In preparation for Issue 46.3: Ghosts, the editors of the issue collected a list of ten works of writing currently haunting them.
Book Reviews
Review of The Bear Woman in Translation
How had Marguerite ended up on that phantom island, the Île des Démons, crawling inside a dark cave surrounded by wild wolverines and hungry, snarling bears? What scandalous affair aboard the ship had led to her abandonment? These insatiable curiosities fill the writer’s mind, and she is swept away in research, trying to escape her own time by imagining life in the 16th century.
Review of Beast at Every Threshold
Poems in Beast at Every Threshold attempt both: the consumption of media and narratives is a process of looking for reflections of the self in another, while to “fluent” is to, in a way, translate between languages of love and touch.
Review of This Has Always Been a War: The Radicalization of a Working Class Queer
In their debut essay collection, Lori Fox examines the intersections of queerness, class, poverty, gender, and mental heath. This Has Always Been a War is written in eleven essays and with each one Fox brings humour, urgency, and just the right amount of anger to conversations that demand attention.
Review of This is My Real Name: A Stripper’s Memoir
Cid V. Brunet’s debut memoir, This Is My Real Name: A Stripper’s Memoir, is a loving, vengeful lament to sex work, based on the ten years Brunet worked as a stripper across Canada under the name Michelle. Anarchist and self-described “queer separatist,” Brunet reconstructs their experiences as Michelle with a precise, devastating eye, offering both the grime and glitter of the industry with the same restrained lyricism.
Review of Narinjah: The Bitter Orange Tree
Alharthi’s work is careful and honest, written with respect for this grandmother character and the familial gravitas she represents. While the readers may feel a tinge of sadness for Bint Aamir and the life she could have lived, there is solace in knowing Zohour’s carries on.
Review of Manikanetish
Originally published in French by Mémoire d’encrier in 2017, Manikanetish is the second novel by Innu writer Naomi Fontaine. A finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, it now appears in English-language translation by Luise von Flotow, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Translation and Interpretation.
The Breaks
Julietta Singh’s The Breaks is at once a letter, a memoir, and a work of narration. In addressing her six-year-old daughter, Singh’s storytelling is, for the next generation, “a map of broken things, a recyclable archive that will spur you to fashion other ways of being alive, of living.”
Letters to Amelia
In the respective epistolary novels The Color Purple and The Quintland Sisters, authors Alice Walker and Vancouver native Shelley Wood enlivened a genre that many literary scholars had dismissed as anachronistic. Both works probed the exploitation of girls within their families and in greater society.
Home of the Floating Lily
Silmy Abdullah’s Home of the Floating Lily begins and ends with the idea of ‘home.’ The stories focus on characters wrestling with migration, containment, and forging new identities as ‘foreigners’ on Canadian soil.
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ROOM 47.4 FULL CIRCLE
Step back with Room into the past, to parents, to childhood homes, and to people once known and loved; dig into themes of grief and healing; and ultimately explore what it means to come full circle in literature.
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