Read This: The best of Canadian small press
A Secret Trial: Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron and the Public Trust By William Kaplan (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Non-Fiction
William Kaplan’s A Secret Trial is quite possibly the most important book on public life in Canada that has been published this year. The book aims to correct the main assumption of Kaplan’s previous book, Presumed Guilty, which exonerated Brian Mulroney of any wrongdoing in the Airbus affair. While there is still not a shred of evidence that Mulroney was involved in the scandal, he wasn’t as forthcoming with Kaplan, the RCMP or the Canadian public as he should have been. Kaplan is pretty annoyed with all concerned. He lectures Mulroney on the ethical obligations of leadership, then proceeds to lecture Stevie Cameron on journalistic integrity. Finally, Norman Spector adds a painful Afterword, exposing the bipartisan nature of the culture of corruption in Ottawa. It’s extremely depressing. —Andrew Potter
Summat Else By Royston Tester (Porcupine’s Quill)
Fiction
In these connected stories, narrator Enoch Jones guides the reader through his coming-of-age with a cockeyed charm that makes both the English Black Country and the bloodthirsty Barcelona of Franco’s final days feel as real as one’s own kitchen. With a novel’s momentum, each story plunges us headlong into the next hair-raising stage of Enoch’s life—Evensong pickpocket, reform school punching-bag, apprentice rent-boy—culminating in an epistolary tale with a cliffhanger ending that, somehow, completely satisfies. Tester’s structural craftsmanship alone is dizzying, but it is Enoch’s strength of character in the face of fascist gunfire, S & M dog collars and a pederast driving instructor, among other things, that ultimately makes this collection so winning. (And the paper it’s printed on is really nice.) —Adam Lewis Schroeder
Rue de Regard By Todd Swift (DC Books)
Poetry
Infused with pop culture, Western Europe, and Todd, Todd, Todd, Rue du Regard divides its time nominally between Paris and London. It drops a thousand names, from Baudelaire to Loni Anderson (disappointingly misspelled) to King Kong to Vidal Sassoon. The poems move with their energetic author and the reader is expected to follow. The 14-line “That Girl in Autumn” travels from Marlo Thomas’s to “Hart Crane’s Manhattan,” and seems to excuse itself by claiming to be merely “a sassy New Critic of British Vogue.” In the end, I’m afraid, it is too much. Too much pop, not enough culture. “Brittany Murphy Adoration Society” is not a poem a poet born in 1966 should wish to publish in his third collection, or, frankly, anywhere. Blog-worthy, perhaps, but not what I look for in a poetry book. —Chris Chambers
