The Mysterious Death of Tom Thomson (Porcupine’s Quill), a graphic biography of Canada’s most mythic painter, is a masterpiece of both creation and reproduction. George A. Walker’s series of more than a hundred woodblock prints moves beyond pure homage; it recasts surviving photographs of the artist and Thomson’s own manic paintings while also introducing searing new images. Virtually nothing is known about Thomson’s violent death, but Walker’s haunting depictions of the event are so striking that they seem to come from some morbid photographic source. The simplicity of the woodblock medium can make the narrative difficult to follow, but this turns out to be Walker’s great strength. He challenges his reader with a poetic ambiguity that makes for an active, rewarding read.
—Ian Beattie

The transformation was swift and deceitful: in just a decade, Canada went from a nation of peacekeepers to one of soldiers. So argues Noah Richler in What We Talk About When We Talk About War (Goose Lane Editions), a valuable account of that metamorphosis. Richler focuses on the rhetoric used by politicians and pundits determined to rewrite Canada’s creation myths. Targeting such figures as former chief of defence staff Rick Hillier, military historian Jack Granatstein and op-ed writers like Christie Blatchford, he smoothly critiques the marketing of violence and draws readers’ attention to the warmongers in our midst. But by dismantling their mechanics more thoroughly than their motives, Richler risks sounding as simplistic as the militarists he spends 360 pages criticizing.
—Max Halparin

Nyla Matuk’s Sumptuary Laws (Signal Editions) is a crowded book. The poet’s relentless stream of similes can make one feel sorry for the adjectives and nouns piled into the collection, trying desperately to get a little signifying done but with no room to do it. When Matuk allows her language some breathing room, though, the results are glorious, saturated with eroticism and a wonderfully wry intelligence. Matuk courageously takes on a full house of themes—at one point leaping from imperial Rome to mini-golf and back again in the space of two lines—though this requires some wrangling. Still, in a field as beleaguered and under-read as contemporary poetry, a little over-confidence might be just what’s needed.
—Ian Beattie

Magnified World (Random House Canada), Grace O’Connell’s first novel, deals with the fallout from a suicide: as the book opens, Maggie’s mother has drowned herself and Maggie has begun to have blackouts. In cinematic prose, O’Connell unravels the process of coming to terms with a mother’s death, one painful setback after another. For all the richness of the writing, though, the unraveling itself plods. Certain key moments feel forced; others are easy to see coming. As O’Connell, for the sake of plot, hands Maggie one more challenge in a stream of punishing trials, one wonders whether it’s possible to put a character through too much. It’s not that the reality of grief isn’t crushing, but Maggie can’t catch a single break. It makes the book exhausting to read.
—Amelia Schonbek

The characters in Andrew Hood’s The Cloaca (Invisible Publishing) are not happy people. Many of them are failed artists who suddenly find themselves pushing forty with little to show for it, a leitmotif that might be tiresome and depressing were it not for Hood’s comic bite. One sad woman finds comfort in a “queer backyard spandex wrestling league”; elsewhere, a nude man who’s just been egged by a pack of teenagers reaches down to “pluck his penis back out of his body.” Despite winning the Danuta Gleed Award for his previous collection Pardon Our Monsters (Esplanade Books), Hood remains one of Canada’s most criminally undervalued writers; lovers of witty, understated fiction would do well to pick up The Cloaca.
—Drew Nelles