslated regional vocabulary, but in a clever manner in which the reader could gauge the meaning of the foreign word, or, wouldn’t be lost if they couldn’t. It added authenticity to the story’s setting and characters.

This story is admirably well informed. Pick’s authenticity of time and place alone are award-worthy. When you read a novel by a writer who is also a poet, you expect elegant or showy diction, but Pick doesn’t go between these two genres by simply tilting her hat to the left or right. She has two separate hats, and with her novelist hat on she is not a poet writing a novel, but a damn fine novelist with an excellent penchant for pristine storytelling, storytelling that magnifies and amplifies and goes beyond relaying a series of events to evoking mood and time and place and character dynamics, and all the subtle nuances that make a novel convincing and compelling. This one sticks with the reader after they’re done reading, and that’s the mark of an accomplished writer and novel. The style of her storytelling makes this story all the more haunting, and the moments when her sentence-level writing shines are downright commendable. Pick’s empathy is clear, in the tone, diction, and narration, and that too bolsters her novel. It is not the facts of Nazi invasion that she is presenting here: it is the emotional and social response, and that’s how and why the book succeeds.

Poetry can be fierce or beautiful, and at its best, as in McCartney’s For and Against, it can be both. This collection of poems not only blends those opposing attributes, doing so is what makes it blaze.

This collection has its fists out and its heart on its sleeve. Its poems are anger with its mask off, or vulnerability with its heart on its sleeve, and sometimes there’s no difference. These poems are the sound scissors snipping through the threads of human relationships, and the prose is tight and snaps in all the right places. These poems roar where most pine or whine, and offer insight where most would ruminate on longing. I am not knocking the latter types of poems in those statements, but rather marvelling in McCartney’s engaging exorcism of fleeting moments. The most meaningful connections between poetry and its reader emerge through moments of honesty on the page, and For and Against demonstrates that beauty need not be pretty, just honest and raw. Felt.

For and Against is a top 10 best collection of 2010. It’s a showcase of all the heart, fist, fury, fire and ice of human emotion played off of a visceral exploration of love: that one strange force that makes and breaks us, and marionettes all other emotions.

The Death of Donna Whalen is an unprecedented novel by one of the country’s most innovative writers: if Michael Winter isn’t reinvigorating a genre, he’s inventing one. As an author who “doesn’t like to make stuff up,” and already had books of embellished biography and historical fiction under his belt, Michael Winter sorted through 10,000 pages of court documents about a real-life murder trial in St. John’s — some 3 million words that stood 5 ½ feet tall — and chose not to change or inflate a thing, but to instead curate those 10,000 pages of court transcripts into a 269-page novel. The idea of curating a novel as much as writing one: that’s an exciting new thing. Think of it as filtering a real-life event through a writer. Michael chose what passages were relevant to build a certain story, and I think the book would be remarkably different if another writer had of been the one to filter those 3 million words into a 269-page novel.

Like any Michael Winter book, this novel is stylistically innovative, but unlike his previous works, his signature writing style is, by necessity, somewhat removed from it. The limitations of the “documentary fiction” genre — reporting things as they were said and embellishing little — left Winter with very few ways to reveal character and flavour setting and story, but he found ways. He retained each character’s dialect, thereby subtly rendering the colours of culture and character, and he preserves something in the way each character might think and talk and act. Also, by using varying points of view (close to a dozen) he shows us enough sides of each character for them to feel fleshed out, flawed, and human like any of us. For example: the accused rough-around-the-edges boyfriend Sheldon Troke isn’t outright vilified: particularly because of his well-portrayed and genuine fondness of Donna’s children, and Donna herself is not presented as an angel. At all.

The Death of Donna Whalen is about the shocking real-life murder of a young mother in St. John’s who was found by her young daughter. Donna had been stabbed 31 times and left for dead, with panties wrapped around her throat. The brutal murder shook the supposedly quaint city, shining a light on its darker outer edges. The police investigation and testimonies that followed were bunk and tainted from the start, and it was the clever way Winter structured this novel that really made it a compelling read. As details of the horrific murder unfold, so do the discrepancies in the botched police investigation. The result is the most vicarious reading experience of 2010, if not the decade. This novel makes a judge and jury of its readers, because of the way Michael structured it, stacking contradictory passages atop each other, leaving the truth not only hard to find, but impossible to be certain of. You get the full 360-degree view of the case and its suspects, but it’s more dizzying than it is clarifying, lending the book a pageturner feel. You spot the contradictions and strereotypes that a cop would, and have to sort through them like a jury would. The end result is the readers’ mind yo-yo-ing along for 260 pages, never quite sure of anything. The reader becomes a detective, faced with infuriating inconsistencies in peoples’ testomonies, and one too many people claiming to be an insomniac with a broken clock and creaky door (so they would have seen or heard their loved one leave the house on the night of the murder).

Winter has truly written something provocative, unique, and engaging here. It is an atypical novel, structurally and stylistically, so it takes a period of adjustment, but once you’re locked into the mess of it, it’s absolutely a gripping, memorable read. It is also the ultimate example of the golden rule: show don’t tell a reader. And what it shows, without a doubt, are the flaws in our justice system, the relativity of truth, and the most basic, core impulses of human emotion. It will even — I am sure — uncover prejudices some readers think they keep buried. I can’t suppose what Winter might have been trying to “show us” with this novel, but what I saw was that a trial is more about a persuasion of opinion that anything else. The presentation of facts outweigh the facts themselves. In a courtroom, people get more concerned with not implicating themselves or a loved one in a murder than in facts, and you see how easy it is for police to purposefully, or worse yet, accidentally fabricate a story by selectively choosing information from their investigation.

Ultimately, this novel isn’t about the death of Donna Whelan, but what a death can do to a community, a family, a person, and what traits, good and bad, a trial like this can draw out in each. This novel is quite an accomplishment and an ambitious innovative project well worth your time, and a genre I implore writers to further explore.

The Glass Harmonica exposes the lives and secrets of a dozen or more McKay Street residents by dissecting the fictional St. John’s street and sliding it under a microscope that reveals the direct, indirect, and tenuous-at-best threads that link these characters, and how everyone is at least a little bit dirty when thrust under a microscope.

Wangersky chose to vary points of view, jumping in and out of each character and house on the street, and back and forth in time, and the end result is a league of narrators: more than a dozen. The upside of a carouselling point of view is that it gives Wangersky so many more lives and therefore stories to explore and entangle. The result is astounding number of subplots clicking together to form a grander plot far beyond what a novel with a single point of view could carry. One character has one life, one backstory, but having a dozen points of view, mathematically speaking, can give you 12 times the story. It’s all there in The Glass Harmonica: Murder, car accidents, love in all of its pain and glory, humourous passages, eerie passages.

The facility with which he steps in and out of characters is impressive. He brings each to life and it’s because he’s such a good sentence-level writer that he can bring this many characters to life in one novel, without losing the reader or jarring them or watering down the plot, as happens in most novels with a carousel of points of view: the reader gets dizzy and confused. Not really the case here. In The Glass Harmonica it’s more like Wangersky is spinning each character, and his many side stories, in 360 degrees, so the reader gets the full story and all sides of every character. Or, more compellingly, the stories all unwind, revealing mini mysteries, twists, and eerie turns. Some play themselves out within a chapter, and others take whole the novel to unfold. Some chapters leaving you hanging, and then others end in a backwards cliffhanger: you’re not wondering what happens next but what happened before this chapter / moment in time. Wangersky takes the reader back and forth in time 12+ characters’ lives, intersecting them at random points in their lives, and in that sense, The Glass Harmonica is a carnival ride of a book.

Perk for anyone who has lived in downtown St. John’s: it may be the best embodiment of “rowhouse living.”

More than anything with this novel, though, I quite simply marvelled at Wangersky’s masterful turns of phrase, crystalline sentence-level writing, and his uncanny ability to bore deep down into his characters and thrust their stories out onto the page.

What makes this novel so strong will, however, be a slight challenge for a certain demographic of readers. The idea of sticking with one character in a novel is that it is like putting a reader in the passenger seat, and taking them for a ride. When you start switching characters and points of view each chapter, it’s like stopping the car so the reader can get out and get in another character’s car. But while that will be jarring for some, it’s truly what makes the novel. The structure of it. How he intersects these lives, making compelling mysteries and betrayals and side stories out of everyday life on an ordinary street, which therefore becomes an extraordinary street. The Glass Harmonica is certainly an ambitious and innovative novel, and if I can be so bold as to assume what Wangersky’s “goals” were, than I can say he scored them well. There’s well-wrought characters that last, clever plot twists, a lot of story, and damn good, bang-on sentence level writing.

Blood Relatives (Pedlar Press, September 2010)
By Craig Francis Power
293 pages, $21
A condensed version of this review appeared in the Telegram on Sept. 24^th, 2010

With more and more books being published a year in Canada, it is getting harder and harder to stand out. But Craig Francis Power engages immediately with a combination of well-polished writing and his unexpected imagery. In the opening paragraph, Charlie visualizes the organ music at his father’s funeral service as individual music notes getting trapped, like birds, as they rise up and hit the roof. It’s this combination of lush writing and vibrant imagery in a story of a down-and-out lead character that sets Craig and his book apart. His imagery boasts such a disassociation of source and comparison subjects. Example, “The pipes made a sound like someone choking on a chicken bone.” Or he writes that the flankers from a fire “swarmed like roses in the wind around us.”

Blood Relatives is a novel about the sudden death of a father Charlie didn’t love and the slow death of a relationship with a woman he did love. It’s also about fighting off a dark genetic inheritance and the complexities of parent-child relations. His father wasn’t a great man, and yet he was the man, by default, who took Charlie fly-fishing at Metcalf Falls. And Power chose to balance any heavy subject matter with levity and a comedic cast, including an eccentric Newfoundland-dog-loving patriot he met at his father’s funeral, who may just be the key to unlock the secrets of who his father really was. This man, Hank Kinsella: he’s fantastically absurd, with a literally rotten mouth.

It’s Power’s rich writing and endearing back-up characters that make the book stand out and spare it from being like any other novel with a troubled protagonist. This is a solid, impressive debut that unquestionably puts Power on the next wave of writers out of Newfoundland. Craig had a lot of hype to live up to for this book. It won two well-regarded awards before it was even published: The Percy Janes first novel award (won by writers like Joel Thomas Hynes) and the Fresh Fish award (won by his talented-writer girlfriend, Sara Tilley). He exceeds these high expectations by the end of his opening paragraph. Also worth mentioning is his notably well written and realistic dialogue, with conversations seeming more wayward, unfocused, and natural than in most novels where dialogue is too clearly serving a narrative purpose. It is true to life in this book: what one person says doesn’t necessarily influence the response of the other character.

The apple may have fallen from the tree, but Alistair and Alexander are two very different apples, writing-wise. Green and red, or Granny Smith and Gala: each with their own distinctive qualities. Alistair seems known as a masterful storyteller, and the voice of dwindling cultures, whereas Alexander feels like part of the “new wave” of “the new writing” out of Atlantic Canada. His writing is clean, confident, and distinctive. His stories — urban and universal — are ambitiously constructed and all the more solid for it. In fact, Light Lifting features a story, “Miracle Mile,” that was a Journey Prize finalist — the Journey Prize being the country’s most esteemed award for short fiction. And it’s not even the best story in the collection.

The backcover of the ARC I read claims that, “MacLeod’s stories are as compelling and true as any currently being written in this country.” I think they chose some fair adjectives there. He has a very compelling voice; I was drawn into his writing by a narrative hook sharp enough to keep me on the line throughout his longer-than-average stories. And “true” is a good descriptor here. He takes you right in to the universal threads of various relationships in these stories. Like how work can bond the most eclectic groups of co-workers, as in the stellar title story, “Light Lifting.” In his structurally intersting and ambitious, “Wonder about Parents,” a real stand-out story, he tackles the strength of the countless tiny threads that bond a man and his wife, a man and his child, a man and his memories … as well as the history of lice, the mass panic of H1N1-like outbreaks, and then some.

There is a confident, distinctive, pleasure-to-read style in these stories, and a lot of surprising and apt lines in here too, like the description of a kid’s face after a fist fight, “[Blood] ran back towards his ears and up into his hair and down into his mouth in these long, long, spidery lines. It was like his face was a window and someone had thrown a rock through the middle of it.”

Light Lifting is an assured and promising debut, and one of the region’s finest collections of shorts in 2010. It puts a new MacLeod on the scene, and the way I see it, from here on in, we’ll have to say, “Which one?” when someone refers to MacLeod’s writing.

And, is it just me, or is Biblioasis the country’s metal detector for short fiction Gold? Kathleen Winter, Rebecca Rosenblum, Amy Jones … Alexander MacLeod.

Joey Comeau’s Overqualified is September’s Book of the Month because it is what we’re all looking for, or at least what I am: something new, fresh, different, that works. People use the term “very original” too freely. They waste it as a descriptor. Overqualified, however, really is “very original,” because it is unprecedented.

Overqualified is a novel written in the form of one- to two-page cover letters to various establishments — from New York Times to Xerox Canada — but details of the main character’s life and mental dilemmas often trickle into these letters, most notably about his brother Adrian, who has been hit by a drunk driver, and his girlfriend Susan, who he loves, “honestly,” even though he occasionally panics that she’s the last girl he’ll ever love and … “be with.” Recollections of what he and his brother used to do slip into these cover letters, or, more crassly, stories of what he’d like to do to a girl other than Susan, and these are funny and occasionally piercingly sad divergences from why he is the best candidate for the job to which he is applying. He tells Absolut Vodka, “My brother and I used to fight to the death on the top of barns … [and] made up characters for ourselves. We hummed our own fight music.”

He tells Paramount Pictures he wants to write horror movies because he watched Pet Cemetery four times before he ever “saw more than a flash of the dead guy,” but that he likes being scared. That he and his brother Adrian used to go out to their grandparents’ barn with flash lights, and one of them sit outside while the other would go in without his flashlight and see how long he could stand in there alone in the black room. “It wasn’t the sort of game where anyone won or lost,” he tells Paramount, “I want to write horror movies that scare you, but leave you with the feeling that your brother is right outside the door, waiting.”

These memories of the brother are cleverly structured, potent, and well-written. But the book is in no way sombre for any period of time. Overall, it is offkilter and amusing; hilarious in parts with perfectly placed ridiculous moments. The honesty is often as funny as it is sad, like when he tells New York Times, “A stint in juvenile hall adds a much needed bit of excitement to a childhood I can barely remember.” He tells the Park Lane Mall he is the ideal candidate for the Santa Claus position because his hating kids means he isn’t a pervert, and that when he worked at the Mattel toy company, he hired people of “small stature” and designed a new uniform for them of “green slippers and ridiculous hats” and made people sing as they worked until he was fired on three counts of racism towards Irish midgets he allegedly referred to as “my north pole leprechauns.”

And he’s a visionary, this guy. “Dear Gillette, do you remember when you were the best a man could get? … you need to get back to your roots, Gillette … bring back the straight razor. That was a product … You want Gillette razors against a businessman’s throat in an alley. Gillette razors hidden in the mouths of inmates.”

If not overqualified on some of his cover letters, he is often humourously over-confident: “Dear Parker Brothers … I have never designed a board game before, but I think I’d be good at it. You roll the dice and make your move. How hard can that be?”

And he has a tendency to get amusingly off topic, as in his cover letter to Irving Oil, “I want to get drunk in a bar and take a pool cue and fuck up a dude with a scar down the side of his face,” or telling HBO why he is the man for the boxing show because, “I don’t make collect calls, I make the operator pay.”

All gags aside, Comeau is a good, solid writer. He knows what detail can do. And the book is funny, a pleasure to read, a lesson in innovation, a laugh-out-loud stab North America, and an occasionally unexpected heartbreaker. It is a book for everyone with an iota of life in them.

PEI poet Steve McOrmond made his mark in 2004 when his debut, Lean Days, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award ( an award for the best first book by a Canadian poet.) His follow up, Primer on the Hereafter, won the Atlantic Poetry Prize. As expected, his 2010 release, The Good News about Armageddon, is a great, and, distinctive collection of poetry.

As the title implies, these are poems that tackle contemporary crises, but with a sort of matter-of-factness that is quite powerful and, impressively, never trite. The collection is topical and yet not solipsistic or a warning or offering answers. Cynical, though not without comedy. The poems are “just saying,” and doing so with a well-spent economy of words. Its outright fortitude spares it a preachiness or a purple tinge, and intellect and truth spare it from bordering on angst. It is written with an effective fervor that gives teeth to these biting, mostly splendid poems. Something meaningful echoes back as you read, and the weight of its subject matter is partially unloaded with a share of comedic relief as well. If crying about it can’t change the world, you might as well laugh about it.

Its finer moments are nothing less than potent: the language and how it is delivered, the imagery, the humour as a vessel to best carry substance. My favourite aspects of the collection get at the absurdity of this: we’re living on a planet we know we are destroying, and we’re living in a world fraught with increasing issues, and increasing apathy to them. It’s just another oil spill, it’s just another war, it’s just another talentless teen celebrity getting all the media spotlight.

“Online, I am no closer
To the blessed interconnectedness.

Deaf woman mauled by mountain lion.
Are Paris Hilton’s 15 minutes over yet?

Outside, a cold wind scatters
the last of the fallen leaves.

Human disinterest story.
Corpse lay next to TV for 3 years.

This just in from Hubble: a pair of black holes
locked in death dance. Make it your screensaver.

Are we winning the war on terror?
I think it might snow.”

What’s evident in reading this: Maybe the end of the world isn’t a big and sudden bang. Maybe it is a slow death, like a socio-economic-environmental cancer, already metastasizing through the planet as I type this …

“When there are no more wolves,
What will you cry then?”

Here’s a book for those of you who like your literature hungover, angst-ridden, strung out, and with trackmarks.  Though I hate comparisons, if someone called her Halifax’s female form response to Joel Thomas Hynes, I wouldn’t agree — the writing and narrative hook differs — but I would see the parallel in content. Many of her characters could be the girlfriend of many of Hynes’s characters. As an example, the protagonist of “Jesus was a Punk Rocker” wakes up in last night’s clothes, pinned to her bed under the weight of a nasty hangover: “I still have to piss, so I grab the vase next to my bed that once held eighteen long-stemmed red roses. It’s been empty for a while. I undo my fly and peel off my jeans … take care of business … [and] briefly consider sending it to him, with a note, This is what a sincere sentiment looks like, asshole.”

A quick read, Got No Secrets clearly shows that Botha has a real fire in her belly, and you feel the flames in this debut. I could say the stories lack subtlety, or I could say they roar. I can also say that there are moments of surprisingly original imagery in this book. There are also some too-true slaps across the face of the western world. “Being an addict to most people is way cooler than being overweight.” But there’ll be one plague looming over this book: the fine line between being repetitive and being consistent. There are some distinctive and more unique stories here: a story of a daughter and her boyfriend murdering her parents, or the world’s first pregnant (soon-to-be) man, but they are overwhelmed by a consistent presence of heroin, coke, booze, and never-subtle angst of the “real artist.” If everyone’s throwing up and angst-ridden all the time, it is hard to separate one story from the next. That said, I tasted some of her vomit-related lines, kudos there, her writing can get quite evocative. Her potential is quite evident, if that’s the goal of a debut, and she’s earned my attention with her vehement debut.

The title of the book, by the way, comes from a catchy Brendan Benson song:

http://chadpelley.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/07-got-no-secrets.mp3

I hate writing reviews because what is left to say, really? “An exciting debut.” “A real pageturner.” The pleasure with This Ramshackle Tabernacle is that you don’t have to dig for words, these stories evoke something in you and draw it to the surface. No digging required.

 It is quite common for reviews to compare first books to similar books as a helpful way to inform readers about a new author. But it would be counterproductive of me to make any comparisons in this case — because what struck me about this book is that Martin is a truly unique and powerful voice in his own distinctive way, and this is a truly unique collection of linked short stories. A compelling one. It is emotionally engaging and impressively written.

 There is an impressive range of voices in this collection too, and Martin has a handle on each — from troubled teens to bickering old married couples, and he is always so truly convincing. This range extends beyond points of view to tone and story content, among other things, and deserves applause: I laughed out loud at “Becoming Maria” and “Crafty old Dragon” but was conversely riveted and shook up by the harrowing and fearlessly written “Shaver.” There are shockers, like “Eight Ball,” and “Roulette,” while stories like “Adrift” simply and effectively strum a reader’s heartstrings. Tender, though, all of them: the shockers, the tearjerkers, and the funnier ones.

In Jessica Grant’s wonderful endorsement quote, she says, “You will laugh and be lacerated.” Echo: you will laugh and you will be lacerated. Sam has all the tricks up his sleeve, but more importantly, he has a deep empathy and sincere compassion that punches through and unites all of his stories. Collectively, the book will rattle you, and ultimately these are stories about outcasts, broken lives, or characters on edge. True. The characters are downtrodden or at a mental impasse, but really, and in the author’s own words, “These stories deal with both the rundown aspects of our humanity, but also with the redeeming love that can hold a community together when tragedies threaten to make it crumble.”

Noticeably, there is an undercurrent motif of “faith versus religion” here, but it is transient and incidental. It provides thematic meat for those who want that, but does so unobtrusively, so that those who don’t want it won’t trip up on it. 

Another noteworthy praise: There is no filler in this collection; each story packs its own punch. Though some of those punches are an uppercut that could take Mike Tyson and others are a playful slap on the shoulder.

It’s hard to believe this is a debut. If there are any kinks to be worked out they have nothing to do with the barebones writing, which is assured and not overly adorned: less is more, and it is like he has found his voice and Is honing his trademarks already. But I guess that’s what a masters degree in creative writing, studying under icon David Adams Richards does for a guy? Martin has a very articulate and distinctive diction and voice. This Ramshackle Tabernacle packs a real emotional resonance. It is weighty and lingers and swims in a rare and profound humanity. Most writers fail to engage this well, and what a nice dose of surprising imagery. “The slump in his shoulders makes him look like a cracked branch walking.”

It is a rare treat to find a new voice you are this excited about, to know you’ll be buying his next book. There should be bets on emerging voices, just for fun. Much like horse racing or poker: there are equal parts talent and luck involved in how a writer’s career unfolds. I might go all In on Martin though. Not quite 30 and writing this well? That’s worth a tall stack of chips. It leaves the guy, what, five decades to master his craft?

A truly moving collection of poetry that dwells in profoundly personal yet universal subject matter. A book a blaze so you feel it. Outspoken and insightful, there is a way she conducts her language so you hear all the right nuances. So the sharp lines sink in. Deeply.

She is exorcising moments of sorrow in many of these poems, and in the rest she is asking the questions we all do. Yet what she is ringing out of these questions is the beauty of life, hammering home a paradox: The things that make a person forlorn are the very things we live and breathe for while they’re here.

Her diction is elegant, exact, and evocative. If every collection of poetry has a poem that never leaves you, that’s what makes Lost Gospels stand out: the abundance of poems that spoke to me, rattled me, so I wouldn’t forget this collection the minute I start reading another one. I think we’re all in this book: We’ve seen many of the scenes Lorri pontificates upon, but she captures it and serves it up in a way only a poet laureate like her can.

In other poems, reflections from a place of sorrow and deep introspection, surprisingly, reflect the hidden beauty of everyday life. When a poet cracks themself open like this, they open their poetry up to a broader and more compelled audience. This book is a valley and I fell right in. Universal and opened-ended observations said, asked, or thought about with such crystalline phrasing that at times a reader might just understand the world a little more. The seeming ease with which she wraps words around the core of what’s being said is what stood out to me. Genuinely moving subject matter, language, and clenching one-liners, tied up into a neat package of poetic radiance.

Some highlights, in my opinion: “Legs,” “Winter Kill,” “Wild,” and “Hemlock Ravine.”

 Lorri Neilsen Glenn was Halifax’s poet laureate from 2005-2009. Click here to read an interview with Lorri at Speaking of Poems’ website. Also, catch her at the 2010 Shelburne Writers’ Festival, where she is conducting a workshop in addition to reading.

- A GG finalist and Winner of the Atlantic Bookseller’s Chocie Award; a winner of the Dartmouth Book Award and a finalist for the Thomas Head Raddall Award.

- Special features include an afterword by Marina Endicott, a great interview with Lynn Coady, and more.

A work of rare vivacity. Strange Heaven is bursting with dark humour and its well-placed opposite. This re-release of Lynn Coady’s critically acclaimed debut novel is proof positive she is a genuine, assured, compelling voice, and has been from the start. It has been said, written, taught, and seldom denied that to capture a reader requires making them buy and care for your characters, and Coady is particularly gifted in this regard. If characters could get any more real or fun to read about, then Lynn Coady would make all the real-life  people you know seem dull and unconvincing. This book is funny, sad, compassionate, ridiculous, believable, authentic, brash, mature, gripping, immature: and a dozen other adjectives to assure you it is worth a read. If you missed Coady’s lively debut the first time, don’t make the same mistake twice.

Click here to read more about this book at Goose Lane’s website.

On Larry and his latest novel

Larry Mathews is credited as the founding member of the Burning Rock Fiction Collective. A writer’s group that includes names like Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, and Jessica Grant. Credited perhaps because in his inaugural year of teaching creative writing at Memorial University, him, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, and some others, didn’t want to stop meeting and swapping writing once the class had finished, and from there began Canada’s most legendary writer’s group.

Mathews is, as described by Mark Anthony Jarman, “A Searing and silver-tongued wit.” His latest novel came out a few months ago, The Artificial Newfoundlander, and Salty Ink made it May’s Book of the Month. Read that article here. It’s a gut-busting, fast-paced, pleasure-to-read story, in which an amusingly introspective and disgruntled professor is surrounded by absurd characters as far-fetched as life itself, as his role as  a father, lover, and academic is put to the test.

On his pleasure-to-read The Sandblasting Hall of Fame.

The Artificial Newfoundlander left me needing a little more Larry Mathews. For years now, I’ve been wanting to read his debut collection of shorts, The Sandblasting Hall of Fame, but we all know how that goes: 20 new books hit the shelves each month, burying the old ones deeper down in the to-read pile. Bookstores are frustratingly quick to send anything a year or two old out the door, so you have to order online, etc.

Don’t be lazy like me about this book. GO. Get it.

Few books have the abundance out laugh-out-loud moments, the sheer, glistening wit of it. The sheer “joy of reading.” Oh, and from a writer’s viewpoint: the clever narrative construction and the lack of throwaway sentences: his style is punchy and gripping: a great combo when you throw his wit in the mix. Mathews plain has fun with language here, in the way Jessica Grant does in her heralded (exquisite!) writing. If people are going to be consistently comparing Burning Rockers Michael Winter and Lisa Moore’s attention to detail, they ought also to be comparing Grant and Mathews’ clever wordsmithery and pleasure-to-readedness.

What he does with his endearing misfit characters acts as a way to do with fiction all the things I like seeing done with fiction. A distinctive voice, engaging from start to finish, that hauls you into a story, keeps you there, clipping along at a good pace, and you hit the ending like a brick wall. (Because that’s how accidents happen: you forget about your surroundings, absorbed in something else, like, say a Larry Mathews’ story.)

His characters might be oddballs or they might not be. They’re certainly great to spend time with. Larry is masterful, yes, masterful, at what the old books call character development. In an opening paragraph: you know the characters, right away, just like that. They’re off-kilter, yet fully realized and convincing, and plain fun. They’re also unabashedly human.

Mathews, on his characters, “My guys are clowns in the sense that they see the Fall of Man whenever they slip on a banana peel. Then they take you backstage and you can see that, without makeup and costume props, they’re not much different from you and me.”

The Sandblasting Hall of Fame was longlisted for the 2003 ReLit Award, and features stories that have appeared in various esteemed literary journals, including Prairie Fire, Grain, and Fiddlehead. “Hanrahan Agnoistes” was anthologized in Coming Attractions 02′.

* Note: A slightly different form of this review appeared in The Telegram

Kathleen Winter is no stranger to writing, in any form. She has written for television — from Sesame Street to CBC documentaries — and for newspapers, including her former weekly column, Naturally, in The Telegram. Her last book, boYs, a vibrant collection of short stories, won the prestigious Winterset Award and the Metcalfe-Rooke Award. Annabel is her debut novel.

Annabel tells the story of a child who is born both male and female, in the hyper-male hunting culture of 1960’s Labrador. Surgically altered at birth and given the name Wayne, only three people know of his secret: his parents and a trusted neighbour. But as Wayne approaches adulthood, as his identity strives to lay a foundation, the woman literally buried inside of him, Annabel, refuses to be forgotten. It is the story of a “son” who wants to swim in an orange bathing suit, not trunks. It is the story of a mother who has to deny her son, who could have been her daughter, that one, simple wish, and live with that denial. It is the story of a wife who loves her husband, but not wholly enough to stop longing for her life back in St. John’s, and who she could be. It is the story of a Labrador man whose ability to connect with the natural world exceeds his ability to connect with his family, yet he is there, faithfully, when needed, and out of love, not fatherly or marital duty, genuinely doing what he thinks is right by them: providing for his wife and forcing a maleness on Wayne, but never without empathy, admitted hypocrisy, or guilt.

“Treadway loved his wife because he had promised he would. But the centre of the wilderness called him, and he loved that centre more than any promise.”

It is just as much a novel about the characters as it is about their predicament, and Winter can channel her varied characters masterfully, switching points of view between her five characters as they encase themselves in private worlds. In showing us all angles of her five main characters, from inside and out, whether it was her intention or just gifted writing, she’s showing us the humanity that overrides gender and age, and the basic human traits and desires that unite us all.

Annabel is also an evocative portraiture of ethereal Labrador. Winter’s writing reaches a hand out of those pages and hauls her reader down into an authentic Labrador you’ll feel like you know by sight, smell, sound, and experience. It is convincing, right down to the plants, the smells, or how a blind man can navigate a canoe and hunt ducks. You’ll see its desolation and its draw, depending on the character she channeling. “The village of Croydon Harbour, on the southeast Labrador coast, has that magnetic earth all Labrador shares. You sense a striation, a pulse, as the land drinks light and emits vibration … the visitor has to be an open circuit, available to the power coming off the land.” Her skill in this regard is crucial, because setting plays a big role in how these characters are shaped or misshapen, isolated or liberated, together or alone.

Her writing is a mesmerizing combination of crisp language, deep empathy for her well-wrought characters, and a world-savvy wisdom. There is an unobtrusively aphoristic quality to the writing that will at times stir your mind. This aspect of the novel comes through particularly well in the world-travelling, tender-hearted, deeply intelligent character, Thomasina. “To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.”

She delivers her story with a gracefulness that matches the mystique of Labrador and the tenderness required to carry this story. Annabel is an unforgettable novel of struggles, personal and inter-personal, and Kathleen’s empathetic voice does them justice in a way that connects reader to story. Destined to be one of the biggest novels out of Newfoundland this year, this is a story of isolation and a communication breakdown that breaks a family down, and breaks the reader down along with them.

Winner of the hip-assuring Metcalf-Rooke award! (Previous winners: Rebecca Rosenblum & Kathleen Winter)

This is fresh, new, fearlessly vibrant writing. Amy inhabits moments, she potently exorcises memories from her characters and you experience their longing or panic or exultation. The innovative structure in many of these stories should be celebrated, read, and emulated. It gets to a point where, What new can happen in writing, really? Every story has been told. A hundred times. That’s where Amy Jones comes in: every story might have been told one hundred times, but not the way she delivers them. This is where she excels: what Amy Jones does with narrative structure and point of view in some of these stories is innovative, epic, and unforgettable. In “How to Survive a Summer in the City” she uses ten tips, like Seek out free air condition, as pagebreaks. Pagebreaks that tie in to the story in clever ways as shifting points in the story. Amy’s radical switch in POV in the heart-wrenching “One Last Thing,” a story of a sister whose sister has run away, took the story to a level of potency no other technique could have. And after being floored a few times by her narrative wizardry, you think, What else does she have up her sleeve, and story after story she’s hauling out some new literary stunt, some new way to make her story enthrall you. I read “An Army of One” and I forgot to breathe. Read this full collection and you’ll never forget her, you might even consider her 2009’s big discovery in CanLit short fiction. I do. I’m really quite jealous I haven’t written some of these stories myself. My only complaint about this collection is that the opening story, a fine and solid story in isolation, doesn’t showcase Jones’s greatest talent. (Granted, “her greatest talent” is a relative claim, so I am being bias, a critical faux pas.)

Jones’s stories are as vibrant as the book’s cover. This is lively writing, punchy diction, and critically acclaimed dialogue, with closing lines that are occasionally a whole lot more for the deeper reader. They are character-forward stories featuring memorable characters — like the longing, list-writing Miriam Beachwalker — and if the title gives the illusion it is a sexually charged book: at times it is. The writing in stories “An Army of One” and “All We Will Ever be” censor nothing about the line between lust and longing, and properly captures the potency of unrequited love or, forgive me here, “the power of love.” The writing is tender in places and explicit in others, so that the vivacity of memories, passion, emotion, and desire punch through more than effectively.

Also commendable: she tells her stories in a way that is all Amy Jones. She tells them in a way that alternates between a wind-stealing punch in the guts and a playful punch on the shoulder. These stories, at times, fierce, powerful, and sexually charged, come from a tender, honest, and at-times vulnerable place, not an obnoxious, boisterous one. It is a deeply human collection, as vibrant as the front cover image. 

What Boys Like is on my top ten best collections of short stories. It’s her understanding of how to best tell a story, her explorations with narrative structure and POV are cutting and effective, and never gimmicky or repetitious. See “How to Survive a Summer in the City,” “One Last Thing,” An Army of One, “Twelve Weeks,” or “All We Will Ever be,” for a lesson in What Salty Ink Likes about Amy Jones.

Short fiction from the author of the multi-award-winning novel, Come, Thou Tortoise!

The qualities of Jessica Grant’s writing are beyond words, and not having the words makes you feel like an inadequate writer or critic. She’s stumped me, and others, and for that reason, Jessica Grant’s Making Light of Tragedy might be the best collection of short fiction printed this decade. Every story has been told, writers are getting sharper and more talented … but no one except Jessica Grant is writing so fresh and so clean in a way that is accessible to a broad audience.

Sometimes a book is so good you rip through it, pull an all-nighter, and you’re tired at work the next day. Other times, you buy a book everyone is talking about, and can’t get past the first dull chapter.

Less common: you come across a book you like so much you savour it, you refuse to waste it, you read it slowly, afraid it will end. I have yet to read the last 3 stories in this collection.

I’ll reel it in, but I’m blowing nothing out of proportion: these stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and the opening story alone won the country’s top short fiction award, The Journey Prize, in addition to the heavy-hitting Western Magazine Award.

This is an astonishingly original piece of work, perhaps most notable for its off-kilter, endearing, and often over-contemplative characters: “It’s the kind of ceiling that bursts helium balloons … what if sometime I need to bring helium balloons in here?” I fell in love a few characters. Well, every one. Whether you want to read something for its creative merit, its originality, or because it’s Goddamn funny, read this book and meet these characters: “I learned there is nothing sexier than damaged fingers. But I was a soak-in-Palmolive kind of girl. I didn’t have the balls to let loose on my own hands with a hammer and achieve an authentic damaged finger of my own. So I opted for painting my nails blue.”

Every story is delectably unpredictable, delivered in a distinctive way, and she plain has fun with language, and this combo makes her the most readably original voice in Canada. Over the course of my reading this collection, I witnessed Canada slowly realizing that, as her novel Come, Thou Tortoise was nominate for award after award. She’s unique, fresh, fun, at times sad-sans-pathos, vibrant, distinctive, engrossing, and endearing. “I jogged down the walk from my building, hopscotching over the ice patches.” Hopscotching as a verb. She experiments with structure, has fun with language, makes her own vivid descriptions, and her characters are all experiencing some facet of life too few of us can tune into.

In the opening story, the journey prize winning “My Husband’s Jump,” you get the play off the title (and the bookcover). A woman has just lost her husband, but the story is somewhat hilarious, somewhat implausible, but portrayed in a way that’s believable. It’s about an Olympic ski jumper who hit a big jump and still hasn’t landed. “I pitied the Swiss ski jumper. I pitied them all. For any jump to follow my husband’s, any jump with a landing, was now pointless … I had heard the IOC was planning to scrap ski jumping from the  next Olympics. How could they hold a new event when the last one had never officially ended.”

You never know where Grant is taking you, and that’s one of her great attributes as a writer: to tell stories in a truly new way, to offer believably off-kilter characters, to extrapolate some quirky, fleeting thought into an engaging story. To make that story shine. To do all that, as a rule, in just a few pages. These are short, short stories, and a book you should buy.

These stories slice because they’re pared down to a point. There’s nothing here that doesn’t need to be. Every sentence counts in a Harvey book or story, and that’s something I’ve really taken away from his writing when I self-edit. That and the power of a tight POV and the architecture of a sentence. Also: A grittiness shot through with compassion is not an oxymoronic style.

Kenneth J. Harvey’s rise to international stardom started with this collection of short stories. Appropriately so. Directions for an Opened Body highlights all of his qualities. A clear strength in Harvey’s writing is his ability to put a reader in the shoes of someone they are not. With his remarkable knack for a tight, engrossing POV, he takes his readers deep into a character’s psyche, and they therefore experience the story more potently. Right away in Directions for an Opened Body, in the opening story, “Open House,” a man has just snapped, after a final yelling match with his partner, and in a burst of madness, he trashes his house moments before an open house . There’s an eerie edge you feel from his writing, at times, that vibrates through you as a reader. It’s a rare thing I only encounter from a Harvey book — see, in particular, Harvey’s multi-award-winning The Town That Forgot to Breathe – and this book is full of them: a punch that can take your breath away and leave you The Reader Who Forgot to Breathe. There’s an apt Timothy Findley quote on the frontcover of the Minerva edition of the book, “Harvey has created a stunning world of hidden ferocity.”

Also, there is another budding trademark of Harvey’s here: his writing isn’t overly adorned or flashy; it’s calculated and features an interesting way of wording things. Like in “The Profound Liberation of Roy Purdie,” when he describes the sensation of a pair of sunglasses in the inside pocket of his suit jacket as “a giant, brittle bug, sleeping in a pouch.”

Perhaps most impressive: The stylistic range of these stories and their content is astounding. It is a book pulsating with equal parts savagery and sympathy. A collection with lust and violence in equal doses. Stories like “Ballerina” about a woman trying to turn a man’s daughter on him, exemplify that signature synergy of harshness and tenderness that characterizes, for me, Kenneth J. Harvey. That graceful grittiness or compassionate rawness. That and his versatility in style and subject matter. “Open House” drags you into the madness of a domestic dispute gone off the rails, “Orange Shadows and a Sound That Is the Two of Us” is a poetic, intimate, stylistically interesting erotic piece (“Everything that means anything is there in how her face changes when I move inside of her, drawing forth the sound that is the two of us”), “The Passing of Time” is a four-page, subtle-enough elegy to the death of Newfoundland culture, there a parable feel to “The Profound Liberation of Roy Purdie,” and the envelope-pushing tale of bike-gang initiation and other taboo, “My Sister’s Husband,” will plain make you uncomfortable, because it happens, and Harvey never shied away from delivering the story in (relatively tasteful) detail. It’s because of this versatility and sense of what’s next that this remains the only book I’ve read in one sitting.

This book, Harvey’s first, highlights everything about him I admire, namely: 1.) His versatility in style and story content. 2.) The power of a tight point of view: Harvey reaches a hand out of his stories and hauls you in. 3.) That signature graceful grittiness that unites his diverse body of work. 4.) He stands apart. I cannot lump him into categories with other writers like I can and do with others.