By Vivian Hansen

Snow In A Silver Bowl
by Nathalie Sorensen
Frontenac House (2026)

Sometimes I crave reading the presence, of a collection of words that affirm my era. Sometimes I don’t want to lick my finger to turn the page; I know it will turn without the effort of what is wet. Nathalie Sorensen’s debut collection is one such poetry book that keeps me turning in resistance to all things that are inaccessible to me.

Even so, the wet enters the motion of turning: “this is the river, ravishing,/unknowable, itself.” (14) These poems are the river, the essence of a self that craves affirmation in the lucid, hard dreams of a life. Sorensen uses this word at a frequency I find intriguing, “… a lucid blade of grass,”(15). What is lucid, after all, but a waving handkerchief, a sometime sorrow that reminds us of what we cannot stash aside.

And then come the images. These are holy in their poetic magnification: the numinous hallucinations that heal (20) where the lion sits down with a carried Caro (a friend dying of cancer). Perhaps the most poignant parable is found in “when an old fireplace/is lit again, the old people come back.” (23) This place is the ‘rest hard’ industry of memoir and how one creates space for the healing.  

The structure of many of these poems is asserted in commas, which infiltrate so many lines but also emulate a kind of recipe and second person solution:

Look up.
Stars, nebulae, quasars
galaxies, supernovae;
a small part of all there is (35)

For weeks, months, years
make ink.  Grind the inkstick
in the shallow stone bowl
until your arm aches,
until the ink is impeccable,
a true dark. (35)

This is the measure of years for a woman, but like the early feminist confessional poetry, the poet grows a tantalizing close watch in the magic realism of the laundry. It is that horse rising from the aquarium that we always suspected was there, but never really sure.  

From The Unicorn in Captivity (Unicorn Tapestries, 1495-1505, MET Museum)
He bleeds.

Drops, red as berries,
Spot his white coat.
Around him, flowers, bluebells,
oxlip, bistort, cuckoopint,
woven with botanical care,
tinted with madder, turmeric, woad.

Who among us will breach the fence,
unbuckle his harness,
help him to his feet,
and lead him into the bluebells?

The question of who among us seems not to have changed in more than 500 years, and this is an unsettling apprehension of how the human voice just cannot catch, a moral force.

Lest the modern reader of feminist text dismiss this simple knowing, Sorensen offers another guidance:  Lascaux, where she last lay in the grass, a woman comprehends: “deep in the grass, the aurochs pass.” (30) The extinction of a hunted creature is uncertain, but we can lay here for awhile and think on it.

I experience a fine gratification in reading this work; it is an accessible and sensate offering. It does all the heavy lifting and allows me the rest.

Vivian Hansen’s publications include three full-length books of poetry — including A Tincture of Sunlight and A Bitter Mood of Clouds — and several chapbooks. She has published essays in Coming Here, Being Here, and in Waiting. She also has a short piece in the Calgary Public Library Dispenser Series (2019) Where We Surfaced.

The post Review of Nathalie Sorensen’s “Snow In A Silver Bowl” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

By Renée M. Sgroi

Calling It Back to Me
by Laurie D. Graham
McClelland & Stewart (2026)

On any given day, chances are good you might read or be fortunate enough to hear work by any number of talented Canadian poets. Sometimes, though, you hear work so grounded, so thoughtful in its questioning that you end up reading the entire book in one night. Exactly my experience this past National Poetry Month, after hearing Laurie D. Graham read from her latest collection, Calling It Back To Me (McLelland & Stewart). 

An exploration of family history that collides with colonialism, Calling It Back to Me flows through four, longform pieces that interrogate central questions of place and personhood. The title poem, for instance, opens with heirloom, ocean-crossing steam-trunk chests whose “belongings / gone now,” (5), yet considers simultaneously “the processes occurring / within us and all around” (8). An apt beginning for a collection that explores ancestry as both oppressed and oppressor. Gender also figures in these poems, as the poet untangles what it means to be a woman, recorded for posterity as: “Just a married name, / a father’s name on a document” (6).  The second poem, “The Great-Grandmothers” morphs beyond the book’s predominant couplets as the poet digs deeper into female ancestry. “Lily McClughan”, for instance, begins with a spacious meditation on a name that is “Hard to affix” (21) while “Sophia Czyzowski” by contrast is punctuated by brisk lines that describe this ancestor as someone whom “You would not want / to cross her” (26).

The third poem, “Toward an Origin Story” expands on the dualistic effects of immigration. The poem begins “Under Russia’s boot, / under England’s boot,” and pointedly observes the irony that: “they sailed off / to become the boot” (47). This clear-eyed, unsentimental swerve reveals a mind unafraid to explore tensions. The poet asks, “How can I speak / for this?” (48) and later on, “And we repeat on land / the wake they threw— / the churned grasses, / the razed overburden” (50-51). Haunted by these historical entanglements, the final poem aims for “A Good Closing”. Opening irreverently with “Mary so fricking full of grace coming out / of the Pizzaville, red envelopes of longing,” (61) the lines move towards a rubato as the poet acknowledges: “I’ve come to know / differently the passage / of time. I return and return, / recall ever more poorly/ the stubble, low poplars yellowing” (63).  We are led back to the Prairies where the poet’s ancestors settled on land that was not theirs, back to the geography of a place with “the flat, flat water—” (72), which the poet acknowledges, even as she inks these images onto the page, she will one day herself no longer be able to recall.  

Calling It Back to Me is a nuanced, intricate look at what it means to live as a settler in this country. These poems speak through a sophisticated, masterful voice that willingly opens itself up to a painful world, yet readily, humbly acknowledges, “But I can’t span it.”

Renée M. Sgroi (she/her) has published two poetry collections. In a Tension of Leaves and Binding (Guernica Editions), was twice listed on the CBC’s Fall 2024 Poetry Books to Watch lists, and was shortlisted for a 2025 International Rubery Award. Her third collection is forthcoming in 2027 with Frontenac House Press. A member of The Writers’ Union of Canada and the League of Canadian Poets, Renée is also a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.

The post Review of Laurie D. Graham’s “Calling It Back to Me” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

By Robert Hilles

The Shape of Disappearing Letters
by Marty Gervais
Mosaic Press (2026)

Marty Gervais has published twenty-five books that include books of poetry, novels, and nonfiction. He has been awarded the prestigious Harbourfront Festival of Prize and has worked as journalist for The Windsor Star where he’s won nearly twenty Journalism awards. He has twice won the Milton Acorn’s Poetry Prize and has been the Poet Laureate for Windsor. To top all that, he is an amazing photographer and ran Black Moss Press for more than fifty years. Given all that this is his bravest poetry books to date. The key word in the title is Disappearing. In this book, the poet, with much dignity, chronicles how many on his father’s side have suffered from some form of loss of vision later in life. In this book he elaborates on all of that but focuses the most on his father and his dealings with that. He writes not with self-pity but with brave acceptance. Early on he writes about an uncle who also bravely faced a growing blindness (Finding the Garden): 

“A glorious hideaway in the dark shadow
of the nearby factory where after the onset
of blindness he lost his job and soon
retreated to this cramped little paradise behind
his house where he could be seen gliding about
with a metal watering can, weaving in and around
this carefully sculpted world he so intimately
knew, almost like when he patrolled Ford’s
assembly lines as a hard—nosed union boss”

This is poem like most in the book the conveys the ability to adapt.

The poet has had to deal with poor vision all this life and it starts as young boy and his first eye exam (Eye Exam):

“‘Boy, his eyes are bad for
a kid so young,’ said the optometrist
when he asked me to read
the eye chart at the end of the room
— the large letter “E” on the top line
leaping and shouting for attention
— a kid in the schoolyard”

His first pair of glasses results in him bullied (First Pair of Glasses):

“Like my father’s — big, black, square
sliding down my nose — my index finger quickly
found a new role pushing these plastic spectacles
back and up into place
I didn’t have them a week when someone punched me
in the face and broke the bridge
I patched it with a brown bandage
forever unravelling”

These early poems help set the stage for what happens years later. First his father loses the ability to drive (The Last Drive Home):

“My father told me how on the last day
he owned a car — having had to give
it up when he failed the eye exam—
he sat in his 1991 Buick in the driveway
hands gripping the steering wheel
like a teenager pretending to drive”

And much later his father continues to work in his workshop despite being essentially blind (The Lesson):

“His hands caressed the two-by-fours
— no different than a blind man searching
the shape of a familiar face — my father
in a new apartment, as he went about
building a work bench, something
he had never been without”

This poem ends with these wise words from the poet’s father (The Lesson):

“‘You don’t need to see,’ he scoffed
‘You know when you’re good!’”

Later still his father lives with his inability to see (My Father Reading):

“My 85-year-old father sat alone —
a mug of coffee beside him
and The Windsor Daily Star spread
flat on a small kitchen table
pretending to read —
eyes straining at headlines
the index finger of his right hand
slowly gliding underneath the words”
A similar fate faces the poet (Like My Father):

“My notebooks are looking more and more
like children’s handiwork — the pages
I handed in the nuns in Grade 2,
letters tall and fat, sometimes ragged
odd and happy and frantic, big creatures
waving or dancing or misbehaving”

And as an echo to his father’s pretending to read the poet does something similar (Saving Grace):

“I spread out the map of the world
…

My eyes scan the darkening shades
of mountains, greens in the broad plains
deep blues of rivers and oceans and seas
and my hands slide freely across
boundaries like soaring birds above
in the metal grey February weather
no passport, no care as they settle
and light again —”

We eventually come to this (Seeing Him Play – For Julien)

“I can still pick out my six-foot grandson
in these televised varsity hockey games
if I stand just inches away from
the wide screen, straining my eyes
to track his lean and familiar shape
as he maneuvers the puck, smoothly weaving
and bobbing and slipping through
this pinball maze, the brightest of icescapes
a world of blurred jersey numbers
of streaks of light and colour and shadow
and sound and maybe not enough to say
I was there

but still I’ve tasted something
of all that easy grace
and luck and prayer”

The poet is bullied early in life because of his glasses but endures. That is what is strongest about this book and will give every reader hope because no matter the adversity he survives and endures. It would be easy for the poet to feel sorry for himself especially after grandfather, uncles, aunts, and father all struggle with the same loss of sight later in life. It would be easy for the poet to feel cursed or put upon but Marty Gervais does not let that best him. Instead, the good in him endures.

The book ends with this brave author’s note:

“I am going blind. No surprise. My father, my grandfather, various aunts and uncles, all were stricken with macular degeneration (AMD)—one of the most common age-related eye conditions that affects the central part of the retina, called the macula.”

Read these poems and celebrate the human spirit behind them. 

Robert Hilles lives in Nanaimo, BC and to date has published twenty-five books. He won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Cantos from A Small Room. His books have also been shortlisted for The Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Prize, The W.O. Mitchell/City of Calgary Prize, The Stephan Stephansson Award, and The Howard O’Hagan Award. He has published eighteen books of poetry, four works of fiction, and two nonfiction books.

The post Review of Marty Gervais’ “The Shape of Disappearing Letters” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

“We’ve always been here / monsters, queer-coded villains / performing the transgressive act / of living.”

These poems take us on journeys from Calgary to Windsor, inward and outward, from joy to sorrow, evoking visceral empathy along the way. Your blood boils as you read “How to be One of the Good Ones” as she writes of a neighbour finding out she’s trans and saying “Oh, well you’re one of the good ones.” The poem continues with instructions on how to be “one of the good ones”, with a clever and biting list of what not to do:

“Definitely don’t pour    gasoline on their front line / spill-spell    SHE/THEY / in PetroleumBold capital letters / and don’t strike the match.” 

The searing image left behind from that unstruck match has never left my mind, nor have the hypothetical pink, blue, or white hydrangeas planted in the bed of such a neighbour (“with permission, of course”). The musicality and rhythm of her verse come through in this piece too, when she writes,

“Don’t speak the spells / dripping truth from lip— / sweet      then spicy     drip drip drip.”

Kay is not bound to form, and her poems rarely rhyme, but when they do, it’s as melodic as an earworm. From a modern sonnet to braille to an answer from a magic eight ball to a concise blackout poem, Kay plays with form like she invented it. And she may very well have with the way she plays with cascading footnotes in “Mirror, Mirror … Or Maybe Overthinking … I Don’t Know Yet”. Here, the would-be simple phrase “I am a woman” is dissected and pulled apart at the seams to challenge and discuss terminology, feminist theory, beauty standards, and what it means to be transgender in today’s world. 

At the halfway mark, in “Monsterology 101: the Anatomy of Monsters” she asks, “Did you really expect rage to be harmonious?”

Because yes, there is rage here, but it’s not blind. It’s the all-seeing useful kind we need in the tank in order to show up to the fight. I see There’s Magic Here Too as the shadow self to Kay’s first collection. Where Transcribing Moonlight is soft, gentle, and melancholy, There’s Magic Here Too is raucous, funny, and, not hard, exactly, but punchy. Deftly weaving together monsters and myths and pop culture, moulding it all to enhance and tell of her identity journey, leading the reader not only to meaning, but a riotous, raucous enjoyment that gets you fired up for the cause. This is a riot grrrl album and I am the middle of the mosh pit. Let’s fucking go. 

Because this is the “trans agenda” – fighting for the right to exist. It takes courage to just be a trans person in these phobic times, and yet, Skylar Kay not only exists, she uses her experience as a rally cry for change. She’s creating, contributing, even setting the tone of the conversation: one of humour and compassion, resistance and criticism. The monsters she animates, the centaurs and werewolves, the witches and faeries, are vessels of reflection, little pools waiting to be rippled. 

People so often deem our differences as monstrous, when of course, monsters are magical. And as Kay writes in “Now You See Me”, “magic turns to truth into the dark.” So, let’s turn off the lights and let this untamed, unabashed queer magic show us the way. Because this book teaches us that magic, if we let it, can dispel the fears of otherness and unite us in the beautiful, diverse, unique tapestry of what it means to be human. 

So, if you’ve ever felt like an outsider, if you’ve ever wondered, “Is there any magic left for us?” like the eight ball answers in “Corner Store Oracle”: “The choice is yours.”

Ashley J.J. White has been writing since she was a little girl. She spent her twenties planning and promoting rock concerts. She now works as Program Coordinator for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, based in Calgary. She has always been a champion of the arts and a cheerleader of independent art. She is currently working on her debut novel, Elizabeth Who?

The post Review of Skylar Kay’s “There’s Magic Here Too” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

In A Riptide
by Ronna Bloom
Brick Books (2025)

Lolograssing: What Means This?

Ronna Bloom’s exploration into death is an honour; as though we must all come late to the explication of words that are used to touch death.  Four intentions of dying come to close meanings of how we all come near to such closure: To Show the Scars: Sick Person, For Ten Billion Years: Old Person, The Earth Held Me: dead person, Don’t Close the Door to the Door: Happy Person With Nothing. This collection works on the essential journey of dying to the self.

In the first sequence, we come to terms with the hospital setting; the sickness of defeat. It is a place of trauma always newly visited. Here, we must encounter the difference between healing and sending, in a setting that always delivers a site of unassailable conflict. This is where we can all discover a found poem:  

Lyrical Hospital

Who is your mercy contact? (10)

Look for them; the words will comfort. Or not. The poet only promises that you can read in short, manageable bursts when you are in crisis. Or perhaps that perception is just crutch-like enough to buy you some time to feel.  

We put our heads down and try to work
our tiny magics.

Take our blessing pills, interrogate our crimes,
and commit new ones. (16)

More than likely, the uncertainty and warnings of sickness must be assuaged in how we become hollowed out to God:

Out of this, let my small noun cry faith.
Let me unperson for a minute –
here, hold my cup.
Breathe me presence into the face
of my mother’s tantrum of grief
that I can’t answer any other way.
Her whine – let it be a song-plea
to the balladeers of other centuries.
O, how the cows moo in solace. … (20)

O, how the O has it. We hear the grief.

In the second movement of the collection, the old person laughs:  

Sisyphus
Carry your own stone. (28)

I wish I had presented that stone to conflicted friends and critics over the years. There is a kind of grief with it, like time and energy wasted in the sense of obligation to roll that stupid, wretched stone upward in the illusion that we make all the difference. Was that sentence long enough? Bloom makes it easy, and I see the small poem as stone.  

Bloom envisions a scene, in Rending the Garments: “There should be a shiva for every kind of grief-/the break-up, the diagnosis, the assault-/where people come over unbidden and/wash their hands and bring casseroles/and hold you. (43) 

We are getting closer to the keening, and the reflections of grief. All is not a depth charge, though. Bloom leaves us with the magnitude of analogy. How we slip through the invisible barriers between life, death, grief and healthy contentment:

Death leaves you so alone.
Your hand goes through a mime’s window
Hello?  Anybody there? (56)

I’ve always enjoyed the faith of a mime. Bloom’s collection offers us that hope.

Vivian Hansen’s publications include three full-length books of poetry and several chapbooks. She has published essays in Coming Here, Being Here, and in Waiting. She also has a short piece in the Calgary Public Library Dispenser Series (2019) “Where We Surfaced.” Her most recent work, “A Bitter Mood of Clouds,” is available from Frontenac House.

The post Review of Ronna Bloom’s “In A Riptide” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Elephants in the Room: New Short Fiction
by Betty Jane Hegerat
Shadowpaw Press (2025)

Betty Jane Hegerat is well known in the writing community not only as a respected teacher and mentor, but also for her skill in crafting engaging short stories. Hegerat is a masterful writer of character, place, and most of all the small things that are actually THE things that matter. Perhaps it is because of Hegerat’s earlier career as a social worker that she brings such empathy to her writing, transforming mundane, ordinary moments into compelling, relatable narratives. 

Elephants in the Room includes fourteen highly polished stories. all which deal with the awkward situations, the unspoken or uncomfortable truths, the missed opportunities in life. In other words, the elephants in the room.

The collection opens with “The Queen is Coming” a story of a middle-aged son who takes his mother to view the Queen’s cavalcade in the 2005 royal visit to Calgary. The mother feels a strong bond with the Queen as she and the Queen were pregnant with boys at the same time, and both of their sons are named Charles. There is something so tender in the crafting of these parallel lives. The story’s narrator, Charlie, balks at taking his mother to see the Queen, but dutifully does so, his mother wearing an early replica of the Queen’s mink cloche hat which Charlie’s sister speculates is made from cat fur. The lacklustre son hasn’t chosen the best vantage point of the Cavalcade, but the mother motions her son to listen as she opines about the Queen:

 “You look at her face, Charlie. She’s so…serene. How can that be possible with all the stress the poor woman has been through?”

I choke back a snort. “She has a bit of hired help, Ma”

“Oh, not that, she says. “It’s the children. The way they live their lives. What a disappointment that must be.”

I feel heavy, leaning there on my haunches, the weight of my own dull life hovering over Ma and me. 

“I guess that’s just something that comes with being a mother,” I say. 

“No, dear,” she tells me softly, without taking her eyes off the street. “Elizabeth has had bad luck with her Charles. Aren’t I a lucky old woman to have raised a decent man like you?” She turns now, and the smile takes twenty years from her face.”

Part of the magic of that story, as in all of Hegerat’s work, is the dialogue: the authentic exchange between the characters, and what is not said. Often the real story, and the drama, is just underneath the surface of the conversations in this collection.  

Hegerat is also skilled at braiding wry humour with the everyday drama. In the story, “Unmasked”, Eldon, an older queer man who experimented with sex as a teenager, and accidently got a girl pregnant is waiting to meet his progeny for the first time. He reflects on how the mother of his child declared “father unknown’ on the birth registration and cut him out of her and the child’s life. “My Dad said I should be relieved. If I had been named and Inge had decided to keep the baby, I could end up paying support for years. In spite of feeling relieved—no longer having my nuts caught in a noose, as Dad so delicately put it—my teenage mind took a secret swaggering pride in knowing I’d fathered a kid.” When Eldon meets his daughter, he ‘had the feeling that under the mask she was looking at me like I just fell off the turnip truck.’ He goes on to say, “Look I’m sorry if I keep sticking my paw in my mouth, but I’m kind of lost here.”

The stories momentarily open the door on the lives of those who don’t quite fit in and offers deeply human portraits of the working class, the elderly, the isolated. Here we meet an angry foster child, a lesbian spinster teacher, a school kid dealing with the death of his bully, a grieving widow, a wayward brother. We are given a glimpse of the quiet struggles in day to day lives, and in doing so, Hegerat never veers into the sentimental, but quietly reveals the souls of complex characters.   

It is often said that it is hard to write a great tragedy, but perhaps more difficult is to write a great story about the small happiness, conflicts, and internal transformations that happen in the lives of day-to-day characters. 

Rosemary Griebel is an Alberta writer and librarian. Her award-winning poetry has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, as well as on CBC Radio, literary magazines, anthologies, and chapbooks. Her collection of poetry, Yes (2011), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert and the Pat Lowther awards, as well as the Stephan G. Stephansson award. Recently, her essays have appeared in Reimagining Fire: The Future of Energy (2023) and Ascenti: Humans Opening to AI (2024). In 2019 one of her poems was chosen for Alberta’s first literary landmark, as part of Project Bookmark Canada’s CanLit Trail.

The post Review of Betty Jane Hegerat’s “Elephants in the Room” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

By Jonathan Greenbaum

Dear Humans: Stories
by Hollie Adams
NeWest Press (2026)

Nowadays we pick up works of fiction that mix genres to achieve the author’s aims. Hollie Adams’ new short story collection, “Dear Humans,” exemplifies this. Her publisher describes the book as a place where the fantastic meets the hyper-realistic. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, Adams is a literature instructor at the University of Maine. She is the author of the novel, “Things You’ve Inherited from Your Mother” (also issued by NeWest Press).

Quirkiness is the word that best characterizes the thirteen stories in this collection. The narratives are mostly about career women. The tone and style of the stories have a minimalist flavour, like the early work of the American poet and short story writer, Raymond Carver (May 25, 1938 to August 2, 1988). Carver’s plots are memorable for their strangeness, though his one-dimensional characters quickly fade from memory.

“Eyebrow,” the second story in the collection, works on many levels. The first-person female narrator, Mary Watkins, tells us that she has “cat-sitted” Eyebrow, a pet belonging to her teaching colleague, Ben. We learn that Mary is fond of Ben. “[His] mismatched teeth, of course, no dealbreaker as far as I was concerned.” [p. 17]. And later: “I wanted to pour his scent [Ben’s] over ice and drink it.” [p. 19]

Some of the quirkiness in this story comes out in its humour. For example, Eyebrow butts his head into Ben’s shin and then abruptly turns away “to show us his butthole, tail curling like a question mark, asking for feedback.” [p. 18]  Mary notices that she has a mysterious bump on her forehead. Strangely, the bump grows into a horn. Later, when Ben unexpectedly visits Mary in her home, he sees the protuberance on her forehead.

“I can’t explain it,” [Mary says]. “My doctor isn’t sure—”
“It’s so white,” [Ben] says. [p. 27]

Ben touches the horn. Then he and Mary undress. We are led to believe that they will have sex, as Mary wishes. Only at the last minute Ben surprises the reader. “Heavy-breasted and horned, I may be an obscene image, a vulgar teenage fantasy, but a fantasy all the same,” Mary says, thus concluding the story. [p. 33]

How are we to read this? Is Mary’s horn a phallic symbol? Ben touches it and seems to like it. Is this some kind of sexual role reversal? Or just plain fantasy? We are left wondering.

The narrative, “Like That but Times a Million,” is similarly odd. Sarah, the pubescent first-person narrator, tells us that her neighbour, Robbie, has lost his father. Sarah remains in her house to avoid seeing Robbie. Hoping to cheer up the boy, Sarah’s father invites him to swim in his pool. And swim Robbie does, lap after lap, refusing to stop even when the weather turns menacing.

The lightning flashes closer now but everything else is so very black and when I look up, it seems that more than half the world is sky. [p. 37]

This is very good descriptive writing. It portends what might happen to Robbie if he doesn’t get out of the pool. The story is told in different sections. At times Sarah wonders about death and other things. She cannot bring herself to tell Robbie that she’s sorry for his loss. What will happen? Will Robbie be struck by lightning and perhaps die like his father?

In the story “The Documentary We’ve Been Making for Fifty Years,” the narrator describes the vicissitudes in the lives of a group of friends who begin to shoot a very amateur film in the late 1960s. The filming scenes serve as a backdrop for a narrative about what happens to these people over the next fifty years. The ghost of a gorilla hovers over these characters (fantasy, again).

The story, “The Sessional Years,” is told by a first-person narrator, an English instructor named Britney. Britney is asked out by James, one of her adult male students. Later, James follows Britney to her apartment building. Is James really stalking Britney? A confrontation ensues between these two characters. Students stalking their teachers? This seems to be the “realism” that Adams’ publisher evokes.

I wondered about the “Dear Humans” of the title: is Adams addressing the characters in her own stories? Does she find them “endearing?” Or is the title a statement to the world at large that humans are dear creatures? (Never mind about the wars we start).

Hollie Adams tries very hard to create clever, hip female characters. Some readers may find this wit and hipness humorous.

“But if I let all those skeletons out of my walk-in, I’ll lose Poppy [my daughter], spend the next 5-10 taking communal showers and longing for non-Velcro shoes,” says the female narrator in the story, “Liking It.” [p. 104]

I confess: dialogue like this strikes me as flippant.

In sum, Adams’ narrators serve as vehicles to tell the quirky stories. I often wished that the stories, themselves, would be the vehicle to delve deeper into the hearts and minds of these women.

Jonathan Greenbaum, is a retired Ontario high school English teacher. A graduate of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, Jonathan’s short fiction has appeared in The Nashwaak Review. 

The post Review of Hollie Adams’ “Dear Humans: Stories” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

A Single Syllable of Wild
by Angela Waldie
Frontenac House (2026)

In many ways, the title sums up this first collection’s deep intent: to sound a singular and resonant note that fights for the wilderness. To that end, the most common pronoun in Angela Waldie’s A Single Syllable of Wild is “you.” In four consistently-lengthed sections, Waldie addresses forests, glaciers, birds, mountains and most passionately and tragically, bears. In “Bear 64,” the ursine is both watched by humans and disappeared by them, they give her a “radio collar” and a “faded plastic ear tag” and even dangerous “sandwiches thrown from cars” and take from her photographs, immunity, autonomy. Similarly, in “Bear 148” who was shot as she “crossed another border/she could not see,” or Skoki who was “banished from the mountains” and put in a zoo due to being habituated to humans, although some bears like “The Boss of Bow Valley” persist despite having been hit twice by freight trains. Waldie doesn’t flinch from baring our often-terrible incursions into the wild: as scientists, tourists “in air-conditioned cars” (Minnewanka), or just simply as clumsily-misguided humans. She extends the directive to “Please don’t touch the animals” beyond a signifier to a brute reality as with our meddling the “snow bunting could fall from the slender wire” or “The bison, in flicker of fear or fury,/might charge.” 

Knowing the value of stillness, immunity, and silence for non-human creatures, Waldie celebrates how the pandemic freed them from us for a few seasons, and rhapsodizes in tones reminiscent of Gary Snyder or Don McKay of how we need to either vanish from nature or disappear into it by becoming “waterfall,” by leaving, truly seeing, pausing and learning “humility from mouse-eared chickweed,/and from tiny pink shooting stars” (High Water, Blakiston Creek). “Can we spare some space/for places still/just bird, wind and wildflower?” (Foothills Meditation) she keens, fully aware that of all our challenges as humans, simply letting other species be seems to be the most difficult goal and, when unachievable, deadly with consequences. Such as how global warming is creating the rapid retreat of glaciers, their hope the raven who carries a “frozen incantation” (From the Bow River, Calgary) for them in its beak. On occasion, Waldie over-extends an image, for instance by giving the wings of birds the quality of “empathy;” the general gist is clear but unnecessarily couched in an airy poeticism. Otherwise, her voice is pure and direct, and at times a bit monotonous as nature can be. She also experiments with many variants of free verse: stanzaic, visual, in numbered segments, and sometimes even writes a beautiful pantoum like “How Long do Forests Remember Fire?” or the enchantingly sad spell (heroic couplets within quatrains) of “Cascade” : “Spring torrent, summer vesper/autumn shiver, winter whisper/grizzly path, stone reader/Minnewanka dream feeder.” A stirring and essential debut. 

Catherine Owen, a Vancouveriteedmontonian, has published 17 books in four genres. Her latest is Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024), nominated for both the Al and Eurithe poetry prize and the Robert Kroetsch award. She teaches Poetic Forms at Concordia University of Edmonton, runs The Clio Project, a documentary series on older women artists, and edits and reviews from her 1905 home on Alberta Avenue.

The post Review of Angela Waldie’s “A Single Syllable of Wild” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Beneficiary
by JoAnn McCaig
University of Calgary Press (2026)

Seren lived many lives. She was born into a picture-perfect family with matching sweaters and yearly personalized Christmas cards. She never fit in. On the break of 1970s, she escaped her pearls-around-neck life and rebelled through her teenage years and early twenties. Some think her life started when she married TJ and became a mother, though it might have been the end of her. Seren certainly felt more alive than ever after sudden inheritance brought her back to the life she once ran away from.

It is a story of a woman who is afraid of being defined. A mother, a divorcee, a rich girl… Seren never wants to live within constraints of one word. She seeks her life and freedom, avoiding yet falling victim to uncomfortable stereotypes that keep her safe. Seren is not a loveable character at first sight, but she becomes an old friend whose flaws you accept and cherish her honest charisma. Seren, as a teenager, is a seeker of an unknown fantasy; she rarely understands her own desires or actions of others. We see a more mature version of her later in life, although still clueless about the way people around her think and bitter about some tragic parts of her life. By the end of her life, Seren becomes a conscientious citizen with a stable moral compass. She is reflective of her life and her actions. She knows she isn’t perfect and she owns her flaws. “What she thought to herself was I don’t deserve this. But I accept it with gratitude” (214).  After living a life of denying her privilege, she finally accepts it and sets out to help less fortunate, to make a difference in a meaningful way.

Beneficiary is a book for readers who take their time getting to know true nature of characters. JoAnn McCaig masterfully recreated Canadian 1970s to early 2010s depicting each decade as a distinct era for Seren. This book is packed with vivid detail; it replicates Seren’s emotional turmoil with great care that combines turns the novel into a beautiful recollection which often reads like a memoir. McCaig is not afraid of brutally honest sentences and sincere reckoning moments. The way she tells the story reflects the narrative in Seren’s head, highlighting the memories she considers of great importance to her character, while briefing through some significant parts, the ones she is doing her best to forget.

“A few days later, she woke up from yet another sweaty hallucinatory daytime dream and she knew exactly what was wrong with her: I miss my own pain. An ill-favoured thing, but my own” (88).

The author manages to create a palpable presence of a woman who is perceived so differently by every person in her life that a reader cannot help but wonder who she really is. Sometimes it remains a mystery to Seren herself. She makes mistakes, lots of them, which makes her character so compelling that it’s impossible to think of her less. Like all of us, she navigates this life with blind effort, and she is sincere about every turn.

Sasha Yurchenko is a Ukrainian-Canadian writer and a prose editor for a queer-led journal Ivy Literary. She is currently earning her B.A. in Creative Writing and Publishing in Sheridan College. New to Canada, she enjoys reading about unique cultural experiences, especially from marginalized communities. Her work can be found in Darkness Falls anthology and B222 Journal.

The post Review of Joann McCaig’s “Beneficiary” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Toxemia
by Christine McNair
Book*Hug (2024)

Toxemia, the first work of creative non-fiction by multiple-award-winning poet Christine McNair, is a powerful and emotive collection of lyric essays that tracks McNair’s several horrifying experience with illness and injury. “Toxemia” is the historic term for what is now called preeclampsia, a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy which is life-threatening and significantly increases the risk of subsequent stroke and heart conditions. McNair suffered with preeclampsia with each of her two pregnancies, notwithstanding clinicians’ assurances that having a second episode would be highly unusual. The book seems part of a continued effort to contextualize these experiences and “to contain my fear and put a circle around this work.” (150). 

Skillfully constructed, evocative and compelling, Toxemia is far from a static chronological recounting of illness and its impacts. McNair guides the reader through layers upon layers of incidents and reflections. “My mother peels layers of my skin away with the washcloth” (95). McNair says, and she herself peels back layers of personal and familial history. Another compelling metaphor is that of nesting doll(s), which McNair uses as the titles of two of the essays. Memories of a childhood accident live within the joys and terrors of giving birth and fearing death, nested among stories of her forebears, both real and cobbled together or fleshed out from scant and perhaps inaccurate information. “I introduced a ghost memory to the fold” (155) she muses, but concludes that nonetheless “a sliver of something like a person … is something of a person.” (156). 

McNair brings us intimately into other health crises besides preeclampsia, including stroke and heart issues, sharing the visceral impact of symptoms and fears prior to a rare heart condition, marantic endocarditis, being diagnosed: “I am not having a heart attack. It is my asthma. It is anxiety. It is indigestion. It is my heart. It is my lungs. It is my brain. It is the fae. It is excess of mercury. It is a familial curse. It is a small elephant curled onto my breast bone. What is it.” (51) and the moving lines “Please let there be something that can be found and treated… It just has to stop. I’m drowning in the unexplained.” (53). Anxiety and mental health challenges are also revealed as life-threatening, with eating disorders, clinical depression and a suicide attempt among the layers and intersecting elements of McNair’s medical experiences

McNair uses a variety of devices that amplify the impact of her themes. Some essays are very brief, while others unfurl in numerous sections. With a few exceptions, McNair uses present tense, bringing urgency and immediacy to the medical events. Some essays probe French grammatical tenses, with titles such as “imparfait” and “passé composé”, and the terms’ explanations (in English) as epigraphs. This adds to the nested, time-shifting feel – the difference between repeated past actions is blurred into fears of what might happen. Other titles play upon the notion of déjà vu: “déjà vécu”, “presque vu”, “jamais vu”, “déjà vu” (for two poems), “déjà rêvé’ and “déjà entendu”. 

“foliate” employs a technique McNair used for the poem “the problem with orchids” in Charm, her Archibald Lampman Award-winning poetry collection: strategic replacement of key words in an official text (here a 1916 “mother and child” guide) to surreal and occasionally chilling effect. She writes of the “flower pressure” of “explosives” during their “latency”, of one explosive who “went into the defoliating room and gave mirth to a perfectly normal changeling”, of “roses and irises” and “sluggish owls” (71-74). 

The essays “jamais vu” and “déjà vu” are shaped from text from Downton Abbey where the fictional Lady Sybil’s death exemplifies the historical frequency of maternal death when preeclampsia could not be halted. Other cultural references ground the experiences in the quotidian, while elements such as historic texts, a comparative table of symptoms, and a listing of treatments over time add context without pulling focus from the personal and immediate.

Visual images are effectively interspersed throughout Toxemia. Two photos are especially moving despite their simplicity. In one, McNair’s grandmother’s hands are loosely clasped atop folds of fabric on her lap, and in another tiny children’s clothes belonging to McNair’s two young daughters are displayed as in a museum exhibit. The latter photo is situated within the longer “Nesting Dolls” essay, one section of which enumerates questions to be answered “based on research about what people want to hear from their parents who die too soon.” (100). In an earlier section of this essay, McNair worries “If I die now, my children will barely know me… They’ll remember me in stories that other people tell them until those become their memories of me… They’ll remember cut-outs of who I was” (99). 

The book’s sections headings echo stages of medical diagnoses: “symptoms”, “presentation” “risk factors” and “treatment”. The progression through these stages is subtle and nuanced, with the intersecting memories culminating near the end of the “treatment” section with McNair’s hope that she will leave “some sort of glow record for the kids. I want a touchstone for me of time and good for when things go dark.” (157).

McNair writes that “every body survives something. Or they don’t.” (145) and that “The body remembers what the brain forgot.” (67). Toxemia is an impressive and deeply moving evocation of survival, and of remembering.

Frances Boyle is the prairie-raised, Ottawa-based author of three poetry collections, a Rapunzel-infused novella and an award-winning short story collection. Her debut novel, Skin Hunger, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in fall 2026. For more, visit www.francesboyle.com.

The post Review of Christine McNair’s “Toxemia” appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.