Book Reviews

Table Manners

Table Manners

Table Manners is an unsettling and deeply hilarious book of poetry that is best devoured like any good meal—slowly and with intention. Table Manners, the debut collection of poetry by Toronto writer, editor, and teacher Catriona Wright, is a bold exploration of food,...

Bad Endings

Bad Endings

Carleigh Baker’s debut collection of stories is a weird and wonderful frolic through the vagaries of relationships, especially their ends and mostly from the perspective of women. Bad Endings, Carleigh Baker’s debut collection of stories, is a weird and wonderful...

Tarry This Night

Tarry This Night

In a world not unimaginably different from our own, members of a religious cult wait out a civil war in an underground bunker. Tarry This Night, Kristyn Dunnion’s second novel, is an unsettling tale told in turns by five members of the Family, including Father Ernst,...

Letters to My Father

Letters to My Father

Bänoo Zan’s second book of poetry, Letters to My Father, opens with her rationale for seeking refuge in poetry, and fleeing from stories. Bänoo Zan’s second book of poetry, Letters to My Father, opens with her rationale for seeking refuge in poetry, and fleeing from...

Children Shouldn’t Use Knives and Other Tales

Children Shouldn’t Use Knives and Other Tales

Children Shouldn’t Use Knives and Other Tales shreds the yellow ribbons of childhood sentimentality and, instead, offers an exploration of what it feels like to be small and vulnerable in a stormy world. I’m not nostalgic for childhood. Childhood was terrifying—the...

The Sweetest One

The Sweetest One

What if three of your older siblings died at age eighteen after they left town? The narrator of Mah’s first novel, Chrysler Wong, longs to leave the fictional town of Spring Hills, Alberta, but is paralyzed by her belief in a curse against her family. By Melanie Mah,...

Homegoing

Homegoing

Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing is a timely and important contribution to literature, and to conversations about anti-black racism in popular culture . . . This novel should be read within this context, giving pause for reflection and examination on how we allowed...

a place called No Homeland

a place called No Homeland

Many of Thom’s poems deploy this bold, storytelling voice, foregrounding the wisdom of what is said, experienced, lived, rumoured, and gossiped in lieu of traditional history with its myopia of normativity. a place called No Homeland consistently examines the...

Art Lessons

Art Lessons

Koller’s novel explores universal concepts of what it means to exist and grow, to root and transplant—as an artist, a woman, a human, a living thing. Art Lessons has the potential to take root in your heart—let it. “Trees, for me, are like humans,” writes Cassie, the...

Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne

Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne

Part art criticism, part biography, part lyric journey, Painter, Poet, Mountain studies the intersection of inspiration, experience, and creation that is inherent to various forms of artistic expression. Ut pictura poesis (“Just as painting, so, too, poetry”), perhaps...

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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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