by Ted Binnema, François Lanoë and Heinz W. Pyszczyk
University of Alberta Press
2025/$39.00/232 pP.

When it comes to navigating in unfamiliar terrain, today’s travellers have many options based on GPS systems. I’m a bit of a luddite with my boat anchor of an iPhone, but it does have the county map on it showing every quarter section of land, and landowner’s name, for miles around. If all else fails, I have topo maps for old school route finding, thanks to generations of cartographers who have plotted the entire country in a series of grids based on calculations of latitude and longitude. But in Cartographic Poetry we learn that Indigenous people, the Siksika and Gros Ventre, had a totally different way of navigating, based not on mathematical measurement but on landmarks, particularly rivers, that were, and are, of cultural, historical and spiritual significance. The authors note that “Poetry is language condensed: Siksika cartography is landscape distilled,” that is to say, not only landmarks but the history of a nation was distilled in the minds of the First Nations travellers and guides. Every river, every mountain, every buffalo jump was a living story in the mind of the people.

This was the mental cartography the early fur traders relied on, while exploring the west with Cree and other Indigenous guides. One notable explorer was Peter Fidler, a Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor and map maker. In 1792, guided by Sakatow and his band of Piikani, he made a winter journey from Buckingham House on the North Saskatchewan River south to the Oldman River gap. Nearly a decade later he established the short-lived HBC trading post of Chesterfield House, where he asked the Siksika leader Ac ko mak ki (Old Swan) to draw a map of the land south of the post, an area that at the time was a blank spot on European maps. Fidler, writes author Ted Binnema in one of his chapters, took great care in getting his guides to draw on paper the maps they held in their minds. Among explorers in that era, he “was unique in his systematic efforts to preserve and document Indigenous cartographic conventions.” Indeed, Cartographic Poetry contains a wealth of ethnographic detail on place names thanks to the meticulous care Fidler took with his Siksika and Gros Ventre informants.

The maps drawn for Fidler are very different from the European tradition of mapping. They are minimalist by necessity, since they would have been typically drawn in the snow, in sand or mud, or upon a piece of hide using charcoal or other medium. They show the Rockies, the “Back-Bone of the Earth” to the Piikani people, as a pair of double lines in Alberta bending east to the Musselshell River in Montana and then south again to the Big Horn Mountains. From it, the major rivers are drawn simply as lines leading out to the plains with the Indigenous names attached by Fidler. We are then shown their transition in Fidler’s hands to maps a fur trader might understand. Next, this Indigenous knowledge passes from the HBC to the famous British cartographer, Aaron Arrowsmith, for his 1802 map of North America. The authors point out that Fidler, if allowed, would have made a much better map than Arrowsmith. The latter, to “…make his depiction plausible to a western reader, invented sinuous river courses and confluences even though he had no evidence for them.” His map was relied on by Lewis and Clark for their much-ballyhooed continental transit in 1804 (which had already been done with zero fanfare by Alexander Mackenzie in 1793), but Arrowsmith’s map “…contributed nothing to the success of the Corps of Discovery.”

Today these maps “are priceless treasures,” write the authors. In publishing them they hope others will “become as fascinated by the maps, their authors and the territories they depict as we are.” With this respectful, evocative study, they have succeeded.

Sid Marty’s most recent book is Oldman’s River, which won the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize in 2024.

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by Sarah Boon
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2025//$27.99/312 pp.

Meltdown opens with a harrowing scene. Alone with a student on an Arctic glacier, hours from help, the student repeating “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.” In such remote places a small misstep can rapidly become life threatening. Author Sarah Boon rises to these moments. A hydrologist by training, she has ventured across northern and western Canada, from the forests of northern British Columbia to Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic to the Rocky Mountains in southern Alberta. Her fieldwork offers a window into landscapes few ever see. Among the most dramatic is the collapse of meltwater lakes that form on Arctic glaciers each summer: “We sensed movement—like a freight train running beneath our feet—and heard loud cracking and creaking with the ice. It was a bit unnerving to imagine the glacier as a living organism on whose back we were standing as it shook off the remnants of winter.”

Against the backdrop of glaciers and remote forests, Boon captures the less glamorous side of science: setting up instruments, sorting data and warding off black flies. But what she sees as most central to her approach is ground truthing, the conviction that being in the field, watching ecosystems shift, offers insights no remote dataset can match. She writes of “the joy of leaping from rock to rock to cross a stream, and the satisfaction of finding my footing on a rubbly mountain trail.”

While her passion for this kind of science is clear, she also recounts how difficult she found the culture and politics of academia. Much of this, she argues, stems from the experiences of women in science; indeed, she cites a jaw-dropping study showing 64 per cent of women in fieldwork experienced sexual harassment and 22 per cent report assault. These figures underscore the risks shaping women’s participation in field science. At the same time, Boon’s difficulties in academic settings seem to arise not only from external barriers but also from her own preference for solitude and self-reliance.

Boon lays herself bare with commendable candour. The book reads like a diary, a cathartic record of her search for a place in the world, oscillating between research and writing. Writing is the path she ultimately embraces, foreshadowed early but only revealed in the book’s closing pages.

Meltdown is not a book for everyone: its immersion in academic life and the minutiae of fieldwork will appeal most to those drawn to the inner workings of science. Yet for those who enter, it offers a compelling portrait of a determined, self-reliant and brilliant woman, and a vivid sense of what it takes to carry out research in some of the most remote corners of Canada.

Annie Prud’homme-Généreux is a science writer at UBC.

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by Kate Beaton,
University of Alberta Press, 2025

“I wanted, so badly, to be an artist from a very young age,” writes Cape Breton-based author Kate Beaton. “But I’m from a have-not place.” Beaton is the author of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands—a best-selling graphic memoir that won CBC’s Canada Reads. Her new book—the text of the Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture she gave at the U of A—is a poignant and funny exploration of class and art. Growing up working-class, she writes, you’re always aware of “the money you don’t have, and possibly never will.” But “I am here today with a career as an artist, as a cartoonist, a writer, the whole nine yards, because I am the beneficiary of a long history of a community that values art. And that is a working-class legacy also,” she writes. “Art for each other, art for shared history, for storytelling, for pleasure, art through hard times, art because it has value.”

by E.A.J. Gibbs,
Self-published, 2023

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Liz Gibbs, a registered nurse with 45 years experience, was assigned to be a screener at the entrance to a Calgary hospital. This self-published book is her journal from 2020 to 2022. It’s raw, but it is an invaluable record—not least of the increasingly weird assertions used by anti-vaxxers to try to enter the hospital without following protocols. “The extreme right will threaten our democracy so long as there are gullible people, easily led to believe in conspiracy theories, lies and nonsense about vaccines or any other issue,” she writes near the end, musing on Camus’s The Plague. “We must be on our guard.”

by Scott Charlton Paul,
Self-published, 2024

“I’ve lost more than I gained during this messed-up pandemic. I’d like to imagine something positive coming out of it.” Digger lost his construction job after deciding not to get vaccinated during COVID-19. Now, to fulfill his mother’s dying wish, he drives from Lethbridge to Ottawa to deliver a letter to a sister he never knew existed, Sarah. It’s a complicated reunion—Digger’s journey coincides with the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers driving east to shut down the capital, and in Ottawa Sarah recently lost her husband after a preventable COVID-19 outbreak in a long-term care home. The debut novel by Lethbridge author Scott Charlton Paul, The Sunbeam Room makes space to put down the lingering anger and sorrow of the pandemic and to pursue new connections in whatever unusual shape they take.

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by Omar Ramadan
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2025/$19.99/72 pp.

The 2006 Lebanon war. The 2007 Lebanon conflict. The October 17th revolution in 2019. The 2020 Beirut explosion. The liquidity crisis. It’s against this backdrop that Lebanese-Canadian poet Omar Ramadan has lived and composed the poems in his debut collection, This Sweet Rupture, a lyrical and at times terrifying ride-along through Manitoba blizzards, DQ Blizzards, Whatsapp calls, Google Streetview, Istanbul taxis, Beirut checkpoints and the Vancouver airport.

The title refers to rupture, but the thread through the work is of bridging and blending: English with Arabic, father with son, nation with nation, history with modernity. Arabic words and script are used throughout, comprising perhaps no more than 1 per cent of the text, but present and prominent in their unannotated claim to attention. For the reader who speaks no Arabic, the effect is an erasure, and a recognition of lack or failure to know a world. For the Arabic speaker, it’s a different book. In the poem “Sesame Love” Ramadan asks the “question of ‘when did hummus become hummus’…/ What singular moment in time did the cultural lexicon decide/ this word is acceptable not to italicize. Does the OED have/ jurisdiction/ over what is acceptable.…” The couple buying hummus at the grocery store in this poem, well, let’s just say they make a bad choice—for an inauthentic product that has recently been the object of some boycotts—yet, he concludes, “…I don’t lay the blame at their feet, or in their hands, or on their tastebuds.” This is a book that you’ll think about while you read. But you’re not going to be told what to think, or what to do.

The title refers to sweetness, and in the literal sense, food is a recurrent theme across this collection. Lavish, sensory descriptions of home country foods are a trope of English-language diasporic literatures, and Ramadan doesn’t stint on these, but he gives the same loving attention to a Krispy Kreme doughnut, as in “Suckers”: “I thought about the sugar melting on my tongue. I watched the doughnuts/ from behind the glass plate pass through the conveyor, cooked fresh and live./ How the dough would glide into the oil, come out looking inflated. How the/ inflated dough passed under endless sugar glaze.”

Ramadan has finely honed skills as a storyteller, sharply  pinpointing the core of a narrative. He’s a multisensory observer, invoking tastes, smells, temperatures and those interoceptive sensations that underlie emotion. Whether he’s jaywalking to Safeway, fishing for sharks with his uncle, or watching his father disassemble a rifle at the dinner table, we feel ourselves viscerally present. The poems skip across geographies, but each is precisely placed and essential to the sweetness of the whole.

Dawn Macdonald is a writer and researcher in Whitehorse.

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by Tyler McCreary University of Alberta Press, 2024

In 2006 prime minister Stephen Harper claimed that Canada’s tradition of inclusive development was a key part of our country’s “emergence as a global energy powerhouse.” We were, of course, not there yet. The landlocked oil sands require pipelines to link production to global markets. In Harper’s time, the first new pipeline proposed was the Northern Gateway—from Alberta to the northwest BC coast. The attempt to build it, writes Tyler McCreary, revealed that “the ideal of inclusive development that Harper evoked was illusive if not illusory in practice.” The pipeline would have run through the traditional territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, who have taken their land claim to the Supreme Court, and who largely opposed the pipeline. “This book unpacks how the fate of this pipeline became entangled with Indigenous mobilizations,” writes McCreary. “Specifically, it examines how state and corporate actors tried to incorporate Wet’suwet’en concerns into formal governance processes and how Wet’suwet’en resistance exceeded those frames, ultimately becoming part of the constellation of forces that blocked the proposed project.” For those wanting insight into the complex realities of Indigenous law and proposed resource development in Canada, this is an essential book.

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On Beauty:
Stories
by rob mclennan
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2024/$24.99/204 pp.

A conventional story features a protagonist who is driven to take action to achieve an intense desire. Over the course of the narrative, the leading player faces difficult obstacles to their objective, forcing them to make choices that test and reveal their talents and flaws. Most conventional stories lead to a climax wherein the protagonist takes a decisive action that causes them to succeed or fail in their goal, and more importantly, exposes their character. The tale then ends.

On Beauty is less a collection of conventional stories and more an anthology of beautifully written character sketches. The author, rob mclennan (who writes his name in all lower case), has published 31 books of poetry, and the “stories” in this book reflect this aesthetic. Each chapter is a series of expressive feelings, ideas and images of a character’s circumstances.

In “The Garden,” David tends to the small garden on the balcony of his apartment, while longing after his neighbour as she tends to her own garden. “From his shaded perch, he could make out tattoos of small birds down the length of her left arm as she gathered ripe baby tomatoes.” But David doesn’t take any action whatsoever to pursue his yearning. He makes no choices that drive any plot and none of his actions reveal his character in any meaningful way. David’s journey is little more than a series of conceptions, impressions and reflections on his day-to-day life. Character is truly revealed when a person faces a challenge or a crisis that compels them to leave their comfort zone and do something out of their ordinary routine. Without this, nothing of the person’s true nature is revealed. The story is mundane, limited in meaning.

With that said, On Beauty does include stories where the protagonist takes decisive action. For instance, in “The Last Man on Earth,” a 12-year-old girl, Verity, tests the limits of her newly found independence when she rides the city bus home from school, getting off at stops farther and farther from her home. When a predatory passenger expresses his lewd appetites, Verity confronts the creep in a way that reveals the depth of her strength and courage. The result is deeply satisfying.

One can read the narratives in On Beauty for what they are: a collection of arresting and elegant character portraits written with visually evocative language. In “The names of things,” for instance, a terminally ill man catalogues his possessions in a way that ascribes meaning: “I name you, silver pocketwatch: handed down from my great-grandfather, from his time in Montreal.” The man’s journey ends with these affecting and poignant words: “I name you, tears of my mother…. I name you, morphine. I name you, breath.”

Andrew Torry is a curriculum designer in Calgary.

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by Amy Kaler
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2024/$26.99/204 pp.

Half-Light: Westbound on a Hot Planet is Amy Kaler’s collection of short essays about “going west,” both literally and metaphorically. Her exploration is part travel journalism, part memoir and part cultural criticism. “While I am geographically westbound, in a place whose past is… not mine by choice,” she writes, “I am also bound for the west in a chronological and mythical sense.”

In the prologue, Kaler tells us her book is about three things: getting older, the settler west, and living during a climate catastrophe, but these ideas never quite come together to create a unified whole. The idea of “going west” is loosely applied but not always successfully, and once in a while I found myself skimming to the next essay. In spite of this, there is much to appreciate in Kaler’s writing.

A professor of sociology at the University of Alberta, Kaler doesn’t flinch in her approach to difficult subjects. Even as people lose their homes (and lives) to wildfires, floods and hurricanes, our minds might timidly dance around the broader implications of these extreme weather events, but Kaler plunges right in: “I can’t help but think about the end times, that I might be seeing everything fall apart.” This doesn’t read as apocalyptic rhetoric. Kaler’s is a thoughtful examination of one of our greatest, often unspoken fears.

Kaler and I are of a similar age, so, at times, her writing reflects my own existential musings. The predictable unfolding of birthdays seemed relatively straightforward until I turned 50, a birthday that left me shaken. Of this phenomenon, Kaler writes, “I’m starting to see that the road ahead of me is shorter than the road I’ve travelled.” Never self-indulgent or maudlin, Kaler’s writing on aging is instead reflective and insightful.

Kaler’s academic background gives her a wealth of knowledge from which to make connections. In one of my favourite essays in the collection, she writes about COVID-19 restrictions as both “not a good way for me to live” and an opportunity for “withdrawal” and compares her isolation to the experiences of medieval anchorites Jutta von Sponheim and Hildegard of Bingen. Jutta had gone into her decades-long isolation willingly while Hildegard was confined as her companion. Jutta probably died of self-starvation, but Hildegard thrived after Jutta’s passing, becoming an abbess and writing treatises on theology, natural history and other subjects. On her good days, Kaler tells us, she could take inspiration from Hildegard, hammering her experience into her “own purpose.” On her bad days she felt more like Jutta, “prone to extremes in order to ward off an unknown future.”

Many of Kaler’s essays feature forgotten or nearly forgotten places, relics of the “settler west.” If you’ve explored the western provinces, you’ve likely seen some of these “capitalist ruins.” They are communities or mines or bridges that rose as part of the “economic apparatus of the west” and all but disappeared once they lost “financial value.” In one essay, Kaler explores Retlaw, a ghost town she describes as “a brief candle,” a “place where a town used to be for almost ten times as long as the town existed.” Over a lifetime, I’ve seen so many of these ruins that they seem commonplace. Kaler’s reflections remind me that they are a signature of our colonial past.

Half-Light: Westbound on a Hot Planet is full of astute sit-a-while-and-think-about-it observations, many of which I’ll want to come back to and reread or quote in my own writing. At her best, Kaler offers us new ways of seeing and grasping both the mundane and the terrifying.

Roberta Laurie teaches communication studies at MacEwan University and is the author of Weaving a Malawi Sunrise.

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by Dawn Macdonald
University of Alberta Press
2024/$19.99/80 pp.

In Strange Things (1995), Margaret Atwood questioned some of the most popular and romantic literary stereotypes about Canada’s North. According to Atwood, previous generations of poets liked to personify the North as a dangerous spirit, a beautiful but icy siren who would beckon and tempt (usually) men to their (usually) deaths by freezing and/or starving. Other writers depicted the North as the ultimate challenge, the final frontier, a test of manhood. Either way, our history and literature are full of bold explorers, greedy gold-seekers and others who fell victim to its almost irresistible allure.

Dawn Macdonald is not one of them. Born and raised (off the grid, according to the back-cover notes) in the Yukon, Macdonald describes a North which is anything but stereotypical, or stereotypically romantic. “I’m so not interested in writing” says the speaker of “A Boring Poem,” “any Northern/Nature/Yukoner poems about the Northern Lights and my trusty-sled-dog-see-your-breath-adventure.” Instead there are insider details, some humorous and others not so funny. In one of the list poems, for example, each line begins with “Every Yukoner”: “Every Yukoner has tried hitching the backyard chickens to the kicksled as a labour-saving mode of transportation”; “Every Yukoner has died of a fentanyl overdose”; “Every Yukoner sells ice to every other Yukoner.”

Elsewhere in the collection, trendy Northern art is critiqued as “in-migrant art” (and “in-migrants” are defined as “mostly White, mostly city. Mostly seekers. Prospecting for personal growth.”) We also hear the voice of these self-help prospectors, tempted by the allure of the North: “wow that’s so real, those Northern Lights sure do resonate on a hipster wavelength.”

Conversational, tangential, at times funny, at times baffling, these poems can also dazzle with their imagery. The vaguely disturbing “Quickness,” for example, describes a frog as “rot-coloured,/ leaf-veined, a splot/ of bonefat, a wriggling towelette.” All of the poems “turn out to have animals in them,” admits Macdonald; it may not be typical nature poetry, but foxes, deer, mice, eagles and owls all show up. And I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry about living in harmony with silverfish before! In one poem, wasps hang their “sting-centric disco ball from the roofline”; in another, a kingfisher is “just a bird with a great name/ a flopamop with a marketing department.”

There’s all kinds of clever wordplay here, unexpected twists on familiar expressions, such as “The weekly squeal gets the geese.” And my favourite line, which I’ve been sitting with ever since reading it, is “Puns are koans’ country cousins.” Amazing! This collection is odd, unpredictable and fun to read out loud.

Kelly Shepherd is the author of Insomnia Bird (Thistledown).

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by Ali Bryan
Cormorant Books, 2024

At the start of Ali Bryan’s new YA novel, Leo—“65 kilos of farm chores and male siblings and meat and potatoes”—pins Grade 11 student Rowan on a wrestling mat. She can’t get up, she narrates, and her dad, who has ALS and is there watching the match, “can’t get out of his wheelchair.” Told with empathy, humour and Bryan’s sharp ear for dialogue, Takedown is an intense yet heartwarming story of a championship-level teenage wrestler who, as outside attention focuses on her athletic prowess, is also fighting for her family. The action scenes are accurate and visceral, but the novel’s heart is in relationships—friends, family, mentors—and Rowan’s struggle with grief.

by Reginald Wiebe and Dorothy Woodman
University of Alberta Press, 2023 

It’s “not surprising that superhero comic books would include cancer in their narratives,” write authors Reginald Wiebe and Dorothy Woodman. “Cancer stories bring readers… into a world that may feel familiar or into uncharted territory occupying the public interest in a real and present existential threat.” In the popular Marvel comics, superheroes usually beat the villains. But when a superhero gets cancer, as happens in several comics, “the right thing to do is not always immediately apparent and conflicting desires can’t always be resolved into neat ethical categories.” The book shows how superheroes grapple with the loss of invincibility, allowing readers to do the same.

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by Patrick Grace
UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS
2024/$19.99/80 pp.

In his first full-length book of poems, Patrick Grace, managing editor of Plenitude, Canada’s online journal of LGBTQ2S+ writing, casts a searing light into the unseen places where queer desire collides with male aggression. While men’s abuse of women continues to be a deplorable, near-daily staple of global headlines, intimate-partner violence between gay men is far less reported and no more likely to be believed. Deviant recalls Histoire de la violence, in which French author Édouard Louis narrates his rape by a man he picked up off the street one Christmas Day. Despite unambiguous DNA evidence that linked the accused to the crime, the Parisian judge presiding over a later court proceeding found him guilty of nothing more bruising than theft. With an acuity paralleling Louis’s own forensic parsing of the injuries he sustained, Grace asks us to slip inside his skin and feel for ourselves the emotional and physical blows landed by his partner and the authorities alike: “did the man in blue believe/ another man/ committed the violence/ because it’s always a man/ you have to talk to/ on the other end/ you have to convince/ on the other end/ who finds it/ inconclusive/ domestic/ misunderstanding/ I still find/ glass in the bedroom/ the yelling light/ the breath over and over.” The punch-like directness of Grace’s lines substantiates my persistent misreading of the title he chose for this collection as “defiant.” How true it is that the best revenge is writing well.

Deviant is admittedly much more than a social autopsy of the cruelties rained down upon Grace by another man’s fists. Nor do the book’s other poems sugarcoat gay-male realities in “the kids-are-alright” rationalizations that our betters like to trumpet about the rights that LGBTQ2S+ people benefit from today. Like Louis, Grace is a millennial (“I straddle the line// between inexperienced and educated/ Gen-Y think tank chugging along”) and he’s well aware that the agency he enjoys as a queer person (“I have the best memory/ of what it means/ to be gay/ at the end/ of summer./ By gay I mean/ wondrous,/ the sun/ hitting/ our thankless bodies”) owes much to the freedoms secured by past generations (“Not every driver wanted me dead/ that summer of broken yellow lights”). Deviant nonetheless attests to the risible fact that all’s not yet irrevocably peachy in Emerald City: men still meet on the down-low in bathrooms (“Men beckon you into the stall with a wave”) and despite “kiss[ing]” like they do on TV, feigning aplomb,/ thinking this is what a teenage boy desires,” “it’s in your best interest to mistrust/ the ones who watch you watch.” In these unyielding poems Grace makes it clear that through what he calls our “animalself” we leave ourselves open to both the beauty and the abuse.

John Barton will publish Compulsory Figures in 2025.

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