“‘I feel alone,” she says, ‘when I’m with other people.’ ‘Ah,’ Ernest says. ‘The worst kind of lonesome,’” (Lockyer). In the rural town of Burr, Ontario thirteen-year-old Jane’s dad has just died. She spends her time fantasizing about becoming a worm that will burrow into his body, buys tarot cards and tries Ouija boards to …
“I didn’t know there could ever be hurt like this, and that’s the truth. It comes, over and over it comes, and it hurts so much…there’s no rest from it even when I go to sleep, when I go to sleep I dream it over and over again,” (King 262-263). Louis Creed has just moved …
“As much as we like to believe in fairy tales, where only stupid or bad people meet tragic ends, women are not murdered because they bring it on themselves through their actions or their inactions; women are murdered because they find themselves in the vicinity of a murderer,” (Biller). Despite her success as a mystery writer, …
I’m very grateful to the Literary Review of Canada for reaching out to me to review Nick Bantock’s The Corset & the Jellyfish. Read my full review on their Substack, Bookworm!
“I wonder what the fuck I have to do for people to recognise me as a threat, you know? It’s like…am I even doing this shit? Have I even fucking done anything?…Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a …
“lost and alone,/wandering./i swill back the pain; it burns and it belches/rage and despair/leaving only a windigo/who cannibalizes himself,” (Thistle, 157, “Windigo”). Jesse Thistle recounts his journey of recovery from drug-addiction. He remembers his brief time in the foster-care system with his brothers, moving to Ontario with his paternal grandparents, until he finds himself homeless. …
“We carry our childhood, the good and the bad of it, into our adult lives. In that way, we’re never very far from the children we once were,” (Connolly 212). Eight-year-old Phoebe lies comatose in a hospital bed with her mother, Ceres, close by her side, reading the fairy tales her daughter loved. But as …
“I’m no longer sure which is worse: surviving and living the rest of my life as a lie, or wasting away in this apartment and dying from this cancer,” (Maylott 35). Paige Maylott’s debut memoir is an honest exploration of transition and discovery. Finding solace, community, and love in online communities and games, Maylott comes into …
“To be loved by your father is to be loved by God,” (Dey 17). Despite everything, Mona Dean can’t stay away from her famous writer father Paul Dean. Not when he left her mother and sister when she was eleven, not when he ignored the abuse his new wife, Cherry, dealt against her and her sister …
“At seventeen, Lenora Hope/ Hung her sister with a rope/ Stabbed her father with a knife/ Took her mother’s happy life/ ‘It wasn’t me,’ Lenora said/ But she’s the only one not dead,” (Sager 9-10). Kit McDeere is familiar with the childhood chant of Lenora Hope, the young teenaged girl who all those years ago was …
Sarah O'Connor 