South Babak LakghomiDundurn Press, 2023 Review by Simon Lowe Babak Lakghomi’s sharp-edged, jewel-like novel, South, cuts as cleanly as it sparkles. A minimalist, literary dystopia recalling the sparse, unexplained mysteries of JG Ballard’s early catastrophe novels, South charts the hallucinatory...
DancesNicole CuffyOne World, 2023 Review by Jasmine Morris Nicole Cuffy’s debut novel is a story brimming with vivid prose that weaves together threads of artistic ambition, black womanhood, and a complex internal journey. Cuffy charts how an uncomplicated dream...
Slows: TwiceT. LiemCouch House Books, 2023 Review by Bridget Huh T. Liem’s second poetry collection Slows: Twice asks us to inhabit a world of doubles where everything must be approached slowly, with extraordinary care, lest it shimmer into a...
Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the ForestAmanda LewisGreystone, 2023 Review by Kim Trainor We are surrounded by some of the most beautiful and ancient trees on the planet, yet many of us on the west...
The Corrected Version Rosanna Young Oh Diode Editions, 2023 Review by Joanna Acevedo The speaker in Rosanna Young Oh’s The Corrected Version has a complicated relationship with work. As she details the day-to-day experiences of working in her father’s grocery store,...
A Safe Girl to LoveCasey PlettArsenal Pulp Press, 2023 Review by Roz Milner For a few years, Casey Plett’s first book, A Safe Girl to Love, was hard to find. Originally published by Topside Press almost a decade ago,...
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil SandsKate BeatonDrawn and Quarterly, 2022 Review by Ellie Eberlee The headline published May 1, 2008, by the New York Times, read as follows: “Canadians Investigate Death of Ducks at Oil-Sands Project.” The article...
Safety Razor Emily Osborne Gordon Hill Press, 2023 Review by Cara Waterfall There is the body of myths passed down from generation to generation, and then there is our own body of myths, which spring from memory. In her...
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive Katie Farris Alice James Books, 2023 Review by ALHS Katie Farris’s debut collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, is frank and vivacious, weaving out of the complexity of life an...