Autant by Paulette Dubé Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $19.95 ISBN 978-1-77187-156-3 Autant, the highly-original novel by Albertan Paulette Dubé, begins with a confession – in the Catholic sense – and a directory of the multiple characters who populate this 144-page tale set in small fictional Autant, Alberta. The inter-generational story unfolds between two years – 1952 and 2012 – and it’s big on superstition, angels, sibling dynamics, and bees. At the centre of the bustling “hive” is the Franco-Albertan Garance family, headed by Edgar and Lucille. The youngest of their daughters, perceptive Bella, is prone to bleeding and headaches, and as Lucille’s offspring she comes by her superstitions honestly. Lucille paints her kitchen door blue “so that angels would recognize the house as a safe place,” and as a child she found a stone that “gave her dreams of a tall ship, a beautiful woman with blue eyes, long red hair, and, then, a small boat on dark water”. Young Bella also has an affinity for stones. She leaves them for her mother as gifts “inside shoes, beside the bed, under the pillow. It was her way of saying I love you, goodbye, and I…

Gaits by Paulette Dubé Published by Thistledown Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $17.95 ISBN 978-1-897235-74-4 I’m positively wild about Paulette Dubé’s new book. Walking through the numbered poems in Gaits was a meditative experience; they ferried me into the understory – with its seeds, scat, berries, pine needles, creatures, bird song, and autumn leaves (which “follow as brown tap shoes”) – and readers, there’s no place I’d rather be. There’s ample white space around the stanzas in the award-winning Jasper poet’s fifth collection, which fittingly allows both the pieces and their readers room to breathe. As the title suggests, the poems examine “gaits” – both animal and human – through the seasons. It’s an inspired idea, and one which required a hawk eye and owl ear-to-the-ground (and air). Although brief and deceptively simple, the finely-honed pieces are actually multi-layered: the masterly poet weaves descriptions of the natural world, mythology, contemporary life, and philosophy into a spider-fine lace of words. Look, for example, at how the following lines pull double duty: “a day of soft rain\melts a hard week of snow”. I highly agree with the poet’s assertion that “healing is\water over stones, wind over grass, sounds\of deer, fearless.” Like…