The Beautiful Placeby Lee GowanPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$24.95 ISBN 978-1-77187-208-9 Saskatchewan born-and-raised writer Lee Gowan has penned a thick new novel—The Beautiful Place—and it’s a beautiful thing. Gowan’s three previous novels have garnered much attention (Make Believe Love was shortlisted for Ontario’s Trillium Award), and his screenplay, Paris or Somewhere, was nominated for a Gemini Award. Currently the Program Director of the Creative Writing and Business Communications department at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, this award-winning author’s giving readers something completely different with The Beautiful Place, which delves into the sci-fi world of cryonics; the realistic world of failed marriages, 21st Century parenting, and dementia; and the ever-precarious world of art and art-making. What Gowan’s done here is ingenious: he’s imagined an ongoing life for Philip Bentley, Sinclair Ross’s protagonist in As for Me and My House. Gowan’s tri-provincial sequel to that prairie classic’s told from the perspective of the minister-turned-artist’s grandson, also known as Bentley. The younger Bentley—a fired, semi-suicidal cryonics salesman, writer, and father of two daughters from different wives—is approached by a beguiling woman named Mary Abraham who “met Jesus in a dream and walked with him to a desert…

Never Found: A Poetry Collectionby Jesse A. MurrayPublished by Off the Field PublishingReview by Amanda Zimmerman$14.99 ISBN 9781775194668 Jesse A. Murray, a Saskatchewan poet and high school teacher, follows up his debut collection, I Will Never Break , with this second assortment of poems exploring different perspectives, thoughts, and ideas. Never Found is stuffed full of verses ranging from the raw to the soulful, the bittersweet to the bitter. The compositions evoke a variety of emotions—both dark and pure—and Murray even hazards to tackle some of the more heart wrenching, touchy subjects. Murray has the gift of knowing when to boldly declare the emotion he is desiring to provoke or gently nudge his readers into discovering it for themselves through his phrasing. Isn’t it always more gratifying, as a reader, when you can dip into your own experiences through someone else’s writing? That is the craft of a talented writer. Unfortunately, one of Mr. Murray’s greatest regrets is having kept his writing unpublished for so many years. He has done his best to course correct through the amount of works he has sent out into the world over the last few years and, as he finds his writer’s footing, the…