After the Truck Hit by Jennifer Kuchinka Published by DriverWorks Ink Review by Michelle Shaw $19.95 ISBN 978-1-927570-16-6 When I first picked up Jennifer Kuchinka’s book After the Truck Hit, I was both intrigued and apprehensive. With a title like that, I figured I was in for an emotional journey. After the Truck Hit is both a story and a journal of Jennifer’s life before and after the accident. It’s a story firmly rooted in Saskatchewan. In Estevan, where Jennifer was born and where she lived for a time with her husband; in Macoun, a small town in the southeast corner of Saskatchewan, where she grew up and where she lived with her parents and baby daughter while recovering from her accident, and in Regina, where she studied at the University of Regina, met her husband and subsequently spent almost three months in the fall of 2010 recovering from her accident. Much of the book seems to have been taken from Jennifer’s personal journal after the accident which is both fascinating and a little frustrating in that the reader experiences firsthand her jumbled and repetitive thoughts. To make it easier to follow, Jennifer “fills in the blanks” in italics, putting…

I Exi(s)t / exit I by C. Isa Lausas and Tyson Atkings Published by JackPine Press Review by Jessica Bickford $30.00 978-1-927035-15-3 I Exi(s)t / exit I is in the most basic explanation, three books musing on the same subjects brought together in one. Two monologue poems meet in a third text message dialogue between two people preoccupied with love, death, and existence. Of course, like all good art, it isn’t that simple. This book, with its white vinyl covers, titleless, and embossed with a triangle on each side begs for exploration, and it does not disappoint. With magnetic clips, it opens three different ways, revealing new content with each iteration and deepening the sense of mystery I feel clings to this book.  It never quite wants to tell you everything. I spent probably the first five or ten minutes with this book in my hands just playing with different ways to open it and finding the unique points of entry into the stories within. At the very centre of the book I found a selection of three digital photos, numbered and signed (as I Exi(s)t / exit I is limited edition), and revealing just one more detail about each…

Wildness Rushing In by dee Hobsbawn-Smith Published by Hagios Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $17.95 ISBN 978-192671025-9 Wildness Rushing In is the first book of poetry by Saskatchewan writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith, and, as with many inaugural books, she mines wide-ranging personal experience-from childhood to the present-for a collection that reveals her universe of passions, sorrows, and the reflective, in-between moments best expressed in poetry. Among what impressed was Hobsbawn-Smith’s range of form (she incorporates prose poems, the villanelle, couplets, quatrains, a glosa, and less formally structured pieces), and her liberal use of personification. Snowflakes “swathe\the metal braces and rusty frames\of the tools in the farm field,” morning fog is described as “smoothing\the landscape,” and sun “rubs the ashes\from the forehead of the sky.” In her poem “The great divide,” a remembrance of a drive home with sleeping sons in the back seat of the car, she writes “a windshield full of stars\weeps for what can’t be said.” So lovely, and weighted with meaning. One way a writer adds music to poems is by using alliteration, and we see-and hear-numerous examples of this kind of music in this book. In a touching poem for a brother who died too soon,…