Claudia Dey’s debut novel, Stunt, is written in the present-tense first-person semi-omniscient. That first person is Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old for the first two sections before doubling in age overnight to eighteen for the final three. In meandering flashbacks, she gives us her history, including conception and birth. This knowledge about events she could never remember, in other parts of the city, or in the hearts and minds of characters she passes on the street comes across as absolute fact. Eugenia admits few maybes, few I imagines into her narrative; everything seems to come from a wise and literate oracle, and is often too beautiful to be doubted.
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The Door – Margaret Atwood
Brian PalmuThe Door is divided into five parts: poems on the personal; on writing; on war and politics; on prophecy; on old age. I like the ordering here. It mirrors the progression of a life through identity, creation, worldly concerns, wisdom (real or imagined), and the long goodbye.
Quick – Anne Simpson
Catherine OwenRisk is what interests Anne Simpson these days,” or so states the How Poems Work section on CBC’s site Words at Large, in its synopsis of Quick’s opening poem “Clocks of Rain.” The poem depicts a car accident from the point of view of an observer intent on gathering all the aesthetic data she can from agony, like a morbid Midas. The rhythmic punches of ‘stops’ assonantly counterpointed with the also-repeated ‘clocks’ shape a stanzaic veering on the page that works, but the three chunks of text, the last almost an entire regurgitation of the opening stanza, are replete with lax renditions of pain.
Selling Civilization
David MasonIt isn’t easy being a bookseller these days. We are being assaulted from every side, by what seems to be progress, or at least that’s what people call it. A few years ago I referred in print to the current explosion of instant world-wide communication technology as the Electronic revolution, comparing it to the Industrial [...]
Fuck Books
Steven W. BeattieTime is a blind guide.
Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city. For over a thousand years, only fish wandered Biskupin’s wooden sidewalks. Houses, built to face the sun, were flooded by the silty gloom of the Gasawka River. Gardens grew luxurious in subaqueous silence; lilies, rushes, stinkweed.
No one is born just once. If you’re lucky, you’ll emerge again in someone’s arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.
Fuck books!