Georgia Straight

Like any identity based upon commonalities such as gender, sexuality, or race, the umbrella term Asian Canadian can be both illuminating and problematic. On the one hand, similarities and shared experiences can provide insight and create dialogue. On the other, differences between subsumed identities can fragment unity.

Such issues are central to the cinematic anthology Reel Asian: Asian Canada on Screen (Coach House Books, $29.95), edited by Vancouver-born University of Guelph English professor Elaine Chang.

The Girls Who Saw Everything

By Sean Dixon. Coach House Books, 290 pp, $21.95, softcover

The members of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women's Book Club have trouble drawing a line between reality and literature. It's not so much distinguishing fact from fiction; it's more a cause-and-effect confusion. What begins as a session on a mysterious text called He Who Saw Everything mutates into an all-involving quest spookily linked to the events unfolding in the story they're studying.

Everyday is the new black of contemporary poetry. The personal, the domestic, and the banal are no longer boring chatter but subject to a cultural articulation: the lingual equivalent of finding a great shirt at the back of your closet and having everyone say you look really cool in it.

Rachel Zolf takes everyday "plain language" and pulls it apart with abandon to see what it costs us under contemporary economic regimes in her book Human Resources (Coach House, $16.95).