Edited by Wendy McGrath
LABERINTO PRESS
2025/$25.00/114 pp.

Albertans may be known for our touchiness, at least politically, but we haven’t generally been known for our sensitivity—which is to say Albertans are not particularly known for leaning into the sense of touch, or what is touching, either literally or figuratively. In Beyond Touch Sites, recently released by Laberinto Press, Edmonton poet and novelist Wendy McGrath complicates that narrative by collecting poems, stories, essays and other short pieces by Canadian writers from a variety of backgrounds addressing the importance of what is probably our most important sense.

I don’t envy McGrath the job of arranging the anthology. The variety of genres and approaches means any final arrangement is bound to miss at least one connection between pieces. But her choice to divide the anthology into “Tender,” “Trace” and “Time” works well, letting very different writers come together in the literary equivalent of chamber music.

“Tender” is the category that makes the most immediate sense when we’re talking about touch, and this part of the book address tenderness in all its forms—the tenderness of lovers, of parents, of friends and longing for love. All the writers in this section are immigrants to Canada, and the sense that exists only in memory or desire is strong here, as in Jumoke Verissimo’s poem “Touching Laughter (for Vivian)”: “My friend’s laughter arrived from the other side of the ocean./ I could touch it. I felt her rippling cheeks in my hands.”

The longing for absent touch is something we all have—even if we have never left our home. We long for the past, for instance, and feel it still with us. “Trace,” the most multilingual of the sections, brings together pieces that explore the touch of the past and how it lingers—in our person and in our communities. This section includes a short play by Edmonton’s Pierrette Requier, largely in French, about the traces of touch left by the members of a Franco-Albertan community, and an exquisite multiform longer poem, “Touch in Ten Movements,” by Calgary’s Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike.

Touch is a physical experience but it’s also a method of timekeeping (we count out the passing moments with our fingers on our wrists), of stopping time (we hold our child to keep them young forever) and even of time travel. In “Time,” the anthology moves from the past that leaves just a trace to the past that remains present through memory and ritual. “So We Shall Return,” by Calgarian Rona Altrows, provides a fitting ending to the anthology. “I forgive you for all of it,” says a woman who has just prepared her sister’s body for burial. That’s only part of what touch can do, if we let it.

Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views.

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Edited by Ángel Mota Berriozábal,
Laberinto Press, 2024

“For many immigrants,” writes Jenna Butler in the introduction to this bilingual anthology, “though we may have left our home countries and their distinctive landscapes behind out of necessity or desire, we continue to walk in those spaces in our memories… guided by the fragrances that stir our memories.” This link between smell and rural and urban green spaces is explored by each of the contributors, almost all of whom are immigrants. In Kelly Kaur’s account of a return trip to Singapore, for instance, the “perfumy fake pine” air-freshener smell in her cab “makes me homesick for Calgary,” even as the cab driver points out how the many trees among the dense buildings give the Singapore air a “sweet perfume.” “I am here,” writes Kaur. “I am there.”

by Janet Melrose and Sheryl Normandeau,
Touchwood Editions, 2024

“Confidently designing a landscape that incorporates grasses takes a little inspiration and know-how,” write Sheryl Normandeau and Janet Melrose in this thoughtful and well-illustrated book—the 10th in their series of prairie gardening guides. The prairies are a grassland ecosystem, they write, with “little remaining of the original native grasslands.” Protecting what remains can help prevent flooding, provide habitat for pollinators and other wildlife, and help conserve “the valuable water resources that provide our drinking water and moisture for our crops.” The same attention to prairie ecology, they say, can be given when planting grasses in our gardens, lawns and ponds. With advice on which native grasses to use—and why—the book gives gardeners both inspiration and knowledge.

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by Margarita Saona
translated by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, with Lindsay Kikunen and Margarita Saona
LABERINTO PRESS
2023/$23.00/140 pp.

Sometimes an author’s Twitter (“X”) bio reveals more than the facts. This is true of the Peruvian-born writer/scholar Margarita Saona, whose profile appears as follows: “Reader. Writer of very short fiction. Teacher. Author of Tin Heart and Despadre. Martial artist. Heart transplant recipient.”  This stylistic restraint and suggestive juxtaposition exemplifies what Saona’s publisher and translator, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, calls the author’s “sparse, clinically precise yet mysterious prose.” It is a disciplined toughness conjoined with open-hearted vulnerability, and it is a sensibility that infuses the marvellous, strange worlds of The Ghost of You.

In 53 formally inventive short stories that range in length from a few pages to a single, aphoristic sentence, Saona experiments with a lightly surrealist treatment of themes related to memory, love/disillusion, loss, the transitory nature of identity, estrangement and disorientation in space and time. An early prose-poem-length narrative entitled “A Dream” compares dreams to “a game or a map”—a game whose “rules” aren’t clear and a map whose legends are “unreadable.” Saona’s deftly controlled stories are dreamlike in this game-map/map-game way: they are outlines of situations that we trace only with a shadowy sense of uncertainty, as when trying (and failing) to recall the full-bodied depths of a dream. These are deliberately cloudy weird little worlds in which the hypothetical, metaphorical and actual frequently blur, worlds often peopled by fantastical characters (high-wire acrobats, clock-eating children) but nevertheless recognizably modern in their excavation of (urban, migratory, dystopian) alienation, pain and fear.

In effect, Saona’s vignettes autopsy the bare bones of their dramatic situations. The stories inspect the tissue of connections and phantom limbs that make up lives: the after-presences of lost “you’s”, who are sometimes named and sometimes left to be inferred; the contingencies (or “fate”?) of fleeting intersections and uncanny near misses between strangers—commuters or neighbours with unknown affinities; the unspoken emotional chasms that can yawn between intimates—lovers or family members, such as the disenchanted daughter in “Full Moon.” Only rarely, as in “Motherless,” does a note of sentimentalism encroach on Saona’s dispassionate dissection of “this universe made of remains.” It is a haunting “frail harmony of odd things” and “lost things” that bind Saona’s collection, and while some of the daringly shorter pieces might be hard to pull off as stand-alone “stories,” they work as evocative stitches in context of the collection as a whole. That said, the standouts here are the more substantive stories, such as the superb “Memory Diptych,” a two-part narrative juxtaposing the scenario of a man who tries but fails to forget a failed love against the scenario of a man who tries but fails to remember his lost lover.

Margarita Saona is an accomplished writer and scholar whose works include multiple creative and critical books. All the more reason for providing this seasoned author with “an English-speaking home,” as Laberinto Press has done. Small-scale production initiatives such as Laberinto, which expressly seek to promote cultural diversity by translating literary works from under-represented languages and diasporic writers, are an essential counter to an overwhelmingly Anglocentric publishing industry and global translation flows. It is especially thrilling to see such a new initiative pop up here in Alberta. Edmonton-based and new, this press deserves support on principle alone. But if Laberinto Press keeps publishing literary work as entrancing as The Ghost of You, readers will be buying the books anyway.

C.S. Wiesenthal is an Edmonton writer and a professor emeritus in the Department of Film and English at the U of A.

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Beyond the Gallery: An Anthology of Visual Encounters

Mother Earth: Boreal Beauty of the Peace Country with Flora, Fauna and Fungi ID (published by Sharon Krushel, motherearthbook.ca, 2022). “A sole shutterbug can’t even begin to capture all of the glory and biodiversity of the Peace Country,” writes editor Sharon Krushel. Featuring 31 artists and photographers, this colourful book showcases the abundant outdoors in northwest Alberta, from 386 species of plants, wildlife and fungi—including vermilion waxgills, silvery blue butterflies, lynx, bears and so many birds—to the Peace River as seen from Krushel’s husband’s “home-built experimental aircraft” and shimmering northern lights in the winter sky.

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Edited by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi
Laberinto Press
2020/$23.00/218 PP.

Edited by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, a Canadian-Argentinian writer and editor, Beyond the Food Court brings together the culinary traditions of 14 Alberta-based writers who use food as a lens to approach politics, geography, culture and identity. The result is a thoughtful collection of essays filled with appetizing descriptions of traditional meals and feasts that invite the reader to reflect about our relationship to food regardless of our individual background.  

In a culture focused on the more practical aspects of our diet—from nutritional value and availability, to sustainability and ethics—it can be easy to overlook the role food plays as an expression of identity, a sentiment accurately portrayed by Adriana Oniță in the opening essay of the collection, “Notes on Dor, Poetry and Learning to Cook in Quarantine,” a lively piece drizzled with words in Italian and Romanian.

Each essay here takes the reader on a journey of yearning, not only for long-lost recipes and flavours, as Wendy McGrath does in “Sauerkraut Tableau and Other Art Installations,” but also for a sense of normalcy and commonplace activities in the midst of a pandemic—or upon arrival to a new country.

In “Resolviendo” Ana Ruiz Aguirre describes food as a “cultural signifier which can sometimes reinforce social hierarchies, economic systems and community ties.” Indeed, since the US embargo was enacted in 1962, cooking food in Cuba has become an act of defiance. The limited supply of imported foods bred creativity and sparked the creation of communally prepared dishes such as ajiaco, a Cuban stew paralleled here to a multicultural society. “Concocting this soup entailed an exercise in community building,” Ruiz Aguirre writes. “Each person contributed whatever ingredient they could.”

The anthology as a whole reads as an ajiaco of sorts, with each essay rooted in a specific socio-cultural and historical context, yet contributing to a collective narrative. For instance, in “Disposable Double Lives,” Mila Bongco-Philipzig eloquently reflects on the challenges Filipino workers face in Canada, while Asma Sayed takes on the challenging task of conveying the significance of cultural losses imposed by the white gaze in “Of Curries and Custard Apples: Identity, Memory, Resistance.”

On a lighter but not less important note, in “Empty Mason Jars” Marco Melfi shares his (unsuccessful) attempts at maintaining a sense of connection to his Italian roots by traditional means. “Food delights, triggers memories, impacts how we see ourselves and how we relate to others,” he writes.

An enjoyable, important read, Beyond the Food Court shows a path to finding common ground in our polarizing times.

Ximena González is a writer in Calgary.

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