Book Reviews

Review: A Kid Called Chatter

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.

Review: The Second Substance

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.

Review: No Shelter

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

Review: Weeding

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.

Review: Remnants

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.

Review: The Closer

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.

Review: Shelterbelts

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.

Review: Tear

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.

Review: Para-Social Butterfly

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.

Review: Fictional Father

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.

Review: Nightlight

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.