Digging the Vein

By Tony O’Neill

Contemporary Press, p. 219, $11.00 (US)

     Review by Matthew Firth

Tony O’Neill’s novel Digging the Vein jolts readers with its naked honesty and unflinching gaze centred directly on the perils of heroin addiction. In short – it’s a blunt and bold junky novel. And, yes, junky novels have been done before but so damned what. What’s relevant is that O’Neill’s novel is frank, passionate, non-judgemental and superbly written. This is one of the best novels I’ve read in recent years.

  The prose is fluid and perfectly paced. The novel gets claustrophobic at times, which is understandable, given it immerses the reader in a world of hard drug users and abusers from word one. The reader is drawn deeper and deeper into a realm of need, violence and treachery, so deep that it feels there will be no reprieve; that this book will end in bleak death and certain destruction. It keeps you pressing on, morosely curious to know when death will creep onto the page, only occasionally thinking that survival is possible. 

   The narrator is a one-time successful musician from London living in Los Angeles. He married in Las Vegas in the throes of a drunken binge. He bounces from band to band, the gigs getting smaller as the drugs get harder. The marriage collapses. There are more relationships with women, but those centre more on drugs; sex is part of the background. Eventually, everything in his life fades to the background, is shoved there by heroin, which demands he have no other dance partner but smack:

“I looked at the clock; it was quarter to nine in the morning. A time when people all over the world, except in Hollywood, were heading to straight jobs, completely divorced from my reality of shit, sweat, vomit, and heroin. I didn’t know if I’d swap my place for theirs, but then again over the past months, I’d started to believe that I was a little crazy.”

O’Neill gives a lucid insider’s take on heroin addiction’s punishing punch. The narrator loses it all. He does go crazy. Then he tries detox and rehab but only gets his head above water momentarily, before heroin drags him back under, smothering all the earnest 12-step jargon with one quick jab to whichever shrivelled vein the narrator can find. Hell returns. The only question is whether Hell is where the narrator stays.

   Digging the Vein is a beautiful plunge into an ugly world of harsh reality. It draws on Burroughs, Selby, Bukowski and Dan Fante but O’Neill has his own style and vision. This is a solid, uncompromising novel. Read it wide-eyed with your salve of choice at hand – you will need it.

 

The Work of Mercy

By Stephen Guppy

Thomas Allen & Son, p. 240, $24.95

   Review by Salvatore Difalco

A blurb from The Globe and Mail on the front cover of this otherwise attractively designed book published by Thomas Allen, with its luminous image of a blonde child on a swing in sunlight, and a lovely blue-screen thing going on, declares that Stephen Guppy is a “beguiling writer” – something that made me wince a little. Add to this that many of the stories were published in some of the most illustrious Canadian journals out there, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, Event, New Quarterly, and so forth, which told me pretty much what to expect when I started reading them, and undermined for me, unfortunately, any possibility of beguilement. One of the stories “Downwind” appeared both in Prism International and The Journey Prize Anthology, something that also put me on alert. But I tried to put all these considerations aside and be as objective and fair as I could be when I started reading the very competently written short stories in The Work of Mercy.

   The book starts reasonably well with “The Light of Distant Planets,” no jarring flaws or stylistic lapses jumped out at me, though I must confess I forgot every single detail of the story within minutes of finishing it, a peculiar thing. Same with “Motels of the Northwest: A Guidebook,” a ruthlessly competent and completely forgettable story. But perhaps I’m being unfair. I’m too cynical and too outside the sensibility that engenders stories like those to pass comment without sting. But like the scorpion, I can’t help myself when I run across stories like “Downwind”, a retrospective tale told from the perspective of an old woman. It seemed like just a silly story at first – frigid, false, with something nuclear combusting (literally) in the middle of it. It was like running into a transvestite with long blonde hair and nice breasts but with five o’clock shadow and a bulge in his/her pants. But I can even get around this sort of thing if it’s done with a sense of irony or humour. But “Downwind” is a very serious story.

   I know, I know, I’m being too harsh. I’m sorry, Mr. Guppy. You’re a fine writer. But I cannot be restrained and cannot be nice when I read lines like this:

                                       

“Like all inhuman things, they wait, their bodies changing form, abandoned in the arid light of heaven.” 

This, the last line of “Downwind”, refers to the “leaves” of the previous sentence, “floating motionless in the pool.” It’s an astonishing sentence, probably the one that clinched the story’s place in The Journey Prize Anthology. But, read it. What’s wrong with it? The same thing that’s wrong with the rest of the stories, I guess. The read like they were written in the arid light of heaven.

Strange Ghosts

By Darren Greer

Cormorant Books, p. 174, $24.95

     Review by Bill Brown

While the inexperienced need not head back to square one, a few 16th century essays by Michel de Montaigne might help situate Darren Greer’s efforts. Or come closer and dip into the likes of Julian Barnes, George Orwell, Alberto Manguel and John Raulston Saul. What about the American essayist, Phyllis Rose, who calls Montaigne, “The father of jazz”? (Alluding no doubt to him being the first to let one thing lead to another, thereby kick-starting this most fluid of literary forms.) Joseph Epstein reminds us that the personal essay is not meant for the barricades; it is rather a stroll through someone’s mazy mind.

   So the subject of a personal essay, no matter its title, is the author. But unlike most other forms, this one is unrepentantly personal. The competent essayist, in addition to showing us about the rooms of an interesting mind, must stitch their contents into something of universal interest. But to pull this off they must, among other things, establish respect, an amiable link with the reader, and the reader’s trust.

   Darren Greer, in his opening sentence, sets a clear pitch to his no-nonsense voice: “In 1995 I checked into a drug and alcohol treatment centre in Ottawa … ” Very quickly he also reveals his love of “Hollywood crap.” He makes no “claims to have the kind of mind Wittgenstein had … ” And to this day the fellow has trouble publicly identifying as Aboriginal.

   Do I hear, so what?

   And you’d be right, save for his thoughtful reflections and all the unforced references to Homer, Tennyson, Dostoyevsky, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, Oscar Wilde, Felix Partz, Tennessee Williams – a hallmark of essayists who assume a cultivated readership.

   But Greer’s references are more than name-dropping. He marshals them to his greater cause. He muses, “If I want to tell my coming-out story, I have to find another way into it … ” And, it seems, that’s what Strange Ghosts is all about. Through Greer’s mind’s eye, we look down on the world from Paris to Phnom Penh. We dip into literary and historical lives as well as his own in the service of revealing a few threads: the alienation and isolation we all feel and the “coming-out” story as a never-ending experience for each of us. He might have come-out as gay, as HIV positive, as an addict, but how many of us continue to come-out as failed lovers, as flawed fathers, hopeless dreamers, or the activists Greer refers to as naïve and angry “corn-fed young men and women with bees in their bandanas” about the state of the world. As he says in his closing sentence: “We carry our prisons with us.”

   Humour, while common in the personal essay, is downplayed here. It comes in drops. Greer’s collection, as a result, comes across as very personal and extremely touching, although it may also read at time as too earnest.

   And while I’m inclined towards Epstein’s notion that the personal essay is best left to “the middle-aged and beyond” with their vast store of experience and reflections, Darren Greer has made a fair case for the opposition. He speaks honestly and entertainingly. We believe him. This reader, at least, feeling a bond of understanding and affection, will be looking for more from this not-too-young man.

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Reprinted from Issue #14

Toy Gun

By Dennis E. Bolen

Anvil Press, p. 336, $26.00

     Review by Philip David Alexander

Picture this: You work a dirty and difficult job on Vancouver’s mean streets. Your boss Myra is a by-the-book woman who watches you like a hawk. Your caseload includes a crackhead security guard who is still pulling robberies and thinks he’s got you fooled, a repeat offender hooker and the damaged son of a criminal who was once under your watch. This is the world of Barry Delta, parole officer and protagonist in Dennis E. Bolen’s third Delta instalment Toy Gun. The first two Delta books were Stupid Crimes and Krekshuns. Both offered up engaging plots and were peopled with vivid characters. Delta himself was (and is) tough, philosophical, cunning and surprisingly, vulnerable. Bolen really mines the inner workings of Delta in this story. In the process, he delivers a two-fisted character study that puts the reader right on the damp and gloomy streets that Delta trudges.

   Delta still dodges people who would like to see him dead and there is definitely plenty of action and chiselled, almost hardboiled, prose:

“Barry parked on an eastside street so iffy he wondered if he would ever see the government car again. In this particular block he had once heard gunshots in the middle of the day. Down the street the stripped hulk of a not so old SUV rusted on bare rims. Hookers stood on opposing curbs. Pugilistic men with shaved heads patrolled in cars with blacked-out windows. Asian gangsters dined for free in terrified noodle houses.”

But to call Toy Gun a crime or procedural novel would be to sell the whole work short. Toy Gun is about a man who clashes with the people he needs most and bends over backwards to offer the often undeserving reprobates on his caseload a second kick at the can. In Delta, Bolen gives us a man who is filled with both compassion and dedication for all that his job entails, with anger and confusion for the fallout that has poisoned his personal life.

   One of the chains Delta carries is his womanizing. Consider this excerpt where Barry Delta is pondering an argument he’s just had with his wife Tanya:

“ … for a moment the intimacy of their struggle moved Barry, brought him closer to Tanya, yet the iniquitous presence of others in the room – known by him, hidden from Tanya – scorched him like acid. Sitting with them were all of his female friends … He was nauseated and wallowing, a swimmer in refuse with no chance of rescue and years gone by without a clean breath.”

Toy Gun is filled with powerful moments that add up to knowing Delta so well you can’t help but hang on, white knuckled, to see if he works it all out. This shadowing character study, with its beautifully rendered moments between Delta and his wives and lovers, might put the reader in mind of Denis Johnson but the overarching theme of a hard man pursuing a fleeting redemption, attempting to bust out of an emotional jail he helped create, is pure James Elroy. And when it comes to novels filled with criminality and complex characters, I can't think of a higher compliment. On a sad note, Toy Gun is reportedly the last of the Barry Delta trilogy. Let’s hope Bolen has second thoughts and decides for at least a quintet.

The History of Vegas

By Jodi Angel

Chronicle Books, p. 187, $19.95 (US)

     Review by Matthew Firth

Jodi Angel’s debut short story collection The History of Vegas is a bit of an odd mix. Her writing style is quite finely-crafted, in the usual writing school manner, but her subject matter is down and dirty; from-the-gut. It results in lucid storytelling centred on unconventional characters and themes; a literary style married to marginal subjects.

   By and large it works for Angel but I also think her polished prose belies her gritty subject matter somewhat. Angel’s writing is so smooth that it works against her, rendering her edgy subject matter blunted and less authentic. With fiction chock full of adolescent longing, sex, violence, stupid petty crimes, drugs, cheap motel rooms, pet abuse, game shows, shitty jobs and muscle cars you expect a prose style equally rough-around-the-edges. I’m labouring the point here, but there’s something about Angel’s squeaky-clean literary style that takes the air out of her salty subject matter. Maybe it’s my anti-academic bias at work – I just have a hard time fully accepting her nasty themes and plots when the prose is so well schooled. I’m being too harsh, too critical of Angel’s ability to write well. I’ll drop it.

   So, the stories, then: as mentioned we’re dealing with the dispossessed and marginalized here, characters who have not been loved, who wallow in fleeting pleasures, who take what they can from each other without worrying about the consequences. The story “Donny” is a good example. Donny is Nicki’s creepy, horny teenaged boyfriend. Nicki’s messed-up younger brother Tony looks up to Donny and Donny humours him in the process. But what really concerns Donny is little more than using Tony’s older sister to get his rocks off. Angel portrays the teenaged fixation with instant gratification perfectly in this story.

   “Supplement” is a great story that mingles farm working with sordid sexual goings-on. It also provides one of the book’s longer-lasting images: that of Husso, a Basque farmhand who castrates lambs with his teeth. Angel strikes a similar vein in “The Skin from the Muscle” when, in precise detail, she describes how to skin a buck when a pair of female strangers show up with their kill at the remote home of a teenaged boy. In this story, and in the title story, characters ease into sex as if they’re stepping out for a smoke. Boy meets girl. Boy says, something like, “Hey, let’s hang out.” And the next thing you know they’re banging away with adolescent fervour. It’s a bit of stretch or maybe I’m just too far removed from those teenaged days of perpetual hard-ons.

   “Portions” is another standout story also representative of Angel’s dark subject matter: an older sister teaches her overweight younger sister to vomit, to purge after binging. Drugs, greed, the American racial divide and brotherhood are at the centre of Angel’s quietly tragic story “Push”.

   Overall, this is a strong collection – certainly better than most debuts and certainly edgier than most of the wishy-washy fiction that finds print in Canada. But still, I stop short of trumpeting The History of Vegas fully on the grounds that Angel’s style and subject matter are too much at odds. It’s like whisky: for fiction that deals with the seedier side of life, even if it’s the expensive stuff, it should burn a little going down.

 

No Margins: Writing Canadian Fiction in Lesbian

Edited by Catherine Lake and Nairne Holtz

Insomniac Press, p. 314, $21.95

     Review by Bill Brown

No Margins is set up as an alphabetical series of writers responding to an interview/questionnaire, followed by an excerpt or story, finishing off with a biographical note – all sandwiched between a capable introduction by Susan Knutson and a “selective Annotated Bibliography of Canadian Literature with Lesbian Content” by the well-read Nairne Holtz. Begging comparison with the recently published Writers Talking from Porcupine’s Quill, No Margins would have benefited from the assured editorial touch of John Metcalf. While Writers Talking offers up a smooth trip through well-crafted stories, No Margins, though exhilarating in spots, makes for an uneven ride over a mix of stories and excerpts from novels.

   For a successful example of the latter look no further than Dionne Brand’s excerpt from In Another Place, Not Here. You’ll find language moving lushly across the page, the rise and fall of a West Indian lilt tossing the reader from one passion to another. It’s a heartless reader who won’t want to read the entire novel.

   Another is Marion Douglas’s deeply humorous excerpt from Dance Hall Road. Through a splendid evocation of a humid southern Ontario summer, she explores the pinhead on which both “funny” and “sinister” can dance at once. Her snappy prose and unusual imagery, used to flesh out complex difficulties with a few bold and humorous strokes, remind one of Elise Levine or Terry Griggs. Take the two old men in a corner store: “Soft-spined in appearance, creatures who had just yesterday made the switch from water to land and weren’t quite sure what to make of the move.” As with Brand’s piece, you’ll need wild horses to keep you back from the rest.

   And don’t miss Jane Eaton Hamilton’s “Wart’s Ugly.” It’s a delightful story with a cast of whacky family members, including a mentally-ill mother and Wart, a tomboy daughter losing her hair. The story whirls around the friendship of Wendy and Wart in a skilled manner suggesting Hamilton is familiar with the gospel-according-to-Norman-Levine: The less said the better. So, like Wart, we’re never 100 per cent certain what’s what, but we sense the unease and suffering of both parents and the pain of kids blundering their way through love and lust. While there’s an inevitability to the conclusion, and the details remain elusive (like what happened to both mom and dad?), we do know that Wart digs a deep moat around herself, ending a brilliant and satisfying look at a girl’s first broken heart.

   For these three alone No Margins is worth buying. But there’s more: The anthology kicks off with “A’thyraa” by Luanne Armstrong, an interesting formal period piece reminiscent of earlier queer writer Richard Armory. Less successful is Emma Donoghue’s excerpt, “Here and Now,” where we come close to Harlequin Romance, with its impossibly naïve back-and-forth of those recently fallen off the cliff of love. Even less successful: Lydia Kwa’s “Soft Shell,” a brief but contrived piece playing nightmares off daymares. Ditto Larissa Lai’s “The Sewing Box,” an excerpt from her novel-in-progress.

   While intrigued by Daphne Marlatt’s “Update,” a raucous format made me thankful for its brevity. Shani Mootoo’s “The Upside-downness of the World as it Unfolds” is a disappointing contribution from a Giller shortlisted writer. She works with interesting characters but her narrative voice feels both distant and inconsistent (as in, she doesn’t know a chapatti but can pick out a cherdo or a patli from a hundred yards). Add in awkward imagery – “Stiff as an old piece of dried toast” and you’ve got the idea. Also, with Elizabeth Ruth’s “Tiny insurmountable hills” you know you’re in iffy water from the start with imagery like “Her words stuck like Elmer’s glue fastened them.”

   And where’s the irrepressible Karen Tulchinsky of Five Books of Moses Lapinsky? Her “Ruined by Love” starts off slowly and stays there. Feels like a San Fran to Vancouver road trip with everyone asleep, including the driver. And Marnie Woodrow’s “Body Doubles,” about LA’s low-level has-beens spit out by the film industry, ends the anthology on an unfortunate note.

   Finally, an excerpt from Ann-Marie MacDonald’s acclaimed Fall on Your Knees needs nothing more said. And in Ann Fleming’s “The Pear,” while not much happens, idealism and realism touch, spark and sizzle in a touching portrait of a woman too lonely for too long.

   The anthology’s title describes these pieces as Canadian fiction in “lesbian.” Fortunately, for book sales, “Lesbian” sounds a lot like other languages: gay, straight, bi, ethnic, etc. This anthology, important as it is to the queer community, shows the lesbian sisterhood of writers, like all others, contains one part dazzling writing shooting through the roof and three parts spread around the rest of the house.

 

Loose End

By Ivan E. Coyote

Arsenal Pulp Press, p. 176, $17.95

     Review by Bill Brown

Coyote’s third collection is another terrific read. Imagine David Sedaris or Stuart McLean but with their barrels sawed off, an economy of words and a slip sliding of gender. Then add in a dozen of Dan Bushnell’s haunting black and white photos of Vancouver’s East End. The stories, both funny and poignant at once, draw from Coyote’s years of living in this notorious neighbourhood. By using both first person and real names she not only blurs the lines of fiction but also packs an added punch with these dazzling tales – none much longer than four pages (revealing their roots as pieces for Vancouver’s Xtra West). Unlike McLean’s, though, her treats can be swallowed whole, not chewed until your jaw aches.

   Without preaching, she encourages us to let our true selves shine. Warts and all. No matter what. Not the easiest, but surely the more satisfying route. Black eyes aside.

   Only thing better than reading Coyote is listening to her. But with Loose End’s close-up, narrative voice, this is a terrific approximation. You piggyback on her keen eye; zeroing in: “I took in the way he rested one hip higher than the other, how he lazily spun his stop sign in one buckskin-gloved hand, how stainless steel was wearing through the toes of his boots. Sexy boy.” – as though casting her eye over a Luca Signorelli painting, not a modern construction site.

   This is a sure-footed storyteller. One you’ll follow effortlessly through 40 or so tales (and a couple of essays) on everything from bikers to babes, from young to old, gay to straight, and just about everything in between; including all you could want to know about cars and the tools to fix them.

   So, if you’d like to laugh yourself to a higher plane of being, snap up Loose End and pour yourself a beer. And it doesn’t matter which team you play for, you’ll be marked as a philistine if you don’t find something here that knocks your socks off.

 

Girls Closed In

By France Théoret

Guernica Editions, p. 116, $15.00

     Review by Lorie Boucher

France Théoret’s Girls Closed In recounts a 16-year-old girl’s experience at a boarding school for teachers in 1950s Quebec. At a lean 116 pages, the novel is a spare interior monologue on solitude, identity, and the effects of confinement and extended introspection on a young psyche. Short, unadorned sentences carry the reader quickly through the mind of the unnamed narrator as she falls in love with, and is rejected by, Yolande, an elusive and detached classmate. Like a plain frame on an intricate painting, Théoret’s simple language sets off the larger ideas in her perceptive and thoughtful book.

   The notion of solitude is threaded throughout the novel and ideally manifested in Yolande, a model of solitary calm. Yolande embodies a type of solitude that “does not confine you to boredom or insulation” – a “serene, personal kind of solitude.” The young narrator aspires to this self-contained detachment and attempts to adopt the external signs of internal satiety. But when Yolande charges her with superficiality and rejects her, she seeks solace outside of herself in a new group of friends. Solitude, the narrator later avers, is less a way of being than a way of perceiving: “My solitude was reconfiguring itself as a way of learning to see.” This evolution of the narrator’s perception of solitude is a good example of the nuanced assertions made throughout the novel. There is a depth and complexity to Théoret’s writing that rewards close reading.

   There is also a certain claustrophobia to the novel that may encourage some readers to plough through the pages. I admit to coming to appreciate the novel only on a second reading. The themes of imprisonment and surveillance consume the text – the strict rules of the boarding school, the constant watchfulness of the nuns, and the physical confines of the grounds are echoed in Théoret’s description of just about everything else. Lines like “we were wrapped in our silence,” “shame hemmed me in,” and “she’d enclosed me in her decision” are enough to make you open a window. The layers of metaphor are better appreciated the second time around, however, and at 116 pages, there’s no harm in retracing a few steps.

   But there is some semblance of freedom in the novel. Faced with an unchallenging and unmotivating academic year, the narrator decides to keep a “journal without deletions.” Through her writing, the narrator recovers some of the freedom lost to her environment and furthers her pursuit of the solitary ideal. “Writing was a solemn system of absolute solitude.” Reading plays a similar role throughout the novel. Through books, the narrator escapes her mundane classes and connects to the outside world. While literature as liberator is not a new concept, Théoret applies it skilfully to her purposes.

   Girls Closed In is a serious and well-crafted novel. Théoret achieves an uncommon complexity and deserves credit for this multi-layered work.

 

Eighty-Sixed: A Compendium of the Hapless

By Brian Ames

Word Riot Press, p. 200, $11.00 (US)

     Review by Megan Butcher

Eighty-Sixed is a collection of stories about people who have refused, are refusing; those who have been refused, rebuffed. As you can imagine, it’s an occasionally disturbing read, and Brian Ames doesn’t pull his punches, but delivers them in crisp prose. In the best stories of the 22 collected here, Ames creates situations that are just a little off. They feel real, like it might be happening down the street, but then one detail makes his reality true, and yours a dissonant knock inside your skull: it could be an unexpected word or gesture, or, as in “Monocle”, an unusual physical characteristic that forms the backbone of the story but doesn’t touch the narrative.

   Elk hunting plays a role in quite a few of the stories, giving the collection a through-line in terms of setting and tone. My favourite story of the collection is about Jackson “Ajax” Romero, a former failed baseball hero, former successful barfly and current hunter. Whether he’s a success at that is left up to the reader. The elk’s progress through the hunt is intertwined to good effect with Romero’s life as a baseball player. The two narratives ricochet off each other, point and counterpoint. Ames uses the mythical underpinnings of the story to amplify small but important aspects of Romero’s character, rather than making a heavy-handed one-to-one comparison. 

   Not all of the stories are this successful. None are terrible but this would have been a stronger collection without the flat obviousness of “Ten Dollar Dog” or the affected weirdness of “Physics Package” – in the case of the latter, the one “off detail” is pushed too far and so the story just seems fake and flat. Occasionally, he tries too hard for a poetic image: “Her outrage faded like the aftermath of fingers retrieved from a pail of water” (p. 67). Not only does this simile use too many words and awkward structure to explain a simple image, it’s not true. When you remove your fingers from a pail of water, the initial aftermath is a vacuum. Sure, the rings slowly fade but why conjure vacuums at all if you want a slow fade?

   Overall, though, Ames is a great writer, with a knack for situation, setting and character. I’ll read many stories in this collection again and wait patiently for more.

Darwin Alone in the Universe

By M.A.C. Farrant

Talonbooks, p. 160, $17.95

     Review by Megan Butcher

The back cover blurb of Darwin Alone in the Universe makes this book sound serious, deeply philosophical, and really, rather pretentious and dull. A singular disservice, since Darwin – while often bleak, while often touching on very serious subjects, such as existence and the substance of history and the prevailing view of the universe – is also funny. Laugh out loud funny. Uncomfortable funny. Farrant has a light touch with irony, thank god, and knows how to handle juxtaposition deftly enough that her chosen elements are both perfect and jarring.

   Take “The Advice Giver.” Three questions: a man who reveals he has no soul wants relationship advice, another man wants the Leviathan removed from his wife’s tongue (“verbal monsters in the mouth that can’t be rubbed off”), a woman considers ECT to shock her husband into wanting bondage. Farrant uses the banality of the Q&A format to underscore the ridiculous ways in which we consider these matters of soul, language and sex. And her lists! Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good list; but in this format, the few words of each bullet sing oddly on their own and make a disturbing 10-point melody together. By the time you get to the last item of the last list, you have a history of surreal meaning ringing through the collection.

   Her language is beautiful, her words chosen well. She’s not a showy writer but uses language to set tone and space and sneak up into the brains of her readers. The stories alone give snapshots of people, places, feelings incarnate – none complete a narrative arc on their own but they’re perfectly formed to call up echoes of personal experience. They tap into narratives being formed within the reader. This gives them a currency and an emotional resonance that stayed with me long after I finished the last story.

Hammered Out

Edited by Frances Ward

Peter Street Publishing, p. 128, $12.00 

   Review by Mark McCawley

My first impression of Hammered Out is of a collection with somewhat of a conflicted identity. Is it an anthology or a magazine? In this case, it’s both. Hammered Out is a Hamilton-area literary magazine that normally features poetry – yet once a year they publish fiction. This is their second annual fiction special: a sampler of writings with no pre-set theme or genre – other than, perhaps, “this insanity we call life” – or so states the editor, Frances Ward.   Ward’s twenty-two disparate selections reveal a veritable grab bag of genres, prose-styles, narrative techniques and thematic concerns, spanning the gamut. The stories range from modernist and postmodernist fiction to magic realism to satire to gothic-noir to historical and speculative fiction. The most striking feature of this collection is its diversity. The only thing held in common by the twenty-two contributors is that they all hail from, or have some connection to, Hamilton, Ontario (though this is not a criteria for inclusion).   Naturally, with a collection this diverse, not every story will be to every reader’s taste. My own tastes and biases drew me away from some pieces and closer to others. Still, there are several standouts in this collection.   “The Idea of Brahms” by David Dawson is a story about failed parental expectation and how said expectations resound through childhood and well into adulthood. The main character, Albert Johannes Wesnicki, will strike a familiar chord among many readers. His father wanted “either an Einstein or a Brahms, take your pick”. He had just been reading that the musical part of the brain was very close to the mathematics part, and a long way away from the hockey part.   “Smooth With The Ladies” by Matthew Firth is a cautionary tale about looking to get lucky with the ladies on a cold Friday night in the middle of February when yesterday’s paycheque is a wallet bulging fat with cash and Monday morning looks a long way off.   “Outside” by Salvatore Difalco is by far my favourite piece in the anthology. It’s an unsympathetic treatment of lower-class urban life. It neither glorifies nor laments the grubbiness of its main character Larry’s daily existence as a young offender. Difalco draws the reader into a world and an experience few will know outside of the correctional system. Larry’s conflicting expectations of life and death in the urban jungle are juxtaposed with those expectations that the youth justice system attempts to enforce. For example, Larry’s counsellor, Miguel – described by Difalco as “a compassionate goon” – insists that the premise “a single act of kindness yields two more acts of kindness in return” will set Larry on a course with only one true, real outcome.

   If Frances Ward’s selection hammers out one thing for certain, it is that there are many writers in Hamilton to watch.

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Reprinted from Issue #13

Venous Hum

By Suzette Mayr

Arsenal Pulp Press, p. 208, $21.95

    Review by Lorie Boucher

News of a high school acquaintance’s death prompts Stefanja to urge her neighbour and best friend Lai Fun to help her to organize a 20-year reunion. The prospect could not be more unappealing to Lai Fun but the guilt of sleeping with Stefanja’s husband, Thor, quiets her objections. The reunion is nothing Lai Fun can’t handle, anyway. Growing up a lesbian named after an Asian noodle with vampire vegetarian parents in a small Alberta town has given her the kind of steely resolve one needs to charge through unseemly tasks.

   Suzette Mayr’s Venous Hum is a hilarious and well-written novel. So strong are its more overt comic elements that they threaten to obscure the crafty satire of Canada’s love affair with Pierre Trudeau and our earnest hope for equality, bilingualism and a pluralist, multicultural identity. This is not to discount the value of comedy, nor the skill in producing it; the dead seriousness of recent Canadiana is enough to make you want to launch yourself off the roof of the National Library. But the humour in Mayr’s tale is certainly runner-up to her construction of the novel, which is supported by several original conceits, most notably the extended metaphor of “invitation.” Trudeau’s open invitation to immigrants to Canada is set against invitations to a high school reunion and ultimately satirized in the required invitation of vampires into homes. These connections thread through the novel unobtrusively and don’t beat the reader down with overt repetition or a condescending 1+2+3 formula.

   Other devices are used similarly skilfully throughout the book. Mayr introduces recurring symbols, like the spectral ever-presence of griffins – in the city, at Lai Fun’s wedding, on her sister Angelique’s bus route – early and consistently but their prominence escalates at the same pace as the story. In fact, it is this restrained use of macabre imagery and the presumed normalcy of the novel’s first 100 pages or so that make its eventual switch to magic realism so effective. To refer to it in any detail would require an unforgivable number of spoilers but suffice to say that the twists are great. Sure, Mayr gets a bit silly when she includes vampire recipes for deep-fried fingers in black bean sauce but by then you’re already pulled in and forgive her the slip.

   With Venous Hum, Mayr successfully walks the fine line of literary skill and mass appeal, which is no small feat. A class of English students would suck back Venous Hum like a shot of Wordsworth and book clubbers would no doubt love the sensitive and spot-on treatment of friendship, motherhood, infidelity and nostalgia. It holds up on both levels and for this reason earns my strong recommendation.

 

 

Asthmatica

By Jon Paul Fiorentino

Insomniac Press, p. 149, $21.95

     Review by Matthew Firth

I’ve written about Jon Paul Fiorentino before (in the Ottawa Xpress, not Front&Centre) and I’m unchanged on my stance – the guy writes well but he really needs to find something worth writing about, which would, subsequently, give readers something worth reading. Because Asthmatica ain’t it.

   This short story collection pretty much epitomizes a burgeoning genre in CanLit: self-satisfied, smug, urban hipster lit that is seriously lacking in substance. Other examples: Jonathan Goldstein’s Lenny Bruce is Dead (though praised by nearly everyone but me – see my review in Front&Centre #4) and more recently Nelcott is My Darling by Golda Fried. Oddly, there’s a Montreal connection to all three books that might be a factor or just coincidence.

   In Fiorentino’s case, Asthmatica is intended to be comedic fiction and there are humorous moments but more often his fiction comes across as insipid and arrogant. The problem is Fiorentino’s tone. He writes from a point of view of privilege. He’s a Montreal lit hipster these days and from that vantage he opts to look down his nose at his humble past in suburban Winnipeg, where the bulk of the stories are set. It’s like Fiorentino is too cool to write seriously and has to make sure all his readers know he’s making fun of everything: Winnipeg, his own self-proclaimed teenaged sissiness, his hyper-religious parents, his headbanger brother, slutty classmates, crappy jobs and their crappy bosses, drunk relatives, hockey, mainstream brands of beer, bingo, teenaged beer-drinking parties, suburban lawn mowing and anything else that a downtown Montreal hipster could never risk associating himself with in any genuine manner and still preserve his mantle of cool. Sure, Fiorentino lived through all of the aforementioned but in this book it’s used as fodder for ridicule, which is a shame because if he’d dropped his guard he could have assembled a collection of meaningful stories reflecting on fairly common but at the same time potentially captivating times: coming of age in the suburbs. Natasha and other Stories by David Bezmozgis and Greg Kearney’s Mommy Daddy Baby trawl similar territory but both resist Fiorentino’s too-hip-to-give-a-damn demeanour.

   Fiorentino’s Asthmatica is a letdown. I’m not out to put the boots to Fiorentino, like his character Jonny does to Sven Andersson (son of fictitious, mediocre mid-80s Winnipeg Jets winger Anders Andersson) but until he writes something more weighty and less look-at-me-being-oh-so-clever, I’ll take a pass.

 

Animal Rights & Pornography

By J. Eric Miller

Soft Skull Press, p. 90, $10.95 (U.S.)

     Review by Bill Brown

In this remarkable collection Miller manages a vertical takeoff. The first story, “Food Chain,” deals with a family, which, in more ways than one, is living on the edge. And though the tale is brutish, Miller recounts it with the detachment of a parable or a fable – but definitely one gone off the tracks. Keeping a tight rein on his keyboard he recounts the horrifying collapse of a rural family; both literary form and language are spare. The movement understated. And as in most of the other stories, no names, just “mother,” “father,” “daughter.” And through this distant narrative voice we wonder at such awful things coming to pass but in the end see they are simply passed down along with the genes, then multiplied and amplified by both ignorance and isolation (from each other as well as others). It’s a chilling story and not for the faint-of-heart.

   But can Miller keep the ball in the air over a collection of 21 stories – many less than two pages long? Yes. Save for a few clunkers, he uses the same sharp knife to slice open something foul: sadism, rape, scat, cannibalism and much more. Everything made nastier by a recurring pointlessness and disturbing randomness.

   “Broken Harder,” one of the standout stories, deals with the uncertainty of a supposed straight guy who gets force-fucked by a Chinese guy he doesn’t know. In “Ceremony” all is implied. Nothing terrible happens on stage but the suggestions are reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s 1948 story, “The Lottery,” where shocking actions rise up amidst apparently normal folks. Similarly, in “Ceremony,” no one knows the origins of this story’s barbaric ceremony or how far it goes back or even what it’s for. Just that it exists. “Invisible Fish” is an unsettling tale of a pet store turned toxic. What was once a place of spirited good humour and harmless jokes “has gone sour.” After learning the “chimp knows the secret,” all that’s left, we sense, is to find out how far the poison will spread. “John School” explores the space between viewer and viewed in pornography. Miller pinpoints this as the geography where porn’s power lies. If either party suddenly were to want a chat or to go to the movies, the whole thing would shrivel. The money, of course, expands the space and keeps everything taut.

   Yet throughout this collection Miller pulls off an exploration of pornography without writing porn. His skill as a writer keeps him on dry ground. Here you will find the straightforward matter-of-factness of a Norman Levine but also a few baroque flights of fancy: the rape of a mermaid, one death by vagina.

   In the concluding story we learn “even worms suffer.” Here Miller addresses us directly: “It doesn’t matter who you are.” It seems whatever our “new level of consciousness,” it is too little, too late. The damage done; the task ahead overwhelming. And so we come full circle from the first story, “Food Chain.” Now there’s little to do but await the worms.

   These are gripping stories, read in a jiffy. Taken together they echo off one another, their outlandish content narrated in a matter-of-fact voice. The resultant effect is powerfully wrought. Brilliant.

   Think Annie Proulx in a small space. Tight and explosive.

 

 

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Reprinted from Issue #12

Damage Done by the Storm

By Jack Hodgins, McClelland & Stewart, p. 214, $32.99

     Review by Len Gasparini

British Columbia writer Jack Hodgins is perhaps best known for his first story collection, Spit Delaney’s Island and his first novel, The Invention of the World – both published in the mid-1970s. He has since published eight other works of fiction – most recently, Damage Done by the Storm.

   In this collection of ten stories Hodgins mostly retraces his well-worn narrative route, that of Vancouver Island’s logging and farming communities. However, the lead-off story “Balance” is a road not taken. It’s the droll account of a lonely and self-absorbed orthotist whose job involves creating by hand a “perfect balance” for the plaster casts of weak or deficient human feet: fallen arches, twisted toes, inadequate heels. The nameless narrator develops a fetish for these plaster feet. “Sometimes my fingers burn with the secrets they have learned,” he muses at his workbench. This kind of story, with its pygmalionism, everyday psychopathology and bittersweet pathos is not often encountered in Canadian fiction. A dark gem it is.

   Other stories such as “The Drover’s Wife,” about an avaricious lady logging boss and the title story about a retired Ottawa Senator, come very close to verging on cliché. “This Summer’s House” and “Inheritance” are both overly long and bogged down by banalities. Hodgins has trod this turf before. His characters have grown older. The down-home anecdotes and humour a la Garrison Keillor have lost so much of their edge that they seem almost dated. It’s as if the themes were out of step with this new millennium in which innocence has been sent packing.

   “Galleries” is one story whose setting alone should arouse reader’s interest. But Hodgins says nothing about Oxford, Mississippi other than it’s a university town and William Faulkner once lived there.

   A widowed mother and her 30-year-old son – tourists from Edmonton – are in Oxford so that the mother can do research on her Faulkner book. Without his camera, the son is bored. He strikes up a conversation with an attractive black student who works part-time as a waitress. She easily persuades the son to drive her home. Home is a sagging tin-roofed house near the piney woods north of town. Hodgins’ handling of the son’s awareness of the woman’s sensuality is too timid, as are the author’s perceptions of Dixie culture. It’s obvious he doesn’t know Southern blacks. The son’s uptightness is the real gist of this story, despite his observations to the contrary.

   In “Promise” a 12-year-old boy learns that adult appearances can sometimes be deceiving. And “Astonishing the Blind” is sincerely told from the point of view of a Canadian woman pianist living in Germany. The tale is somewhat gentle in tone, even solemn; and it’s layered with symbolism.

   Hodgins’ Damage Done by the Storm might make for some pleasant reading but its quality is uneven due to the limited range of subject matter. Although some risks are taken, they seem as cautious as hedging one’s bets. More stories of the calibre of “Balance” and “Astonishing the Blind” would have made this a powerhouse of a book.    

 

A Destroyer of Compasses

By Wade Bell

Guernica Editions, p. 175, $15.00

     Review by Matthew Firth

Spain is the fulcrum of Wade Bell’s short story collection A Destroyer of Compasses. Bell, a Canadian writer, situates all but one story in Spain. The one story not set in Spain centres on a Spanish woman who has immigrated to Calgary. Despite the common geography, Bell does a good job varying styles: “In Ronda” is flash fiction; “The House of the Americans” borders on novella, while other stories are of more typical short story length. His characters too range in age and both female and male points of view are present.

   Still, Spain is the glue that bonds these fictions. More so, foreigners living in Spain – specifically English-speaking foreigners from Canada, the States and the UK – are under Bell’s microscope. The ex-pats seem to just find themselves in Spain, at slightly different points of recent history: during Franco’s reign, at its end or in its wake. Some of the foreigners are anarchists in Spain to help counter Franco’s fascism. But the foreign anarchists, such as the unnamed man in “Chains” who is complicit to a nightclub bombing in Barcelona, are far softer than the home-grown anarchists. Similarly, some of the other ex-pat characters appear to drift into Spain to get their kicks and then move on:

 

I’m just a tourist, a beach bum, a collector of impressions and postcards. I’m on an open-ended holiday. One day my money will run out and I won’t be able to make enough teaching English as the Americans do with their government teaching certificates and, like Catherine, I’ll go home. I don’t want commitments.

 

This describes a Canadian who finds himself resident in a household of Americans and Spaniards and drawn deeper into their interpersonal shenanigans the longer he stays.

   “Green” also shows ex-pats getting into trouble of sorts the longer they linger aimlessly in Spain. Sam, on the heels of a marital break-up, has spent several months in Spain, drinking, hanging around and lusting after woman until his wallet runs dry. His demise is not tortuous; it comes across more as pathetic, a slowburn concession that he has little to live for. But when Sam starts drinking with another Yank, Dexter, it leads him to a woman and sudden happiness. Later, Sam concludes, “I’m so happy to know you guys ... You’ve given me back my life.” This kind of salvation could happen anywhere but Bell’s plausible character examination, mixing of nationalities and use of happenstance that only seems possible for characters who get out in the world to mingle and take chances tells us that Sam’s saving grace could only go down under the hot sun of Spain. This attribute is key to this book and it successfully differentiates Bell’s collection from a lot of the insular, hyper-regionalized CanLit of recent years.

 

Cities of Weather

By Matthew Fox, Riverbank Press, p. 300, $22.95

     Review by Bill Brown

Readers of Montreal’s Maisonneuve magazine, where Matthew Fox is associate editor, are already acquainted with Fox’s spirited prose. This collection of not-so-short stories lets the rest of us in on the secret.

  While most of these accomplished stories chase gay characters, you don’t have to be gay to keep up. In fact the first (and title) story is anything but gay. The big lie, which pops up in other stories, arrives here fully formed: After her boyfriend walks out, Janey fills the void with a clay amalgam of everyone in her life. Their fingers and hands. What Janey calls “The Project” gives shape to her spiral into total isolation from family (in Florida), job (she loses it) and best friend (ditto). Voyeurism reigns. It’s a beaut of a story; fully realized and showcasing Fox’s mastery of the small gesture (“running a hand along the tweed partition”) – cueing us at once to both touch and separation, the story’s two axes of isolation – and his spot-on turn-of-phrase (“humdrum beauty”). Nothing seems amiss.

  And so it goes through stories that rub together a web researcher with a sculptress, which juxtapose a live-alone and an apartment teeming with roommates or another which sets off a Toronto fashion maven against a decaying old-country grandmother. The sparks that fly are most often bright without being showy.

  Unfortunately this collection isn’t waterproof. “The Dead Roommates,” a story of two roommates left to write eulogies for two roommates recently killed in a car accident is at once too stark and too ornate. One unlikable, navel-gazing young man is left to circle another who is both drawn and repelled by him. While the one is too thinly drawn, the other is seen in cliché images (“tension inflated like a party balloon”). With mostly interior monologue, uneven pacing and unsteady voices this reader ended up not caring what happened to either, which isn’t much.

  But, taken as a collection this is a brilliant debut. Fox knows that gay or straight, we all have the same problems. And his pen for the most part is sharp enough to clarify both the common threads and the startling differences.

 

Learning to Swim

By Larry Lynch

Gaspereau Press, p. 155, $25.95

     Review by Matthew Firth

Larry Lynch’s short fiction collection Learning to Swim is a strong work of chiselled prose and sharp, exacting storytelling. Plus the book is beautifully presented by Gaspereau Press. Aesthetically, the book is very appealing due to its design and attention to detail while not succumbing to that too-precious artefact vibe.

   “The Rope” – the first story – is a spellbinding tale of an ordinary yet peculiar rural family, the rituals they keep and the secrets they harbour. The story centres on “the boy,” the youngest son of a reclusive, semi-alcoholic father and a doting mother. His two older brothers have left the home to work out west in the oil fields. Slowly, Lynch reveals family tension and troubled history, subtly leading to a powerful conclusion. The story is expertly paced. And a description of a pig butchering by wacko neighbour Bev Allison is downright chilling.

   The title story has a nice mix of humour. It does concern learning to swim, as well as learning to write fiction and how to bring a woman to orgasm. “Scramble” is a surprising change of pace. So too is “The Weight of a Blind Dog” but it’s also an odd, slightly surreal story, yet very inviting.

   “Absolutes” is a stark tale of mind-numbing and body-breaking labour. A man named Allison works on a factory assembly line. Daily he confronts his foreman demanding to know when he’s going back to his old job. Daily the foreman sloughs him off with excuses and a selective memory until one day – when the foreman has been into his vodka – he shows Allison the futility of his labours. The foreman’s revelation is heartbreaking but also a bang-on accurate analogy of the ugly truth of manual labour when it’s stripped of meaning and value. With this sharp kick at the story’s end, Lynch infuses his bitterly realistic tale with a dose of the Orwellian.

   The longest story – “Topography” – again mines tension and inner conflict. It reminded me of a Michael Bryson story; it has a certain quirky and off-centre feel, dealing, as it does, with a faltering relationship between Denis, a parks and rec worker and foreign aid volunteer, and Corrine, a bodybuilder. Lynch ups the tension via side-relations with other troubled souls: Eric and Tanya (a couple awash in jealousy and mistrust) and the mysterious Vincent who lures Denis into grey areas. 

   Simply put, there’s not a weak story among the seven in this tight, clean collection.

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Reprinted from Issue #11

Exact Fare Only 2: Good, Bad and Ugly Rides on Public Transit
Edited by Ian Cockfield
Anvil Press, p. 170, $18.00
    
Review by Mark McCawley )

Let me be blunt. There is something about these serialized, one-size-fits-all anthologies that feels, well, disposable. Add to that the moniker of “commuter literature” and we have what seems to be a recipe for literary fast food. Fortunately, the writing in Exact Fare Only 2 is anything but disposable and unlike the quick rush of fast food, the works here resonate long after the book is read.
   What we do have is a microcosm of the human condition, as revealed through real-life tales, poems, reflections and rants surrounding that singular human experience which crosses all ethnic, cultural, political and economic boundaries: public transit. In Exact Fare Only 2 tragicomedy sits alongside subtle, and not so subtle, social commentary and wry, mordant humour as the writers navigate and negotiate the myriad unwritten rules and unspoken protocols of public transit, seeking that most elusive destination: their stop.
   Such as the oddly prophetic epiphany Teresa McWhirter receives in “Another One Rides The Bus” – “In this country, according to the strict rules of Canadian politeness, anything unpleasant is ignored.” Or, as in Matt Hern’s “Sweating” where he is reluctant to make eye contact and thus become part of a spectacle: “I resist meeting his gaze in my self-conscious, Waspy, Canadian way.” Or, as in
Chris LaVigne’s “Move to the Back” he spends the “entire ride pretending not to look at people even though they’re in my direct line of view … avoiding eye contact with well-practised precision.”
   Then there are those who are ambushed by others and events beyond their control. Here we have, as in Matthew Firth’s “Missed Bus,” a reluctant participant in a midnight exchange of essential services. Or Catherine McNeil in “Making the Last Bus,” who in missing her last bus discovers there is no such thing as a free ride.
   Perhaps it’s a Canadian thing; if it’s uncomfortable, unseemly, or politically incorrect – we try to ignore it. Yet if the writers in Exact Fair Only 2 tell us anything, it’s that we ignore our planet and our common humanity at our peril. For that lesson alone, Anvil Press should be applauded.
   So, whether you’re flying first class all the way, second or third class by VIA Rail or the QE2, riding the dog, or simply hitching a lift on the peasant wagon – sit back and enjoy the ride. Anything can and does happen.

A House by the Sea
by Sikeena Karmali
Vehicule Press, p. 224, $19.95
  
Review by Bill Brown

A House by the Sea is the classic “quest” tale. Zahra Khan roams geographically, historically and spiritually with a restless heart and with what in the end must be thousands of Air Miles to cash in. And even though she finds the house, author Karmali makes it clear the house is not the end of Zahra’s (or anyone’s) journey.
   Our narrator’s struggle, described by others as the bid by all immigrants to “find a home,” was complicated for this reader by her saucy voice. This is a narrator who refers to making an effort to conceal her own “provocative charms” and tells us of a customs agent who “examines my behind with more interest than my bags.” And for the man she pursues – “I contort buttocks, stretch midriff and thrust bust to ensure that he will be pleased by what he sees.” Of this incident she reflects, “When Fate beckons, I always follow.” Follow? Not a very sympathetic voice to follow for over 200 pages. Feckless and self-indulgent doesn’t make for a sound guide.
   The story ranges back and forth over time and continents. The point of view shifts in unsettling ways, as does the verb tense (four times in one particular paragraph.) Add to this a background that for many will be unfamiliar (the early 20th century Indian Diaspora) and that narrator and grandmother share the same name, then it won’t be surprising the reader may feel the need of more than the map provided at the book’s beginning.
   Still, this is interesting ground: what drives people to leave and the varied ways in which they do and don’t make out upon arrival. It’s exotic – among others, East Africa in the 1920s. There’s enough love, loss and death in this story to keep a heart thrumming. And the narrator tells us “The heart and stomach of our household has always been its kitchen.” A proclamation amplified by Karmali’s divine musings over food: coriander, lemon squeezed on crispy fish, garlic, mint and cashews. This is her writing at its best. Meticulous, sumptuous.
   Unfortunately, the novel would have benefited from closer editing. There are too many startling literary fixations (e.g., gargoyles and thundering are just two that reappear more than twice) and an uneven pace (sometimes breathless as we skim time and continents; other times hiding the forest behind a tree.)
   In her Acknowledgements, Sikeena Karmali thanks Dardick for “the courage to publish fiction that is unconventional.” The tale of a self-obsessed coquette who leads us through a family saga of three generations is hardly “unconventional.” The prose? What might seem unconventional to one seems nothing more than sloppy to another.
   In describing the narrator’s love-interest, Ali, Karmali uses a deft hand: “Workers straightened their backs when he entered the room.” And of herself the narrator says: “Little did she know I wanted to burn.” This is Karmali cooking on high.
   As a debut novel, A House by the Sea has its ups and downs. Karmali has shown she can come up with the magic. Her readers should be treated to more-disciplined writing in her next work.



Nowhere Fast
By Yashin Blake
ECW Press, p. 168, $19.95
    
Review by Matthew Firth

The variety in this short story collection surprised me. Judging by the slightly surly looking author photo and recalling Blake’s first book, Titanium Punch, I was expecting urban angst, heavy metal references and little more. Sure, there’s some of this in Nowhere Fast but there are also layers to Blake’s work that make this collection shine on different levels.
   Variety: there are short, swift stories with a kick (e.g., “Du Maurier Summer”); ruminative character and character interrelations stories (e.g., “By the Numbers”, “Mention my Name”) and even some fairly cryptic, erudite stuff (e.g., the first story, “Another Mozart”). Marks to Blake for not coming across as a one-trick pony.
   Still, the centrepiece of the book is “Battle at Sea”, a series of three stories. War and heavy metal run through the series and, the deeper you get into the book, the more the reader comes to realize that both influence Blake’s fiction considerably. The first part of “Battle at Sea” – “Midway” – is a story of alienated teenaged angst amidst a crumbling family. The second part – “Press Ganged” – is all beautiful, teenaged rage. A gang of kids form a death metal band and plan to subvert a school concert by performing a Slayer tune. The story builds to a near tumult, the capper works and youth grabs a glimmer of control of the reigns from the tired, boring middle-agers.
   The title story is also a standout. In “Nowhere Fast” Gene and Lori, a young Toronto couple, head to Ottawa for a long weekend at Lori’s folks’ place. But before heading out, Blake provides some background – an undercurrent of trouble and weirdness between Gene and Lori. The story opens with Gene aroused and wanking to an image of Jessica Lynch, the American soldier “heroically” saved in the recent Iraq war. Lori’s put off by this but also somewhat resigned to it, remarking, “Only I could end up with a boyfriend who masturbates to fucking Newsweek.” The sexual tension rises and falls in the story. But it’s also diverted by other concerns: Toronto is in the midst of the SARS scare and Gene and Lori have to navigate family expectations and interactions back on Lori’s home turf. It’s a fluid story and staunchly contemporary. Blake shows his flexibility with this story, dwelling on the young Toronto couple’s woes and minor epiphanies.
   Music, war, booze, sex, broken families, and broken relationships course through Nowhere Fast. It’s a 21st century collection and for the most part devoid of nostalgia, firmly rooted in the present or very recent past. For example, the current fixation with security, terror and subsequent anxiety pervades in “Tomahawk”.
   Blake provides an arresting exploration of current infatuations, political climates and emotions, infusing his well-crafted stories with a palpable sense of urgency. It’s an accomplished book from a writer who demonstrates he knows when to lay it on heavy and when to ease off and power down.


Orchestra of the Lost Steps
By Shelley A. Leedahl
Thistledown Press, p. 168, $18.95
   
Review by Megan Butcher

I’ve been having a hard time remembering these stories. I’d go to write the review, forget what had happened, pick the book up again, flip through it and find out that I did actually remember all the stories but forgotten I had read them – they’d been mistakenly filed away as “stories from my friends.” Shelley A. Leedahl’s characters seem like cousins of friends of friends; the weird and heartbreaking stories that get traded late at night.
  The tone of the writing is subdued, well fitted to the generally sombre narratives. Though occasionally funny or wry, for the most part, Leedahl’s stories are melancholy. Some are wrenching, such as the man mourning his infertility in “Avenida Triste” or the young woman losing her husband in the title story. Others are simply unsettling. Leedahl has a keen eye for the hairline fissures between couples. She uncovers them gently but unsparingly. Even though many of the stories end on a hopeful note, I found myself remembering them with unease and sadness.
  The characters Leedahl creates are credible, mostly because of their depth. For the most part, they’re not entirely likeable. In “What Do You Think Life Means?” the main character – Lovilla – stranded on a country road with a dead cow, seems plaintive and irritable. And irritating. Understandable but not pleasant. But because the focus is so tightly on Lovilla and her reactions, I came to appreciate the mettle underneath her fussiness. And Leedahl is gentle in her direction of the story. At no point does the writing seem heavy-handed but the ending is perfect and inevitable.
  As a whole, the stories don’t work together to form a bigger narrative. There doesn’t seem to be a particular sequence to them or a build up or an expanded exploration of themes. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily because each of the stories is complete in and of itself. As someone who often finds short fiction frustrating, I liked that all of the stories in this collection left me with a definite feeling – and not a feeling of bewilderment. That Leedahl manages to do this without slamming the stories shut in an obvious and clumsy way is a testament to her abilities. The writing is skilful; her grasp of narrative is clever and nuanced and her characters are interesting. Read this collection and pretend the stories happened to a friend of a friend – you’ll be the hit of your next dinner party.

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Reprinted from Issue #10

The Urban Bizarre
Edited by Nick Mamatas
Prime Books, p. 178, $15.00

Review by Nathaniel G. Moore

The Urban Bizarre, a new fiction anthology out of Ohio edited by Nick Mamatas, is an example of the small press paying off for all. The healthy rival to the lit mag, lit zine and academic literary journal is the independent trade literary anthology. The publishing venture is a hit and miss for everyone involved; the publisher can rest assured the consumers will be drawn to a collection that involves a collection of like-minded writers, the editor can have the satisfaction of putting together their dream team of writers, the book-buying public can spend the same amount of money they would put out for a single-authored collection for a gaggle of bards and finally, the contributors get the satisfaction of playing for a literary team.
  The collection starts with “Tuck” that premises Martin Tucker, a man having an affair the morning of September 11, 2001. This story is so well timed, curt and focused, the dialogue is so real – a re-read is inevitable.
   “Highway To Hell” by Michael Belfiore is the story of Charles, a cigarette company executive hunted by a demon, pulled over by a possessed state trooper with a long red tongue. Despite obvious insane subject matter, the prose works. “Time was immeasurable. The sun went no lower in the sky. The heat, the same unrelenting furnace blast, untempered by wind, unchanging.”
   The collection is paranoid and, dare I say, culturally reflective of post 9-11 America, in which many writers feel pressure (hopefully) to reflect in their work. It’s comforting to think that while other young individuals are fuelling themselves at 7-11 and staring empty into computer screens – others are nurturing their troubles, concerns and trying to create something, trying to secure some stable ground on which to build a reality.
   These are not stories about farms and the great struggles of the baby boom generation, canoe trips with middle-aged anthropologists in tweed or generational discursive traditionalism that meanders into sentimental drivel. These are confrontational pieces designed to engage the reader instantly. They succeed, for the most part, in doing so.
   In “Amy”, written by Ann Sterzinger, the macabre world of stripper drug love comes to fruition. This story stands out in the collection as a standard voyeuristic pick-up piece about a bi-curious stripper but the way it’s set up, the reader is assured she is no longer alive by sentence two of the piece. Finally, it should be noted, with a collection as diverse as this, it’s hard to sum up or highlight one story over another. Sometimes, single sentences stand on their own in reviews, perhaps that is the case with my final sampling. From Douglas W. Texter’s “A Dangerous Day” who describes a character with “strands of his dishwater blond hair.” Hit and miss, yes, but worth investigating.


Hopeful Monsters
By Hiromi Goto
Arsenal Pulp Press, p. 171, $19.95
 
Review by Matthew Firth

Hiromi Goto’s short story collection has the occasional clunk but is otherwise a solid piece of work. “Stinky Girl” is an odd foray into the mind of a large, smelly girl with a hostile mother. The prose gets fairly purple, annoyingly so at times (e.g., “Lucky for me, I must say I’m blessed with a certain higher intelligence, a certain sensitivity which enables me to more than endure the trials of this existence.”). But the story also surprises, with whimsical moments such as when the girl thinks her mother has fed her dead father’s head to the dog, having taken said head out of the kitchen refrigerator.
   “Tales of the Breast” blurs the real and the surreal. A woman suffering through the pain that often accompanies breastfeeding a newborn is preached at by her sanctimonious partner. The couple is fraught with tension, resentment and anger:

   “You look like you’re still pregnant,” he jokes. “Are you sure there isn’t another one still in there?”
   “Just fuck off, okay?”

By its end, the story spins into a beautifully imagined turning of the tables tale.
   In “Drift” the title refers to many things in a story where a daughter and mother set out to find an obscure, natural hot spring somewhere near a logging road in the Rockies in winter. Drift refers to the huge piles of snow the women must traverse; to the way loneliness caused the daughter to drift from her husband; and to the way the mother and daughter’s conflicting personalities forced a chasm between them. But the daughter and mother’s blood ties drift them together again. Like in the book’s first story – “Night” – Goto accurately portrays intergenerational relations and strife.
   Drift could also describe other stories in the collection. It’s a theme returned to again and again in Hopeful Monsters: characters drift from relationships, from sanity, from their sexual orientation, and from their homeland (Japan, in this case) to the cold, Canadian prairies. Cultural drift is strongest in “Home Stay” and “From Across a River.” 
   “Hopeful Monsters” centres on a woman who gives birth to a baby with a tail – a caudal appendage, more clinically. Again, intergenerational tension raises its head. The woman’s anxiety over her new baby is also palpable:

They hadn’t named her yet. The names they had chosen before she was born tasted like ashes inside of Hisa’s mouth now. Her eyes burned dry. The Rat. It was the year of the Rat, wasn’t it?

The story moves along nicely but the ending disappoints – it’s unrealistic and the story really loses steam, just sort of peters out.
   “All Possible Moments” is a prose poem type of story – a brief, imagistic, erotic moment described. It’s an alluring chunk of prose but an odd choice to end the book.
   A largely satisfying collection, Goto demonstrates a fruitful imagination, often juxtaposing this with insightful examinations into tense contemporary relations between men and women, mothers and daughters, and the generations.

Autumn Rhythm
By Richard Meltzer
Da Capo Press, p. 192, $19.95

Review by Chris Robinson

Meltzer’s latest book, Autumn Rhythm, is a collection of fifteen texts, each divided into episodes that explore death, ageing and identity, as reflected by such people as Charles Bukowski and wrestler Stan Stasiak, in addition to personal subjects: parents, father, cat and self.
   In the title piece Meltzer ruminates on his fast-approaching geezer status (he’ll be 59 this year). Just like a geezer, he jumps from thought to thought, going over the past, present and possible future of his life. The fragments range from the trivial (“There is nothing that concerns me less than the décor of my room.”) and smutty (a vivid description of what geezer sex might be like), to more poignant commentaries: a painful observation of his dying cat; a knockout piece about the last recordings of Coleman Hawkins, Skip James, and Joe Callicott; and the excellent “Vanity and Culture,” a philosophical defence of his fondness for bars (“To grab some jargon from the existentialists, with a couple-three Hamm’s in your gut – hell: even Coors fucking Lights – potentiality begins to approximate actuality.”).
   “Beginning-Middle-End” opens with a vivid wet dream Meltzer once had about his mother. Meltzer then alternates a casual interview with his elderly mother with childhood memories of her. He comes to a painful realization: he doesn’t know this woman at all:

Hey, I’ll cop to it: I do want my mommy – a mommy (or equivalent). Wish the hell I had one – what the fucking fuck.

In “The Old Fuckeroo,” Meltzer examines his father, a man he describes as a “Pompous blowhard; stultifying omnipresence; dreary S.O.B. with a heart of gold, no, silver, no, aluminium; white collar drudge; earnestly mawkish drip-dry sap.” By the end, however, sadness and regret once again creep in:

[H]e would still never become someone I (or anyone) could exactly “talk to” – he never mastered smalltalk or became approximately Real. Which today feels sort of tragic – or something – but that’s the fucking breaks.

The book is more than a family tale, however. In “Stan Stasiak’s Dead”, Meltzer attends the funeral of the wrestler and is disappointed to find that the few people who eulogize him prefer to spout a stream of nothing niceties: “A generic funeral, a dismal affair … the nullification of a life rather than its celebration.”
   In “Stiff,” Meltzer remembers his encounters with Charles Bukowski, a man he once admired for setting “A standard, for measuring our own orneriness, our trashy facility, our fuckdance with our own weary detritus, our big stink.” Meltzer is let down when he discovers that Bukowski has become a walking, talking parody of himself.
   In Autumn Rhythm Richard Meltzer celebrates our blemished, fragmented pasts of failure, disappointment and insecurity – and even a few minor triumphs here and there. For Meltzer, life, whatever its setbacks, is “A MAGNIFICENT peep, but a peep … then never-ending stillness.”


So Beautiful
By Ramona Dearing
The Porcupine’s Quill, p.163, $18.95

Review by Harold Hoefle

I read the book yesterday, more or less in one sitting, and decided: Ramona Dearing has got it, “it” being the ability to etch in various places in this cartographic sprawl we call Canada, to give us old and young and male and female protagonists, to give us sex and loss and exile and humour, to show us paining realities and then the way a character – a person – can suck it up and follow the Klondike Kate mantra: “Mush on and smile.” Or, at least, mush on. In So Beautiful, Dearing’s collection of thirteen stories, her characters survive and there is little whining. In “The Simple Truth,” one of two stories set in Labrador, Ellen tells us that people in the bar love to bullshit – big surprise – whereas she could be candid about her dad: “There’s the time the Mixmaster fell off its pegboard hook because her brother Cole’s head was hitting the wall.” Matter-of-fact talk of violence without the excrescence of sentiment and when that occurs, all the reader gets is something like this: a once-suicidal young woman assuring her roomie she won’t try to off herself again because the roomie is a friend. The roomie’s reaction: “That just busted me, and then she started in, too.”
   Life rattles Dearing’s characters, the about-to-be convicted for sex-abuse Christian Brother and cheated-on wife and underfed teen boy and paranoid female architect – the list of sufferers goes on. But they just take it. In “St. Jerome” there’s Ivan, seemingly unable and unwilling to take his brother Jerome’s help in getting work or a date. The story’s dialogue is relentlessly, artfully absurd:

  “Look,” Jerome says. “I thought a woman would be good. I thought she would lift a load.”
  “And nothing’s changed.”
  “And nothing ever changes.”
  “Except the wind.”

Dearing’s stories are set in Newfoundland (Labrador and St. John’s), Vancouver, Bowen Island, rural southern Ontario, northern California. Her stories range, detailing the physicality of each place with an observation, an image. In St. John’s, a woman worries about the expensive property she has just bought, “right in the yuppie middle of the downtown heritage revolution.” In Vancouver, the mountains and sushi and beaches and monkey trees impress one character, then she walks through the downtown eastside and sees “A sixteen-year-old who looked like she should be eating strawberry shortcake and wearing headphones but instead was rocking back and forth on the sidewalk in the rain, no coat.”
   So Beautiful is Dearing’s first book. She joins fellow Newfoundlanders Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Michael Winter and Lisa Moore as one of the country’s best young(ish) writers. Central, Western, and Northern Canadians should stop thinking about Newfoundland as the periphery. It is the centre.

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Reprinted from Issue #9

Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws
Edited by Zoe Whittall
McGilligan Books, p. 328, $22.95

Review by Matthew Firth

It’s difficult to spank a book that sets out with good intentions but like my parents used to say – it’s for your own good. To be blunt, editor Zoe Whittall needs to learn to say no. This short fiction anthology – with 43 contributors, across 328 pages – is at least twice as long as it should be. What’s more, had Whittall been more selective, the book’s weaknesses would be far less glaring.
   Among those weaknesses, there are way, way too many coming-of-age stories – adolescents stealing parents’ booze, blundering teenaged sexual mishaps and “Truth or Dare” scenarios gush from this book. Come on, this is tiresome, predictable stuff. Worse, it shows a near complete desiccation of the literary imagination. Who couldn’t write 1500 sickly-nostalgic words on suburban, teenaged, rec-room high-jinx? Debra Anderson and Joey Stevenson are among the worst of this lot. But worse still is Emily Pohl-Weary’s posturing fiction in “Dangerous Places.” Dangerous, my arse. Pohl-Weary’s story is just vacuous despite desperate attempts to be downtown-Toronto hip. The tone reminded me more of snide comments scrawled in a high school yearbook than supposed cutting-edge fiction. Because according to Whittall’s intro, that’s what Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws is supposed to be, “Bad-assed girls … revolutionaries … the antithesis of the Oprah table.” Not even close. About two-thirds of the stories do not represent the theme, or if they do, my idea of bad-assed and revolutionary is far different than Whittall’s. The anthology is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. For example, Mariko Tamaki’s story “Hump” is, ostensibly, about yoga. Yoga? Since when is yoga bad-assed? Tamaki’s story wouldn’t be out of place in Chatelaine. 
   Other lowlights: Patricia Wilson’s “The Stairs” about a talking vagina is either a rip-off, or a fumbling pastiche, of WS Burroughs’ taking asshole from Naked Lunch. Take your pick. Lisa Foad’s story “In Trace Amounts” is, unfortunately, not true to its title: it’s a discursive story that starts and goes nowhere and takes way too long to get there.
   But it’s not all bad. “Slut Kiss Girl” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is gutsy; one of the few stories that represents the book’s title. Her story about simultaneously despising while being drawn to her shit-hole, small hometown works because – unlike Pohl-Weary and others – Piepzna-Samarasinha shelves the annoying hipper-than-thou pretence and just writes from the gut. Other fine stories: Heather O’Neill’s “I Know Angelo” is bleak and unnerving; “What We Wanted” by Michael V. Smith about struggling with adolescent homosexuality has a nice subtlety and control to it that is lacking in many of the weaker stories in the book. Stuart Ross amuses – as he often does – with his contribution “The Interview.” And George K. Ilsley blends humour nicely into his punchy story “Impulse Control.” But these stories and a smattering of others are almost lost amidst the dross in the collection.
   Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws is a disappointment. Whittall’s idea was solid. Among other things, maybe she should have looked a little further afield for contributors. Skimming the writers’ notes, about three quarters are from/based in Toronto, compounding the cliquey, insiders-only feel. Enough said; this collection just flops on many levels.

A Demon in My View
By Len Gasparini
Guernica Editions, p. 167, $15.00

Review by Matthew Firth

Len Gasparini’s short story collection A Demon in My View is a surprising, provocative book. It really sneaks up on the reader – sort of like what’s depicted in the book’s cover illustration: a fairly sombre man at the wheel of a car with a grinning devil in the backseat. The illustration suggests malevolence lurks in the back of the average person’s mind. Gasparini’s stories do likewise. While the collection is quite diverse, the stories that really stand out are those that deal with temptation, sex, dreams, and hints of violence, but not in a glamorized, Hollywood manner. Rather, Gasparini plausibly probes the dark side of ordinary lives in several of the fourteen stories.
   “The Succubus” – the last story – is centred on a middle-aged man (Roger) who is confused by his sexual longings. He is estranged from his wife, his third, but at the same time uncomfortable with lurid ideas of his stepdaughter and her teenaged friends. He lets his lust lead him; it takes him in an unexpected, hallucinatory circle of sorts. In “Amy Crissum” a woman with a seemingly insatiable and adventurous sexual appetite suckers a tattoo artist, Marc Larose. Marc’s rage comes to a near boil but he manages to control it long enough to exact sweet revenge on the philandering Amy. In both stories, Gasparini examines what motivates frustrated, confused men to act the way they do. Gasparini draws out these actions slowly, with perfect control and pace.
   “Off-Off-Broadway” starts beautifully: “For three months Mike Simmons lived with the gnawing uncertainty that he may have killed a man.” Mike’s a drifter from Windsor, Ontario who gets in over his head in New York City. Uncomfortable with his homosexual tendencies, he explodes in a violent fit that, given the location and the circumstances, is reminiscent of Hubert Selby Jr.
   But it’s far from all sex and violence in this unassuming book. Three early stories set in Gasparini’s native Windsor peer into the awkward and competitive coming-of-age years of 1950s teenagers. Again, what is perhaps most accomplished about stories such as “Facts of Life” is the authenticity and compassion Gasparini portrays in his finely-honed fiction.
   Other surprises are “Wild Pitch,” a story rife with humour and pathos about a man trying to resurrect his youthful baseball prowess at age 56. And expect the unexpected in “Background Music,” wherein an erudite pornographer tries to infuse some meaning into his sex film and educate the performers in the process.
   A Demon in My View is a very satisfying collection. Gasparini covers considerable ground in a fairly short book. For a veteran writer now in his early sixties, he demonstrates more resolve, more courage than most young Canadian writers. There’s no middle class mewling going on here. Just blunt honesty, vivid imagery and adept skill.

Residual Desire
By J. Jill Robinson
Coteau Books, p. 181, $18.95

Review by Frances Ward

“Nothing in its original form.” is the last line of the first story of this collection of short fiction. The story is entitled “you are not yourself right now” and the line refers to the “growth and decay” on which all life is based. This short sentence sets the tone for the entire collection.
   J. Jill Robinson obviously knows about loss and coping. She knows almost too well how to write about it. I could not read more than one story at a time due to the high intensity level of each. Yet I could not leave too much space between stories either. Like a scab begging for more picking, the book followed me around until it was done and all wounds were gaping.
   These cleanly written, emotionally-charged stories evolve around the choices one makes in life, how one grapples with the resulting disappointment and loss, and how one must often make those choices against all odds: based on the imperfect past, based on the complexities carried within us every second of every minute of every day, based on that over which one has no control, due to either blind ignorance or pathetic helplessness.
   In one of the stories, “her heart’s content” a mother, in spite of her nervousness, lets her three-and-a-half year-old son stay the weekend with his aunt and cousins only to have the worst of all mother’s fears realized: he drowns in a pool. The authenticity of thought and emotion described in this story is painfully gut wrenching. In another, “Midnight at the oasis,” a woman chooses to obsess about keeping a tidy house, eventually and consciously driving her husband away. The progression from that to the discovery of her lesbian leanings is totally natural as written. And in “The dog next door” a woman knows that the new puppy belonging to her neighbour’s young boys will end up dead like the previous two pets, yet she chooses to do nothing but observe as the inevitable scenario plays out. There is plausible reason for her action (or lack thereof). Justification of self is a major factor involved in this collection.
   I particularly like some of the titles used, including the combination of italics and Roman text, symbolic of the internal and external conflicts of life and the grey area between. It was the title of the collection that invited me to read in the first place: residual desire. I think of drug residue detected in a body during an autopsy. Desire as a drug. Was it an overdose? Was it self-administered? Was the victim an addict?
   Robinson has tapped into that deep obsessive well of analysis very skilfully and without fanfare. She also succeeded in tapping into my waterworks on several occasions. There is no clear-cut path to redemption in these stories yet there is a strong sense of the positive force called “survival” – the force that gets us through all the crap.

Random Acts of Hatred
By George K. Ilsley
Arsenal Pulp Press, p. 176, $19.95

Review by Bill Brown

George K. Ilsley’s title for this collection is more than clever, it sets the stage for the richly layered moods inside: at once playful and heartbreaking. Deftly executed, his stories put a fresh spin on universal themes: betrayal, yearning, fear, self-loathing. Most gays have gotten over the idea that they corner the market on these issues, Ilsley included. So this timeless can of worms is opened slowly, stylishly, inviting all of us to squirm.
   “Our Boy,” the opening story, is a sausage-link of misery. “Our” boy (as in “our man in … ” with its implication of taking us to another world) convinced this reader he was in safe hands. Beautifully constructed sentences. The spotlight hitting just the right detail to fill out a character (as in “Hats made her careful. She smiled without moving.”) This is a writer who pares down language to enhance not only its vivacity but its vividness.
   Ilsley, especially in the opening stories, and Newfoundland writer Michael Winter march to the same tight drum. Both breathe air into their readers’ imagination rather than suffocate with the florid prose often favoured in CanLit. Like Winter, Ilsley knows his readers well and trusts them.
   Apart from a few first-book jitters which feel like nitpicking – too many of the young gay protagonists seem bookish, fey, polite; the last part of the book not fully equal to the first; and an occasional lapse into Romance writing (e.g., “The waves of turmoil dashed the two stunned men up against each other.”) – this is accomplished writing. As intriguing as an Italian palace of rooms opening onto rooms. And while the internal motifs may be startling or harsh, the transition is not.
   While you’ll not find this catalogued under “straight-friendly gay fiction,” you might safely pass it along to your brother-in-law when you finish and be fairly certain there’ll be no major meltdown.
   On the cover, we have a young boy peering out through the slim opening of a door. In fact, Random Acts of Hatred cracks the door wide open for us the reader, flooding the lives of boys and young men with a disturbing but radiant luminescence.
   Lovely book, Mr. Ilsley. More, please.

Knucklehead & other stories
By W. Mark Giles
Anvil Press, p. 248, $18.00

Review by Bill Brown

Mark Giles may live in Calgary but his “prairie” stories speak straight to the heart of this eastern Canadian. One story is about a mother who, meeting her daughter for lunch, goes to the wrong café; another concerns a laid-off geologist’s attempt to re-enter the workforce; yet another about a mother who smokes-up before taking her kids to the mall. One story spirals out of control around a fellow who can’t stand his neighbour’s dog. Doesn’t sound like much? Why bother? Bother.

Giles’s stories are riveting explorations of elemental forces: panic, hope, terror, asphyxiation, being lost. And yet, because he’s chosen such quotidian settings and characters these stories touch each of us – especially as he peels away the layers so tenderly, so sympathetically. Our hearts end up being broken by the struggling, the flailing around, the too-often silent howling from these pages.

These are beautifully crafted tales – as polished as gems. Not a detail which doesn’t count towards something larger: dusting the leaf of a lemon tree diverts a mother’s care from her kids; a man’s hopeless wait for a job interview mocked by flipping through a magazine called Entrepreneur Success (okay, maybe a tad obvious); but how about the tiny alligator crest on a golf shirt enlarging the panic welling in the face of a narrator’s imminent death.

The first story, “K,” initially enigmatic, reveals itself slowly. You don’t have to know that K is the symbol for potassium but it helps. It’s a good example of Giles giving the reader just enough clues but then enough leash to play. “What does potash look like?” Important question, given this is a story about abandonment, desolation and longing. A boy has lost his father to a potash mine outside Saskatoon and we feel the hopelessness