What We're Reading: Staff Writers' Picks, Spring 2023

Wondering what to read this spring? We’ve got you covered! Here are some new and forthcoming titles that we are especially excited about.

Chrysalis

by Anuja Varghese

House of Ananasi, March 2023

“Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community.

A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home. The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the monstrous and the mundane.

Poetic, sensual, and surreal, Varghese’s stories delve into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation through an unapologetically feminist lens. Drawing on folklore, fairy tale, and magical realism, they take aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revel in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.”

Anecdotes

by Kathryn Mockler

Book*hug Press, September 2023

“With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse.

Absurdist flash fictions in “The Boy is Dead” depict characters such as a park that hates hippies, squirrels, and unhappy parents; a woman lamenting a stolen laptop the day the world ends; and birds slamming into glass buildings.

‘This Isn’t a Conversation’ shares one-liners from overheard conversations, found texts, diary entries and random thoughts: many are responses to the absurdity and pain of the current political and environmental climate.

‘We’re Not Here to Talk About Aliens’ gathers autofictions that follow a young protagonist from childhood to early 20s, through the murky undercurrent of potential violence amidst sexual awakening; from first periods to flashers; sticker books to maxi pad art; acid trips to blackouts; creepy professors to close calls.

In ‘The Dream House,’ The Past and The Future are personified as various incarnations in relationships to one another (lovers, a parent and child, siblings, friends), all engaged in ongoing conflict.

These varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.”

The Librarianist

by Patrick DeWitt

House of Anansi, July 2023

“From bestselling and award winning author Patrick deWitt comes a novel about an ordinary man who thought life’s surprises were behind him – until a chance encounter changes everything

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

Behind Bob Comet’s straight man facade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Comet’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsized players to welcome onto the stage of his life.

With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.”

Brown Boy

by Omer Aziz

Scribner, April 2023

“Brown Boy is an uncompromising interrogation of identity, family, religion, race, and class, told through Omer Aziz’s incisive and luminous prose.

In a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of Toronto, miles away from wealthy white downtown, Omer Aziz struggles to find his place as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy. He fears the violence and despair of the world around him, and sees a dangerous path ahead, succumbing to aimlessness, apathy, and rage.

In his senior year of high school, Omer quickly begins to realize that education can open up the wider world. But as he falls in love with books, and makes his way to Queen’s University in Ontario, Sciences Po in Paris, Cambridge University in England, and finally Yale Law School, he continually confronts his own feelings of doubt and insecurity at being an outsider, a brown-skinned boy in an elite white world. He is searching for community and identity, asking questions of himself and those he encounters, and soon finds himself in difficult situations – whether in the suburbs of Paris or at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yet the more books Omer reads and the more he moves through elite worlds, his feelings of shame and powerlessness only grow stronger, and clear answers recede further away.

Weaving together his powerful personal narrative with the books and friendships that move him, Aziz wrestles with the contradiction of feeling like an Other and his desire to belong to a Western world that never quite accepts him. He poses the questions he couldn’t have asked in his youth: Was assimilation ever really an option? Could one transcend the perils of race and class? And could we – the collective West – ever honestly confront the darker secrets that, as Aziz discovers, still linger from the past?

In Brown Boy, Omer Aziz has written a book that eloquently describes the complex process of creating an identity that fuses where he’s from, what people see in him, and who he knows himself to be.”

Bones of Belonging:Finding Wholeness in a White World

by Annahid Dashtgard

Dundurn Press, April 2023

“Sharp, funny, and poignant stories of what it’s like to be a Brown woman working for change in a white world.

I take a deep breath, check my lipstick one last time on my phone camera, and turn on my mic. It’s about ten steps, two metres, and one lifetime to the front of the room. “Hello,” I repeat. “My name is Annahid – pronounced Ah-nah-heed – and shit’s about to get real!”

In a series of deft interlocking stories, Annahid Dashtgard shares her experiences searching for, and teaching about, belonging in our deeply divided world. A critically acclaimed, racialized immigrant writer and recognized inclusion leader, Dashtgard writes with wisdom, honesty, and a wry humour as she considers what it means to belong – to a country, in a marriage, in our own skin – and what it means when belonging is absent. Like the bones of the human body, these stories knit together a remarkable vision of what wholeness looks like as a racial outsider in a culture still dominated by whiteness.”

Continuity Errors

by Catriona Wright

Coach House BOoks, May 2023

“Feminist poems both serious and absurd that question our obsession with productivity instead of with care.

Continuity Errors questions the privileging of work and productivity over rest and care from an ecological and feminist perspective. Written before and immediately after the birth of her first child, these poems try to imagine the future her son will inherit. Encounters with an unusual cast of characters – including lonely cryptids, unrepentant grifters, and persistent ghosts – provide incomplete answers, and while the continuity errors keep multiplying around her, Wright pauses to consider whether our devotion to innovation is keeping us stuck.”

Wait Softly Brother

by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Buckrider Books, May 2023

“From lost siblings to the horrors of war to tales of selkie wives, Wait Softly Brother is filled with questions about memory, reality and the truths hidden in family lore.

After twenty years of looping frustrations Kathryn walks out of her marriage and washes up in her childhood home determined to write her way to a new life. There she is put to work by her aging parents sorting generations of memories and mementos as biblical rains fall steadily and the house is slowly cut off from the rest of the world. Lured away from the story she is determined to write – that of her stillborn brother, Wulf – by her mother’s gift of crumbling letters, Kathryn instead begins to piece together the strange tale of an earlier ancestor, Russell Boyt, who fought as a substitute soldier in the American Civil War. As the water rises, and more truths come to the surface, the two stories begin to mingle in unexpected and beautiful ways. In this elegantly written novel Kuitenbrouwer deftly unravels the stories we are told to believe by society and shows the reader how to weave new tales of hope and possibility.”

Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets

by Kyo Maclear

Knopf Canada, April 2023

“For readers of Crying in H Mart and Wintering, an unforgettable memoir about a family secret revealed by a DNA test, the lessons learned in its aftermath, and the indelible power of love.

Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies in December 2018, she gets the results of a DNA test showing that she and the father who raised her are not biologically related. Suddenly Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling a family mystery piece by piece, and assembling the story of her biological father. Along the way, larger questions arise: what exactly is kinship? And what does it mean to be a family?

Thoughtful in its reflections on race and lineage, unflinching in its insights on grief and loyalty, Unearthing is a captivating and propulsive story of inheritance that goes beyond heredity.

What gets planted, and what gets buried? What role does storytelling play in unearthing the past and making sense of a life? Can the humble act of tending a garden provide common ground for an inquisitive daughter and her complicated mother? As it seeks to answer these questions, Unearthing bursts with the very love it seeks to understand.”

Goddess

by Deborah Hemming

House of Anansi, February 2023

“An entrancing novel about a wellness retreat on a remote Greek island hosted by a celebrity guru who is more than meets the eye.

On a flight to New York at the end of her first book tour, up-and-coming writer Agnes Oliver meets Jack Verity, the handsome filmmaker and ex-husband of Geia Stone, a famous actress turned wellness guru, whose popular lifestyle brand Goddess™ promotes controversial therapies and expensive beauty tools in the name of self-care and inner nourishment. Jack invites Agnes to a party in the Hamptons, where she meets Geia and finds herself welcomed into the guru’s inner circle.

That summer, Geia arranges for Agnes to attend the Goddess™ Summit, an exclusive wellness retreat held on a remote Greek island. There, Agnes observes many strange happenings she can’t explain, as one by one the other guests seem to fall under the spell of their enchanting host. When Agnes begins to discover who Geia really is, she realizes it’s up to her to protect the other women at the summit from an unexpected and unwelcome fate.

A propulsive and captivating story about beauty and influence, self-doubt and seduction, Goddess is an electrifying new novel from a talented writer to watch.”

Recommended by Jessica Rose, Brianna Wodabek and Jen Rawlinson

The Marigold

by Andrew F. Sullivan

ECW Press, April 2023

“In a near-future Toronto buffeted by environmental chaos and unfettered development, an unsettling new lifeform begins to grow beneath the surface, feeding off the past.

The Marigold, a gleaming Toronto condo tower, sits a half-empty promise: a stack of scuffed rental suites and undelivered amenities that crumbles around its residents as a mysterious sludge spreads slowly through it. Public health inspector Cathy Jin investigates this toxic mold as it infests the city’s infrastructure, rotting it from within, while Sam “Soda” Dalipagic stumbles on a dangerous cache of data while cruising the streets in his Camry, waiting for his next rideshare alert. On the outskirts of downtown, 13-year-old Henrietta Brakes chases a friend deep underground after he’s snatched into a sinkhole by a creature from below.

All the while, construction of the city’s newest luxury tower, Marigold II, has stalled. Stanley Marigold, the struggling son of the legendary developer behind this project, decides he must tap into a hidden reserve of old power to make his dream a reality – one with a human cost.

Weaving together disparate storylines and tapping into the realms of body horror, urban dystopia, and ecofiction, The Marigold explores the precarity of community and the fragile designs that bind us together.”

VenCo

by Cherie Dimaline

Random House Canada, February 2023

“From the bestselling author of Empire of Wild, a wickedly subversive, deliciously imaginative, deeply feminist novel of contemporary witches on the rise – a book that only the supremely gifted storyteller Cherie Dimaline could write.

Lucky St. James, orphaned daughter of a bad-ass Métis good-times girl, is barely hanging on to her nowhere life when she finds out that she and her grandmother, Stella, are about to be evicted from their apartment. Bad to worse in a heartbeat. Then one night, doing laundry in the building's dank basement, Lucky feels an irresistible something calling to her. Crawling through a hidden hole in the wall, she finds a tarnished silver spoon depicting a story-book hag over letters that spell out S-A-L-E-M.

Which alerts Salem-born Meena Good, finder of a matching spoon, to Lucky's existence. One of the most powerful witches in North America, Meena has been called to bring together seven special witches and seven special spoons – infused with magic and scattered to the four directions more than a century ago – to form a magic circle that will restore women to their rightful power. Under the wing of the international headhunting firm VenCo, devoted to placing exceptional women in roles where they can influence business, politics and the arts, Meena has spent years searching out witches hiding in plain sight wherever women gather: suburban book clubs, Mommy & Me groups, temp agencies. Lucky and her spoon are number six.

With only one more spoon to find, a very powerful adversary has Meena's coven in his sights – Jay Christos, a roguish and deadly witch-hunter as old as witchcraft itself. As the clock ticks toward a now-or-never deadline, Meena sends Lucky and her grandmother on a dangerous, sometimes hilarious, road trip through the United States in search of the seventh spoon. The trail leads them at last to the darkly magical city of New Orleans, where Lucky's final showdown with Jay Christos will determine whether the coven will be completed, ushering in a new beginning, or whether witches will be forced to remain forever underground.”

JAJ: A Haida Manga

by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Douglas & McIntyre, May 2023

“With gorgeous imagery, visual artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas brings to life the tumultuous history of first contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples and the early colonization by the Europeans of the northern West Coast.

Yahgulanaas uses a blend of traditional and modern art, eschewing the traditional boxes of comic books for the flowing shapes of North Pacific iconography. The panels are filled with colourful and expressive watercolour paintings. The panels of each page, if removed and assembled into one whole image, form a large image reminiscent of a woven robe.

The story follows several historical figures, including Johan Adrian Jacobsen (JAJ), who comes to the Haida village of Masset to collect specimens for a German museum, through a time span that includes first contact, the devastation of the smallpox epidemic, and the mass resettlement of disenfranchised peoples, both Indigenous and European.”

duck eats yeast, quacks, explodes; man loses eye

by GARY BARWIN & LILLIAN NEĆAKOV

Guernica Editions, May 2023

“Written as a vibrant discussion between Barwin and Nećakov, this book-length poem takes us on a hypnagogic journey that examines many ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Although the work considers many themes, such as trauma, grief, anxiety, climate change, impending doom, war, illness, and cultural fragmentation, at its core, it argues for an unbridled creativity and beauty.”

Back in the Land of the Living

by Eva Crocker

House of Anansi, August 2023

“A sexy, unforgettable story about love and longing in a time of chaos by Scotiabank Giller Prize longlisted author Eva Crocker.

Back in the Land of the Living brings us a year in the life of Marcy, a young queer woman who moves to Montreal in the fall of 2019 after making a mess of her life in St. John’s. Alone in a big city on the brink of lockdown, Marcy finds herself working an assortment of odd and sometimes dangerous, sometimes ethically questionable jobs, and swept up in a tumultuous romance with a charismatic but controlling woman. As friends, loyalties, and philosophies collide, Marcy tries to carve out a future amidst the intertwined crises of late capitalism, the climate apocalypse, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

With all the candour, wit, and bracing wisdom that have won her accolades and awards across Canada, Eva Crocker gives us a sexy, unforgettable story about love and longing in a time of chaos.”

The Tenant Class

by Ricardo Tranjan

Between the Lines, May 2023

“In this trailblazing manifesto, political economist Ricardo Tranjan places tenants and landlords on either side of the class divide that splits North American society.

What if there is no housing crisis, but instead a housing market working exactly as intended? What if rent hikes and eviction notices aren’t the work of the invisible hand of the market, but of a parasitic elite systematically funneling wealth away from working-class families? With clarity and precision, Tranjan breaks down pervasive myths about renters, mom-and-pop landlords, and housing affordability. In a society where home ownership is seen as the most important hallmark of a successful life, Tranjan refuses to absolve the landlords and governments that reap massive profits from the status quo.

The tenant class must face powerful systems of disinformation and exploitation to secure decent homes and fair rent. Drawing upon a long, inspiring history of collective action in Canada, Tranjan argues that organized tenants have the power to fight back.”

A Restless Truth

by Freya Marske

Tordotcom, November 2022

“In this timely book, Barlow counters the prevailing atmosphere of pessimism that surrounds us and offers lessons of hope that she has learned from a lifetime of activism. She has been a linchpin in three major movements in her life: second-wave feminism, the battle against free trade and globalization, and the global fight for water justice. From each of these she draws her lessons of hope, emphasizing that effective activism is not really about the goal, rather it is about building a movement and finding like-minded people to carry the load with you. Barlow knows firsthand how hard fighting for change can be. But she also knows that change does happen and that hope is the essential ingredient.”

A Tidy Armageddon

by BH Panhuyzen

ECW Press, April 2023

“The world is transformed into what looks like a massive warehouse overnight, and the results is a suspenseful and action-rich tale as humanity is forced to face the scale of its consumption

The world is utterly transformed: every product of human creation has been organized by an unknown hand into a vast grid of nine-story blocks, each comprised of a single item type: watering cans, lighthouses, fake Christmas trees, helicopters, plastic spoons, and everything else Earth’s culture and technology have ever produced, stacked in homogenous towers and separated by a maze of passageways.

Navigating this depopulated environment, a small contingent of diverse soldiers tries to make sense of this enigmatic apocalypse while desperately searching for survivors. They are led by Elsie Sharpcot, a Cree woman who has endured the military’s rampant racism and misogyny, and Dorian Wakely, her PTSD-afflicted second-in-command. Both veterans of the war in Afghanistan, they lead a group of army misfits while they all struggle – against the elements and each other – to survive.

Passing with fear and wonder through this museum of human achievement, provisioning themselves from its resources, the group races to outrun the approaching winter and find a home.”

On Class

by Deborah Dundas

Biblioasis, May 2023

“Deborah Dundas is a journalist who grew up poor and almost didn’t make it to university. In On Class, she talks to writers, activists, those who work with the poor and those who are poor about what happens when we don’t talk about poverty or class – and what will happen when we do.

Stories about poor people are rarely written by the poor – and when they are written they tend to fit into a hero narrative. Through hard work, smarts, and temerity, the hero pulls themselves up by their bootstraps in a narrative that simply provides an easy exception: look, we don’t have to give you more, you just have to work harder. On Class is an exploration of the ways we talk about class: of who tells the stories and who doesn’t, and why that has to change. It asks the question: What don’t we talk about when we don’t talk about class? We don’t talk about luck, or privilege, or entitlement. We don’t talk about the trauma that goes along with being poor.”

The Suspect We

by Shane Neilson & Roxanna Bennett

Palimpsest Press, May 2023

“In The Suspect We, Roxanna Bennett and Shane Neilson collaborate to make a documentary poetics concerning pandemic conditions for the mad, neurodivergent, and disabled. Written while the world huddled indoors, The Suspect We is the product of a poetic friendship as well as a reaction to it. Throughout, Bennett and Neilson query CanLit politics and care deficiencies as mutually dependent while also taking care of one another through their own work and its address.”

Troll

by Logan Macnair

Now or never Publishing, April 2023

“When aspiring actor Peter Riley is given the assignment in his drama class to perform in a YouTube-style video, he creates the character of ‘Petrol Riley,’ a satire of a politically extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist. Peter is soon surprised to learn that the video he has uploaded has gone unexpectedly viral, with thousands of viewers misinterpreting his satirical performance as genuine. Seeing this as his path toward fame, Peter commits to portraying the hatemongering character of Petrol full-time, building a devout and rabid fanbase of online supporters that only grow more loyal and extreme the more hateful Petrol’s rhetoric becomes. As his reach grows, Peter must reconcile with his notoriety and decide whether this newfound fame is worth the influence he is having on his legions of impressionable online admirers. Striking and timely, Troll offers a meditation and authentic critique on the unique conditions and occasional ugliness of modern online communication.”

To the Forest

by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, translated by Rhonda Mullins

Coach House Books, June 2023

“When the pandemic forces a family to return to the mother’s childhood home, she seeks meaning in her ancestral roots and the violent beauty of the natural world.

Fleeing the city at the beginning of the pandemic, two families are thrown together in a century-old country house. Winter seeps through the walls, the wallpaper is peeling, and the mice make their nest in the piano. Without phones and Internet, they turn to the outdoors, where a new language unfolds. Five children become tiny explorers, discovering nature and its treasures, while the adults reconnect with something greater than themselves.

In To the Forest, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette considers existence and death in a celebration of small places and the natural world. A house built on a foundation of gravestones, the local handyman Clark Kent, a mystery woman long dead that no one wants to talk about: Barbeau-Lavalette brings to life the oddities of a place and a cast of colourful neighbours who have lived unusual lives.”

South

by Babak Lakghomi

Dundurn Press, August 2023

“South is a haunting and hallucinatory reimagination of life in a world under totalitarianism, and an individual’s quest for truth, agency, and understanding.

B, a journalist, travels to the South of an unnamed desert country for a mysterious mission to write a report about the recent strikes on an offshore oil rig. From the beginning of his trip, he is faced with a cruel and broken landscape of drought and decay, superstitious believers of evil winds and spirits, and corrupt entities focused on manipulation and censorship. As he tries to defend himself against his unknown enemies, we learn about his father’s disappearance, his fading love with his wife, and his encounter with an unknown woman. A puzzle-like novel about totalitarianism, surveillance, alienation, and guilt that questions the forces that control us.”

Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

Edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua

Haymarket Books, April 2023

“An energizing case for hope about the climate, from Rebecca Solnit (“the voice of the resistance” – New York Times), climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment.

Not Too Late brings strong climate voices from around the world to address the political, scientific, social, and emotional dimensions of the most urgent issue human beings have ever faced. Accessible, encouraging, and engaging, it's an invitation to everyone to understand the issue more deeply, participate more boldly, and imagine the future more creatively.

In concise, illuminating essays and interviews, Not Too Late features the voices of Indigenous activists, such as Guam-based attorney and writer Julian Aguon; climate scientists, among them Jacquelyn Gill and Edward Carr; artists, such as Marshall Islands poet and activist Kathy Jeñtil-Kijiner; and longtime organizers, including The Tyranny of Oil author Antonia Juhasz and Emergent Strategy author adrienne maree brown.

Shaped by the clear-eyed wisdom of editors Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and enhanced by illustrations by David Solnit, Not Too Late is a guide to take us from climate crisis to climate hope.

Contributors include Julian Aguon, Jade Begay, adrienne maree brown, Edward Carr, Renato Redantor Constantino, Joelle Gergis, Jacquelyn Gill, Mary Annaise Heglar, Mary Anne Hitt, Roshi Joan Halifax, Nikayla Jefferson, Antonia Juhasz, Kathy Jetnil Kijiner, Fenton Lutunatabua & Joseph `Sikulu, Yotam Marom, Denali Nalamalapu, Leah Stokes, Farhana Sultana, and Gloria Walton.”

Swans

by Michelle Brown

Palimpsest Press, April 2023

“Michelle Brown’s second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada’s catchiest lyric poets.”

The Art of Libromancy: Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-first Century

by Josh Cook

Biblioasis, June 2023

“The essays in The Art of Libromancy explore the politics, philosophies, technologies, emotional experience, and craft of selling books in the twenty-first century.

In a society filled with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda, true storytelling and story-reading are more important than ever. But with Amazon continuing to increase its power in bookselling and publishing and the publishing industry consolidating into even fewer houses, telling important stories and getting those stories to readers is increasingly difficult. From the relationship between bookselling and white supremacy, to the economics of bookselling in contemporary hyper-capitalism, to a new philosophy of “good taste,” to the craft and art of handselling, veteran bookseller and writer Josh Cook turns a generous yet critical eye to an industry at the heart of American culture, sharing tips and techniques for becoming a better reader and, of course, recommending great books along the way.”

Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin

by Jake Byrne

Buckrider Books, April 2023

“Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin is a swirl of energy, emotion and observation that takes the reader across the world on a Carmen Sandiego–like journey as well as deep into the complexities of modern queer life. Unabashedly sexual, and embracing a wide range of styles and tones, Byrne’s poems move easily from lines of love and desire to sharp critiques of capitalism and war, and the co-opting of queer culture by them both. These are destabilizing poems, poems filled with glittering imagery and ideas and questions and truths, poems that share the poet’s longing to live in a time that is not “as cruel and unjust / As every other time has been before it.”

Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There

by Jade Wallace

Guernica Editions, April 2023

“Each section of Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is a psychogeographic investigation. Two casual ghost hunters on a road trip hear the death rattle of their relationship. Residents of a city’s fringe measure their physical and social isolation. A mother and her adult child have diametrically opposed reactions to their vacation spot. Lovers on a romantic coastal getaway discover how estranged they are from one another. Curious figures begin to embody their environments. Forthright and anecdotal, these poems recount the signals people transmit and receive, and the reciprocal ways we make, and are made by, the places we inhabit.”