Literary Review of Canada

Katherine Ashenburg is a novelist in Toronto and the author of The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die. Paul W. Bennett is an author, education columnist, and regular guest commentator on talk radio. He lives in Halifax. Murray Campbell is a contributing editor with the magazine. Ellie Eberlee works as an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press. Graham Fraser is the author of Sorry, I Don’t Speak French. Keith Garebian will publish his autobiography, Pieces of My Self, in June. Tom Jokinen lives and writes in Winnipeg. Mark Kingwell is the author of, most recently, Singular Creatures: Robots, Rights, and the Politics of Posthumanism. Hattie Klotz is exploring the tastes of Italy. Martin Laflamme is a Canadian diplomat, currently posted to Taiwan. Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian of religion and a visiting fellow at King’s College, London. Patrick Leonard…

I WAS TEN WHEN THE BIG FRIENDLY GIANT sauntered into my life, along with James Henry Trotter, Charlie Bucket, Matilda Wormwood, and Danny, the champion of the world. I do not remember the order in which they arrived, but I do remember where I was when they did: Mr. Dickey’s grade 5 classroom. Hardly precocious, I had long struggled with reading. As much as the world of books fascinated me from the outside, I couldn’t seem to enter it, no matter how much or how often I tried. Discouraged, I would retreat into other imaginative realms: the creek bed where I hunted for fossils and pretended to be Indiana Jones, the abandoned farmhouses and storm cellars I probably shouldn’t have been exploring, the castles and pirate ships I built out of…

RE: It Thinks, Therefore…? by Alexander Sallas (March) I VERY MUCH ENJOYED ALEXANDER SALLAS’S REVIEW of Mark Kingwell’s Singular Creatures. I think one of the more important conversations to be had today involves the ethics of artificial intelligence. However, Sallas does get one thing wrong: the best episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is actually “The Inner Light.” David Rhind Ottawa RE: The Azores by Richard Sanger (March) IN MY FAVOURITE POEMS, THE HUMAN VOICE speaks. The artful use of words opens a path, to be sure, with plenty of space for thought, feeling, and mystery. But a human way is opened, even in such works of rigorous form as Shakespeare’s sonnets. And so it is with Richard Sanger’s haunting poem “The Azores.” I felt the journey, the circling, the savouring, the remembrance, even before fate’s…

Revival and Change: The 1957 and 1958 Diefenbaker Elections John C. Courtney UBC Press 296 pages, softcover and ebook AS HE EMBARKED ON THE FEDERAL election campaign in April 1957, John Diefenbaker was filled with doubts. He had led the Progressive Conservatives for just four months and didn’t think he had done well as opposition leader. The opinion polls were showing the incumbent Liberals miles ahead. He was concerned that he might even lose his own seat in Saskatchewan. The Liberals “are out to beat me at all costs,” he wrote to his brother, Elmer. “Gee it would be my end if I got defeated personally and I would be out for sure.” The next two months would show just how wrong Diefenbaker had been to worry about disaster. He narrowly won that 1957 campaign,…

As quetiapine’s dose jacked up, my muscles acheduntil the dystonic body bent upon itself, knew wood,concrete, boron. I became material, a tetanic object, ecstatically inert—in pain, muscles tautened to pull against their bonesas if tethered on a bow, but the quiver ensteeled, yanking weaker flesh—the whine, the bones, they whine—as the computermonitor, turned on, whines — not a metabolic problem, says screen,nor an enzyme screaming beastly exhaustion in lactic acidwaste, but a brain, always a brain having strung its receptors like tin cansalong cell membranes—clang, clang, clang, the stigmataof love, and oh, excruciating, do not warn the lovers, may they lieso still with one another, the signal arrested between bodies,in sickness, health, and I am the difference between that difference—some talk of body. I feel a body felled, dense, lyingin sulci, as if surface touch of vinyl…

From Layton to Singh: The 20-Year Conflict behind the NDP’s Deal with the Trudeau Liberals Matt Fodor James Lorimer & Company 208 pages, softcover and ebook IT’S A CURSE, BUT LEADERS OF THE NEW Democratic Party have been moderately likeable. Ed Broadbent was your uncle. He’d wink and tousle your hair. Jack Layton was dynamic, if a bit too downtown. Here was a guy you’d have a beer with — but just the one. Audrey McLaughlin was…well, she seemed nice. Jagmeet Singh, the party’s federal leader since 2017, polled at 46 percent approval in 2021, leading up to that year’s election, compared with 37 percent for the Liberals’ Justin Trudeau and 28 percent for the Conservatives’ Erin O’Toole. People liked this young man from Scarborough: soft-spoken, skilled at social media, measured in the face…