Executing an experimental premise in a traditional style, Leah Bobet offers a ‘narrative review’ of Kan Gao’s writing for the video game series that culminates in Impostor Factory (2021) from Canadian developer and publisher Freebird Games. ISBN N/A | n.p. | $12.99 each CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Memory isn’t static — or even past — in Freebird Games’ award-winning interactive fiction series To the Moon, Finding Paradise and Impostor Factory. It dips, loops and
Meghan Kemp-GeeThe Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023)ISBN: 978-1-55245-460-2 | 80 pp | $23.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Meghan Kemp-Gee‘s debut poetry collection is billed as “a little bestiary” centred around deer, wolves and the spectral voices of extinct lizards and soon-to-be extinct whales. It’s a description that underplays the sheer structural acrobatics she uses to create — and then resolve — a tense, biting and agile conversation about euphemism, superimposed experience
Rebecca CampbellArboreality (Stelliform Press, 2022)ISBN: 978-1-77768-232-3 | 117 pp | $18.99 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Built upon her Sturgeon Award-winning novelette ‘An Important Failure,’ Rebecca Campbell‘s Canticle for Liebowitz-style novella, Arboreality, uses the intimate losses and incremental gains of a post-climate collapse Cowichan Valley community to create a compassionate, masterfully executed book about rewilding our ecology of ideas. When Vancouver Island’s climate destabilizes, a few academics break up McPherson Library’s collection to save it
Through a process of careful and combing traditional review, Leah Bobet is able to find and extract the half-concealed magic tricks and the mixtapes from Jen Sookfong Lee’s debut poetry collection The Shadow List (Wolsak & Wynn, 2021). ISBN 978-1-989496-28-2 | 96 pp | $18 CAD #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Smudged lipstick, sleepless nights and a deft structural-linguistic game that cracks binary questions of self-worth like a hatching egg: Vancouver author Jen Sookfong Lee’s The Shadow List charts