Becca Lawlor, editorial intern at The Ampersand Review, reflects on the loneliness between all of us, and specifically The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life, in this traditional review of Rune Christiansen’s latest novel translated by Kari Dickson (Book*hug Press, 2023). ISBN: 978-1-77166-834-7 | 264 pp | $23 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY In its title, The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life by Rune Christiansen, translated by Kari Dickson, speaks of loneliness as if it were
Catriona WrightContinuity Errors (Coach House Books, 2023)ISBN: 978-1-55245-459-6 | 80 pp | $23.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Capitalism, climate change, feminism and the gender binary — Catriona Wright’s Continuity Errors responds to these topics with dry humour and a vivid parade of aliens, robots, fae, and more though is still incredibly serious in its message. In this, her second poetry collection, Wright plays with the absurdity of the world we live in, having written
Anita Lahey (writer) & Pauline Conley (illustrator)Fire Monster (Palimpsest Press, 2023)ISBN 978-1-99029-337-5 | 220 pp | $29.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Fire Monster is an incredible blend of art forms — in this graphic novel, writer Anita Lahey and illustrator Pauline Conley collaborate to blend poetry with illustration and sometimes music to create a fictional retelling of the 1976 Main-a-Dieu, Nova Scotia wildfires. It details the generational effect the natural disaster had on the
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
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
Hollay Ghadery has a fine ear for the complex orchestration of dualities in Sing, Nightingale, the latest novel by Marie Hélène Poitras, translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins (Coach House Books, 2023). ISBN 978-1-55245-448-0 | 176 pp | $22.95 CAD — BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Arguably, all books aim to transport readers to another world, but not all books can do this as self-reflexively and immersively as Sing, Nightingale by Marie Hélène Poitras (translated from
Wayne NgThe Family Code (Guernica Editions, 2023)ISBN 978-1-77183-793-4 | 316 pp | $25 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY The Family Code by Wayne Ng is a riveting and heart-wrenching story of inter-generational trauma that pivots around Hannah and her young son, Axel. Hannah and Axel live in poverty and are both victims of abuse: Hannah, at the hands of her father and partners; Axel, at the hands of his mother. Interestingly, the novel is narrated
Khashayar MohammadiWJD (Gordon Hill Press, 2022)ISBN 978-1-77422-070-2 | 68 of 138 pp* | $20 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Khashayar Mohammadi’s second full-length collection of poetry, WJD, is an absorbing phenomenological exploration of language, culture, country and spirit. While rangy, roaming different literal and figurative landscapes from Iran to “pre-cosmic” nothingness, the poems are singular in their bubbling richness; an intensity that punches as it delights, plucks at the darkness but also, proffers a hard-won
Joanna Acevedo reveals the ghosts and the guts beneath the “deceptively simple” surface of R.F. Kuang’s latest novel Yellowface (Harper Collins, 2023). Note: the last paragraph of the review contains potential spoilers. ISBN 978-0-06325-083-3 | 336 pp | $37.00 CAD / 30.00 USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY R.F. Kuang’s forthcoming novel, Yellowface, brings up complex and nuanced concepts of race and appropriation in the literary world, through a close examination of the publishing industry. Failed
Chen ChenExplodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023)ISBN 978-1-7327347-8-4 | 48 pp | $10 USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY In Chen Chen’s latest chapbook, Explodingly Yours, which came out in January 2023 from Ghost City Press, Chen explores similar themes from his previous two books, but with a more explicit touch. The chapbook is erotic, ephemeral and formally innovative for Chen. As seen in his most recent release, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (BOA
Gabrielle BatesJudas Goat (Tin House, 2023)ISBN 978-1-95353-464-4 | 104 pp | $16.95 USD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Gabrielle Bates’ debut collection of poems, Judas Goat, surprises and shocks with its candor and specificity about being a young woman in the beckoning Deep South. Violence permeates this collection, as does religion — images of Judas, his organs spilling out of his body, make appearances, as do the Virgin Mary and other eclectic figures. They are woven
Since our debut more than two years ago in September 2020, CAROUSEL’s USEREVIEW has published over 100 traditional, experimental and short-form capsule reviews. Last year, we debuted our Reviewer-in-Residence program, in which we published short capsule reviews from a single reviewer for three weeks in a row. Never ones to coast, we decided this year to expand our Reviewer-in-Residence program to shine an even brighter spotlight on individual reviewers’ critical practices. For 2023, we have
Nisa MalliAllodynia (Palimpsest Press, 2022)ISBN 978-1-99029-306-1 | 80 pp | $19.95 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Allodynia (Palimpsest Press, 2022) is the debut poetry collection from bpNichol Chapbook Award-winning poet Nisa Malli. In Allodynia, Malli builds on her explorations of pain and illness, moving her poetry further into the sci-fi and speculative realms. The collection is divided into three sections: ‘Pain Log,’ ‘Ship’s Log,’ and ‘Pain Log.’ The poems from the two ‘Pain Log’ sections
Natalie Limarrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022)ISBN 978-1-98946-313-0 | 32 pp | $12.00 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Natalie Lim’s debut poetry chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022) shares the same name as Lim’s CBC Poetry Prize-winning poem, but this is an astounding collection that shows Lim’s growth as a poet since winning the prize. Lim’s writing is breathless, seen from opening poem, ‘How do you tell someone you’ve written a poem about them.’ Here, Lim
Mikko HarveyLet the World Have You (House of Anansi Press, 2022)ISBN 978-1-48701-069-0 | 96 pp | $19.99 CAD | BUY Here #CAROUSELreviews#USEREVIEWEDNESDAY Mikko Harvey’s second book of poems, Let the World Have You (House of Anansi, 2022) is a dive into a strange and surreal world. Like his debut collection Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit, Harvey’s newest work is full of animals and other creatures interacting with the daily occurrences of our lives. In ‘Funny Business,’ the
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