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The Bibliophile: Small (or Large) Machines

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Introducing Best Canadian Poetry 2025

It’s been a few years since it fell to me to send the acceptances for the three Best Canadian anthologies: Ashley Van Elswyk, our editorial assistant, has lately managed this massive and potentially unwieldy task with her usual good humour and organizational grace. But as I recall, the poets’ responses tended to be the most entertaining. These ranged from effusive thanks directed to the messenger, who truly deserved none—all credit to series editor Anita Lahey and our guest editors, who annually make the selections, buoyed by seemingly bottomless stores of enthusiasm and curiosity—to what amounted to gentle phishing accusations, so surprised are some writers to learn they’ve made the year’s list. I have certainly felt the same way on the receiving end of one of those magical emails dispatched from the mysterious island of editors: Who are you, really, and why are you subjecting me to such a cruel joke? Writing is failure, as a wise soul reminds us, but every now and then—annually, for at least fifty Canadian poets—maybe it isn’t, and readers of Best Canadian Poetry are the rich recipients of these successes.

Photo: A stack of the new Best Canadian Poetry 2025 selected by Aislinn Hunter, with longtime series editor Anita Lahey.

Occasionally a writer would ask me what it was we meant by “best,” or by “Canadian,” though I can’t remember a poet asking what we meant by “poetry.” I doubt this is because we each have an answer ready. It’s far more likely that we are glancing sideways at each other and hoping not to be asked, either because we haven’t a clue at the moment, or because we know precisely and with a fierce certainty we’d either be embarrassed to assert or afraid to argue for and fail to defend. On my brighter days I believe and happily insist that what poetry is is an attempt to understand what poetry is, and on my darker ones I lament the same. On my pedantic days, of which one is Friday, November 22, I am partial to the offerings of William Carlos Williams—“A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words”—and Robert Frost: “a momentary stay against confusion.” I like the Williams for the veneer of exactitude it undercuts at the same time it declares itself, how its metaphor invites extending. Small like a pencil sharpener, or like a really big humidifier? Large like Linotype, or like a particle accelerator? Yes, and yes, and yes and yes. Frost, of course, is Frostier: as the key turns in the sonnet’s lock, for at least that instant, something has tumbled into place.

Inevitably our BCP editors must face this question and its endless answers again and again as they compile their initial list of one hundred poems and meet over a period of months to discuss and refine that selection to just fifty. I don’t envy them their task—every poem, and every acknowledged answer, means another crossed off the list—yet those decisions yield yet another entryway, another place to stand. Having completed her selection for BCP25, Aislinn Hunter, this year’s guest editor, writes in her introduction:

I believe that poems behave like living things. They open and close, they shift and grow. Poetry’s essential elements move into us—letter and word shapes swimming past retinal neurons and along phonological and lexical routes, eventually meeting neurons and synapses that light up the forest / the temple / the mess hall of our brains. Language—poetry’s essence—changes our physiology, which is to say that a poem’s doing to us is as real as rain on skin. Of course, the power of the art we’re meeting matters, as does the state of alertness we’re in.

In our disembodied age, in which we are increasingly more likely to encounter one another as pixels than as people, what a beautifully embodied understanding of the ways that poems can do their work on us, can remind us how to slow and even stop, if only for a momentary stay.

And so, Dear Reader, I leave you with three of my favourites from this year’s edition: Molly Peacock’s “Honey Crisp,” Bertrand Bickersteth’s “A Poem about Black Boy’s Horse,” and “He/him” by Y.S. Lee. Each is accompanied by the poet’s biography and their comments on the making of the poem, a favourite feature among BCP readers old and new. I hope they’ll find you, wherever you are, and leave you feeling a little bit more real, open to yourself and to the world we share.

p.s. Books, I’m told, make great holiday gifts, especially ones that come price-bundled and beautifully wrapped in Ingrid Paulson’s superb Best Canadian Series design.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

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Honey Crisp

Molly Peacock

Hello wizenface, hello apple,
understudy in the fridge
since March (it’s September).
Hello wrinkly red cheeks,
I’ll bet you’re almost a year old,
born last autumn,
kept in the fruit storage built
half-underground on the farm,
then, in the snow, sold to me.
Hello my honey crisp (well,
my honey, no longer crisp . . .),
are you asking why you
haven’t been eaten by now?

Because that man hewed to his routines:
an apple for lunch every day,
the same red punctuation.
You were earmarked for the date
he slipped from my arms & we both
slid to the floor, red angel, are you
listening? 911, hospital, hospice,
and ten days later (you were
about six months old then),
he died and was carried
to a cold shelf.

Hello smiley-stem, hello days
moving you from spot to spot.
Hello week where I forgot
and left you at the back and
went about my new life.
Greetings new groceries!
Their jumble causes a re-
arrangement of your bin,
so I have to pick you up
—would you rather
have been eaten and
lived on as energy?
Not yet, not yet, my pomme.
Hello soft wrinkled
face in my palms.

—from The Walrus

Molly Peacock lives in Toronto and has published eight books of poems, including The Widow’s Crayon Box (W. W. Norton, 2024). She inaugurated The Best Canadian Poetry series in 2008 with Tightrope Books, editing it until 2017, and is delighted to return as a contributor. Peacock is also the author of two biographies of women artists, The Paper Garden (Emblem Editions, 2011) and Flower Diary (ECW Press, 2021), and the memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece (Riverhead, 1998).

Of “Honey Crisp,” Peacock writes, “After my husband died, I cried for twenty-eight days straight. On the twenty-ninth day, I woke without tears, picked up a blue mechanical pencil, and began to write the poems that would become The Widow’s Crayon Box. ‘Honey Crisp’ literally began when I walked to the refrigerator. There was my husband’s last apple—I couldn’t throw it out. In the back of my mind was William Blake, who spoke to a Tyger. Could I write a poem where I spoke to the apple, telling it what happened to my husband, reminding it of its origins, how I bought it, and why it would never be eaten? That idea could go very, very wrong! But widowhood made me fearless. I pulled out a purple pad (what other colour do widows use?) and drafted the poem. It amazed me that if I was simple and direct, like a seventeenth-century poet talking to an animal, I could infuse the poem with all I felt. P.S. The apple stayed in the fridge after the poem. I painted a watercolour of it. Then put it back. A long time after that, I buried the almost-dried apple with the geraniums in my balcony garden.”

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A Poem about Blackboy’s Horse

Bertrand Bickersteth

Boy’s horse stepped in a badger’s hole, lost her footing
and fell. Boy was flipped

in the air. His foot caught in the stirrup. He felt a pain
shoot through his ankle,

felt the inertia of his flight take over the topography, twist
westerly, still tilting to the east.

His body was a loose spigot pivoting around the fulcrum
of a meaningless ankle.

He felt his fingers slipping through her withers, felt the fear
of the horse rushing to the ground

above him. He couldn’t stop any of it. Couldn’t stop himself
from imagining the unknowable

impact or the whistle of weight to follow. He knew what was
coming. He knew the soil

he was headed for. Knew its knowledge. The chemistry of
its creativity: mildly gleysolic

chernozem, churning life and his livelihood as he knew it.
Knew it, too, as foreign, as far

from familiar as he was from family. He tried to imagine a family
but their image burst into the falling

air before him, before fading, as always, into the darkness
of dirt. Then came the weight

of sadness and the piercing pain of the forgone, unmentioned,
unmurmured, like that flash of green,

that patch of wild timothy whose individual blades know nothing
of their shared past,

know nothing of their sibling entanglement, nothing at all
of their intertwined roots

whose domain is the catacombs beneath the crust, whose action
is downward groping, like fingers of ancestry,

a blind quest in the sorrow of soil, forever fumbling, forever finicking
for the unknowable mother of darkness.

—from The Fiddlehead

Bertrand Bickersteth lives in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary) in Treaty Seven. He is the author of The Response of Weeds (NeWest Press, 2020), which was the recipient of multiple awards, including the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. He currently teaches at Olds College and is writing a collection of poems on Black cowboys.

Of “A Poem about Blackboy’s Horse,” Bickersteth writes, “After suffering from a year-long bout of writer’s block—brought on by the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020—I eventually found my way back to writing through the topic of Black cowboys. I was struck by how iconic cowboys are to the west and yet how unknown the existence of Black cowboys is (yes, Black cowboys here in Canada). I began writing a series of poems fleshing out their histories and, for some reason, I became obsessed with the moment of death in one of their lives. John Ware, the most famous/unknown cowboy in Canada, died tragically, ironically, when his horse tripped and fell on top of him. I was compelled to write poems that repeated this moment from different vantages. I think knowing that our national awareness of Black cowboys was doomed to die, I wanted to hold on to him as long as I could, stubbornly pause everything in the moment before the end, desperately cling to that moment when his Black life still mattered.”

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He / him

Y. S. Lee

At seventeen, you almost crashed the Firebird
on a road whose name we’ve long forgotten.
Flare of yellow in the headlights, then
you stood on the spongy brakes,
wrenched the wheel hard right. We lurched
into stillness, just shy of the ditch

In the minute afterward
engine ticking
cicadas silenced
you asked, Does life feel real to you now?
I think I laughed. I definitely thought
No

When you tell me your big news
it’s like that moment when the optometrist
flicks one final lever and the soggy letters
suddenly surface, bold and sleek
against a field of light. Oh,
there you are.

—from Grain

Y. S. Lee lives in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Exit Permit (Anstruther Press, 2023), and a winner of Contemporary Verse 2’s Foster Poetry Prize. Her fiction includes the award-winning YA mystery series The Agency (Candlewick Press) and a forthcoming picture book, Mrs. Nobody (Groundwood Books).

Lee writes, “I wrote ‘He/him’ for my high-school bestie when he came out as a trans man. I was thrilled for him and wanted to celebrate his identity. Gender transition is sometimes seen as slow and arduous, but I also want to keep sight of what a triumph it is. Plus, he and I did our share of impulsive stuff as teens and I’m interested in how even dumbass near-disasters can offer moments of insight, if we pay attention.”

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20 Stores for 20 Years: Interabang

The second independent bookstore we’re celebrating as part of our “20 stores for 20 years” anniversary project is Interabang Books, located in Dallas, Texas. Lori Feathers, bookseller extraordinaire, chose the genre bending memoir A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa as her favorite Biblioasis pick, and our publisher Dan shared why he knew Lori would be an amazing advocate for our books from their first meeting.

Photo: The eye-catching front entrance of Interabang Books invites all to come in and browse for their next read.

Dan first met Lori at  the 2019 Winter Institute where she quickly became a vocal champion for Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport—and went on to champion many more of our books. Dan says, “I’ve met few other people as committed to the vocation of bookselling, and to independent publishing and literature in translation, as Lori. She’s fearless as a bookseller and literary critic; and as a champion of exceptional books, her enthusiasm and commitment knows no bounds and has resulted in some of my favourite literary things, including her podcast (with Sam Jordison) Across the Pond and her North American edition of The Republic of Consciousness Prize. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she’s also a dancer: she’s as nimble and elegant as they come.”

And here’s why Lori chose A Ghost in the Throat as her favorite Biblioasis book: “More than almost any other book that I’ve read in the past few years, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s beautifully bewitching A Ghost in the Throat has stayed with me. In it a young, stay-at-home mother becomes obsessed with another woman, long deceased. Her muse is Eibhlín Dubh who, as a young mother herself, composed a legendary, 18th-century lament for her murdered husband, The Keen for Art O’Laoghaire. Although centuries and social class separate the two women, the narrator is irresistibly drawn to Dubh’s Keen. Ghost depicts the narrator’s quest to uncover the essence of Eibhlín Dubh from a history in which she has been silenced. This extraordinary book reclaims Dubh for posterity, reanimating her via Ní Ghríofa’s extraordinary and resonant writing.”

Photo: Lori Feathers posing with her Biblioasis pick, A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Why We Published It

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Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly newsletter here!

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Editors’ note: While The Bibliophile was taking its summer nap, we were wide awake and thinking about some kinds of features we’d like to run in this space. Thus, this week’s installment is the first in a charmingly irregular series we should probably call “Why We Published It,” which debuts with Vanessa’s response to Anne Hawk’s The Pages of the Sea.

Photo: You can pre-order a copy of The Pages of the Sea today!

As a kid growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1980s, I spent a lot of time by myself. We lived on the rural outskirts of an already rural place, four miles from a town of fewer than 1,600. Between the turquoise waters of the public swimming pool—what was to me, at age six, the hallowed centre of the known universe—and the farmhouse I grew up in: cornfields and fields of tobacco and soy, rolling hills and the rocky glens and old-growth trees that stair-step the lower third of the the county down to the wide Susquehanna. A trip into town to the grocery store or drive-through at the bank was a source of excitement, and seeing my father’s brown Ford Ranger emerge from behind the woods at the top of the ridge that formed the southern edge of the little valley we lived in engendered a chanting sort of song that I’d sing as he made the left hand turn onto our little road, technically two lanes, but closer to one and a half, and into the long stone drive at the end of a day he’d spent pumping gas and changing tires at the gas station in town.

When I was eight or nine, my father got a new job, one that required he wake at 4:30 in the morning and drive an hour to a welding shop where, from what I could tell, he spent the day burning tiny holes in his t-shirts. Around this time, my mother stopped her part-time work cleaning houses and took a night shift stocking shelves at the grocery store. Now she slept all day, and left for her job as my father was coming home, exhausted, from his. What did I know, what did I know, as Robert Hayden asked, of the sacrifices they made, what it took from them to meet their responsibilities the best they could? Not much, if anything at all.

I did know there was a meadow with a modest herd of Holsteins and that sometimes there was a bull, and when that was the case I could not climb the metal gate or slip under the barbed wire to take the old dirt footpath along the dry creek to the tree with the bent trunk, the moss-covered one I liked to sit on. I knew I had to make myself lunch in the summer, and quietly, so as to not wake my mother, and when she was promoted, for her hard work, to a daytime position, I knew where we kept the key to the front door to let myself in after school. I can’t remember if I was told to lock it behind me: probably not. But other than these rules and similar, and school, and church most Sundays, I was left almost entirely to my own devices. I swung on the tire swing that hung from the weeping willow, and played in the sandbox, and practiced with my youth-sized recurve bow, shooting at a stack of haybales against the barn. I kicked a soccer ball against a wall and practiced free throws in the driveway and shot my BB gun at the stop sign on top of the hill, straining to hear the faint ping. I walked the fencerows back towards the deeper woods as far as I was not afraid to go, and I read stacks and stacks and stacks of books.

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Books: have we come round, at last, to the point? The Pages of the Sea, a debut novel by Anne Hawk, landed in my inbox one day in April courtesy of Dan, who’d received it from the good people at Weatherglass Books, an independent press in the UK. I took a galley home and started reading that night. (Some childhood habits, happily, never change.) In the opening scene, Wheeler, the novel’s young protagonist, is sitting outside watching her aunt, Celeste, go in and out of the house:

We quickly learn that Wheeler and her two sisters have recently moved into the house they now share with their two aunts and three cousins because their mother has gone overseas to work in England, and “[e]ach month a postal order arrived from England covering the sisters’ room and board.”

When Tant’Celeste speaks to Wheeler, it’s to ask a question she can’t answer: where the rest of the children have gone. When Wheeler doesn’t respond, Celeste sends her to look for them, and when she returns alone, she’s not sure what to make of her aunt’s response:

It’s a beautiful piece of exposition, these opening four pages: Hawk immerses us in Wheeler’s world, capturing the child’s discomfort in the unfamiliar situation and her uncertainty about the mysterious actions and emotions of adults, and establishing both conflict and setting, one inextricable from the other. Wheeler’s interior monologue, written in the rich cadences of her native Caribbean English, with dialogue rendered in the same, voice the lived experience of a time and place and together join a standard English narration in what Hawk describes as a collaboration between Englishes that complement and often overlap each other. It’s a technique that puts me in mind of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s brilliant vernacular novel of the American South, which starts gazing out towards a metaphorical sea and then introduces a young protagonist growing up without a father or mother, and of another of our favourite Biblioasis books: Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen, with its inventive English translation, by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, of an untranslatable Norwegian dialect—and another novel that begins with a small girl living on a small island, wondering about the world of adults. Like both of those books—one a classic of Modern literature, one an International Booker finalist and bestselling Biblioasis novel—this one welcomes its readers into its world on its own terms from a position of imaginative generosity and of love. It’s often said a great book teaches you how to read it: let me be one of the first, and certainly not the last, to say this is a great book.

For reasons likely obvious by now, my response was: sign it up. And so I couldn’t be more pleased to be writing this to you, Dear Reader, the week before the Canadian publication of Anne Hawk’s brilliant debut novel, The Pages of the Sea. I hope it will find you, wherever you are and wherever you are from, and it will remind you what literature is for. And I hope you’ll stay tuned for September 27, when The Bibliophile will feature an original essay by Anne Hawk on Caribbean English.

BC readers: Upstart & Crow will host the launch of The Pages of the Sea on October 3, 2024 at 7:00PM.

Vanessa Stauffer
Managing Editor

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Keep up with us!

Media Hits: BURN MAN, THE FUTURE, YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

THE FUTURE

The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou (Sep 5, 2024), according to CBC Books is the #1 bestselling Canadian fiction title in Canada this week! You can view the full list here.

The Future was featured in the Windsor Star. The article was published on January 13, 2024, and you can read the full profile here.

Trevor Wilhelm writes:

“Dystopian novel The Future, published by Windsor’s Bibliosias, is in the running for a national competition to determine the one book to rule them all.”

Catherine Leroux, author of The Future, has been interviewed on CBC: Let’s Go. The interview aired on January 15, 2024. Listen to the full interview here.

Grab your copy of The Future here!

BURN MAN

Burn Man by Mark Anthony Jarman (Nov 21, 2023) received an outstanding review in the New York Times! The review was published online on January 13, 2024. You can read the full review here.

Lincoln Michel writes:

“Anyone who enjoys poetry in prose, who feels enlivened by language and struck by sentences, will find much to admire in Burn Man. Jarman’s stories are full of violence, tragedy and mistakes. Yet there’s plenty of humor and heart too. […] Burn Man left me seeing a bit more beauty in our hurting-heart world.”

Burn Man was featured again in the New York Times by Greg Cowles as part of their Editor’s Choice column: “9 New Books We Recommend This Week.” The article was published online on January 25, 2024, and can be read here.

Cowles says, of Burn Man:

“The Canadian author Jarman may not be a familiar name in the United States just yet, but this anthology aims to fix that.”

Burn Man was reviewed by Andrew Hood on The Bookshelf’s website. The review was published online on January 19, 2024, and can be read here.

Hood writes:

“If I would compare Jarman to anyone other than himself, it would be to Tom Waits. Post-Kathleen Brennan Tom Waits. Yes, these are stories in the generic sense, just as a Tom Waits song is, technically, a song, but they are made of different things. For Waits, anything is percussive if you bang on it hard enough in the right place, and Jarman bashes language in the same way. The instrumentation in a Jarman story may sometimes sound conventional, but once isolated, sounds like nothing other than what it is. […] Reading Jarman is often, and I mean this in the best way possible, like drinking from a fire hose.”

Burn Man has also been excerpted in Lit Hub. The excerpt was published online on January 17, 2024—take a look here.

Get Burn Man here!

YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS

Your Absence Is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated by Philip Roughton (March 5, 2024)  is an Indie Next Pick for March and has also received an outstanding starred review in Publishers Weekly. The review was published online on January 14, 2024. You can read the full review here.

Publishers Weekly writes:

“What makes this so irresistible is the narrator’s constant optimism as he probes profound questions from within the murk of his consciousness (“Give me darkness, and then I’ll know where the light is”). Stefánsson is poised to make his mark on the world stage.”

Order your copy of Your Absence is Darkness here!

LOVE NOVEL

Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić was featured on Kirkus Reviews as one of “20 Titles You Can Read in a Week.” The article was published online on January 24, 2024. Check out the full list here.

Order your copy of Love Novel here!

BEST CANADIAN POETRY 2024 & BEST CANADIAN ESSAYS 2024

Best Canadian Essays 2024 and Best Canadian Poetry 2024 (Nov 14, 2023) have been reviewed in The Miramichi Reader. The article was published online on January 23, 2024. You can read the full review here.

Christina Barber writes of the anthologies:

“A testament to the importance of literature in Canada … it is a powerful body that celebrates the creative and literary spirit of Canadians from coast to coast to coast.”

Best Canadian Essays 2024 was also reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press. The article was published online on January 13, 2024, and you can read the full review here.

Susan Huebert writes:

“Each of the authors in Best Canadian Essays 2024 offers a particular style and perspective, but the essays work together to provide a picture of some of the issues Canadians have been facing. Many readers are likely to find something to interest them in this short collection of essays.”

Grab your copy of Essays here and Poetry here!

Check out all three Best Canadian anthologies here!

CASE STUDY, CONFESSION WITH KEITH, TRY NOT TO BE STRANGE and more: Reviews and Lists!

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IN THE NEWS!

CASE STUDY

Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet (November 1, 2022) has been reviewed in the Michigan Daily! The review was published online on September 21, 2022. Read the full review here.

Julian Wray writes,

“Case Study reflects on relationships of power: the physical power of abusive men over women, the lingering power of memory over oneself. It reflects on the power of one’s wishes over one’s reality, the schism we create in ourselves when we resign to our present state and nothing more. Rebecca is a case study of what happens when desires run away on their own, such that a person is left to watch them go.”

Case Study has also received a starred review in Foreword Reviews! The review will be printed in their November/December issue. Check out the full review here.

An excerpt from the review:

“The fictional author and Burnet share the same initials, which should be a clue as to how close the book will come to breaking the fourth wall … The matryoshka-style layering of narratives, each dependent on the other, is engaging and disorienting. Case Study is an immersive novel that stretches its fiction to fact-like proportions.”

Order your copy of Case Study here!

CONFESSIONS WITH KEITH

Confessions With Keith by Pauline Holdstock (September 20, 2022) was reviewed at the Winnipeg Free Press by Bev Sandell Greenberg! The article, “Domestic story of a dysfunctional delight” was published online on September 26, 2022. You can read the full article here.

Greenberg writes,

“Replete with sensory details, the four-part narrative consists of journals written in Vita’s voice in succinct, cheeky prose … The journals establish a sense of intimacy that endears us to Vita, but they also convey a level of tension palpable on every page … Holdstock’s fast-paced comic novel with its entertaining narrative will captivate readers, especially those who relish domestic tales.”

Confessions With Keith was reviewed in The Vancouver Sun by Brett Josef Grubisic! The article, “Holdstock extracts witty, painful glimpse into one woman’s revolving life” was published online on September 21, 2022. Read the full article here.

Grubisic writes,

“Magnetic … artfully expressed—funny, honest, wry, intimate—private thoughts … On page after assured page, Vita [is] confounded thrilled, irked, hurt, and envious—about minutia as well as the big picture—and all of which are facets of what she calls ‘the senselessness of human existence.'”

Get your copy of Confessions with Keith here!

ON BROWSING

On Browsing by Jason Guriel (October 8, 2022) has been excerpted in The Walrus. They’ve titled it “I Miss Being Bored at the Mall.”

You can read the whole excerpt here.

Grab your copy of On Browsing here!

BIG MEN FEAR ME

Big Men Fear Me by Mark Bourrie (October 18, 2022) has been included in the Quill & Quire Fall Books Preview published online on September 21, 2022. Check out the full list here.

Attila Berki writes,

“Mark Bourrie revives the life of George McCullagh—a charismatic high-school dropout, a self-made millionaire, the creator and owner of the Globe and Mail, and a man with great political potential—whose fall in the mid-20th century would be as steep as his rise to prominence.”

Order your copy of Big Men Fear Me here!

TRY NOT TO BE STRANGE

Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda by Michael Hingston (September 13, 2022) has been featured in the New York Times as part of their Newly Published column. The article was published on September 21, 2022. You can read the full article here.

The New York Times writes,

“This combination literary history, travelogue and cautionary tale tells the history of the formerly uninhabited Caribbean island of Redonda and its development into a ‘micronation’ ruled by writers, beginning with the science fiction author M.P. Shiel in 1880.”

Try Not to Be Strange was also featured in Fine Books & Collections as one of their editor’s picks. The article was published online on September 16, 2022. You can read the full article here.

Fine Books & Collections writes,

“Combining travelogue, memoir, and literary history, Hingston has crafted a fascinating tale full of eccentric characters. Editions of all sizes play a role in the drama, and bibliophiles will also relish the author’s auction experience.”

Grab your copy of Try Not to Be Strange here!

THIS TIME, THAT PLACE

This Time, That Place by Clark Blaise (October 18, 2022) has been reviewed at Kirkus Reviews. The review will go live September 28, 2022.

The reviewer writes,

“These stories cover ground not only geographically. They are also crowded with character and incident, always fiercely and smartly observed … Blaise has gathered here a smart, sprawling collection of stories about family, rootlessness, and identity.”

Grab your copy of This Time, That Place here!

CHEMICAL VALLEY, EYES OF THE RIGEL, THE AFFIRMATIONS, HAIL THE INVISIBLE WATCHMAN: Media Hits

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IN THE NEWS!

CHEMICAL VALLEY

Chemical Valley cover

Chemical Valley by David Huebert (October 19, 2021), has been featured by CBC Books as part of ‘11 Canadian books to read for Earth Day 2022’! The list was posted online on April 22, 2022. Check out the full list here.

Chemical Valley was also reviewed by Peter Szuban in PRISM International! The review was posted online on April 21, 2022. Read the full review here.

Szuban writes,

“The characters in David Huebert’s new short story collection Chemical Valley live in a world that has been molded and shaped by neoliberalism and the oil industry—where the vulnerability of their bodies is constantly being subjected to a vague calculus that includes economic precarity, shifting personal relationships, and a natural environment lurching towards catastrophe. It’s a situation that could easily elicit nihilism, doom, and mourning—a kind of eco-grief—and yet, the various stories in this collection strive and yearn towards a sublime toxicity that finds beauty amidst the debris, and accordingly, in the lives of its inhabitants.”

Get your copy of Chemical Valley here!

EYES OF THE RIGEL

The third novel in Roy Jacobsen‘s The Barrøy Chronicles, Eyes of the Rigel (April 5, 2022), has been excerpted in Lit Hub! The excerpt was posted online on April 21, 2022. You can read the full excerpt here.

Get your copy of Eyes of the Rigel here!

THE AFFIRMATIONS

The Affirmations by Luke Hathaway (April 5, 2022) was excerpted in Lit Hub. The excerpt was published online on April 22, 2022.

You can view the poem, “As the Hart Panteth After the Water Brooks,” here.

Get your copy of The Affirmations here!

HAIL, THE INVISIBLE WATCHMAN

Hail, the Invisible Watchman by Alexandra Oliver (April 5, 2022), was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader. The review was published online on April 25, 2022. Check out the full review here.

Alison Manley writes:

“Hail, the Invisible Watchman by Alexandra Oliver is a true triumph, with tight, well-constructed poems creating multiple worlds and stories. Oliver’s use of formal structure and metre is flawless, rich and enveloping. […] Oliver flits between contemporary settings to more distant ones, from the mundane every day to pop culture and all strange manners in between. […] The range of this collection is spectacular. The twists that Oliver places in her verses are sly and magical, the way she uses language and metre to craft such strong imagery in a handful of lines is truly masterful.”

Get your copy of Hail, the Invisible Watchman here!