PreviewsIssue 84, Spring/Summer 2024
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A Brief Relief from Hunger
Spenser Smith
Addressing the bigger context of British Columbia’s toxic drug supply crisis through the perspective of a young man yearning for fast food, powerful drugs, and human connection, these poems use texts such as Facebook comments and news stories in innovative ways to examine the stigma toward drug use and to forge a way toward positive change.
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A Fate Worse Than Death
Nisha Patel
In this stunning poetic investigation of the worthiness of disabled life, Patel evaluates her own medical records that document her treatment-resistant diabetes, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and complex chronic pain, and repurposes clinical texts to create through poetry a way to resist the sway of medical hegemony and to offer complex accounts of pain, sickness, and anger, but also of love.
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A Road Map for Finding Wild Horses
Trisia Eddy Woods
Tracing a year in the foothills of Alberta where the speaker, sometimes with her daughter, searches out and photographs wild horses, this collection celebrates the seasons and the wilderness, finding the magic and the sorrow.
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A Simple Carpenter
Dave Margoshes
Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller, this novel is set largely in the Middle East in the early 1980s against the backdrop of the civil war in Lebanon, and is narrated by a carpenter who lost his memory before being shipwrecked and rescued, and who subsequently displays the ability to perform small healing miracles.
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Acutely Life
Sue Sorensen
This debut collection of life studies interrogates works of visual art, questions fictional characters about their views on grief and generosity, and holds conversations with all sorts of suitable and unsuitable companions, in ways darkly humorous and resonant.
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All That’s Left
Lisa Guenther
Darby Swank is rebuilding her life after the traumatic events of Friendly Fire in this sequel that explores fame, safety, vulnerability, art, and friendship. She goes to college, meets her lifelong friend Ruby, develops her musical talent, connects with her charismatic cousin who has started her own inclusive church in Alberta, and moves to Toronto where her career takes off. The risks of being in the public eye become all too evident, as the characters’ lives intertwine.
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Always Beginning
The Big Bang, the Universe, and You
Candace Savage, Rachel Wada (Illustrator)
With warmth and wonder, and stunning art, this picture book introduces the universe’s history from the Big Bang and the creation of the planets to the beginning of life on Earth and up to today. A timeline and notes explaining the science are included as back matter.
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An Evening with Birdy O’Day
Greg Kearney
An aging gay hair stylist nurtures an obsession for Birdy O’Day, a washed-up pop star he knew as a child, who is finally going to perform in Winnipeg for the first time, in this funny and tender novel about gay friendship, aging without retirement, queer survival, and the power of empathy.
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Apples on a Windowsill
Shawna Lemay
Lemay and her painter husband live “a life in art,” and these essays reflect on that life and how still lifes offer ways to let thrills of beauty shine through ordinary days and objects. Lemay discusses the craft of writing, the art of photography, and the give-and-take of marriage in clear and lyrical prose.
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Art of Camouflage
Sara Power
This debut collection of stories looks at the lives of women and girls connected to the military – female recruits in toxic masculine environments, military wives dealing with countless moves, new cities, and new selves, and military kids who find friendships challenging – with insight and emotional precision.
