The New Quarterly Review

"For those who loved Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior comes a new climate-themed, Shakespeare-inspired novel from bestselling author Catherine Bush. The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A mammoth Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake, its outer wings brushing over tiny Blaze Island in the North Atlantic. Just as the storm disrupts the present, it stirs up the past: Miranda's memories of growing up in an isolated, wind-swept cove and the events of long ago that her father will not allow her to speak of. In the aftermath of the storm, she finds herself in a world altered so quickly and so radically that she hardly knows what has happened. As Miranda says, change is clear after it happens."--

For Kelsey Andrews, the metal-scarred Vancouver skyline is an emblem of distance from her family home in Grande Prairie, Alberta, where nothing breaks the sky but the curve of the Earth. As she adjusts from a thirsty countryside filled with little wonders to a lush cityscape with fewer miracles, depression nests within her, weighted by loneliness and past secrets that remain unsayable. These poems lessen the weight of those burdens. She befriends, rather than beats, depression with the help of a natural world populated by winged things, animals, trees, water and sky. Her poems play with earthy whimsy, though they are not without gristle and little violences -- the moon's ancient bruises, gargoyles that shriek and moan, the thunk when you split a chicken. From snails to suicide and picking blackberries to killing flies, through it all, Kelsey finds beauty and the light that persists. Poetry.

Thirteen stories that expose the complications of women who dare to deviate from the status quo. In the land of fiction, women are too often cast as inherently good—typically kind, always considerate, and traditionally in possession of high morals. Not so in the recklessly audacious stories in Waiting for the Cyclone. A mother in need of rehabilitation, a wife who wakes up in the arms of a man who isn’t her husband, a young woman who comes face-to-face with a bully from years ago. These women don’t need to be liked, do not comply to set expectations, and are not compelled to make apologies. These women, and a dozen more, are perfectly imperfect. A collection of short stories that behaves much like the weather pattern it was named for, Waiting for the Cyclone is at times fast and reckless and at others, calm yet under high pressure. A powerful literary debut from one of Canada’s most promising young writers.

A young woman forms her own idea of feminine sexuality while skinny-dipping with her best friend's mother during a thunderstorm. A naive bride returns to her beloved Ontario farm country and, after an encounter with a young female beekeeper, suddenly sees her husband in a sobering new light. Under pretences, a rural doctor returns for her childhood friend, but finds the women in her new life have only a very specific use for her. A middle-aged woman facing the devastating end of a friendship as well as her last chance at childbirth, flees North only to be confronted with the complexities of life in the Yukon. The women of Equipoise struggle to find their positionality in life in relation to the women around them. They are also contoured by their geographies, caught between North and South, East and West, childhood home and adulthood home. They struggle to maintain a balance within the tension of their opposing female roles, landscapes, friendships, rivalries, victories, and catastrophes, always vigourously seeking equipoise.

I've lived the way a field is sometimes / a shelter for mice / or sometimes a source of game / for a hawk Inspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide. The Tantramar Re-Vision charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, flights, and fears, be it through the woods, the wilds, the page, or the mind where "it's hard to admit / you are not to your taste." It questions an existence in which the inhuman thrives, ignorant of divinity, while the human psyche continues to search for answers as "life takes directions / away from" it. The Tantramar Marsh setting of John Thompson's Stilt Jack resonates with Irie's landscapes of birds, fish, plants, and wildlife, all still within reach yet part of a world where "wind carries sounds / it cannot hear." Insightful and meditative, The Tantramar Re-Vision is poetry of the inner self and the outside observer, a poetic testament to the ways literature creates its own landmarks and nature survives without knowing a word.

On an island teeming with masters of the short story, Mary Lavin's distinct voice and devoted following set her apart. Before her death in 1996, this Irish writer had received many honors and prizes not only for her luminous short stories but also for several highly regarded novels. William Trevor praised Lavin's ability to "make moments timeless, to illuminate people and places, words and things, by touching them with the magic of the rarely-gifted storyteller." In a Cafe makes available for the first time in the United States a collection of her most beloved pieces as compiled by her daughter. In masterworks such as the title story, an unsettling portrayal of widowhood, and "The Will, " which Layin considered the finest expression of her art, the justice in Trevor's declaration we recognize that "the short story of today owes her a very great debt."

A resilient and witty story of fate, free will and superstition by an award-winning author. As the daughter of Southern Italian immigrants joined by an arranged marriage, Fantetti grew up witnessing and weathering the devastating consequences of her mother's schizophrenia. Moving to the other side of the country to escape the constant turmoil, Fantetti casts a canny eye on her painful childhood through writing and performing stand-up comedy. When her dad develops depression, a host of long-buried ancestral beliefs spring forward--like the three witches of the Macbeth-- Mal'occhio, Maledictions and Stregheria -- Fantetti blends old customs with new traditions in an ancient and modern pot to heal a fractured self; studying the sky for planetary alignment; consulting her trusty tarot deck for guidance and visiting her dad's psychic healer for a prescription for prescience. Throughout her journey the enduring father-daughter bond shines through the wisecracks, with great love, determination, and grace.