TRIBUTES TO ROBERT ALLEN BY:
Jon Paul Fiorentino
Anne Stone
Jason Camlot
Mary Williamson
Todd Swift
Angela Hibbs
Andy Brown
David McGimpsey
lydia eugene
Steve Luxton
Angela Carr
Mikhail Iossel
Oana Avasilichioaei
Luc Paradis
Melissa A. Thompson
Mary di Michele
Catherine Kidd
Golda Fried
David Solway
Bryan Sentes
Vivienne Allen

FRONTISPIECES:
Alienated by Darren Wershler-Henry
Mean Old Man in Training by Joe Ollmann
Dear Donna Matrix by a. rawlings
Movie Mythos by Taien Ng-Chan
The Graveyard by Scott W. Gray
The Self-Esteem Workout by David McGimpsey

COMIC:
Nernies by Claire Gibsond and Marian Churchland

REVIEWS:
De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage
Black by George Elliot Clarke
The Men by Lisa Robertson
Stumbling in the Bloom by John Pass
The Future is Queer edited by Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel
Social Acupuncture: A guide to suicide, performance and utopia by Darren O’Donnell
Bow Grip by Ivan E. Coyote
Only This Blue by Betsy Warland
North of 9/11 by David Bernans
[one love affair]* by Jenny Boully

Read by Jane Affleck

On the very first page of the novel, the narrator, Bassam, hooks the reader with a statement that also summarizes the narrative drive: “Ten thousand bombs had landed,”says Bassam, “and I was waiting for George. Ten thousand bombs had landed on Beirut, that crowded city”¦ It’s time to leave, I was thinking to myself.” One might question why it took ten thousand bombs to fall before Bassam considered leaving; however, he is a young man, still living at home with his mother and working a job that is neither regular nor well-paying; his options for escape are rather limited. Escape is what he does decide to do, and the bulk of the novel consists of his efforts to flee the war-ravaged city for Rome, his long-dreamed of utopia.

To fund his escape — his dockyard job not lucrative enough — Bassam chooses to become involved in the criminal underworld with his childhood friend George. A rift forms between the two friends when George joins the militia; this is a moral line Bassam refuses to cross. That he too ends up stealing, cheating and killing is an irony that is not entirely lost on either the reader or the narrator.

The reader is not entirely Bassam’s confidante. There is, at times, a surprising lack of emotional expression, considering the violence represented and the losses Bassam incurs. It is true, though, that how he feels is often “shown” rather than “told,” an effect for which any writer worth his salt must aim. Further to Bassam’s withholding from the reader: the final Beirut scene between Bassam and George stays safely hidden inside Bassam’s head until he is ready to reveal it — even then, the effect is that of eavesdropping on a confession. In spite of Bassam’s reticence in appealing to the reader’s sympathies, De Niro’s Game discloses much to a Canadian audience largely sheltered from the physical and emotional effects of war, due to the simple fact that a war is not taking place on Canadian soil. Bassam’s voice, though emotionally restrained, tells a story that is not only vivid, but also illuminating.

Read by Lateef Martin

George jargon makes you better, wetter, sweating blood. You’re not equipped for this type of English. Elliot English kicks and cracks the skull, heaving vivid vernacular, over-spectacular, into the swamps of the cerebral cortex (wear Gortex) to slosh thru the slush of once fit, firm grey matter, pitter pattered by the rain dance, vain prance of what you thought you could mandle, that is, man handle; man the steering handle it, man oh man you can’t, you’re a starship hurtling through space at warp thirteen when you know you’re only built to mandle, ten on ten on ubiquity and creativity. Clarke creativity, more mysterious than The Nativity: None alive were there to tell you what showed up and how, on black time or overtime or covered in secreted rhyme. None but the originator of the scene can glean what was dirty truth or lie polished clean to gleam through the ages stages of construction, obstruction false supports entrench in the consciousness put a little faith in and see where the raunch is blessed. Black is reflections on life in the key of displaced African in Canada, photography of black in black, grainy and raw, poems and pieces and speeches without leashes swim the pages in stages of thought wrought in sections to keep you from exploding. Black is a rhythm mixed into a rhythm by rhythm, for rhythm. Schisms of the human psyche, down to the blackest pit. Give it to Mikey… he likes it, he likes it. Reading Black might make you smack the slacking mess in you, the nerve to believe that reading this makes you better. Hologram matrix pattern put forth on the brain stem to sing you the lullaby that you just might be bright enough to take Black in and believe that just by reading it you’re better.

Read by Maria Giuliani

A work in five parts, Lisa Robertson’s The Men is a thick exploration of men in social, gender, psychological and philosophical contexts. It is also a comparison of the narrator’s role as a woman in personal, professional, and sexual situations, illustrating the men through the confidence, or lack thereof, of her own sensibilities.

Each of its five parts adds a comprehensive layer to the complexity of these female-male relations, as the narrator moves from insecurity to stout lobbying, answering her question of what it means to enter a man’s world, both literally and figuratively. The sections read as continuous lyrics, purposefully and thoughtfully dissected over their consecutive pages. But the language itself, contained within these lyrics, is at all times intelligent, humourous, and compelling, as the words create motion between the carefully stylized ups, heavy in poetic linguistics, and the seemingly carefree downs, morphing into loose yet synthetic prose:

I want to speak about their sentiment as a secular event.
The weather is as it looks, framed in nostalgia and
money. The fall of the light is the fall of the secular. The
men are a house inside out.

Robertson interlaces all of the parts with consistent themes and terminology, such as metaphors on the presence and absence of light, which intertwine with the narrator’s respective viewpoints, surmising her men from outside their circle and in. Perhaps the most alluded to theme is that of poetry itself: of language, of mutual understanding and misunderstanding, and of being unable to read one another. Robertson also uses language to play with what the men represent — as people and as a collective idea — by alternating the narrator’s references between “the men,” plural, and “he,” singular. Similarly, she alters the narrator’s self-references between the fluctuating “I” and the solidarity found in “we.”

As The Men is 69 pages in length, Robertson is able to offer a study on a timeless topical issue, quite successfully, without losing the originality of her ideas and the strength of her poetry. From the anecdotal to the refrained, this wonderful grouping of lyrics is a pleasure to read.

Read by Darren Bifford

Stumbling in the Bloom, John Pass’ fifteenth book of poetry in just over thirty years, has the distinction of stealing this year’s Governor General’s award. It also has the distinction of being a long and difficult book. It runs 116 pages, and the poems are governed by unusual syntactical arrangements which, for the most part, avoid the direct pleasure of simple statements. The poems often required me to read them several times, not for increased appreciation but for first comprehension. For instance, “But eager to say / what it was gave my body, tradition, happiness, depth / of field to the moment you’ll appreciate / my difficulty”. I’ll admit I did not as yet appreciate. But this, I told myself, is only the first poem.

Turn the page. The second poem, “nowrite.doc” is in fact an extended poem that has been published separately as a chapbook. The theme of the book is beauty, used as both noun and adjective. It is applied especially in the present instance to flowers and swimming, to unplugging the toilet and watching the spokes of a boy’s bike spinning, as well as to the difficulties and demands it imposes on the poet. So, by the time the speaker asks, “Have I said beautiful?” I felt inclined to answer, or shout, or emote, or whatever, “My god yes! with the emphasis on said.” “Here’s what I mean: “My good fortune, good mood, relatively / privileged and happy life notwithstanding it is first of all that the world / is beautiful [...] I say it over and over without irony and edge.”

I recall with new admiration Ms. Dickinson’s advice to “tell the truth, but on a slant.”

I apologize for beginning with the story of my frustrations, since there is a good deal in this book to admire and enjoy. At best these poems seem to owe something to the open form poetics of the mid-fifties; and at least to my ear, to the terse, syntactically governed rhythms of Creeley. While I don’t pretend that Pass writes with anything of the economy of Creeley, or even shares themes, there seems to be evidence of a connection. In the best poems I sense that Pass’ writing, like Creeley’s, is an open search for form. The result is unusual and varying stanza lengths that are governed in their order by the sounds of words rather than the logic of ideas.

A short review says little. But whether this work beats Babstock or, better, Bachinsky, for one of the top Canadian awards is not a judgement I would venture.

Read by James Moran

Borrowing a page from Arsenal’s successful Queer Fear series, Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel alchemize a love of sci-fi and queer lit into a respectable if slightly uneven anthology. The eight contributions in The Future is Queer transgress the boundaries of sexuality, science-fiction and the future, mainly through a dystopic lens.

The best stories comment on current political issues, including controversial wars. In “The Chosen Few,” Caro Soles describes the almost-exclusively all-gay marine squadron which goes on a questionable secret mission somewhere in the Ekvanistan Nations. They don’t know exactly why they’re fighting, but Liam is determined to join his lover Jack. The nature of the war is, at best, quite dubious.

In Joy Parks’ “Instinct,” a climate of political homogeny has driven all sexual identity into the mainstream. There are also gated, heterosexual-only suburbs. The queer protagonist wants to return to a time when gays were fighting for not only rights, but their own turf. Parks makes shrewd observations at a time when some members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community think that queer culture has become too mainstream.

Candas Jane Dorsey’s “…the darkest evening of the year” describes a bisexual protagonist celebrating the winter solstice. If the state were to discover his ceremony, police would descend on his enclave of mixed sexes. Dorsey excels at conveying the dark, end-of-the-world feeling that, during much older pagan times, made pagans fear that the sun would not return in the New Year.

Other stories, such as Timmel Duchamp’s “Obscure Relations,” involve clones interbreeding in an experimental compound. Readers can easily get confused with the large cast of characters, some of which have switched bodies. Rachel Pollack’s “The Beatrix Gates” has a great but somewhat pedantic sexuality identity message about green people truly wanting to be red people all their lives.

One very novel and interesting find in the collection of mixed gems is a comic strip written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Bryan Talbot.

Labonte and Schimel have assembled an admirable and necessary collection that spares no political, religious or ideological commentary about an often dark future. Even when unsuccessful, Future contributors tackle the here and now, which both sci-fi and queer lit, at their best, ought to do.

Read by Michael Davidge

A scansion of the subtitle anticipates the tonal shifts that make O’Donnell’s book not a screed but a compelling read: call it a manic-depressive manifesto, ranging from the suicidal to the utopian. Actually, the book is light on suicide; at the moment, the author is feeling up. Diagnosing a moribund theatre, O’Donnell finds a possible cure in the art world’s recent turn to the social, which prompts him to form an aesthetic of civic engagement, or social acupuncture. Recognizing that real political engagement requires boredom, intensive labour, and too much fluorescent lighting, O’Donnell proposes social acupuncture as a means to reinvigorate a commitment to activist art in the dispiriting war between commerce and culture, where wave after wave of engaged artists are neutralized by the frontline (or is it bottom line?) of capitalism.

Using acupuncture as a metaphor for the imbalance of power and resources (”chi” or energy) in the social body, O’Donnell calls for an art that pinpoints problems in the civic sphere and actively intervenes. Like a lefty Adam Smith arguing that self-interest generates the collective good, O’Donnell also sees social acupuncture as an opportunity for artists to find funding and fame, while benefiting the disenfranchised. He cautions, however, that the rigourous participatory theatre envisioned by social acupuncture (as an alternative medicine for the irrelevancy of theatre in a public sphere with a democratic discourse deficiency) will entail a lot of sick-making “dorkiness, earnestness, and amateurism.” Like real acupuncture, it will not always be pleasant.

Describing himself as “an angry, stupid, white idiot pervert asshole jerkoff,” too wimpy for winter demonstrations, O’Donnell exhibits a frank ambivalence that allows his brand of art activism to avoid the charge of self-righteousness. Unfortunately, the dozen-odd examples of his practice as a social acupuncturist provided by the book, such as a spin-the-bottle game for grown-ups, are not wholly convincing as politically engaged art. Moreover, A Suicide-Site Guide to the City (his most theatrically conventional example, for which the complete script is provided) is not wholly convincing as theatre. Altogether, however, the text is essential reading to all concerned. By arguing for a Neo-Philistinism that emphasizes the accumulation of social capital, O’Donnell places ethics before aesthetics, fundamentally (and ironically to his disadvantage) shifting questions regarding criteria for art from the political to the moral. People may talk, but in the meantime, real political work advances under fluorescent lights, not footlights.

Read by James Moran

First-time novelist Ivan E. Coyote proves that she’s not only a sprinter, but a middle-distance runner. Author of the short fiction collections Close to Spider-Man and One Man’s Trash, Coyote stretches her legs in ‘. Joey, a forty-something mechanic with a quirky, likeable voice, is trying to recover from his wife leaving him.

The book’s warm colloquial tone is like that of the folks residing in Joey’s Drumheller.

You see, Joey’s wife Allison left him a year ago for Kathleen Sawyer, the (now) ex-wife of Mitch Sawyer, who owns the Esso on Fourth Avenue. Joey, a quintessential mechanic, is less astute when it comes to matters of the heart. He’s been stalled ever since Allison left. Everyone, from his womanizing co-worker Franco to his own mother, knows it. Joey, however, does not.

A local recluse trades Joey a used Volvo for an expensive cello. Joey has to learn how play the cello and, somehow, reconcile with his ex-wife. Along the way, he meets some storied characters, from Hector, an older gentleman, to Darlene, a young single mother. Coyote excels at making the characters believable, people you wouldn’t mind meeting while traveling.

Joey often makes hilarious and insightful observations, such as when he tries to find the cello trader to teach him to play. “I’d have to ask Jim if he had any tips,” Joey thinks. “Like how not to make it sound like I was dragging a cat backwards across a countertop, for instance.” Joey also notes that his sister’s marriage is rocky: “I’m a mechanic. You can tell a lot about a guy by how he treats his engine. I told my sister this before she married Jean-Paul, but she wouldn’t listen.”

Coyote is also adept enough not to make this Zen and the Art of Automobile Maintenance. Joey does not attempt to fix his problems by manipulating part of a pop can and attaching it to the vehicle. He has to learn to express himself. The less astute reader may think that Coyote is not writing about herself, but as an auto mechanic of some literary legend, she’s right at home with Joey’s quest and his voice. Coyote spins a fine, sparse, and moving first effort.

Read by T.K. Murphy

In Only This Blue, Betsy Warland demonstrates her exceptional ability to undermine linguistic hegemonies without being demanding or showy. Like many long poems, Only This Blue requests we examine a vocabulary that develops reiterative and associative signification as the text evolves. By meditating upon colour, Warland delimits the ways in which standard associations intrude upon intensely personal moments — but by presenting these associations in fractured, hesitating, rhythmical verse, she creates, through imagistic, aural or visual pattern, new associations that are, in the end, independent of the intrusive red-stop yellow-slow symbolism that began the process.

A tentative colour dictionary might look like this:

RED: The colour of impossible definition. Exact, precise, lively, red is the colour of the dictionary, is the bright coat of an imaginary, “radiant” self, is the certitude of “stop!” It is blood; it is the immediate action of a tow truck. It translates poorly into black and white ultrasounds. It is the dream which ends in a lost breast.

BLUE is the colour of the detachment which characterizes linguistic acts. “Out of the blue” comes the word, previously unnoticed, hurtling “end over end / toward your forehead.” You raise your hands, waiting for impact, and instead a word-rock “cracks” a “windshield”; expecting injury, your safety is both disappointment and relief. In the face of blue “there is no outcome,” no action; just a crack.

YELLOW: the colour of hesitation (”yield / … do not cross over”), of signification proliferating without cognition (a list of all things yellow, and all things that sound, well, oh, just like it). Yellow breaks the astonishing certitude of red. It is the colour of opening (” — aperture of yellow — “), greeting (on a page, the lone word “Hello!”) and eroticism (”[come closer]“).

BLUE + YELLOW = GREEN. Green is described using other colours. It is inarticulate (”who could ever speak / green?”). Green flirts with the space between the soil’s obscuring darkness and the observant blue sky. Green is the knife held to the feminine. Green is the tentative permission to grow. Green is “change in the act of”: green is poetry.

While any such dictionary is perhaps contrary to the spirit of Warland’s endeavour, I present this one to demonstrate the precision and suggestiveness of her assembly. All round, a fine piece of craft.

Read by Kelly Ward

It appears that 2006 has marked the stale-date on tragedy. Five years after 9/11, we in North America have decided that we can now be entertained by what happened in New York in 2001. Feature films and made-for-tv movies have begun using the producers’ imagined accounts of the events of 9/11 as subject matter. These films differ from our obsessions with 9/11 in previous years –they are wholly ficticious where previous books and film material have been widely interested in investigating the facts of 9/11 (read: Fahrenheit 9/11, The 9/11 Commission Report et al.)

It is unfortunate that David Bernans’ North of 9/11 was published in this particular cultural climate. Bernans’ novel centres on the aftermath of 9/11, specifically the backlash felt among a group of pro-Palestinian activists in Montreal. At first glance it may look as though Bernans is capitalizing (as many other creators of fiction have) on ongoing cultural conflicts that are, I would argue, nowhere near resolved. As I watch Hollywood painting stories of 9/11 with dramatic lighting and creative makeup, I can’t help but think that we are missing the point.

Bernans’ novel, however, side-steps these inherent pitfalls, and places the story in the realm of what we, as Canadians, can know for sure. 9/11 has had a specific and palpable effect on our national notion of multiculturalism. The conflict between the main character of Sarah and her American-born father illustrates this truth. Sarah’s involvement in peaceful protest reads to her father as terrorism because it is carried out alongside “Arab terrorist suspects” (read: students of Arab descent). By forcing his story to stay within this Canadian framework, Bernans allows the reader to consider 9/11 in a broader context of consequences. We are not taken inside the planes or into the back rooms of FBI investigations, but are shown characters who are truly “North” of 9/11, un-involved, and yet — as we all have been — forever changed.

Bernans has created a fiction that does what political fiction is meant to do — move readers toward a greater questioning of their surroundings.