Summer 2013

In her enveloping, heartfelt debut novel, Bone and Bread, Saleema Nawaz penetrates deeply into the sibling bond.

For generations of Eastern European Jews, Yiddish was the language of daily life – it expressed tragedy, boredom, affection, and tenderness, alongside all that great trash talk.

Since 2006, poets Susan Gillis, Mary di Michele, Jan Conn, and Jane Munro have been studying and composing renku, a Japanese form of collaborative linked verse.

This is no New Age fluffball. The book opens with decomposing human remains, and includes a corpse lowered into a grave filled with water and another buried in concrete.

Reading this cri de cœur for Canada’s public broadcaster aroused a paradoxical reaction: first alarm, then a fierce desire to see the whole bureaucratic mess shaken up or shaken down.