Jade Wallace surfs the waves of sound and sea that crash upon the shores of Renée Agatep‘s latest chapbook Ohio Radio (Wolfson Press, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-95006-615-5 | 64 pp | $15USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY One experiences duality listening to the radio these days. There’s something quaint about it now — maybe not old-fashioned but running a little behind the times. Its continued existence is a gesture of polite rebellion against the impersonality of streaming
Jade Wallace maps the Southern Ontario Gothic geographies of Anne Baldo’s debut short fiction collection Morse Code for Romantics (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2023). ISBN: 978-0-88984-456-8 | 208 pp | $19.95 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Lately I have sensed a revival of interest in Southern Ontario Gothic. In the past couple of years, multiple fiction debuts such as Erica McKeen’s Tear and Brooke Lockyer’s Burr have deftly employed the genre to tell contemporary stories, and
Jade Wallace traces a genealogy of philosophy and flora, in John Nyman‘s latest full-length poetry collection A Devil Every Day (Palimpsest Press, 2023). ISBN 978-1-990293-46-7 | 88 pp | $19.95 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY John Nyman’s sophomore poetry collection A Devil Every Day is a book preoccupied with contemporary incarnations of evil. Several of the poems in the book read like character studies of the Devil, as for instance ‘The Genuine Devil,’ where “The
Jade Wallace unpacks the overflowing contents of Hollay Ghadery‘s debut poetry collection Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-98927-491-0 | 80 pp | $20 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY When reading a book of poetry, I always like to start with the title. Which sounds silly, because all of us probably see the title of a book before we peruse its contents, but what I mean is that I like to sit with the title,
In this special edition of USEREVIEW, section editor Jade Wallace reviews three seemingly very different books: a novel, a graphic novel and a collection of poetry. What unites all three is an impossible longing to return: to a time, to a place, to a self that is forever lost. #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Brooke LockyerBurr (Nightwood Editions, 2023)ISBN: 978-0-88971-442-7 | 288 pp | $22.95 CAD | BUY Here It is easy to draw comparisons between Brooke Lockyer’s Burr
Kōtuku Titihuia NuttallTauhou (House of Anansi Press, 2023)ISBN | 978-1-48701-169-7 | 224 pp | $24.99 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Tauhou, the debut full-length offering of Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, is billed as a novel and at first blush I could not really understand why. The forms that make up this book are eclectic. Some ‘chapters’ are poems, others are fables, though most can be read like self-contained works of short fiction. Characters who are central
As a Reviews Editor, I try to be conscientious about only ordering ARCs that are likely to actually get reviewed for CAROUSEL. Publishers, especially small presses, often run on tight budgets, and I don’t want them to spend time and money sending out books that will languish on a shelf. But I’m also only human, and sometimes I miscalculate, and we end up with more books than review slots, or a book I would have
Erica McKeenTear (Invisible Publishing, 2022)ISBN | 978-1-77843-006-0 | 304 pp | $22.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY The latest addition to the ‘monstrous feminine‘ literary canon is Erica McKeen‘s debut novel Tear. Aptly described by its synopsis as a “horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman,” Tear shadows its protagonist, Frances, from her childhood with a deadbeat father, an ambivalent mother and her only friend Jasper, to her early adulthood as a reticent and isolated young woman on the
Carol Harvey Steskirump + flank (NeWest Press, 2021)ISBN | 978-1-77439-028-3 | 96 pp | $19.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Carol Harvey Steski’s poetry debut rump + flank is, as the title suggests, concerned with the body, with the essential physical substance of existence — but also with the bawdy, with the erotic, the indecent, the amusing. Divided into three sections, the collection is book-ended by ‘Various Cuts’ and ‘Scar,’ their names clearly evoking the
Karl JirgensThe Razor’s Edge (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2022)ISBN | 978-0-88984-450-6 | 152 pp | $18.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Karl Jirgens gave me some advice years ago that I haven’t been able to forget. He said (and here I paraphrase): “If you want to be a writer, don’t become a publisher.” Whatever wisdom there might be in that aphorism, it doesn’t seem to apply very well to Jirgens himself. He was the editor and
Trynne Delaneythe half-drowned (Metatron Press, 2022)ISBN | 978-1-98835-525-2 | 144 pp | $18.00 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY I became acquainted with Trynne Delaney’s writing through their compelling, experimental ‘dark patterns: matrilineal family curse,’ described as a “poem nested in a genetic pedigree,” that appeared in the “2S+QTBIPOC” issue of CV2. Prior to book publication, a preponderance of Delaney’s publicly available work appears to have been poetry, including their self-published debut chapbook, death of the
Tasnuva HaydenAn Orchid Astronomy (University of Calgary Press, 2022)ISBN 978-1-77385-271-3 | 196 pp | $24.99 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Tasnuva Hayden’s debut poetry collection is a weighty 186 pages of poetry, segmented into 5 long, semi-narrative poems (ranging from 28 to 40 pages each), variously titled, and 10 short poems (1 page each), titled after, and focusing on, individual constellations. The semi-narrative poems orbit around particular subjects, which are both as changeless and changing
Dawn DumontThe Prairie Chicken Dance Tour (Freehand Books, 2021)ISBN 978-1-98829-887-0 | 306 pp | $24.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY The prairie chicken — a rare bird that nearly went extinct in the early twentieth century but is now working on a comeback — is known as a strong flyer, so it only makes sense that a book named after the species would take the reader on a whirlwind tour. In Dawn Dumont‘s latest novel
Jim JohnstoneInfinity Network (Véhicule Press, 2022)ISBN 978-1-55065-591-1 | 78 pp | $19.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Eternity is rendered a slender chronicle in Jim Johnstone’s latest poetry collection, Infinity Network. Where his previous book, The Chemical Life (2017), examined the self as an entity mediated by medication, recreational drugs and various other forms of biological intervention, Johnstone’s current work considers how our identities are incarnated and refracted through the prism of digital media. As
Aaron SchneiderWhat We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press, 2021)ISBN 978-1-77422-029-0 | 224 pp | $22 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY What We Think We Know is ostensibly Schneider’s debut collection of short fiction, though it tests the limits of that designation in various ways. On the one hand, there’s the fact that two of the stories in the collection are virtually novella-length; and on the more experimental hand there’s the fact that many of
C.J. LavigneIn Veritas (NeWest Press, 2020)ISBN 978-1-98873-283-1 | 344 pp | $21.95 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Like many works of speculative fiction, C.J. Lavigne‘s debut novel In Veritas is interested in examining the lives and significance of characters who are outsiders. The narrative primarily follows the protagonist Verity, a lifelong synaesthete who has previously been hospitalized for so-called hallucinations, but which are in fact glimpses into another world that exists within our own world,
Paul B. PreciadoCan the Monster Speak? (Semiotext(e), 2021)Translated by Frank WynneISBN 978-1-63590-151-1 | 104 pp | $15.95 USD / $21.95 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Can the Monster Speak? is the full text of a speech that Paul B. Preciado attempted to deliver to a few thousand psychoanalysts from Lacan’s L’École de la Cause Freudienne in 2019. The speech was never completed because it caused such an uproar among the gathered psychoanalysts and it is
Sabyasachi NagUncharted (Mansfield Press, 2021)ISBN 978-1-77126-248-4 | 94 pp | $17 CAD/USD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY I confess: it was the eye-catching cover of Uncharted — designed by Mansfield’s publisher, Denis De Klerck — that first drew me to the work. The confrontational stare of a white tiger, whose face engulfs and exceeds the the edges of the book, is difficult to look away from. But the interior content of Uncharted, the third collection of
Hollay GhaderyFuse (Guernica Editions, 2021)ISBN 978-1-77183-592-3 | 170 pp | $20 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Ghadery’s debut, Fuse, is a collection of personal essays so intimate and engrossing that at times I had the strange sensation that my consciousness had melted and was being subsumed into the author’s. As if the secrets she was telling were mine laid bare on the page instead of hers. This, of course, is an illusion, a deft trick
Allie McFarlandDisappearing in Reverse (University of Calgary Press, 2020)ISBN 978-1-77385-143-3 | 238 pp | $24.99 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Like loose shale skidding down a mountainside, everything in Allie McFarland’s novel(la) feels like it’s slipping out from under you. The narrative is told by a narrator who is conspicuously unreliable. We watch her lie, for unarticulated if intuitable reasons, to everyone she meets, from the moment she meets them. Neither they, nor we, are