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Suzette Mayr's Monoceros takes place in an alternate reality, albeit a reality that very much resembles our own -- high school is a nightmare, students are bullied to death for being gay, men and women can lose their jobs for being gay, teen girls are vicious, adults are just as lost as the kids are, and the only difference between the two is that the former have given up searching for meaning.

Monoceros, by Suzette Mayr
Published: April 2011
Finally got around to it: July 2011

reviewed by Nancy Freund

"The Unicorns Are Coming."

As you can probably guess from the title, and the immensely enjoyable book trailer, Monoceros has something to do with Unicorns. And it does. But that something, the something that Suzette Mayr is doing with Unicorns, has nothing to do with meme culture, with juvenalia, or with twee. Instead, Mayr's talking about anatomically correct Unicorns. These are desirous and righteous beasts, and they rampage through the novel with all of the swagger and anxiety of adolescent libido.

Since discovering her work in an issue of The Antigonish Review a couple of years back, I’ve been anticipating what Toronto poet Helen Guri would come up with as her first trade poetry collection, finally published as Match (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2011).

Joshua Corey at the Cahiers de Corey blog as given some preliminary thoughts on Rachel Zolf's Neighbour Procedure, along with Geoffrey Nutter's Christopher Sunset.

'A work of radical and rigorous empathy for Jew & Arab ... Zolf's world is raucous, contested, its heteroglossia weighted both ethically and aesthetically ... how physically beautiful the book is: its printing, and that gorgeously textured paper.'

Ah, the glory of today's youth. So young. So full of promise. So innocent. So very much in the pathway of crushing, humiliating, eternal soul-destroying reality.

No wonder that children, in much of literature, are often presented as being somehow wiser than their elders, their lack of world experience uncluttering their precious vision, and thus their every statement uttered from their precocious mouths a jewel of clarity in a universe of uncertainty.

Not to make too fine a point of it, but the title character of Cordelia Strube's Lemon made me want to get my tubes tied. At the very least, it killed any residual yearning for my teenage years.

It's not that Lemon is too brash, too angry or too horrid a character, it's that she's all too real. As Diablo Cody wrote in Jennifer's Body, 'hell is a teenage girl.' This has never been more true than here.