In this issue:

• Silver Lake by Alex Pugsley (Fiction)

• Vidal: A Graphic Novel by Danila Botha (Fiction, Graphic Novel)

• Decolonizing Wilderness Adventure Narratives by Gyllian Phillips (Non-Fiction)

• Earth for Sale by Maude Barlow (Non-Fiction)

• The Wiki of Babel by Kyle Flemmer (Poetry)

• Living History: Essays on A.F. Moritz (Poetry)

Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!

James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Poetry

Michael Greenstein Reviews

July’s Saturday Short

The CanCon Lost Illusions

Balzac, with his novel Lost Illusions, arguably wrote the definitive template for a particular journey from innocence to experience. It’s an unsparing vision of the corruption of talent and the pursuit of love, in all its perplexing distortions, through ambition’s hall of mirrors. But there hasn’t been a contemporary Canadian novelist who’s taken such a story and successfully transposed it onto the entertainment business or created any equivalent of Balzac’s Lucien Chardon, poetic soul from the countryside who comes to Paris to seek his fame and fortune. No one until now, however: Toronto-based author and filmmaker Alex Pugsley has succeeded with Silver Lake, his third entry in his Aubrey McKee series of novels.

In the first novel, McKee forges his identity in the Halifax of the seventies and eighties, influenced as much by the “toughest kid in the North End” Howard Fudge as he is by an eccentric scion of an old Halifax family, Cyrus Mair, and a small clique of budding aesthetes who, inspired by the music coming out of the UK in that era, form their own bands with aspirations of Canadian-famous, artistic legitimacy. The Aubrey McKee of the second novel moves to Toronto, falls in love with a young poet Gudrun Peel and hones his craft as a writer in fringe theatre, inspired by the success of his friend Calvin Dover, an LA based actor and comedian. Drover makes periodic returns to Toronto to flaunt his newfound wealth and attractiveness to the kind of women – aspiring, ambitious young actors – that Aubrey wishes would find him attractive. But in these first two books, McKee had yet to get the chance to work at Drover’s pay grade, and among his milieu.

Silver Lake is the novel where those aspirations are fulfilled. Drover returns and urges McKee to move on from reworking a draft of an unproduced play and his menial work on film sets in order to submit a sampling of his writing to a producer Drover knows and in less than a month, McKee is in Los Angeles, writing for the talk show “Weeknights with Pete Peters.” Suddenly, McKee has some real creative capital. He reconnects with an up-and-coming starlet Poppy Price – originally from Northern Ontario and determined not to go back there. She was out of McKee’s league in Toronto but in LA she can see him in literally a new light. In the throes of this new romance, McKee gets his shot at proving his mettle when a script of his is green lit for him to direct back in Canada – an ordeal that becomes as harrowing as it is humbling. The eventual dissolution of his relationship with Price seems, considering these travails, almost a consolation. Almost.

To read Silver Lake and its depiction of the entertainment industry in Toronto and LA in the early aughts is to be immersed in a world that the streamers and our digital overlords are rendering as obsolete as Balzac’s Paris, of course. Indeed, imagining a character like Poppy Price today conjures visions of botoxed, startled looking ciphers signing autographs at Comicon conventions. It’s hard to imagine Aubrey’s fate as any more glamorous. Yet Silver Lake is hardly as downbeat as all that; it’s a poignant, beautifully written look back at an era when one could still have illusions to lose in such a business, and aspirations the equal of McKee’s – and Pugsley’s - talent.

About the Author

Alex Pugsley has worked on over 185 produced episodes of television, writing for performers such as Lauren Ash, Scott Thompson, Jenn Whalen, Mark McKinney, Dan Aykroyd, and Michael Cera. He wrote and directed the feature film Dirty Singles which won for him the Irving Avrich Emerging Filmmaker Award at TIFF. Following the publication of his first novel, Aubrey McKee, he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch. His first story collection, Shimmer, was nominated for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and his most recent novel, The Education of Aubrey McKee, was longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards.

About the Reviewer

John Delacourt is an Ottawa based writer and consultant whose fiction and reviews have appeared in numerous publications in Canada and the US, including the New Quarterly and the Literary Review of Canada. His short story "Liner Notes" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his sixth novel, The Innocent Canadian, has just been released.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Biblioasis

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 19 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 208 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771967102

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771967105

So searingly beautiful.

There are many unique aspects of Danila Botha’s Vidal, her first graphic novel from the focus on a Sephardi Holocaust survivor, the source material for the graphic novel, the intense colours.

From the first page, the reader is confronted with an oddity: Vidal, the subject of the graphic novel. speaks Hebrew and Arabic. This is not the Yiddish that readers of Holocaust literature are familiar with. We learn that Vidal is from Tiberius in British Mandate Palestine. How does he get from Tiberius to Auschwitz?

More questions come to mind. We know from the dedication that Vidal is the author’s great uncle. Yet, the introductory essay is written by Vidal’s daughters. So from whose perspective is this written? It turns out that it is from Vidal himself and his painting, drawings, notebooks, and sketchbooks that he gifted to his daughters.

The art is astonishing – so different from Maus or Persepolis. Covering the whole page, bleeding into the margins, the colour is everywhere, fearless, like what we image the author to be.

The colour turns the words into tastes and smells. Vidal’s world, in Botha’s interpretation, is bright and wild like the man himself. Until the Nazis show up, and then we see the familiar black, red, and white. The imagery drops the reader back to reality better than any words.

Vidal himself is flawed and that is important. We have a tendency to turn Holocaust survivors into saints but that does a disservice to them. Vidal is not an angel, and it is OK to say so. I mean, who could resist a blue-haired, blue-glasses femme fatale.

A few quibbles: for the non-Jewish reader, words like “shacharit” “daven” could have been in a glossary. I appreciate the commitment to Vidal’s “voice” but foreign languages often trip up readers.

I think the lack of historical context is also a missed opportunity. More dates would have been helpful to establish the historical timeline. A translation of the document dated July 4, 1942 would have given the reader a sample of primary source material. The scene involving the mosque is fascinating. Did all mosques hide Jews? How interesting would that tidbit be given our current moment.

There are also some punctuation errors that confuse the dialogue. A good proofread would have been helpful.

Unlike other graphic novels that end abruptly, Vidal ends neatly which is greatly appreciated. I understand the need to be true to experience but the reader, especially young readers, comes away with confusion when the ending is incomplete.

Vidal is a good Holocaust story but it is the art and Sephardic focus that really separates it from other similar books.

About the Author

Danila Botha is the critically acclaimed author of the short story collections Got No Secrets and the Trillium Book Award, Vine Awards, and ReLit Awards finalist For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known. Her new collection, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness, was published by Guernica Editions in April 2024. Vidal is her debut graphic novel. She lives in Toronto.

About the Reviewer

Natalie Fingerhut had a 20-year career in publishing that included a list of Holocaust graphic novels.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ At Bay Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 25 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 120 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1998779920

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1998779925

Call of the Wild. Little House in the Big Woods. Thoreau’s musings in Massachusetts, Cheryl Strayed’s revelations on the Pacific Crest Trail. These wilderness adventure narratives are much loved, for good reason—they speak to yearnings felt by the urbanized citizen for a simpler life in which artifice falls away, and we find our true, inner self shining like the stars you can finally see once you get away from the streetlights. These are settler-authored narratives that speak to and for settlers, encoding and (particularly in the case of children’s literature) serving to produce settler viewpoints on the wilderness—what it is, and what it means to venture into it.

Gyllian Phillips doesn’t mention the tradition of English pastoral poetry in her analysis of the above texts, but I think it’s relevant. Here is critic Frank Kermode writing in the introduction to English Pastoral Poetry from the Beginnings to Marvell (1952): “The first condition of pastoral poetry is that there should be a sharp difference between two ways of life, the rustic and the urban. The city is an artificial product, and the pastoral poet invariably lives in it, or is the product of its schools and universities. … The first condition of Pastoral is that it is an urban product.”

What Phillips would argue is that the settler-authored wilderness literature posits a landscape that is “empty” and “untrammeled by man” where the heroic settler can experience “solitude” in contradistinction to the socially mediated environment of the city. The characterization of North American wilderness as “untrammeled” erases millennia of Indigenous habitation, and its portrayal as “empty” elides Indigenous displacement. Furthermore, in imagining the land as empty and oneself as living in solititude, the settler refuses relationship with non-humans such as animals, plants, and waterways.

Phillips contrasts her close readings of settler-authored texts with a selection of works by Indigenous writers, such as Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House and Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow. She is reflective about how some of the settler-authored books spoke to her when she first read them as a child, uncritically:

“As a child reader, I felt that Wilder’s “little house” was a mythical assertion of security and self-sufficiency. The walls of the Ingallses’ house seemed to be a bulwark against wilderness, and, as I have said, I did not notice that this was an explicitly settler perspective. Instead, it felt universal to me. Reading The Birchbark House, Moon of the Crusted Snow, and The Marrow Thieves has made me realize that the structures of Euro-American culture are in fact the signs of invasion, dependency, and entrapment.”

Funny enough, for all her careful analysis of the meanings imposed on wilderness, Phillips does fall into one trope in speaking of her experiences off-grid. She mentions that she wrote much of the material during rural “retreats” where she felt like she had so much more time to contemplate, away from the “hustle and bustle” of urban life. I hear this sort of thing quite a lot, and here I think it’s common to confuse “life in the wilderness” with “being on vacation.” Having lived a more rustic life growing up, the main reason why I now live in town is because I have so much more time to write when I’m not doing the endless round of urgent and arduous chores involved in getting wood, feeding fires, hauling water, growing food, gathering food, hunting food, preparing food without running water or electricity, maintaining structures, and so forth. Modern conveniences really do make life more convenient, and while it’s true that you won’t look at your watch as often in the woods, you do need to pay close attention to the angle of the sun. Certainly, you’ll have more time on your hands than usual if you’re staying for a few weeks in a well-maintained cabin with a supply of foodstuffs and no need to go out for paid employment, just as you would if were you doing your writing in a hotel room with sufficient funds to keep ordering room service. Anyway, end of rant, but I think the fact that most people encounter wilderness in the context of a holiday does tend to amplify various attitudes as to what it means to dwell outside an urbanized setting.

You’ll get the most out of Decolonizing Wilderness Adventure Narratives if, like Phillips and myself, you’ve previously read quite a lot in this genre. It helps to be familiar with at least some of the specific texts and authors she cites, a list that on the settler side includes Jack London, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Henry David Thoreau, Cheryl Strayed, Jon Krakauer, and Edward Abbey (among others). If you’ve not read as much among the Indigenous-authored texts, you’ll still be able to follow Phillips’ arguments, and you’ll come away with an excellent reading list. To quote Phillips again, “My reading of literature from Indigenous writers does not come with any claims to special insight or knowledge of Indigenous lived experience, but instead I read (and aim to model reading for others like me) in the position of dialogue: What can this novel tell me about how to understand colonialism, human-nature relations, and novel writing itself?”

If this sounds like a way in which you, too, would like to approach your reading, then Phillips’ book provides a helpful and provocative guide.

About the Author

Gyllian Phillips is a Professor in the English Studies program at Nipissing University, in North Bay, Ontario. Her current research interests centre on ecocriticism with a decolonial focus. A recent publication is “Getting Away From It All, or Breathing it All In: Decolonizing Wilderness Adventure Stories” in the collection Not Hockey, (2023).

About the Reviewer

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wilfrid Laurier University Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 30 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 292 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771127074

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771127073

In Earth for Sale: The Fight to Stop the Last Plunder of the Planet, Maude Barlow discusses the “financialization” of nature, and offers cautionary examples that show why this trend is problematic.

Barlow argues that in modern times, we are seeing a new “enclosure of the commons.” This time, instead of landowners shutting off access to public lands, the enclosure is being performed by corporations taking control of public resources.

Barlow points to economic globalization, “the explosive growth of transnational corporations and the introduction of free trade agreements that limited the ability of governments to regulate and protect their forests, minerals, fisheries and water sources—now often labelled as tradable commodities,” as part of an ongoing problem.

In addition, permitting companies to use “offsets” like carbon credits (although these offsets have now spread into many other areas as well) rather than avoiding polluting in the first place is a dangerous practice. Barlow provides data that shows offsets are often merely an “accounting exercise” that overstate their impact on the environment. Meanwhile, hazardous chemicals get dumped into rivers, pollutants spew into the air, and global warming continues at a dangerous rate.

Many of Earth’s resources, which, Barlow argues, ought to belong to all of us, have been financialized, and the next frontier could be in the financialization of nature. How does it work? By putting a dollar value on a given living entity. The idea sounds simple, and might seem on the surface to be reasonable (pay “x” amount of dollars to protect an endangered animal, for example), but it’s fraught with problems.

For one thing, the financialization of nature implies that living creatures are nothing more than items for our use, rather than having the right to exist in and of themselves. For another, when you let the market rule, the risk is that the market will decide it’s more economical to let nature expire than to keep it going. Furthermore, using the financialization of nature as an opportunity to offset polluting or damage to the environment removes the onus on corporations to not pollute in the first place.

When discussing the fact that Canada is working on legislation that would allow biodiversity offsetting, Barlow doesn’t mince words. She quotes a Greenpeace document that states that this practice “opens up the possibility of a market-based system wherein wealthy developers or corporations simply pay a fee in order to destroy biodiversity—a pay-to-slay mechanism.”

Earth for Sale illustrates the risk of privatizing specific elements of the environment. Barlow gives several examples of municipalities that have privatized their water, only to later decide it’s better to keep control. Likewise, some municipalities, provinces, states, or countries may think it makes financial sense to privatize parks or public lands. But privatization means loss of control, and it isn’t always the best way to keep nature intact.

The bottled water industry is an example of how corporations impact resource availability for citizens. Barlow notes that “Many farmers and villagers of Catalonia in northeastern Spain are angry that foreign bottled-water companies are taking the water from the springs and streams that used to be a source of their drinking water, forcing them to buy the water back in plastic bottles at supermarkets.”

Written with passion combined with a sound knowledge of the topic matter, Earth for Sale is an illuminating read that raises awareness of the importance of maintaining power and control over our resources, rather than handing that control over to corporations. Legislation to curb pollution and other negative impacts, Barlow argues, is important. There’s a risk in trusting that the same corporations and financial forces that have gotten us into the current mess are going to get us out of it.

Despite the grim state of affairs depicted in the book, Barlow encourages readers not to give up. “To give up on hope is to give up on the young, and that would be profoundly wrong,” she says. Barlow advocates for “wise hope,” which means “that you look at the situation squarely” and avoid sugar-coating. Near the end of the book, she provides suggestions for the best way forward.

Small gestures to make things better are important, says Barlow, as is having “faith that many others around the world are doing the same.” Informative and insightful, Earth for Sale is an indispensable read for those concerned about the future of the planet.

About the Author

Maude Barlow is the bestselling author of 21 books. She co-founded the Council of Canadians, chairing its board for over three decades, sits on the board of Food & Water Watch, and the board of advisors of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. She served as senior water advisor to the UN General Assembly and was a leader in the campaign to have water recognized as a human right. She is the recipient of 17 honorary doctorates and many awards, including the 2005 Right Livelihood Award. She lives in Ottawa, ON.

About the Reviewer

Ontario resident Lisa Timpf writes poetry, book reviews, short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her speculative poetry collections Cats and Dogs in Space (2025) and In Days to Come (2022) are available from Hiraeth Publishing in print and electronic formats. You can find out more about Lisa’s writing projects at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com/. Lisa is also on Bluesky, @lisatimpf.bsky.social, and her author Facebook page is @lisa.timpf.author.

Book Details

• Publisher: ‎ECW Press

• Publication date: ‎May 5 2026

• Language: ‎English

• Print length: ‎240 pages

• ISBN-10: ‎1770418660

• ISBN-13: ‎978-1778525728

Part poetry collection, part DIY instruction manual for making your own poems, The Wiki of Babel is just the starting point for a conversation that continues off the page. Kyle Flemmer, ever the experimentalist, has devised a set of five poem-making protocols for selecting and remixing text from Wikipedia. The protocols, which involve a mélange of randomized and deterministic processes along with some degree of curatorial agency, are successful to the degree that they are generative of interesting results.

The book’s introduction alerts the reader to “themes of collective knowledge, information organization, and reader interactivity.” This is a book that begs to be used, not just consumed. It’s a fun read, mind you, but why stop there? In approaching a review, it feels imperative to try out Flemmer’s techniques, and in particular to discover how easy or difficult it might be to produce results that are as interesting as those included between the covers of the volume. As it turns out, moderately difficult. I certainly didn’t get marvels popping out on my first try. That’s why The Wiki of Babel counts as a poetry collection and not just a small set of activity worksheets. The curatorial eye comes into effect in selecting what to preserve, and what to throw back. Creativity is required, along with persistence and a certain ludic willingness to play along.

I had the most success with the technique called “Canadian hypertext” which takes as its starting point the Wikipedia entry for some classic work of CanLit, and proceeds by following hyperlinks to construct a meandering poem out of the words surrounding each jumping-off point. Specifically, the direction is to select seven words encompassing the seventh hyperlink, treating hyperlinked phrases as a single word; click the link and repeat. It’s deterministic inasmuch as the sequence of hyperlinks is fixed, but random to the extent that this sequence remains in flux with the dynamics of Wikipedia edits, and allows a degree of poetic decision-making when choosing where to start and end each selection, as well as deciding when to call the piece complete. The conceptual connectedness of the hyperlinks causes the poem to wander through a series of topics; so, for example, the poem for The Life of Pi moves from tigers, to colonial history, to voyages of exploration, to Antarctica, to wetlands, to birds, to legal terminology. It had occurred to me to wonder if this procedure might ever get stuck in a repeating loop, bouncing back and forth between the same two linked lines, and indeed it does—quite amusingly, at the end of the poem for Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, where “tautology” leads to “tautologies” and back to “tautology” again.

When I tried it out, I found that not all starting choices led to fruitful results, and some quickly hit an impasse. Playing around with various titles by the Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, I found some of my attempts stymied by articles that don’t contain the requisite number of hyperlinks, or by links that aren’t surrounded by the requisite amount of in-line text. Some of these attempts just weren’t very interesting, as they repeatedly veered into content about science fiction magazines and awards—okay in its place, but not terrifically exciting as poetry. Other times the content felt promising—the path from the novel Flashforward led into particle physics and then optical instrumentation, including gun sights—but I had trouble selecting text that didn’t start or end with jarringly nonsensical prepositions, or introduce distracting shifts in tense and grammatical number. A bit of non-grammatical syntax is fine within this type of form, but there’s a point beyond which the whole thing looks like word salad—and an inedible salad at that, made entirely out of croutons. So when I say that I found the “Canadian hypertext” technique to be generative, I don’t mean that it made life entirely easy. These approaches are demanding in their own way. You have to really like counting, clicking around, and starting over.

To give you a sense of how this works when it works, here are the opening lines of Flemmer’s Roughing It in the Bush:

“	marketing Canada as a British emigrant’s utopia
However, it may also denote an intentional community

	common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision
	a supernatural realm beyond the ordinarily observable
	magic, telekinesis, levitation, precognition, and extrasensory perception”

The other four techniques Flemmer has developed and shared in The Wiki of Babel are also interesting to read and play around with, involving translation, the ‘random article’ feature, the “current events” page, and the charting of alternative paths between pre-chosen start- and end-points. Flemmer notes that he worked on this project during a Computational Writing residency program at Banff, which speaks to the value of that program in forwarding the development of innovative work in digital space, out of tools and materials that some might think of as anti-poetic.

Flemmer’s first collection, Supergiants, was one of my favourite books of 2025. It’s really cool to see The Wiki of Babel arrive as a provocation, as both a gift and a challenge to fellow poets. I’ll be kept busy playing with these ideas while waiting to see what awesome things Flemmer comes up with next.

About the Author

Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher, and digital media artist from Calgary, Canada in Treaty 7 territory. In 2014, he founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co., a small press focused on experimental poetics and visual art. His artworks and publications have been exhibited locally and abroad. Flemmer?s other books include Barcode Poetry, Supergiants and TzAR: Pixel Art Anthology.

About the Reviewer

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Calgary Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 15 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 122 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 177385674X

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1773856742

The Word Garden

In Living History Jim Johnstone has brought together a who’s who of Canadian poets to honour A.F. Moritz in a thought-filled Festschrift. The cover of this handsomely produced book of essays features a grotesque face of contorted bodies grasping the grey matter of thinking man, an immanence of bodies in the brain. One twisted figure forms the ear, while another bends in the shape of a mouth. The ear in the head listens to John Ashbery’s words quoted at the back of the book: “An ancient voice, mournful like the wind, speaks to itself yet means to be overhead [sic] in A.F. Moritz’s amazing poems.” The typo points to what is overheard and over-read in these essays that respond to and correspond with Moritz’s remarkable oeuvre.

Johnstone’s “Introduction,” like most of the essays in this collection, demonstrates his own poetic sensibility as he moves from Moritz’s “ark” to “an arc that probes the whole of Moritz’s over fifty-year career.” From words to gardens, ecology, and surgery, Johnstone introduces his chorus of a dozen essayists who cover most of Moritz’s work. He bookends this volume with his conversation that highlights a revival of Romanticism, stillness in motion, relativizing and revitalizing.

Robyn Sarah’s “Signs and Certainties” revisits Moritz’s early publishing career which overlaps with the birth of her own children. In his early verse she recognizes a voice that is portentous, lyrical and meditative. In “Thrown Down into Strangeness” Brian Bartlett examines words as subjects in the poems, which are characterized by action, mood, and uncertainty rather than monuments. He analyzes the long lines of “Maybe”:

“They want to erase you, little married couple of words, but it’s not so easy

to form a perfect, direct style, without vacillations

……………………………………. Maybe tomorrow

the general strike will be called ….

Maybe someone will translate into words hard and definite

……………………………………… the vague suggestion

     of the man ……..

You, vacant adverb, aside from a full stomach are what we have.”

The title’s tentativeness hints at vacillations of vagueness and oscillations of vacant adverbs where v’s insert themselves into the married couple of words. Just as his ridge breaks down into “rrr” and “dge,” so the consonant “v” vanishes and quivers in voice and verse.

Moritz’s coupling of words, ideas, and thinking echoes into a fugue-like refrain, as noted by Micheline Maylor. Indeed, Moritz’s lines progress through a negative dialectics whereby thought and counterthought yield to an unresolved synthesis that moves on to the next stage and stanza without closure. This negative dialectics developed by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School may be part of their dislocation from Germany to New York. In the same way Moritz’s moving garden belongs to his translation from his American childhood around the Mahoning River to Toronto, echoed in the flight of wren, sparrow, and Egyptian departure.

Anita Lahey’s “Read This Poem to Exist” studies the sexuality of gardens, flowers, and fountains in her subject’s poems and essays that occasionally accompany them. One of her lines contains telling typos when she examines the house that “Mortiz” spots “from a bock away” – a Freudian slip with intimations of mortality.

George Elliott Clarke reminds us of Moritz’s surrealism as he ambles through gardens of verse from Joni Mitchell to Blake, Coleridge, and Whitman. He also includes a discussion of Martin Luther King and Rodney King. Clarke’s familiarization of Bill Blake and Sammy Taylor Coleridge points to the shift from Albert Frank to A.F. and Al in Moritz’s ambling identity from Robyn Sarah’s opening essay to Kirby’s final tribute of Al in “Always” and A.F. in affirmation and affability.

Karen Solie hauls Moritz’s long poem “Sequence” by linking it to mourning. Like the process of mourning, the form of the long poem “runs many of the same risks – repetitiveness, excess, a general unmanageability.” In her running commentary she turns to Freud: “In Freud’s theory mourning runs its course, runs up against the geography of a respect for reality.” Her repetition of run echoes Moritz’s fugue-like refrains before she moves on to Derrida’s “hauntology.” Like other poets in this collection, she demonstrates a scholarly range of references.

Ben Meyerson links fountain and flamenco, reminding us of Moritz’s connection to Octavio Paz and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Paul Franz traces the influence of Jacques Ellul on Moritz and concludes by quoting the poem, “Naked to All Interpretation.” This poem, like so many others, mirrors the book’s cover. It begins with an echo of T.S. Eliot: “There is a speaking in tongues by the dead, / like the anaesthetic babble / of a patient held down in death-likeness by his drugs.” It continues to the cover’s image: “The voice of the dead through another / head, another voice.” Examples of “apophrades” or return of the dead suggest why Harold Bloom and John Hollander have paid attention to Moritz.

In contrast to Karen Solie’s study of the long poem, Alexandra Oliver analyzes shorter lyrics for their themes of uprootedness, sites of transformation, and fragmentation. In contrast to Oliver’s essay, Shane Neilson pens the longest essay in the book that focuses on “Mahoning”(1994) to support his environmental reading. He distinguishes between “Energy Humanities” and “Health Humanities,” noting that as autistic, he reserves the right to mint neologisms. His densely packed argument demonstrates “immanence” in Canadian Literature and his bibliography is as long as some of the other essays in Living History.

Ross Leckie explores the Romantic Sublime in “The Death of Francisco Franco.” He walks us through Lorca, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Emerson to arrive at the sublime grotesque: “The graveyard literally covers over the sublime grotesque; it is a repression of the sublime.” That, in response to Moritz’s dramatic monologue, “The Undertaker”; that, in response to the book’s cover, a still feather, “open-mouthed, legs splayed thoughtlessly.” Yet, the poet’s mouth opens, and his legs carry him thoughtfully through landscapes of living history. Living History may be greater than the sum of its parts, but each part demonstrates considerable strength in its tribute to Moritz’s achievement and influence.

About the Author

Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Infinity Network (Véhicule Press, 2022) and The King of Terrors (Coach House Books, 2023). Jim curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry (2018). His most recent book is Bait & Switch: Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and Views on Canadian Poetry (Porcupine's Quill, 2024).

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature.

He has published over 300 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Porcupine's Quill

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 1 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 100 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1774221799

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1774221792

The boys crouched in a circle, poking something with sticks.

“What have you got there, guys?”

“Ants,” said Christopher, brushing his red hair out of his eyes.

I knew Iris to be squeamish about insects, to an almost bizarre degree. Once she’d told me about holing up with Christopher and Alden in their bathroom for almost two hours, until her late husband Peter had come home and killed the large moth in the living room. And yet, here she was peering at ants with our sons.

“That big one with wings is the queen ant.” With her shaggy blonde bob atop her slender neck she always reminded me of a sunflower or a chrysanthemum, not an iris. “She’ll lay eggs soon.”

“Whoa,” said Nathan, blue eyes wide. “Cool!”

“How do you know?” asked Liam.

“Because I know all about ants. Wait here.”

Iris went inside and got a large jar, cheesecloth, an elastic and a trowel. She dug out the top of the hill, being sure to scoop up the queen and some worker ants, and carefully poured it all into the jar. Then she covered the mouth with the cheesecloth and snapped the elastic around it.

“Now we watch. She’ll lay eggs and they’ll hatch in a few weeks.”

Then we went inside for a snack. Iris placed the jar in the window and the boys gathered around it.

“This is great,” said Liam, staring at the jar while gnawing on a carrot stick.

We’d met Iris and her boys a few months earlier at our neighbourhood Parent and Tot program. One day, she and I started talking afterward while our boys chased each other around the community hall field like a pack of crazed squirrels.

“Sorry,” I said, “I’d love to chat, but I have to drop the boys off with my sitter while I visit my dad.”

“He’s in hospital?”

“Hospice.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah. End-stage Alzheimer’s.”

“That’s a hard journey. I saw quite a few Alzheimer’s patients in my practice.”

“I didn’t know you were a doctor.”

“Yes, a neurologist. Once the boys are back in school, I’ll probably go back part time.”

“I guess you don’t have much choice, being widowed.”

“Exactly. Actually, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention Peter around the boys. They’re still so easily upset about it.”

“Of course.”

“We should set up a playdate sometime. They seem to get on so well.”

Over the next few weeks, I really appreciated the friendship that had sprung up between Iris and me, and the kids. During Dad’s last days, she was always willing to listen, and had great advice. It was great to be able to talk to someone who understood what I was facing. Then after Dad died, when I was dealing with the lawyers, the funeral, the estate, all the official documents with the government and banks, I was incredibly grateful that she could take Nathan and Liam at a moment’s notice.

“When are we going to Christopher and Alden’s?” Nathan asked for the thirty-seventh time one morning.

“I’ll call their Mom after breakfast.”

“Ants, ants, ants,” chanted Liam, banging his spoon on the table, his blond hair still tousled from sleep.

As soon as we arrived at Iris’ house, Nathan and Liam ran into the kitchen, and we instantly heard cries:

“Gross!”

“Ew! Mom!”

“What’s she doing?”

The nest was partly visible near the bottom of the jar. Inside, the queen ant held her wings down with her back feet and pulled them off with her front feet.

Iris smiled. “She’s shedding her wings. She’ll eat them for extra nutrition when she’s ready to start laying her eggs.”

“Ugh! I’m going to puke!” cried Liam.

“Please don’t,” I said. “Why don’t you guys head outside?”

“Okay,” said Alden, a grin spreading across his freckled face. “But we’re taking the ants with so we can keep an eye on them.”

And they tore out into the backyard with the jar.

“You do know a lot about ants,” I said, as we poured coffee. “Have you done research on them?”

“No. They are interesting creatures, though. What about you? What do you do for work?”

“I teach music. When the kids are both in school, I’ll take on students again.”

“What instruments do you teach?”

“Piano. And I’ve taught cello, too. I played cello in a chamber ensemble in university, and carried on with it for a few years after graduation.”

“I love chamber music!”

“Really?”

“And I used to play cello, too.”

“What? That’s amazing! You don’t play anymore?”

“No. It was too hard to keep up with it in medical school.”

“I bet. But that’s cool we both played cello.”

Later I thought about how lucky I was to find a friend who was clearly an interesting person, also with two sons. And who loved chamber music! Unbelievable.

Eggs were visible in the nest the next time we visited.

“They look like Rice Krispies,” said Nathan, examining the jar from different angles.

“Ant eggs for breakfast!” said Christopher.

“Ugh!” screamed Liam.

When we walked in, I noticed the music playing in the kitchen; percussion-heavy dance music with auto-tuned vocals. Not what I would have expected from someone who loves chamber music. It grated on my nerves.

“What’s the music?”

“Oh, it’s Britney Spears. Isn’t she great?”

“I’m not really a fan of auto-tuned vocals.”

“What vocals?”

“Auto-tune is something they use during production to correct the pitch of the vocals.”

She snapped the radio off. “I didn’t know that. Let’s go out in the yard with the guys.”

Oh no. I hoped I hadn’t hurt her feelings. Why did I always have to be such a music snob?

Soon, the ants became larvae. The boys squealed at the squirming white creatures in the jar, then tore outside.

“Iris, I want to apologize for last week.” She gave me a blank look, and I continued. “I can be a real snob about music. And clearly a lot of people like Britney, so I’m in the minority.”

“Don’t worry about it. I actually don’t even like her. But speaking of music, I wanted to ask you something. I’ll be right back.”

She went down the hall and returned with a dusty, battered cello case.

“What’s this?”

“I bought a cello on Kijiji. Could you take a look at it?”

I lifted the three-quarter size Yamaha from the case. It had seen heavy use, probably belonged to a school band before. The fingerboard was worn, and the finish was cracked and crazed.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, setting it up between my knees.

“It sounds off.”

“Okay. Could you pass me the bow?”

She hesitated before saying, “Oh, the bow,” and got it out of the case.

I played the first few bars of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, and stopped.

“It’s way out of tune. The strings will need to be replaced before long, too.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize I would have to tune it. Do I call a tuner? And could they install new strings?”

What the hell? She said she played cello. “No. The strings are okay for now, and I’ll show how to change them later. Right now, I’ll tune it for you. Do you want me to show you how?”

“Sure.”

Step by step, I showed her how to find the tones on the strings, and how to tighten or loosen the strings with the pegs. Finally, I got it back in decent tune.

“Thanks, Leah. Sorry, I guess it’s been a while.”

“No problem. I usually tune to my piano, but it should be okay. Next time it needs tuning, bring it over and tune to my piano. Or get a digital tuner at a music store. Here, give it a try.”

“Oh, not right now. Thanks so much, though.” She laid the cello and bow back in the case. “We should probably go see what the guys are doing.”

“You’re right.”

I followed her into the backyard, where the guys were playing catch. What had that been all about? Why did she tell me she’d played cello, when she obviously never had? She didn’t realize it would need to be tuned? So strange.

Scott dragged me along one night to a fundraising dinner at the Golf & Country Club. I normally don’t mind these events if they include a useful activity, like a benefit concert. But this was just a dinner where we had to talk to Scott’s colleagues from the investment services firm and their clients.

“Oh God, really? Do I have to go?”

“C’mon, Leah. It’s a night out. I’ll get my mom to take the kids. You were just saying how tired you are of being at home all the time.”

“A night with McKinley Barker and clients wasn’t the antidote I had in mind.”

But I went. The wine and food were okay, the conversation was dreary. Until Scott introduced me to a well-dressed couple after dinner. The man wore a deep blue suit, obviously custom tailored, and the woman twirled her long dark blonde hair around a finger.

“This is my wife, Leah. Leah, this is Dr. Peter Skinner and his wife, Ashley.”

“Pleased to meet you both,” I said, and shook their hands. Peter Skinner? I knew Christopher and Alden’s last name was Skinner, but this couldn’t be the same family. Maybe an uncle or cousin?

“I don’t suppose you’re related to Christopher and Alden Skinner?”

“They’re my sons.”

I took a deep breath. What was going on here? Was this the Peter Skinner who was supposed to be dead?

“How do you know them?” he continued.

“My boys are in the same Parent and Tot program.”

“Oh, then you must know Iris, my ex.”

“I – well, yes, I do…”

Dr. Skinner laughed. “You don’t sound sure.”

“Sorry, it’s just that I’m a little confused. Iris introduced herself, she said she’d been recently widowed.”

He laughed again, and his wife smiled and shook her head. “Honestly, I think she would have preferred that. But no, we divorced a couple of years ago.”

“I see. I’m sorry to embarrass you.”

“No, not at all. Iris has a tendency to make it up as she goes along. You can’t believe anything she says.”

This was a lot to take in. And it felt really awkward. “I’d think that would be a real disadvantage in her career as a neurologist.”

“A neurologist? Oh, no!” Now Dr. Skinner howled with laughter. “No,” he continued when he regained his composure, wiping tears from his face. “Iris was a receptionist in a neurologist’s office.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Yes, she has quite an imagination.”

“You misunderstood. I said he was dead to me,” said Iris, red-faced. It was a rainy day, so the boys played downstairs while Iris and I had coffee in the kitchen.

“Iris. When we did our intros in the parent group, you said you’d been recently widowed.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I heard what you said.”

“You misunderstood, then. As a neurologist, I see this kind -- ”

“Stop right there. Okay? Peter told us that you were a receptionist at a neurologist’s office.”

She stared at me, hard. “He’s lying. Professional jealousy. He can hardly bring himself to admit that I made more than he did.”

I took a deep breath, put my coffee cup down. “I’m going to go check on the boys.”

They were fine, playing Bionicles with Arthur on in the background.

What the hell was wrong with her? Then I remembered Peter saying she made it up as she went along. I realized there was no point in arguing, and rejoined her upstairs.

We went over to Iris’ a week before Christopher and Nathan started kindergarten. Alden and Liam were both starting their second year of preschool, and we were all done with the Parent and Tot program. It seemed very likely that Iris and I would see less of each other going forward.

The ants were now in the pupal stage. We stood in the kitchen and Iris held the jar for the boys to look at.

“Remember how the larvae shed their skins a while ago, and became pupae? They looked more like real ants then, didn’t they? And now they look almost like adults.”

Each of the boys had a turn looking at the jar, ants clambering up the sides.

“Thanks, Alden. I’ll take that now.” She headed down the hall with the jar.

Alden raced after her. “Mom, what are you doing? Mom? Don’t flush them down the toilet!”

“They’re only bugs. And we have enough ants in this yard.”

Alden wrested the jar from his mother’s hands, then flew down the hall with it tucked under his arm like a football, and the other boys followed him out the back door. I watched through the window as they dumped the contents back into the garden, yelling, “Be free! Be free!”

Iris joined me at the window, watched silently with her back turned to me.

“I think we need some more coffee,” she remarked after a moment.

About the Author

Lori Hahnel is the author of three novels and two short story collections. Flicker (University of Calgary Press, 2023) was a finalist at the Alberta Publishing Awards. Vermin: Stories (Enfield & Wizenty, 2020) shortlisted for several awards and won the 2022 Alberta Literary Award for Short Story Collection. Her work has been broadcast on CBC Radio and CKUA Radio, and published in The Fiddlehead, Joyland, The Saturday Evening Post and many other journals and anthologies. She is at work on a novel about pianist and composer Clara Schumann.

July is Ice Cream Month!

In this issue:

• One Day, Hard and Clear by Anne Baldo (Fiction)

• Excerpt: The View From Stansberry Lookout by James Gaitis (Fiction)

• Salman Rushdie’s The Eleventh Hour (Fiction)

• The Burrowing Owls of the Prairie Grasslands, by Deborah Hodge, illustrated by Karen Reczuch (Non-Fiction, Children)

• Shallow River of Tears: Canada’s Stalled Paths to Reconciliation by Andrew R. Basso and Andrea M.L. Perrella (Non-Fiction)

• Colour Fielding by Penn Kemp (Poetry)

Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!

James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Poetry

Michael Greenstein Reviews

June’s Saturday Short

Kafka’s Clockwork

“In the South,” the first of five stories in Salman Rushdie’s The Eleventh Hour, begins with a sentence that conveys the rhythms and implications of a master stylist: “The day Junior fell down began like any other day: the explosion of the heat rippling the air, the trumpeting sunlight, the traffic’s tidal surges, the prayer chants in the distance, the cheap film music rising up from the floor below, the pelvic thrusts of an ‘item number’ dancing across a neighbor’s TV; a child’s cry, a mother’s rebuke, unexplained laughter, scarlet expectorations, bicycles, the newly plaited hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong coffee, a green wing flashing in a tree.” This sentence is divided by the rhyme of loud TV and quiet tree: The cacophony and chaos of an entire society are contained in this sentence that introduces the rise and fall of individuals, nations, and a cadence of colon, commas, and semi-colon. From synaesthetic sunlight to the sacred and profane, the narrator composes a macrocosm of Chennai in India’s south.

An equally long second sentence develops the contrast between old and young in an atmosphere where a green wing flashing in a tree may refer to an instantaneous epiphany or the hidden elements of a lifespan – be it fourscore, eleventh hour, or midnight. “Senior and Junior, two very old men, opened their eyes in their bedrooms on the fourth floor of a sea-green building on a leafy lane, just out of sight of Elliot’s Beach, where, that evening, the young would congregate, as they always did, to perform the rites of youth, not far from the village of the fisherfolk, who had not time for such frivolity.” Rituals play a significant role in the clockwork between the young and very old, or between the lives of Junior and Senior. The concluding sentence of this paragraph opens their eyes further in an accidental world whose author has been traumatized by a knife cutting through his vision. “With the sun stabbing through their window blinds, the two old men struggled to their feet and lurched out onto their adjacent verandas, emerging at the same moment, like characters in an ancient tale, trapped in fateful coincidences, unable to escape the consequences of chance.” Junior and Senior are ancient characters who reflect their author’s fiction and personal trauma.

Since Rushdie’s ritual often turns the mundane into the magical, Junior and Senior enact these rites mixing friction, festival, and fiction: “These were ritual speeches, obeisances to the new day, often in call-and-response format, like the dialogues or ‘duels’ of the virtuosi of Carnatic music during the annual December festival.” The narrator sings the local colour which resonates to broader appeal, so that the “south” becomes a state of mind calling into question geographic boundaries. As Junior praises the south for its warmth, Senior contradicts him: “the south is a fiction, existing only because men have agreed to call it that.” Inverting the universe, Senior casts doubt on Junior’s notions of warmth. In fact and fiction these octogenarians are inextricably bound: “they fought, going at each other like ancient wrestlers whose left feet were tied together at the ankles.” Junior’s ankle proves to be his Achilles heel in an accident that causes his death.

Joined at the ankle, the two men share a long name that neither of them cares to speak. “By banishing the name, by reducing it to its initial letter, V., they made the rope invisible …. They echoed each other in other ways … but it was the unused name, that symmetrical V., the Name That Could Not Be Spoken, that had joined them together for decades.” Un-naming the ineffable, Rushdie renames them in other ways as Junior V. and Senior V. – the letter tied at the ankles, the shadow cast on the book’s cover that points towards the fateful eleventh hour, towards the sun, an eyeball, or clock. (V. also stands for Vespa, the deus ex machina that destroys Junior.) “If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.” The clock strikes back in this short story as in Midnight’s Children. First published in the New Yorker after the fatwa but before the knife attack that damaged Rushdie’s eye, “In the South” disorients any space-time continuum and almost foretells its author’s fate.

Senior comes from a large family, while Junior is an only child. Senior rises to a senior position in the railway company, and after his wife dies, he remarries unhappily a widow with a wooden leg who takes her revenge on him by inviting members of her family to disturb his peace in their small apartment. He endures multiple health problems of his advanced age: “the daily penances of bowel and urethra, of back and knee, the milkiness climbing in his eyes, the breathing troubles, the nightmares, the slow failing of the soft machine.” Rushdie’s anatomy of dotage portrays the pathos of these years. If Senior’s widow has a wooden leg, Junior walks slowly, plagued by a weak ankle so that he becomes “a man at a desk,” a bystander of world events: “He had stood by and watched, as an empire fell and a nation rose.” He has one friend, D’Mello, who is twenty years younger, from Mumbai but no longer has a “foothold” in his native city. D’Mello tells postcolonial stories about Mumbai’s Black Horse district.

Each section of the story ends with some mention of death that is characterized by a fall. The two friends climb slowly down their building’s stairs helped by walking sticks to the local post office to cash their pension slips. Junior “understood the nature of the contempt in the eyes of the post office employee. It was the scorn of life for death.” The story hovers between eyes and feet, vision and motion, yet humour dispels despair. Junior sighs that his friend’s gloom and doom “will be the death of me.” “This sentence struck them both as so funny that they laughed heartily, and then had to huff and puff for breath.” They pause briefly by the golden shower tree standing in their front yard, which they had watched grow from a tiny shoot to its present sixty-foot grandeur. This tree serves as nature’s commentary on themes of life and death in the story. Like other place names in India, this Indian laburnum is known as “konrai” in their southern language, “amaltas” in the tongue of the north, and “Cassia fistula” in botany. Junior comments that the tree has stopped growing, having understood that eternity is better than progress. To which Senior replies that the tree has stopped because of its nature.

As they walk along the crowded streets, they look down at their shadows, which lay side by side upon the dusty pavement. After Junior falls, Senior laments the loss of his shadow: “And now I am a shadow without a shadow to shadow.” The golden shower tree casts a long shadow over the decades. When Junior is struck down by the girls on the Vespa, he twists his weak ankle and bumps his head on the sidewalk. In a prophetic note, Senior calls the girls “assassins.”

In the story’s final section death spreads beyond Junior’s demise in a move from a personal to a planetary event: “The next morning in the south of the planet, far away from Senior’s hometown, but not far enough, there was a great earthquake under the ocean’s surface and the mighty water, answering the agony of the land beneath it with an agony of its own, gathered itself up into a series of huge waves and hurled its pain across the globe.” Rushdie’s global reverberations cover all of its countless victims. Senior, who had asked for death, is left untouched. “The texts were empty and his eyes were blind.” He imagines a shadow move on the adjacent veranda. The story concludes with a familiar setting atmosphered by shadows in the south. “Death and life were adjacent verandas. Senior stood on one of them as he always had, and on the other, continuing their tradition of many years, was Junior, his shadow, his namesake, arguing.” In the south a long shadow lurches and foreshadows Rushdie’s argumentative fate.

If the first story has its Dickensian moments, then the second, “The Musician of Kahani,” tilts more in the direction of Franz Kafka who is featured in subsequent stories in this quintet. “The story of the discordant musician and the billion-dollar baby began in a time of unsettling change.” The rush in Rushdie measures unsettling changes in history and narrative sequences. Name changing in India invites the author’s un-naming and renaming in his clockwork with its music of magic realism. “Our city’s name was changed some years before the millennium came along to change time itself.” From Mumbai to London and New York, Rushdie chronicles mean time and place in global fictions. “I decided to rename the place myself, just for myself, and began in my writing and conversation to call it ‘Kahani,’ or ‘Story,’ because it’s where my stories come from.” His self-reflexive pronoun reflects the commingled identities of persona, place, and fiction, for his stories come from metafictional Mumbai. In his imagination he replaces the old colonial names with fictional characters from page and screen. Malgudi Circle ripples outward “because this has always been a cosmopolitan city, facing outward to wider worlds – William Shakespeare Bunder.” In that magical circle the city is a “wonder tale,” with its narrator as Prospero taming tempests.

Rushdie’s magic oscillates between individual and national births, and between eleventh and twelfth hours. The twentieth century ends, “And at midnight, the approved hour for miraculous births in one part of the world, a baby was born to a Breach Candy family, and a new thousand-year era began.” We hover between the moment and the millennium. The father is Raheem Contractor, a fifty-year-old mathematics professor; the mother, Meena Contractor, twenty years younger, specializes in information technology; and baby Chandni, the eponymous Musician of Kahani, becomes the mother of the billion-dollar baby. Although there are many contracts within the story, it is ultimately the contract between Rushdie and reader that counts as he serves up satire alongside magic realism. The upscale neighbourhood of Breach Candy affords an opportunity for satire: nobody can agree on the origins of its name, but all concur on its “niceness”: “The people living there, nice people. All kinds, all religions, Hindu Muslim Parsi Christian Jain and one-two Sikhs, getting along. Old-young, side by side. Well-to-do, for sure, well-off families.” Side-by-side hyphens establish the social contract and satire among various groups within this affluent community. Yet the denizens of Breach Candy cannot boast of the wealth of others above them: “not rich like the folks on the high ground, up on ‘those’ parts of Malabar Hill or most of Altamount Road. Dear me, no. That’s rich-rich-rich up there, big-big-rich.” Dickens surveys Mumbai, hyphenating classes as he goes along.

The narrator parenthetically inserts himself in metafictional moments as part of his contract. Describing Raheem Contractor’s mathematical pursuit of proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem, he concludes: “This assertion, incomprehensible to ordinary people, including the present author, whose age increasingly presents him from grasping complex ideas, has vexed the minds of the finest mathematicians down the centuries.” The Eleventh Hour never leaves aging far behind.

Chandni becomes a musical prodigy on the piano and other instruments; Raheem discovers religion and abandons his family; and Meena sells her technology discovery and becomes rich enough to buy her dream home for the family. Chandni charms the billionaire Ferdaus family, marries their son Majnoo in an over-the-top wedding, and becomes pregnant only to lose the baby. Artistic magic takes its revenge on capitalistic power, as Chandni’s fingers resume their magical movement: “It was music of a kind they had never heard before, and the instruments on which it was being played were unknown to them.” Much as the earlier wealth ascended above Mumbai, music now overtakes the city. “It rose above their home like a pillar of smoke, like a column of fire, like the weapon of an invading alien species, and then it rushed across the city and the country to do its deadly work.” Chandni’s unearthly music destroys an entire empire.

After this apocalyptic cleansing the narrator comes down to earth: “Here I am visiting my yesterdays one last time and they are visiting me. I will not come this way again. And at the end of the lane, while the children play, I look up at the end of my story.” A certain nostalgia visits the family’s veranda where Chandni smiles “her strange little smile,” while Dickens and Kafka lurk in the background.

The next story, “Late,” shifts to England where it relocates themes of ageing and naming at Cambridge University. A framing introduction chronicles the College’s history: “The College was almost six hundred years old. It had been founded by a king who was mad for most of his life. After his death he began performing miracles.” Rushdie contracts centuries to a shorter time frame for his story: “Such occurrences, if true, may serve as a sort of foreshadowing of the unusual events that occurred more recently, approximately fifty-five years ago, and that will be set down without judgment in this belated account.” Fiction encompasses miracles, foreshadowing, and belatedness in its quest for truths. “They are events that cannot easily be accommodated within a rigorously rational description of the world.” “Late” offers up delights of irrationality.

So the story begins: “When the Honorary Fellow S. M. Arthur woke up in his darkened College bedroom he was dead, but at first that didn’t seem to change anything.” Echoing Gregor Samsa’s awakening in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” this protagonist’s wakeup call transforms nothing in the twilight zone between the eleventh hour and midnight’s magic. He reaches for his small bedside alarm clock (“it was the day when the clocks went back”): “The clock hands were stuck at midnight.” Rushdie turns back and multiplies clocks through history and narrative clockwork in his grasp of time. If S. M.’s name carries meaning that is revealed by the story’s end, so too does the Provost’s redoubling name, Lord Emmemm. This ghost story carries a frisson of its author’s fate under a fatwa, rescued by authorial irony avenging revenge with a knife that cuts both ways: “in spite of the evidence of his own eyes – the sight of his own body lying dead in bed – he continued to see himself as having his usual physical form.” Hindsight and foresight converge in fiction’s knife-life after death. And Rushdie’s self-deprecating humour plays a role: “If this was death, then it was something he could live with.”

“Late” invokes Shakespeare, Dickens, and Oscar Wilde. Kafka too: “S. M. Arthur’s father, like Kafka’s father, had been a brute …. Brutish fathers had already been ‘taken’ by the literary insurance officer from Prague.” The Honorary Fellow is fully aware of his British and brutish precursors. Belatedly he writes about the Garden of Eden at the end of the world. His preposterous unfinished fiction includes “The Country of Shrinking Borders”: “The idea seemed to be that in the end the borders would arrive at the edges of his own body” – anatomy as destiny under fatwa. His middle name is Merlyn, for he is a magician suppressing and revealing homosexuality, solving cryptic crossword puzzles, and flipping time: “The time in Bombay was five and a half hours later that at the Greenwich meridian. A curious consequence of this was that if you turned your wristwatch upside down in England its hands showed you the time in India.” Always on the alert, Rushdie’s bifocal vision covers inverted time zones. Another part of Arthur’s secret existence is his participation in decoding enemy messages during World War II. The code breakers called themselves the Round Table, as Rushdie comes full circle from the small alarm clock at the beginning of “Late” to an international circle of spying that comes to light after a generation.

Kafka appears most prominently in “Oklahoma,” which alludes to “Amerika,” Kafka’s unfinished novel in which the American state is a destination never reached by protagonist Karl Rossmann. Written between 1912 and 1914, published posthumously in 1927, and originally titled “The Missing Person” or “The Man Who Disappeared,” this picaresque tale appeals to Rushdie who has disappeared for years after the fatwa was issued. As part of his clockwork, Rushdie delays and defers plot, character development, themes, and structures, even as he foreshortens names in his onomastic games. The “Foreword” to “Oklahoma” frames these names: “The text that follows is the last work of a writer whom we sadly lost too early, Mamouli Ajeeb, who preferred to be known by his initiales de plume, ‘M.A.’” Inversions of first and lasts, and foreshortening of identities expose the fate of a writer under a fatwa. Contrasts between revealing and concealing appears in the fate of a manuscript with instructions that parallel Kafka’s: “(contradicting an indication in the text itself that it should not be published).”

The story opens with Uncle K. addressing M.A.: “Uncle K. said to me that first weekend on Long Island, ‘and he never called it Amerika’.” Rushdie’s metafictional modes reinvent Kafka’s modernism a century earlier. The twenty-seven-year-old narrator confesses that he has never read “Amerika,” but has read other related works. “We must carry whole libraries in our heads, like Peter Kien, the hero of Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé.” Like Kafka and Rushdie, “Uncle K. was obsessed with disappearance. His novels and stories were full of vanishings.” Dreams, magic, and ghost stories weave through Rushdie’s fiction. As he works his way through mythological disappearances from the Greek gods to King Arthur, he arrives at an Irish ridge where James Joyce awakens Finn MacCool: “ ‘All Finnegans,’ Uncle K. liked to say … ‘eventually wake’.”

At present Kafka’s first anti-hero is on his mind. Karl Rossmann (a horse man) never arrives in Oklahoma (home of red people); instead, he is stuck in a railway carriage across the vastness of America, having survived the earlier Atlantic vastness. When M.A. suggests that Uncle K. should write an ending for Kafka’s story, he understands the impossibility of such a task. “In the first place I think he saw Karl Rossmann as another Kafka – lost too young but also eternal – and to ‘finish’ him would be … a stepping into boots none of us could fill.” The burden of the past weighs heavily on this acolyte. “And in the second place, could any of us truly imagine what that Oklahoma would be like?” An anti-heroic K. Rossmann in a utopian no-man’s-land invites one more consideration: “And in the third place, he thought of his country – ‘Amerika’ or, as I grew up calling it in my mother tongue, ‘Amrika,’ – as somehow unfinished too, somehow lost in the middle of its own story, its future unknown; so the unfinishedness of the novel felt appropriate. In its incompleteness its meaning was complete.” Hence the sense of an unending and upending in its postmodern turns.

Among Rushdie’s intriguing tangents are ekphrastic excursions to Madrid’s Prado Museum where Velázquez, Goya, and Bosch come alive. Saul Bellow and Lewis Carroll make cameo appearances in his reading list of disappearances. After reading Uncle K.’s manuscript, M.A. concludes that the unstated message of the pages in a manila envelope is “Find me.” That this message in turn points to Rushdie’s disappearance is further underscored by a visual reference: “I was no private eye. I couldn’t see myself sleuthing across America to search for him.” Ultimately the private eye is knifed into the public eye. Oklahoma is shortened to OK and Mamouli Ajeeb’s name is explained as strange and ordinary – an oxymoronic name searching for its Oklahoma.
Like the opening story in this collection, the final story first appeared in The New Yorker. “The Old Man in the Piazza” copies some of Hemingway’s style but is more of a Kafkaesque parable than a realistic account. Every day, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, the old man enters the piazza. “He goes to the only café in the piazza, the Café of the Fountain, and sits on a wooden chair at a wooden table and orders a small, strong coffee.” Realism soon gives way to surrealism in the piazza as language is personified and scrutinized. “In the end it was our language itself who rebelled against the ‘yes’. She got up from the corner of the piazza where she had been meditating silently for half a decade and let out a long, piercing shriek that drove into our ears like a stiletto.” The preposterous knife and fatwa accompany Rushdie every step of the way. Kafka’s clockwork ticks and tolls across this linguistic piazza: “Times have changed. Our people care less for our beautiful and complex language than for the great, crude question of what is correct and what incorrect.” Rushdie’s roadmap across India and America rewinds Kafka’s cryptic clock.

About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of fifteen previous novels, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, most recently Languages of Truth.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature.

He has published over 300 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• ISBN 9798217154203

• Available onAug 04, 2026

• Published byRandom House Trade Paperbacks

• Pages 272

One Day, Hard and Clear is the emotionally resonant debut novel from Anne Baldo, author of the dazzling short fiction collection Morse Code for Romantics (Porcupine’s Quill, 2023). A mature work that demonstrates significant growth in Baldo’s art, in some respects the novel seems to echo—could even be said to continue—the story collection, as if the author was not yet finished with themes of lost love, emotional betrayal, nostalgia for friendships past and youthful uncertainty over what tomorrow may bring.

The story begins in July 2004 with best friends Sami and Lucy freshly graduated from high school and working together at Zehrs Supermarket in Windsor, Ontario. At home, Sami’s mother is unreliable and mostly absent, and her father lets her do whatever she wants. Lucy’s ever-watchful mother worries that Sami, with her lip gloss, overdone makeup, cheap clothes, and disreputable boyfriend, might be a bad influence. Lucy and Sami have been friends forever. There are no secrets between them. But it’s clear they want different things. In the fall, Lucy will enter university. Sami has no such plans and seems content to hang out around town, working for minimum wage, frequenting bars, and hooking up with whomever is available. She has recently broken up with the boyfriend, whose name is True. But Lucy’s mother’s concerns are well founded: True comes from a family with a questionable pedigree (his father’s served jail time), and True has been known to throw a rock or two through the odd window. But even though Sami and True are no longer a couple, their emotional connection remains potent. With Lucy gone, Sami—despite plenty of evidence that he does not bring out the best in her—leans on True to help her through the rough patches.

Baldo’s elegant narrative describes the turbulent ebb and flow of Sami and True’s complex relationship over the next several years, as the two engage in other relationships but always seem to gravitate back to one another. The paradox Baldo presents to the reader is that Sami is smart enough to know that True is selfish and controlling, that he will take every opportunity to question her choices and undermine her self-respect, that he represents a damaging presence in her life. She knows that by staying close to him, by taking his advice and following his lead, she will never move forward and learn to stand on her own two feet. But True is also the addiction she can’t seem to shake, the one that allows her to step out of herself and imagine a world that isn’t filled with disappointment, cruelty and bad luck. Even when she’s making choices that on the surface appear to have nothing to do with him, we feel True’s influence at the root of almost everything she does.

The power of One Day, Hard and Clear resides in Anne Baldo’s relentless dissection of her characters’ motivations and the construction of scenes that reveal them taking needless risks and sometimes even acting against their own self-interest, if only to defy expectations or thwart someone else’s wishes. With friendship at the core of the novel, Baldo demonstrates she is adept at depicting that heartbreaking moment when someone realizes a once-cherished friendship is over. Her prose is compulsively readable, shimmering with detail, creating an irresistible flow that carries the reader along. The novel is also filled with wisdom and insight, frequently capturing, in seemingly effortless fashion, naked truths about human relationships that can be breathtaking in their simplicity: “The margin between someone who would save you and someone who would destroy you is not as wide as we liked to believe.”

Anne Baldo has her finger firmly on the pulse of a generation struggling to cross the threshold from adolescence to adulthood. One Day, Hard and Clear presents life how it is, with all its sharp edges intact. The world it evokes is one where people learn their lessons the hard way, and no one gets to take the easy way out.

About the Author

Anne Baldo is the author of the story collection Morse Code for Romantics. Her writing has appeared in Grain, Stanchion, and Riddle Fence. One Day, Hard and Clear is her debut novel. She lives in Windsor, Ontario.

About the Reviewer

Ian Colford has published three novels and two collections of stories. Evidence was published in 2008 by Porcupine’s Quill and won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award; Evidence was also shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the ReLit Award. The Crimes of Hector Tomás followed in 2012. Published by Freehand Books of Calgary, it won Trade Book of the Year at the 2013 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. Perfect World was published by Freehand in 2016 and shortlisted in the book design category at the 2017 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. In 2019, A Dark House was published by Nimbus Publishing of Halifax and was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Prize in Short Fiction at the Atlantic Book Awards and the Relit Award. In 2022 The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard won the Guernica Prize and was published by Guernica Editions in November 2023. Witness, a sequel to Evidence, will be published in 2026 by Galleon Books of Moncton, NB. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. More info can be found at www.iancolford.com.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rare Machines

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 2 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 240 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1459756355

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1459756359

The Story

The View from Stansberry Lookout—the third novel by American lawyer, international arbitrator, and satirist James Gaitis—which was written sixteen years ago but only now has become relevant, is a Canadian-centric cautionary tale now come true. As the Confederation to the north struggles to confront the governmental, social, and environmental collapse of its much larger neighbor, the Republic to the south, the Confederation’s Prime Minister slowly implements her three-prong plan to save the Confederation and to either bring the Republic to its senses, or to its knees. An international political eco-dystopian satire, with romantic underpinnings.

This book is available for pre-order from Guernica Editions

Across the border. But not that far across because the Royal Quantum Physics Testing Facility was situated in an isolated cleft of the opposite flank, and only forty or so kilometers to the north, of the same jagged and yet youthful mountain range on which stood the Stansberry Lookout. Across the border then, at the Royal Quantum Physics Testing Facility, the Prime Minister and the Captain of the Royal Militia and the Minister of Border Security—being at that time of global anxiety the three most prominent, or if not prominent then at least by their own assessment the most important, governmental officials of the Confederation to the north—were deep in conference with the Chief Physicist of the Royal Academy of Science. The physicist’s name was Dr. Everett Tindler, the winner of many prestigious awards bestowed by the Confederation and the namesake of several theories and more than several hypotheses and a variety of formulas and at least sixteen different compounds and two phenomena almost certain to occur somewhere from time to time. Dr. Tindler thought he soon might become The national hero of his fellow citizens and a great man for the history books and historians alike, but first he had to humor and educate the three Confederation officials who stood before him and who were, in his mind, all as dumb as the pick-up sticks his parents once tossed upon the ground and then insisted he play with when he had preferred to sit in the quietude of a nonadult setting and think and ponder and consider.

The three officials had all heard the same thing from Dr. Tindler and none of them understood it or how it could be possible. So the Prime Minister repeated the question, again asked the white-coated physicist how something like that was even possible. “How can you make a barrier that lets things out but does not let things back in? I mean, how is that possible?”

Professor Tindler looked over the edge of his bifocals and out from beneath his bushy eyebrows and smiled condescendingly. He considered repeating the only valid explanation. But he knew he would not get through to them, that their own intellects, stunted by the linear orientation of their careers and ambitions, were impenetrable and impervious beyond redemption. “You’ve heard of revolving doors,” he said instead, more or less repeating what he had already said before. “This is a quantum revolving door. It revolves to let things out, but changes randomly and unpredictably from moment to moment such that the door isn’t where the door used to be.” The three officials looked at him and shook their heads to show they now understood, but then looked to the ground or their knees or to the others to unconsciously show they did not. And the scientist saw this because it was common in his experience: his students, his colleagues, his audiences, his superiors always wanting to show they understood what they did not and, in their egoism, thereby failing to grasp the knowledge well within their reach if only they would make the effort to gain it. So he added, “The door can’t revolve to let things back in because it is no longer where it was before. In a manner of speaking, that is. There’s a lot more to it than that, of course.”

They talked about it more and the scientist deferred to the three officials by entertaining all the questions they could muster and posit in the soft-spoken and accommodating manner of speech customary to the Confederation. Until the Prime Minister finally said, “Perhaps another demonstration would help us understand,” with the result that the four of them retraced the walk through the narrow secret unadorned hallways that led to what was marked as Quantum Experimental Chamber C. Followed by four of the members of the Royal Special Forces military detachment that provided security at the facility and who wore their special uniforms with an artificially stiff and truly awkward pride. As if when they put them on, all semblance of personality and persona were not merely stifled but were actually eradicated, if only until their workday was done. And once the steel- and titanium-reinforced doors had been opened by secret code and secured key and other, even more ingenious, devices, and then shut securely again with the guards now outside and the three officials and the scientist in, the scientist performed the experiment again, with a slight alteration merely for effect. And when he threw the two balls this time instead of the one, they both did what the first ball had done on the first occasion. Which was to sail through a sheet of unseen energy and particles that were one and the same although the three officials could not comprehend that either—that everything was at once solid and not solid, energetic and not energetic—and then bounce off the glass wall only to bounce again when they encountered the invisible and impenetrable barrier of the quantum field.

“It works with bullets, too,” the scientist said with a smile. “I can show you if you like.” And when the Prime Minister said, “No, that will not be necessary; we’ve read the reports and watched the videos,” the scientist opted instead to light a cigar, which he drew down on deeply before he blew a steady stream of fragrant smoke through the invisible field. And the four of them watched in wonderment as the billowing cloud first spread and then curled about as it dispersed in every direction except back into the side of the room from which it had originated.

The Prime Minister excused the scientist with the usual thanks and the standard condescending reminders of confidentiality and security risk and all of that and the military detail stiffly ushered the three officials to the secret elevators and the secret garage where they loaded them into a dark vehicle with darkened windows and bade the drivers and new security detachment farewell with knowing nods and a final test of radio communication. “Mama Bear departing” and “Roger, Goldilocks.” With another dark nondescript vehicle with dark windows to the fore and another to the rear, and another to the rear of that; as if that particular arrangement of uniformly vague thoracic segments was the norm for any foursome centipede of vehicles, such that this particular entourage would not be noticeable once it came out unto the public roads and into public view.

Back unto the back roads leading out and away from the Royal Quantum Physics Testing Facility and back unto the official scenic mountain highway marked with sign after sign stating Scenic Highway and finally unto the regional motorway that posted speed limits no one noticed and no one obeyed. Back through the glorious mountain passes where old-growth stands of larch and white pine and Douglas fir and spruce canopied thickly and darkly overhead. Around the frost-chiseled limestone cliffs and igneous outcroppings and around the hard curves and unmarked turns that followed the creeks and streams just now cresting with the sudden accelerated snowmelt of early June. Past sauntering groups of lazy elk coming down to the valley floor to browse on the first browse of spring and past bighorn sheep and mountain goats perched narrowly along the rocky ledges of the road cuts. Down and down, slowly and with regret, past the last foaming cascade of waterfalls and out of the mountains unto not prairie but at least into foothill and then something that once might have been open plain filled with wild herds and stalking predators but now was a suburban spread encircling a still-modest city that rose up to break the long horizon to the east. And finally into the secure confines of the Confederation Centre—the Confederation’s western capital—where the Prime Minister now stayed as the final days and weeks and months in the making and execution of her plans unfolded and the new day dawned.

***

The Prime Minister led her two confidants into her private study and ushered them into two enormous overstuffed chairs upholstered with the black leather of the finest Confederation stock of cattle. She opened the walnut liquor cabinet and sorted through the collection of bottles and pulled out a leaded and cut-glass decanter, a decanter emblazoned with the gold-plated crest of her own family name and topped with a pewter topper in the likeness of a mounted grandsire from long ago. And she poured herself and her two companions full tumblers of an imported whiskey pricelessly aged beyond reason. “Well, lads,” she said as she lifted her amber drink to the level of her green-to-hazel eyes so that the crystal cut the Captain of the Royal Militia and the Minister of Border Security into myriad fractal and kaleidoscopic versions of their real beings, “let’s raise our glasses to redundancy.” And when the Minister of Border Security said, “Then you mean to continue with more than one of the alternatives?” the Prime Minister answered, “We take all three, lads. We take all three. There’s no justifying taking chances with what’s ours by natural right.”

This book is available for pre-order from Guernica Editions

James Gaitis obtained a BA in English Lit from the University of Notre Dame and a JD from the University of Iowa College of Law. The author of two previously published novels—A Stout Cord and a Good Drop and the award-winning The Nation’s Highest Honor—he is a lover of all things wild.

Head tipped sideways, the white-flecked brown owl looks straight at you. “What’s up?” his bright, curious golden eyes seem to inquire.

To which your response might be, “What’s down?” After all, he’s a burrowing owl, the world’s only owl species that nests underground. As Deborah Hodge explains in The Burrowing Owls of the Prairie Grasslands, these owls seek out burrows once inhabited by intrepid diggers such as prairie dogs, badgers, and ground squirrels.

I had to smile on reading about burrowing owls’ innovative, if slightly cheeky, habit of helping themselves to homes others did the heavy (soil-)lifting on. It reminded me of the Scrounger in The Great Escape, John Sturges’s WWII movie about British POWs. Rather than trying to make or find useful supplies himself, the Scrounger steals/cons them from others, usually the German camp guards.

Of course to be a successful scrounger, flesh or feathered, it helps to look compelling. Thanks to Karen Reczuch’s vivid illustrations, the stars of The Burrowing Owls arrest your gaze on every page. Like the baby owls, three weeks old, learning to hop, run, pounce, and clap their wings.

Or, like the reaction from mom, dad, and owlets when a hungry fox sidles up to their burrow. Immediately the entire owl fam lets loose with rattlesnake imitations. Via the close-ups of their pointy, wide-open beaks, and now decidedly unfriendly golden eyes, you can practically hear their sibilant hissing. The would-be predator, outfoxed, slinks away.

One thing burrowing owls haven’t been able to outfox is the loss of habitat. As Hodge notes in her afterword, Canada’s burrowing owl population has dropped 90% since 1990. “At one time, untouched wilderness covered much of the middle of the continent, but today almost all of the prairie is farmed and developed and there are far fewer places for the owls to nest.”

However, with commitment and effort, some of burrowing owls’ lost habitat may be restored. Canada’s western provinces and parts of the mid- and western U.S. have recovery programs.

And here’s where Hodge’s riveting narrative and Reczuch’s compelling illustrations serve as a call to action. Young readers absorbing the owls’ story now may one day join the biologists, Indigenous groups, conservationists, private landowners, and other citizens working to save this fascinating species.

For example, in Saskatchewan’s Grassland National Park, one of North America’s only remaining large stretches of native prairie, biologists supplement owls’ food. They tuck goodies such as defrosted mice inside the burrows.

On reading that, you may do what I did: flip back to an illustration of owlets waiting to be fed. Some peek out of the burrow. Some hop outside and look straight off the page at you. With, you guessed it, “What’s up?” in their bright, curious golden eyes.

About the Author

Deborah Hodge is the author of more than 35 books for children. Her awards include the Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada’s Information Book Award and the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. Deborah’s work has also been featured on such lists as ALA’s Top Ten Best Environmental Books for Youth. A former teacher and curriculum writer, Deborah lives in Vancouver, B.C.

About the Illustrator

Karen Reczuch has illustrated many award-winning children’s books, such as Loon by Susan Vande Griek, which won the TD Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction, the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Picture Book Award and the Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada’s Information Book Award. Karen lives in Lake Country, B.C.

About the Reviewer

Melanie Jackson is a Vancouver writer/editor. She’s also the award-winning author of middle-grade/YA suspensers, including Orca Books’ Dinah Galloway Mystery Series, and several chillers set in amusement parks.

Book Details

• Publisher: Groundwood Books, June 2, 2026

• Language: English

• Hardcover: 40 pages

• ISBN: 9781779460318

It’s been over a decade since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its ninety-four calls to action, and so far we’ve done thirteen. At this rate it’ll take a lifetime, so what’s up with that? Why has reconciliation stalled?

Andrew R. Basso and Andrea M.L. Perrella are both political scientists of settler origin affiliated with Wilfred Laurier University. Together they’ve undertaken a large-scale study of Canadian settler attitudes to better understand the sources of resistance, and keys to unlocking widespread support for meaningful action. Between August 2021 and May 2023, they fielded three national online surveys reaching a total of nearly 4,500 respondents. They offer an impressively robust quantitative analysis, replete with mathematical models and associated coefficients. The tabular presentation of results is complemented by sprightly prose outlining the contradictions and conclusions that spring from this wealth of data. Their approach is multi-dimensional, deeply considered, and thoughtful about the many factors shaping settler opinion in multicultural Canada. They laser in on the persisting gap between opinion and action, and the propensity for settler contribution to stall at the level of symbolic action (like land acknowledgements) which signal right opinion without giving up anything in particular.

“Giving up” isn’t quite the right framing, though, because Basso and Perrella would urge us to move beyond a zero-sum orientation that casts reconciliation as a loss for settler populations. They find that the prevalence of zero-sum attitudes remains a significant barrier to translating reconciliation into meaningful change.

Through batteries of related survey questions, Basso and Perrella have devised measures of four basic constructs: denialism, recognition, “thin” or cognitive sympathy, and empathy. They posit a model in which individuals move through these mindsets in order, conquering denial before developing recognition of colonial harms, then moving to a cognitive stance of sympathy with Indigenous peoples in Canada, before developing a “feeling” dimension of empathy. They further posit that the final stage, empathy, is necessary to move a person to action. At the same time, they caution that empathy can be something of a double-edged sword. The pleasures of empathizing may become so great that one seeks to keep the other as perpetual victim and source of emptional supply. If the dangers of “dark” empathy can be averted, though, it’s a powerful driver at an individual level.

For all that this appears to be true, at least in light of their statistical interpretation of the survey results, they find that shifts in the attitudes of settler Canadians are likely insufficient to achieve the aims of reconciliation. They find that even people with overall favourable opinions extend strictly limited support towards the more concrete and meaningful actions that would cost money or take time, beyond the thirty seconds given to a land acknowledgement at the start of a meeting or the unit of curriculum to be delivered in elementary school classrooms. They term this “empty sympathy” or “the shallow river of tears.” Ultimately, they call upon our political leaders to demonstrate true leadership in forwarding reconciliation, with or without grassroots pressure from settler constituents to do so.

As they frame it,

“Our study has uncovered a hard behavioural core of the Settler colonial paradigm. This paradigm is marked by a widespread lack of denial but also by modest recognition of past wrongs, thin sympahy, and empathy. The empty sympathy that currently defines Reconciliation is the direct result of leaving transitional justice in the enigmatic hands of public opinion, helping to insulate the lack of action. Put bluntly, public opinion alone will fail to move the needle and advance justice from below. In a sense, public opinion may simply be mirroring elite postures. Given these realities of Settler public opinion and institutional configurations, we believe that the only way forward is to forgo slow, uncertain, and tedious grassroots justice and for leaders to drag from the front. If leaders are taking meek, ambivalent, ambiguous, or contradictory stands, we do not expect public opinion to straighten that out; instead, the public will mimic and reproduce the meekness, ambivalence, ambiguities, and contradictions.”

In terms of their survey research, I could quibble with some details of their question wording. A couple of the “denialism” items, for example, appear to be trick questions. Survey respondents aren’t usually on the lookout for these, and may tend to answer the more ambiguously or oddly phrased questions as if they had said whatever it seems they ought to have meant within the context. Quirks like this could tend to complicate the analysis, and indeed the authors obtained some contradictory results from the denialism module. Survey work is difficult, and question wording is really hard to get right. I don’t think these quibbles cast any serious doubt on their overall findings. The work is quite robust, extensive, and well conceived.

Their conclusion is really a rather positive one. We don’t have to cry more tears; we just need to galvanize our political leadership. In that spirit, one can only wonder—is Mark Carney reading The Seaboard Review?

About the Author

Andrew R. Basso is an adjunct faculty member at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Andrea M.L. Perrella is associate professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University.

About the Reviewer

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McGill-Queen’s University Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 17 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 448 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0228026695

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0228026693

In the wake of being honoured in 2025 with the League of Canadian Poets’ Lifetime Achievement Award, the ever-prolific Penn Kemp (still at the peak of her powers) completed Colour Fielding (Silver Bow Publishing) a poetic exercise in memoir and in responding to, and writing about, visual art and artists, and their intersection with the written word.

Two figures are conspicuously celebrated: Greg Curnoe (a prominent London, Ontario, artist whose ninetieth birthday would have been in 2026); and the author’s father, Jim Kemp (also a notable London artist and mentor of artists). In fact, the front cover features Curnoe’s Circle Divided Into 28 Equal Sections, an entrancing colour wheel; the back includes an image of his Mariposa, one of his beloved bicycle paintings. Inside, five of the book’s seven sections are introduced by colour renderings of Jim’s works (the exceptions are the first section, which is preceded by a humorous photograph of him as Father Time and curator Clare Bice as the New Year Babe; and the third, a little dive into Georgia O’Keefe). The title Colour Fielding, meanwhile, is a reference to, among other things, both a work of Jim’s that prologues the final section, and to “the work of abstract painters working in the 1950s and 1960s characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour” (Tate Museum website). Importantly, Curnoe was also a noted explorer of colour.

Colour is also a central consideration throughout Penn Kemp’s investigations in this volume. These are comprised of three main themes that wind through the seven sections. These sections could be summarized as follows:

• Very Local Heroes, the longest part, extends the work with memoir that Kemp undertook with her collection Ordinary/Moving (and her chapbook Lives of Dead Poets)

• Triple Takes on Carr, O’Keefe [sic] and Kahlo foregrounds three women artists (Emily Carr, Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, especially the last of these), focussing on how they have been portrayed and imagined

  • Three for Georgia on Exhibit (really a subsection of the above), a trio dedicated to O’Keeffe

• Reflecting Interplay, a fascinating interrogation of Kemp’s own creative process

• Confronting the Muse, an examination of the Muse, conceptually and in real life

• Ekphrastics, which, as expected, focusses on responses to visual art pieces

• Light Eaters, a look at some objects of art, notably Mary Magdalene, who figures into three poems

The first of the three aforementioned themes centres on the artists themselves. This includes Carr (“…Caring not a fig for convention…// //Wild woman of the woods”; Massif) and O’Keeffe, who “enters landscape” (Brush Strokes); and also Kahlo, who fiercely defends herself in Three for Frida on Exhibit (“‘Just try to forget me now. I dare you, double dare you. Already//my art has outlived all you onlookers of this ostensible life.’”); and, through her, Diego Rivera, whose signature Kemp spies at a reading in Detroit on an overhead beam (At the Scarab Club). There is additionally a tribute to Mary Pratt’s generation in Sing a Litany of Women Painters.

Very importantly, though, this category includes a heavy infusion of invaluable memoir. Jumping off from Ordinary/Moving, this collection explores the art scene in London, Ontario and the wider Souwesto region, populated by such luminaries as Greg Curnoe and Jim Kemp of course, but also Clare Bice (“…the bane of Greg Curnoe’s cohort”; At the Beaux Arts Ball), Jack Chambers (Kemp “…basked in his aura since//I was allowed to sit in, enthralled//by words, the man, a life lived outside//our little London in his much wider world.”; After Velasquez), Tony Urquhart (“This bearded Aries wunderkind…”; Drawing in Miniature), James Reaney (“Jamie’s drawings continue to fly//high and wide, a flash of orange//(that tiger burning) in the wings”), and, via Jim Kemp, outwards to the famed Group of Seven (here we have the hilarious picture of Jim Kemp having his daughter serve them “for nibblies, chocolate-covered grasshoppers,//identity undisclosed until my tray was empty”, which resulted in “a flurry of coughs// //I feared would kill them.”; When Dignitaries Visit).

But Curnoe and Jim Kemp predominate. For the latter, in addition to the previously-mentioned episodes, we have a meditation centring on his massive coronary, the author “Called back to London. Called by emergency…” where she wanders the family home waiting with it “until// //my mother and brother return from the hospital”. “On the walls,//dad’s pictures wait with me patiently, prescient// //as dreams.” These include early wartime pictures, which tie back to “…the pure fear dad felt when a buzz bomb caught//him on an English street against a white wall…” (Knock, knock). A bit farther on, in Literalizing the Metaphor, Jim Kemp “The Christmas after his coronary…strung up a branch//to hang instead of our usual tree. Upon//it perched a vulture, black paper maché.”

The gregarious figure of Curnoe, meanwhile, bursts into several pieces, ranging from a lesson in “what an artist can get away with in//flaunting freedom from convention” via scooping pizza slices from an unfinished restaurant plate (Artist in the Hinterland) to a lovely elegy on his tragic death (Travelling Lights). There is also a beautiful piece (From DREAM SEQUINS; set after both Jim Kemp and Curnoe passed on; one of a number of dream poems scattered throughout the volume) describing one of the author’s dreams in which Jim Kemp and Curnoe are working in an otherwise empty building: “…Just as dad welcomed Greg and Jack to//London’s nascent art community in the Fifties, so now//he’s there to greet Greg in beloved fields of pure colour.”

The second theme of the book consists of Ekphrastic poems, direct responses to pieces (or groups of pieces) of art. The Ekphrastics section is naturally important here, but this theme is represented in other sections as well. Artists responded to include:

• Jim Kemp (whose “painting of a mysterious holy woman wrapped in red” [which seemingly is Lady in Red, which appears in the book] is ruined in a dream by New York critic Clement Greenberg; Palimpsest for Dream Sequins)

• Curnoe (who produced a “…riposte to President Trump, already//depicted in prescient paintings eliminating//the United States entirely, so that Canada//directly borders on Mexico…”; Maps of North America)

• Carr (in whose “…one self-portrait, broad brush strokes//obliterate boundary to fling her bosom across the can-//vas like horizontal wheat sheaves”; Massif)

• Kahlo (“The monkey on her shoulder peers//at the viewer it knows is there…”; Iconography Con Monos (1943) )

• O’Keeffe (“…Seed potency//bursting beyond hard casement//through the boundary of design.”; Sunflowers)

• Paraskeva Clark (“Weeds around us flower and are still”; Bass on the Grass)

• Kim Dorland (“He paints incongruous zombies into//Tom Thomson tree-scapes…”; Where We Belong)

• Joan Miró (“What is it about putting on//the mask that allows for//freedom, for Surreal symbols”; After Miro)

• L.L. Fitzgerald (“…Let me present//these things as if saying were enough to// //conjure the perfect illusion of presence”; From An Upstairs Window, Winter)

• Pieter Brueghel the Younger (via a dream which carries the author into one of Brueghel’s famous villages, Enter the Peasant Painting)

• Titian (“…A confusion of delight//ripe and ready to turn from cinnamon to ginger.”; Titian)

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti (“But what am I doing sulking viridescent//and regarding you as complicit in guilt?”; Mary Magdelene to Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

The third and final theme might be characterized as philosophical reflections, covering both the practices of art and writing, and Kemp’s own creative process. These begin in the opening poem in the book, where, recalling that she “used to prime my father’s canvasses by//painting them white with Gesso…” she later indicates that “I still wait with paper’s white space till/words arise, images in words, watching//them come into form, specific entities// //with their own character and personality//ready to burst off the page into life.”

These personal considerations are picked up in the Reflecting Interplay section, whose seven pieces (which in places have a feel of prose poetry) form a most interesting little treatise on the subject, with linkages back into visual art. There are many insights here; a few follow:

• “The dead are always present when we continue//to listen, alert, on the watch. If we don’t attend,//what are the consequences, what will be lost?” (On Perpetual Perception)

• “My intention is to translate//the image into a language that corresponds.” (On Multimedia)

• “I like to live in the place before colour and sound//hive off tangentially…” (Colour Coded)

• “My work is the translator’s, to move one//sense into another’s arena…” (Life Sketches)

• “I never learned poetic structure but//relied on sound and image to lead me//to the poem…” (Projection)

More philosophy permeates the Confronting the Muse unit, which does just that. Many of these reflections are personal (e.g., Wearing our Words; Bearded Snake Around the Collar; What Times Demand); a couple are general interrogations (e.g., Nude in Umber). Dreams are included via Lines of Legend. We also have an Homage to St. Elmo, and meet a friend who threw “her true star//sapphire ring//into the trash.” Kemp, on the other hand, says she “…held on to my own//pale sapphire engagement ring, like//a token or treasure, with a mild horror//honouring her.”

Farther on, in the Ekphrastics section, On the Ear-Whispered Lineage presents a series of quotes from Leonardo da Vinci proclaiming painting as superior to poetry; the piece concludes with Kemp’s instruction “Argue//amongst yourselves.” Continuing the debate, the next poem, Mute Poetry, Blind Painting promotes the virtues of sound (“Trackless, sound cannot be traced the linear way the eye perceives.//While the eye drains energy, sound steals our attention.”).

The final aspect of this theme is covered in Light Eaters, the last section in the book. It begins with a mini-essay on colour, spread over three poems: Scaling the Colour Bar, Titian [which is also an ekphrastic piece] and My Muse Wears Burgundy from Head to Toe. Three poems on Mary Magdalene follow, often, of course, a subject of paintings. The first, Recall, observes, among other things that “She’s always depicted wrapped, contained//and rapt.” Magdalene Rising references the scene in the Gospel of John where she does not at first recognize Christ after his Resurrection, and proceeds on to philosophical reflections. In Mary Magdalene to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (mentioned earlier; this is one of the pieces that does double-duty) she confronts the painter regarding his depictions of her, a tie-back to the poems about Kahlo, O’Keeffe and Carr (and other pieces) in addressing how women artists and subjects have been portrayed, in paint and in the broader culture. The final piece, Figure head, riffs off the carved female figures once-upon-a-time seen on the prow of ships.

There is clearly a lot in this very enlightening and thought-provoking volume. A first-rate addition to Kemp’s already-storied oeuvre. me

About the Author

Penn Kemp is a poet, playwright, and performer who lives in London ON. Her most recent collection is Colour Fielding. The League of Canadian Poets honored her with their Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, 2025-6. Check out www.riverrevery.ca for poetry films based on her text.

About the Reviewer

Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer and speaker from London, Ontario. Her first poetry chapbook was A Song of Milestones (Harmonia Press). Her first full-size collection was Hear Through the Silence (Cyberwit). Her newest collection is Emergence (Wet Ink Books). She has also published poetry, reviews and essays in numerous journals and anthologies; has spoken at numerous venues; and is the proud parent of two adult children. Website: https://jenniferwennpoet.wixsite.com/home

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Silver Bow Publishing

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Feb. 28 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 112 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1774034190

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1774034194

In this issue:

• Those Are Pearls by André Narbonne (Fiction)

• Almost English by Barbara Sibbald (Fiction)

• Breakaway by Karissa Donkin (Non-Fiction)

• Hymns of New Jerusalem by Andreas Gripp (Poetry)

• Elegies and Other Poems by Flavia Cosma (Poetry)

• The Nicholas Racz Interview

Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!

James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief

Fiction

Non-Fiction

Poetry

Interview

June’s Saturday Short

I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue

This is a highly entertaining read about a checked-out office worker who suddenly —by some fluke —has access to all her coworkers' and boss's emails and messages. This changes everything. Up until now she was just barely hanging on, keeping her head low, sending passive-aggressive responses to coworkers' emails. And now she's on top of things, she knows ahead of everyone else what's going on behind the scenes, and she knows what people are saying about her and everyone else. She uses this information to her advantage, but doesn't count on the fact that she might actually enjoy being more engaged with work and her coworkers. Now it's a matter of Not Getting Caught. She especially wouldn't want to ruin the good thing she has going with the new human resource guy - she really likes him. This is a smart, darkly funny, entertaining debut from an Iranian/British-Canadian author from Calgary, Alberta. (Naomi MacKinnon)

The origins of André Narbonne’s fascinating and bracingly original novel, Those Are Pearls, can be traced to years of research into his own family’s history. The resulting novel has an expansive geographical reach and encapsulates a period from the last few years of the 19th century to 1977.

Narbonne focuses on six primary characters: Harry Short, his wife Margaret Roll, two of their daughters, Ruth and Nan, Ruth’s first husband, Frank Good, and their daughter, Margaret. The narrative is divided into three sections—”Duty,” “Education,” and “Accidents of Necessity”—each of which loosely addresses the theme named in the title while zigzagging through the drama and heartache of one family’s decidedly checkered fortunes.

The story begins in the Transvaal with South African Harry Short among a group of British soldiers taking part in the ill-starred Jameson Raid of 1895. But Harry’s motives for joining a mission meant to protect British interests in the region but which failed spectacularly and eventually led to the 2nd Boer War involve a woman, Margaret, whose affections he’s determined to win and whose father, a wealthy doctor, he wants to impress. Harry—of modest means but an independent thinker who reads poetry—is at heart something of a naïve romantic.

Margaret and Harry marry and settle in Cape Town. But their fortunes take a hit when Harry, a boilermaker by trade, receives a diagnosis (described as “dubious”) and for the sake of his health is advised by a doctor to relocate to a colder climate. It is 1910 when Harry determines the coldest place among the British colonies is Manitoba. Harry travels alone to Canada and establishes a prairie home. Margaret follows (reluctantly) with their children. This is how the family winds up in Winnipeg, where much of the subsequent action is set.

Narbonne’s novel is not structured in a linear fashion. For example, the chapter immediately following the opening chapter where we meet Harry Short (“Harry of Jameson’s Raid (1895)”) is titled “Margaret’s Great Depression.” It is narrated by Margaret Good, daughter of Ruth and Frank. Set in the late 1930s, it introduces a girl whose father has left his wife and children, and who as a result suffers from emotional insecurity. The chapter also makes mention of several important family incidents that later chapters depict in greater detail. Narbonne follows this pattern throughout the book.

Narbonne’s treatment of his material is unconventional, but at the novel’s end seems entirely appropriate. The narrative is comprised of several plot threads and follows the six primary characters through the ups and downs of major life events, finally delivering them to their various fates. It is in the graceful and intricate intertwining of these threads that the novel’s considerable forward momentum is generated. Narbonne is writing about people whose actions and decisions have repercussions beyond themselves. Like any family, they are inseparable from one another, even in absence, even in death. They dream, they desire, they carry each other in their thoughts. Sometimes they behave badly, and they are not always good to each other. But despite this, or maybe because of it, we want to know more about them.

André Narbonne writes with empathy and without judgment about human weakness. His prose is elegant and detailed and succeeds in swiftly transporting the reader to times and places far outside our experience. In Those Are Pearls, a novel 25 years in the works, he has written an engaging and spirited account of a family swept up in world history whose eccentricities and passions (occasionally misplaced) make them uniquely appealing.

About the Author

André Narbonne is a scholar, writer, and the publisher of Conspiracy Press, based in Windsor, Ontario. His short fiction has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, won the FreeFall Literary Contest, the David Adams Richards Prize, and the Atlantic Writing Contest. A first collection, Twelve Miles to Midnight, was shortlisted for the 2017 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His first novel, Lucien & Olivia, was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

About the Reviewer

Ian Colford has published three novels and two collections of stories. Evidence was published in 2008 by Porcupine’s Quill and won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award; Evidence was also shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the ReLit Award. The Crimes of Hector Tomás followed in 2012. Published by Freehand Books of Calgary, it won Trade Book of the Year at the 2013 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. Perfect World was published by Freehand in 2016 and shortlisted in the book design category at the 2017 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. In 2019, A Dark House was published by Nimbus Publishing of Halifax and was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Prize in Short Fiction at the Atlantic Book Awards and the Relit Award. In 2022 The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard won the Guernica Prize and was published by Guernica Editions in November 2023. Witness, a sequel to Evidence, will be published in 2026 by Galleon Books of Moncton, NB. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. More info can be found at www.iancolford.com.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Palimpsest Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 15 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 200 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1997508176

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1997508175

Stephen Turner, son of a prominent English gentleman and educated at the finest schools in England, longed to escape his menial position as a railroad clerk but one manifest obstacle stood in his way: Stephen’s maternal grandmother was native. In 1880s India, that placed him in a no-man’s land, neither fully native, nor fully English, and certainly ineligible for advancement in the Civil Service.

Lily Grant was a proper young lady and incredibly determined. Despite her father’s opposition and the very real threat of being snubbed by society, she chose Stephen as her husband and a life that threatened isolation, poverty and hardship, but one that took them from India to New Zealand and back, from remote, mountainous, northern villages to the shores of the Arabian Sea in what is now Pakistan. Along the way, they raised seven children in a hostile climate that threatened their lives daily, and Stephen never stopped fighting to better his family’s life.

Novel? Non-fiction? Almost English by Barbara Sibbald blurs the line between them. It is both a novelized version of the author’s great-grandparents` life story, and a narrative of Sibbald’s quest to find out about her complicated heritage. I’ll be honest: I was half expecting a book that of course has deep meaning for its author but maybe not for an average reader. Was I surprised! This is a fascinating and deeply engrossing story, one I finished in less than 24 hours.

The racism of Anglo-Indian society is at the forefront of this book, as Sibbold details her great-grandfather’s almost impossible quest to overcome the “taint” of his one-quarter Indian ancestry. Despite his education at “Home” – England – his impeccable accent and many friends in society, losing the support of his English father left Stephen unable to break through the ceiling to obtain a coveted position in the Civil Service. The only jobs available were “native” positions, and for many of those, he was too English. Stephen was nothing if not determined: determined to succeed, to see his children receive the education he did and opportunities he did not, and to improve the lives of the people in his part of India. No less determined was Lily, her faith in her husband never wavering.

About the Author

Barbara Sibbald is an award-winning journalist and editor living in Ottawa, Canada.

About the Reviewer

Heather McBriarty is the author of the non-fiction account of the First World War, Somewhere in Flanders: Letters from the Front and a novel of the “Great War” Amid the Splintered Trees. She is a blogger, reviewer and served as a juror for the 2023 Atlantic Book Awards. She is a retired Medical Radiation Technologist, doting grandmother, and avid sailor. She lives by the sea in historic Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bayeux Arts

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 15 2025

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 386 pages

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1778750168

The opening puck-drop at the start of the New York-Toronto women’s hockey game on January 1, 2024, was loaded with significance. The face-off marked the culmination of months of activity to establish and launch the Professional Women’s Hockey League.

In Breakaway: The PWHL and the Women Who Changed the Game, Karissa Donkin delves into the lead-up to this event, as well as sketching out the ups and downs of the league’s first season. Donkin’s book discusses the leagues and teams that predated the PWHL, as well as the motivating factors behind the desire for a more professional experience for high-level female hockey players outside of the national team programs.

Breakaway talks about some of the key figures behind the startup of the new league, who included tennis great Billie Jean King, her partner Ilana Kloss, and Mark and Kimbra Walter. Donkin explores the important role played by members of what became the Professional Women’s Hockey Association. Starting in 2019, these athletes vowed “to not play in any professional hockey league until their labour is compensated and they can play in professional conditions.”

Donkin also talks about the diligent work done by Jayna Hefford, Stan Kasten, and others to bring the PWHL into being, working within a very challenging and compressed time frame.

The introduction of the PWHL, Donkin notes, wasn’t an automatic win for everyone. In the past, there had been different women’s professional leagues operating at the same time. With the philosophy that the best approach was to have one professional women’s league, the PWHL’s founders purchased, then shut down, the Premier Hockey Federation.

This closure was disappointing to the fans, and, like a game of musical chairs, meant that inevitably some players would be left out, as there would be fewer opportunities in the PWHL than there had been in the PHF and PWHA combined. But the advantages for the players were huge. The new league provided baseline salaries, larger venues, housing and moving allowances, and an overall more professional approach.

In outlining how the PWHL’s first season progressed, Donkin uses the Montreal team as a focus. She takes us through the first season chronologically, talking about the challenges and learning points, and also the human side—the impact on players and coaches.

Donkin explores the ups and downs of becoming part of a more “professional” entity. Yes, there was better compensation, and improved playing and training conditions, but there was also the possibility of being traded rather than choosing where to play, the other side of the professionalism coin. The players accepted that as part of the deal.

Throughout the book, Donkin’s familiarity with, and affection for, the subject matter shines through. Donkin’s bio for the book notes that, among other topics, she “writes about women’s hockey and the PWHL for CBC Sports.” Breakaway includes nuances, details, and insights that would not be accessible to a researcher less familiar with the topic.

As someone who followed the PWHL’s progress right from the first game, I found that Donkin’s book provided a deeper appreciation of what it took to get the league off the ground, and the seismic impact its creation had on the quality of the experience for the players.

The enthusiastic reception to the league, from season ticket holders to those who thronged to “Takeover Tour” events held in neutral cities, speaks to the pent-up demand for high-level women’s sport, the kind of fan experience it provides, and importance of having players like Marie-Philip Poulin as role models for young female athletes.

Donkin’s efforts in researching and writing this book did not go unnoticed. She received the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick’s Nonfiction Award for Breakaway. The annual awards, presented by the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick, recognize the province’s best fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s picture books.

Thoroughly researched, smoothly written, and at the same time sensitive to the emotional side of the game, Breakaway should appeal to PWHL fans looking for more in-depth insight into the league’s formation and significance. Hockey fans, sport history buffs, and readers who enjoy books dealing with the women’s sport experience more generally should also find this book an interesting read.

About the Author

Karissa Donkin writes about women’s hockey and the PWHL for CBC Sports and has worked in newspapers and broadcasting for more than a decade. Since 2016, she has been working with CBC’s Atlantic investigative unit, covering stories that regularly air on national programs across all of CBC’s platforms. Her recent work on New Brunswick’s Child Protective Services was profiled on The Current. She has won a National Newspaper Award and several Atlantic Journalism Awards for her investigative work. Her journalism was also nominated for the prestigious Michener Award. Breakaway is her first book.

About the Reviewer

Ontario resident Lisa Timpf writes poetry, book reviews, short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her speculative poetry collections Cats and Dogs in Space (2025) and In Days to Come (2022) are available from Hiraeth Publishing in print and electronic formats. You can find out more about Lisa’s writing projects at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com/. Lisa is also on Bluesky, @lisatimpf.bsky.social, and her author Facebook page is @lisa.timpf.author.

Book Details

• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions

• Publication date: ‎Sept. 23 2025

• Language: ‎English

• Print length: ‎244 pages

• ISBN-10: ‎1773104365

• ISBN-13: ‎978-1773104362

Author of more than fifty books of poetry, award winning poet Flavia Cosma continues to delve into the invisible intricacies and mysteries of the heart. An attentive, sensitive spirit seeking eternity in the tangible manifestations of reality and of love’s multifaceted essence, she gifts us with poems that lead from loss, grief and dark nights of the soul to the redemptive power of nature and the subsequent poetic awareness of our complete belonging to its immanent embrace.

In her dedication Flavia Cosma writes: I dedicate these verses to those attracted by non-existence, who descend the steps of time and discover in their fall the mysteries of it. For them I have dressed in red, taken the buck by the antlers and learned a few things about love.

The book is divided into two sections: Elegies and Other Poems, with the first part comprised of ten cinematic poems, leading us to the scene of what could be the metaphorical intent or the fait accompli of a suicide over the end of a love relationship.

The poems in this first section are set in a hotel, going from a prologue, which forewarns us of danger to the details of the scene of a death. We read of sunken skulls rolling down the alleys, and of distorted bodies lying among the ruins. All balconies, windows and skylights situated on the seventh floor of every hotel should be banned. We assume something horrible has happened on the seventh floor, something deathly and from there, the poems begin to unravel reality by leading us to each level from the ground up.

In the poem Ground Floor, the poet leads us to a yellow ribboned crime scene. There is a body on the asphalt. The words allude to someone who has jumped to their death. Camouflaged/ under golden, sad autumn manes,/ the sidewalk remains as damaging as ever/ to health, bones, blood, flesh./ …/ A body transformed/ to something gelatinous and virtual,/ lies motionless on the asphalt./…/ A yellow ribbon sways, descending/ in the rain of leaves/ from the sky/ and otherwise, as far as the eyes can reach,/ rolls a sea of indifference.

As in entrance to the circles of the psyche’s quintessential hell, we are guided into the first floor’s seeming normality: The room is narrow, rectangular,/ commonplace. It is here that sins of omission, lies and rejection wound the heart: and the outstretched hand and a puzzled bird/ knocks its body against the window.

Progressing from the ground level up to the ninth, gives us some hope, though definitely, something life-altering has transpired on the seventh floor, and we are relieved the protagonist of the poems has survived, filled with grief, but alive still. Love’s illusions ended on the seventh floor. There is no eighth and the ninth floor has phantoms above it, which makes us wonder if the woman is already dead and a ghost herself now, or whether the death is purely metaphorical, a soul death after a painful break-up. We read:

On the ninth floor/the air smells mildewy and stale./ It’s getting hotter and hotter,/ and the room ferments./ On the roof above my head,/ phantoms chase one another/ in broad daylight./ …/ I’m not staying here./ I have to run, disappear./ I can’t breathe this poison.

The death of love in Elegies, is a wounding, unbearable grief. The poems in the second section attempt to return to homeostasis and to transcend deep anguish, shifting the focus towards life. The poems that follow are remedies to salve the pain of living after loss.

The piece Solutions begins the second part of the book titled Other Poems. Like Dante and Virgil emerging out of their harrowing journey through the nether world, to see the stars again, in the first line of this first poem, after the hellish pain of the loss of love, the poet sees how the night gets covered with whirlwinds of stars. Only poetry can save us now, although: people rush themselves, stand in line,/ to consult psychologists, psychiatrists, mediators, shamans, gurus, healers,/ avoiding with great care/ the One who is bleeding on the cross for our sins,/ for the poems we chased away from ourselves/ or refuse to write. For once the pain of the heart is acknowledged and appeased by awareness, the wild animal…/ shaking itself as if from a burden…/ leaves…/ Autumn swallows it and leaves no trace. For, once the pangs of pain are subdued by a return to the peace of breath and awareness, life goes back to its tranquil rhythms: the first day of the year was wrapped in peace, endless peace from the sky.

Life gifts us the remedies our hearts need to survive. We are led to reflect on the ephemeral nature of our passage through life on the earth. In order to survive, we construct language to describe the mystery of what we are, of life, of reality and of love.

Against the coldness of the world, we nestle into love. In the poem Autumn Flowers, like asters and autumn roses, beauty lingers through shades of death as small moments of happiness with the sober eyed cognizance of tardy flowers that face the day’s cold, fearing nothing anymore.

If, as we read in the poem Solutions: our sole achievement, our great success in life, is to deceive time, one hour, as Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence, can indeed hold eternity.

In the poem Shipwrecked, we read: We shipwrecked together/ on the desert of a narrow hotel-room. We were given one hour’s time.

We believe we are hard done by love unmet, but on our life journey we realize that it was not love’s fault, but error, the imperfection of the lover. Love comes, but is imperfect, human, an angel whose arm is crippled, and sadly he limps. Like the blind leading the blind, as in the adage of love is blind, the voice of reason that has been silenced by the hope of love. Reason and clarity finally re-emerge once the ending clarifies that which had been clouded over by love’s blindness. I believe only in you,/ and trust only in you./ You don’t seem to know anything/ and look at me,/ wait for an answer. Reality is not beautiful once the eyes of reason finally see. Once burned we are like a child scalded by fire: in pain, disfigured and alone. The red flowers of passion blooming too fast, wither and shatter as if suicides, yet love survives beyond time. Daydreams save us from harsh realities for it is difficult to continue hoping and living after loss. The poem We so powerfully expresses the inexorable entity which are two lovers once quantum entangled.

We are the primordial embrace,/ the forgotten childhood dream/ become void/ obsession/ …/ two white stones with cut faces,/ looking for each other everywhere, always./ We,/ both immortality and non-being,/ melted into one another.

There are no answers for the suffering of the world and poetry doesn’t offer any either.

To sleep in order not to feel, to be drunk with oblivion is the only way out. Nature offers healing in mysterious ways as in the lines: An angel flashed like lightning over the hills./ For a moment, his wing draped my half-open window. In spite of grief, we can be alive with hands outstretched,/ with the birds, smooth arches in the sky, with the slow rain/ trickling on the windows. Song, dances, echoes and waves of harmonic sound: the universe and reality are shaped by vibration. We can heal by re-entering its rhythm. The sun, the wind and even God do not know what they want. Perhaps no one knows the reason for our existence. It may be just to be, just to exist for life’s sake.

Even facing death, Jesus told us not to be afraid. In the last poem titled I Saw You Under The Olive Trees, Nathaniel…, the ancient olive trees along mount Golgotha speak loudly their own message of survival and resilience. The old stems. Twined, contorted/ they bring hope and sustenance singing in the evening breeze with silver voices. This is what we live for ultimately: to revel in the beauty of the world and to create meaning to feed ourselves and others with the nourishment of hope, happiness hard-won through pain.

Like us, like our lives, those knotted, ancient olive trees withstood millennia of onslaughts yet, fragile and innocent, were born from a drop of sun, from a miracle,/ they exude songs about paths, truths and the endless mystery of Life.

The images of these hauntingly beautiful poems are indeed elegies to life and beyond.

Threaded like sunlight and shadow recurring throughout the collection, Flavia Cosma’s words are a lace of leitmotifs evocative of moments we have all lived or dreamed. Their air-like, vibrant fluidity magically sparks into being a crystal clear, tangible reality. Such a difficult task it is to pin down with words the phenomenology of life and the real world, yet in these poems existence blooms and becomes alive, with all its fears and hopes, its corporeality and sensorial facets, welling up into full dimension.

About the Author

Flavia Cosma is a Romanian born Canadian poet, author and translator. https://www.flaviacosma.com/

About the Reviewer

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews has written seven collections of poetry and two non-fiction books. Her work appears in various journals and anthologies among which: Canadian Literature, The Malahat Review, Descant, The Canada Literary Review, Acta Victoriana, Canadian Poetry Review, The Blue Nib and Lothlorien, among others. Her poetry won first prize in the 2023 International Poetry Prize in Rome’s Antonio De Ferraris contest. Her poem “The First Time I Heard Leonard Cohen'' was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. Her latest book of poems, A Nomenclature for Light was released September 2025 by Mosaic Press. Her poem “Quantum Sparks in the Tabernacle” is the first place winner of the 2025 Ontario Poetry Society’s Long Poem Prize. Josie is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Poetry Society, the Italian Canadian Writers Association and The Heliconian Club for Women in the Literary Arts. She teaches workshops for Poetry in Voice and is the host & coordinator of The Oakville Literary Cafe series.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 1 2025

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 92 pages

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8282095203