On Oil
by Don Gillmor
Biblioasis, 2025
“Alberta is this crucible for all the problems facing society in the next century,” says a University of Calgary researcher in journalist Don Gillmor’s new book. “And some of those problems are in conflict with one another.” That researcher works to reduce the carbon footprint of the oil sands—no easy task, given that every year Alberta produces ever more oil to heat homes, power cars and make everything from plastics to fertilizers to pharmaceuticals. And yet, as a fuel for climate change, oil is also a threat to social and ecological stability. Collectively we have to wean ourselves off it. Gillmor doesn’t tell us how to do that. But in a short, incisive, at times rollicking book, he takes us from the drilling floor (he was a roughneck in the 1970s) to the capitulation of our government to industry under premiers Klein and Smith (most notably) to a glimpse of “the road to a viable future.”
My Works, Ye Mighty
by Christian Bök
Athabasca University Press, 2025
“Conceptualism lets us zoom into the future of poetry,” writes Christian Bök near the end of this slim yet mind-bending book, “at the puny scale of an atom or the vast scale of the void.” Known for his bestselling experimental poetry book Eunoia, or perhaps for his Xenotext project in which he attempted to encipher a poem into the DNA of a bacterium, Bök is here referencing, and is inspired by, the movie Powers of Ten, in which the scale of perspective zooms in from the edge of the observable universe down into an atom. Bök applies this to language, zooming out from mark to phrase to book to archives, exploring the idea of a “minimal element in writing,” a “unit” and “scale at which any literary creation can occur.”
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