Broken Pencil

Saudade: The Possibilities of Place is a collection of fascinating stories of Anik See's travels across the world. Her style, a stream of consciousness writing, has amazing anecdotes and a wisdom that I have never read before. Through Anik, I can travel vicariously to the places she has travelled like Yellowknife, Cuba, and Amsterdam, and gain the wisdom she attained along her travels. Anik's stories are wonderful and her thoughts are refreshing.

The ghost of Glenn Gould possesses Crabwise to the Hounds, both as subject and as organizing agent. Gould, the eccentric pianist, was famous for humming and swaying as he moved through his strictly prescribed pieces, adding another simple layer of noise beneath the Bach or Beethoven he was playing. When listening to the recordings now, the listener is compelled to control it into bars and notes; yet always that strip of sound escapes, deep and personal, a steady hum from his lips.

What is it about modern love? Margaret Christakos asks just this in her seventh collection of poetry, What Stirs, which reads like the sequel to an inside joke as written by a sexualities prof.

RM Vaughan's latest collection of poetry works on the tensions between betrayed and traitor. Telling the story of a therapist crossing the lines between therapist to become the speaker's lover with romance and tension and the added drama of Vaughan revealing in the endnotes that the case is autobiographical, this collection is potent and memorable. One particularly haunting piece is that of the letter Vaughan writes to the defence's legal counsel, with the therapist's name blacked out.

Some poets make beautiful, playful poems that remain coy and mysterious after reading and rereading. Jen Currin is of that kind. Hagiography (saint/holy writing/study) is a collection of poems that moves from death to birth, and visits gardens, houses, beds and streets on its way. It is hard to establish a sense of place in Currin's poems -- stay alert for clues.

Houses are extensions of Hagiography 's characters.

Claudia Dey should be your new girl crush. An attractive blonde with a relationship column in the Globe and Mail newspaper, I though her work may be comparable to, uh, Leah McLaren? But thankfully, it's not!

Pulpy and Midge is a very nice book about very nice people. Pulpy and Midge are gentle, kind, and in an enviable amount of love. Maybe I don't read enough books about nice people, but Pulpy really got to me.

Here is how nice Pulpy is: He wipes his feet at the door; he is kind to the receptionist; he feels guilty about not remembering her name. Sure, Pulpy can be too nice. But so what if he lets people finish his sentences?

At first I was skeptical about The Girls Who Saw Everything for the following reasons: (1) this book about a young women's book club is written by a man; (2) this young women's book club performs literary scenes, not in a theatre but in their lives, sometimes even involving unsuspecting strangers; (3) elements of the story include a robot, ancient cuneiform Gilgamesh stones and the Baghdad Blogger.