The Seaboard Review: March 31st, 2025
Date Volume 2, Issue 13
As April ushers in more spring-like weather, it will also herald our FIRST anniversary and POETRY MONTH, too! To whet your poetry appetite, Michael Greenstein looks at “Bonememory” a stunning poetry collection by Anna Veprinska. We also have three fiction titles, one for children, the other three handle mature themes such as racism, white supremacy, and an award-winning debut genre-bending collection that merges horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi.
Enjoy!
White by Aviva Rubin
In White, Aviva Rubin offers a vivid and haunting account of how ideology is domesticated—how belief systems reproduce themselves not only in public declarations, but also in the private sphere. What emerges is a narrative of slow disillusionment, less interested in dramatic conversion than in the quiet, painful undoing of one’s origins.
The Animal People Choose a Leader by Richard Wagamese, Illustrated by Bridget George
Richard Wagamese was a man whose soft-spoken and generous nature were evident in his writing and in his actions. His death in 2017 was felt keenly by Canada’s literary community. With the reissuing of Wagamese’s stories as illustrated children’s books, it has been a great comfort to reconnect with his courage, his humanity, and creative spirit, and to s…
Her Body Among Animals by Paola Ferrante
It’s hard for me to do Her Body Among Animals justice and not fall into fan-girldom. As I read, I found myself wishing I might have run into Ferrante when I was a kid, somewhere between Dewey Decimals 398.45 (vampires) and 598.2 (birds) in a library of the imagination… Isn’t that what our favourite books do? Introduce us to thought friends we imagine we…
Michael Greenstein Reviews:
Bonememory by Anna Veprinska
With its courageous illumination, Anna Veprinska’s collection of poetry, Bonememory, belongs deservedly in the University of Calgary’s “Brave & Brilliant Series.” Where Margaret Nowaczyk’s Marrow Memory explores Polish adaptation to Canada, and Yuliya Ilchuk’s A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails probes the trauma of war in Ukraine, Veprinska combines th…
Hot Takes: Brief Notes on Books Present & Past
(Note: clicking on the underlined link takes you to the book’s publisher page for more information or for purchasing purposes)
River Faces North (Taggak Journey Book 1, FriesenPress 2024)) A most powerful read. Anti-utopia may appear grim, but the skill of Anne Smith Nochasak turns the reader's journey into a quest for timeless values: standing one's ground, protecting one's own, never betraying one's beliefs, following one's moral compass. The understated humour that suffused the author's writing in her previous novels, is the canoe in which she navigates the troubled waters of the narrative. Her subtle writing pulls one inside the story, so much so that you are experiencing every moment, every thought the protagonist Flo experiences. And you become invested in the future of all the other characters, none of which is minor. A rare achievement. So looking forward to the sequel! (Contributed by Maria Haka Flokos. M.K. Haka was born in Greece and read Architecture at Cambridge (Girton 1980). An avowed Anglophile, she returned to Greece to practice architecture and currently resides in Athens with her family. The Hesitant Architect was her first novel. The Eyes of the Rock Partridge is her second one, currently in working progress, as is the direct sequel to the Hesitant Architect, Their Brilliant Innocence. https://www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/book-shelf/the-hesitant-architect
Absurdities abound in Survivors of the Hive, (2023, Radiant Press) a collection of four unbridled fictions by Kingston author Jason Heroux (The Amusement Park of Constant Sorrow, etc.). These are surreal tales of people adrift in a world without boundaries, where meaning is fluid, where the past bleeds into the present, where veracity has skipped a beat and no longer seems tethered to a reality we can recognize. Heroux’s fictions constantly surprise and occasionally confound. Again and again, he propels his narratives down a rabbit hole of non-sequiturs where we encounter hellish environments and unsolvable conundrums. Logic plays little role in the actions of Heroux’s characters. On page after page, we witness people behaving against their own best interests, glibly making life-altering decisions on the flimsiest of pretexts. Survivors of the Hive gleefully thumbs its nose at narrative convention and will likely not appeal to readers who like their fiction to follow a straight and narrow line. Unapologetically over the top, its excesses are deliberate and its storylines thoroughly loony. But it’s also fearless, endlessly inventive, and a helluva lot of fun. (Contributed by Ian Colford)
Recently, James was in Fredericton for the launch of Luke Francis Beirne’s SAINTS REST novella. The turnout was great! If you haven’t heard about Luke, you will. He’s an excellent author with three titles from Canadian publisher Baraka Books.
James’ review of SAINTS REST is here.
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Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review!
James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief
