Book Reviews

Westerns are populated with larger-than-life characters, but children are notoriously difficult to write convincingly. Kelly’s Chatter and his orphan companions are adult minds in small bodies, making grave enigmatic statements while stone-facedly witnessing the world’s cruelty.

While it’s poetic enough and creates a lush mood of grimy eroticism, leveraging Lardeux’s talent for capturing sensory detail, The Second Substance’s experimentalism wrestles with the musk of the overly familiar.

Henry Doyle’s No Shelter is a plainspoken and authentic record of the grinding and unacknowledged quotidian battle with day labour, despair and displacement.

Geneviève Lebleu explores tense interpersonal relationships between several middle-aged women in a suburban neighborhood through the psychedelic imagery that so defines her lush illustration style.

Céline Huyghebaert’s latest work, translated by Aleshia Jensen, explores the gap left by the death of her father. A melange of form informs the process of understanding the author and her father.

You don’t have to be inside baseball to appreciate Jason Smith’s The Closer, a noir potboiler knocking dingers into the highly detailed background.

Shelterbelts is an understated but forceful debut — a modern prairie drama with its own distinct visual language and memorable cast of characters, an impressive work that leaves one wanting more in the best way possible.

Tear creates a superimposition of architectural and mental space characteristic of psychoanalysis, where physical spaces become symbolic of psychological states. A deeply gothic novel somewhere between Henry James and Shirley Jackson.

Designed and executed like a VTuber’s fever dream, Para-Social Butterfly adapts well-worn avant-garde and modernist poetics to stranger-than-fiction internet subcultures to present a surprisingly sympathetic critique of life under the ubiquitous influence of celebrity.

Kim Fu has an uncanny talent for capturing the subtleties of interpersonal relationships between lovers, between mothers, between perfect strangers in the dark, between ourselves.

Joe Ollmann’s latest work follows the mid-life tailspin of Caleb, a recovering alcoholic and only child of world-famous cartoonist. One would expect Caleb’s sad-clown shtick to get tiresome in this kind of long-form work, but it’s a testament to Ollmann’s storytelling power.

Like peanut butter and jelly, dream poems may not be the most innovative recipe, but the taste of the two together is often much richer than their reputation.