Tip for book-loving reporters: When you receive review copies of new books, don’t start reading them at your desk on work time. You may get distracted and start missing deadlines.
That said, it’s been a good month for above-mentioned book-loving reporters, since two new works from local authors have recently crossed my desk.
Fellow word-lovers, be sure to search out your copies of both, since the peeks I am sneaking on deadline (no really, Mr. Editor, I swear it’s work-related reading) suggest that both will be well worth absorbing on a sunny evening on the patio or a rainy evening on the couch.
THE NARROW ROAD TO THE FAR WEST
First up, it’s a new collection of poems from the city’s poet laureate, Alan Hill.
The Narrow Road to the Far West: Travelling New Westminster By Postcard, recently released by Silver Bow Publishing, is described by the author as his “very personal tribute to some of the places that have meant most to me in my time living in New Westminster.”
Each poem is its own literary “postcard” to a uniquely Royal City location – some well-known, like the petting farm at Queen’s Park, the Tin Soldier and River Market, and others of a less-travelled variety, such as the dollar store at Royal City Mall and the Great Clips on McBride Boulevard.
The poems include both elegant imagery and a sense of the humour and absurdity of day-to-day life.
Like this moment from Centre Span, Pattullo Bridge …
“It is the bruised skin of something extinct
that has been stretched, pulled tight
across the high-rise limbs of the city.”
Or this, from Old Crow Café, Front Street …
“I left with a quadrupole Americano, a
tattoo of a raven on my thigh
the feeling, it may not be too late, to
learn the banjo, run away, join the circus.”
If, like Hill himself, you happen to be a parent of young children, you’ll find more than one image that resonates from your own travels around town. And New West residents of any age – whether you’re a lifer with generations of ties to the city, or a newcomer just discovering all the gems of the city – will undoubtedly experience nods and smiles of recognition as you read.
You might bill it as a literary love letter to the city, of sorts – recognizing its quirks and cracks and foibles but embracing all the life and humanity within.
Check out www.silverbowpublishing.com for more.
HIDER/SEEKER
The second literary offering that arrived at my desk was the newly released Hider/Seeker, a collection of short fiction by New Westminster author Jen Currin.
Currin, who teaches creative writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, has released four previous collections of poetry, including The Inquisition Yours, which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and School (2014), which was a finalist for three awards.
This is her debut collection of fiction.
“These stories are about addiction and meditation, relationships and almost-relationships, solitude and sexuality,” says a release from Anvil Press. “These stories are always unflinchingly honest in their portrayal of relationships – in particular the relationships of the book’s LGBTQ+ characters – as they navigate change, spirituality, and sex. Currin welcomes the reader into the complicated lives of her characters and invites them to stay.”
Currin writes with honesty and compassion about relationships of all forms, and my first dips into the book suggest a writer who knows how to break a reader’s heart by dwelling in those places we often don’t look – around the edges, under the surfaces, in the subtleties and nuances of everyday exchanges that mean much so more than they’re saying.
There’s the moment as a relationship wanders to its end in The Adventure: “Some signposts are shadowy – we can’t read them, they’re too far in the distance, or we don’t want to read them so we pretend they’re not there.”
Or the imagery in A Snake in the Grass, in which a small child refuses to sleep because “Sometimes at night a bear hugs me.” (No spoilers, except to say this one will haunt me later.)
Check out www.anvilpress.com for more on the book.
Do you have a favourite local author or a favourite local book? Send your literary suggestions to Julie, [email protected].
