Questions for Wolf by Shannon Quinn Published by Thistledown Press Review by Allison Kydd $12.95; ISBN 978-1-77187-058-0 Questions for Wolf is a collection of poetry in Thistledown Press’s New Leaf Series. In these haunting, often savage lines, Shannon Quinn evokes not only those who have been exploited, silenced and murdered, but all women. The images are so delicate, yet complex, it is best they speak for themselves. First there are the children: “younger girls fly by/lost in the magical history/of secondhand bikes/all tassels and pigtails . . .” and close by there’s “. . . a circle of girls too young to be with boys who drive cars. . .”. Then come the evils of “sparse expectations,” “a list/of inner-city mortifications/that comes with being poor and a girl”. Quinn knows the drive for something better and the desire for love and attention: “Boys see you for the first time/They see you they see you they see you/gliding mid-flight/Can’t touch you/Can almost touch you”. Such vulnerability leads to ruin, and yet: “I don’t want to be gentle/or wear the comfortable footwear/of common goals/or join the queue/to pull a ticket to collect on insufficient blessings”. Addiction too begins with the promise of…

Size of a Fist by Tara Gereaux Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $12.95 ISBN 978-1-77187-059-7 I recognized the anonymous town in first-time author Tara Gereaux’s teen novella, Size of a Fist. The mill’s closed, there are “many boarded-up shops,” and abandoned homes. I know this town because I was raised in a number of small towns that echo it and I’m familiar with many more, and because I could relate not only to the physical aspects of the town’s decline, but also to the disreputable activities of the youth who inhabit it – including Addy, the protagonist of this New Leaf Editions’ book – and the tangible desire to get away. Drinking, drugs, driving while impaired, “colourful” language, bullying, adolescent sex, and generations of familial dysfunction: this is no Disney story, but Gereaux does shed light on the underbelly of small-town life that some might argue is the norm, rather than the exception. There’s value in holding up that mirror: it presents a truth. The Regina writer portrays a community where the only chance of upward mobility is to be outward bound. This book is more documentary than commentary, and I like that, too: there’s no…

Riot Lung by Leah Horlick Published by Thistledown Press (New Leaf Series) Review by Justin Dittrick $9.95 ISBN 978-1-927068-08-3 Leah Horlick’s debut collection of poems, Riot Lung, offers its readers an inspired celebration of urban and small town experience that will perplex, transfix, enlighten, but also move, those coming of age in a radical time. Most of the poems (except one) are written in the confessional mode, that is, in the second-person. The poems are highly evocative, written with a keen eye for imagery and with a rhythm and free stanza structure that the poet has made her own. The range of subjects varies widely, from sex education in a Saskatchewan town to what the lights in St. Louis reveal in a transient moment of wishing. The poems in this collection demonstrate the complexity of feeling that the confessional poem can bring to those with a longing for life in their poetry. The poems blossom with the senses, with breaks that seldom truncate their line, but rather, extend an image’s duration and resonance. This causes the poems to flow without breath, without an inclination to pause or withhold. Yet, the poetic is somehow controlled. The images are free to arise…

This is the Nightmare by Adrienne Gruber Published by Thistledown Press Reviewed by Carrie Prefontaine $12.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-52-2 Adrienne Gruber’s This is the Nightmare is a collection of deeply reflective poems that will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the complexities of love and language. “I don’t pick up foreign languages well,” the poet laments in “Dead Language,” and this is a theme carried throughout “Limbo,” the first section of the volume. Whether the poet is speaking a “jumbled commentary on who we never were” in “Our Frantic Language,” or reading the “Tabloid Poems” that “scald a pink fleshy tongue,” words themselves are suspect. In these poems, language is most meaningful when it manifests through the physical. In “How I Find You,” for example, emotional pain is written vividly all over the subject’s face: “You have the face of a Japanese bowl, / charred raw strokes of paint along your cheekbones, / plump and full, designed with clear intent, / your jaw tight, and pouring / out of you, something cold.” The poems in section two, This is the Nightmare explore grief, carrying forward the complex search for connection, sense of self, and meaningful language. “[G]rief is a kind of…