Measure Yourself Against the Earth
By Mark Kingwell
Biblioasis, 332 pages, $22.95
This space isn't enough to engage with the substance of Mark Kingwell's new essay collection, so let's approach it a different way. A companion to Kingwell's 2012 collection Unruly Voices, Measure Yourself Against the Earth brings together 25 essays – several previously published in the now-deceased literary journal Descant (RIP) – under the headings Travelling Reflections, Writers and Writing, Ethical Concerns, Words About Images, and Meditations Personal and Political. While there is sense to this organization, what's significant is how in Kingwell's style each essay contains many if not all these elements. Kingwell writes on both more academic philosophical concerns and "philosophy of the everyday" such that an essay on dislocating his shoulder will wind through the writing of Strauss, Freud and Plath. No matter the topic, democracy is a subject never far away. An enlivening continuation on Kingwell's previous work as well as a good place to start for those new to him.
Live From the Underground
By Corinne Wasilewski
Mansfield, 227 pages, $20
Corinne Wasilewski's debut opens in spring of 1980, during the rise of Solidarity against Poland's communist regime. Darek Dabrowski is a Warsaw teen who dreams of New York, but when his father, a local Solidarity leader, is released from prison on condition that he leave the country, the Dabrowskis head to the town of Lampeq, in New Brunswick's Bible Belt. There, the story turns to Eleanor (Lennie) Hanson, a girl who has lived her whole life in Lampeq and doesn't see a way out. Personal tragedy strikes both characters, but their stories don't intertwine in the expected way. That doesn't detract from either narrative, and both could be novels in their own right, but it means the conclusion feels more like a meeting point than a crescendo – a missed opportunity. Moving the Dabrowskis to small-town, evangelical New Brunswick is an inspired juxtaposition. The conclusion notwithstanding, there's much to recommend this novel.
Corvus
By Harold Johnson
Thistledown, 277 pages, $19.95
Common to Christian, Norse and First Nations mythologies, Raven (Latin: Corvus) is the framing narrator in Harold Johnson's postapocalyptic dystopia about security, technology and humans' relation to the Earth. It's science fiction from a First Nations perspective (Johnson is Cree). In the future, after decades of natural disasters, war, desertification and migration, La Ronge in central Saskatchewan is a bustling metropolis. As lawyers, George and Lenore lead very comfortable lives; neither questions the status quo – that is, until they encounter the city's outsiders. As a dystopia, Corvus rightly foregrounds its politics but sometimes treats readers as if we aren't smart enough to get it. Johnson also explains the novel's world in section-long info-dumps though he does leave more subtle clues. By arithmetic, for example, we learn the year is 2084, a hat tip to 1984. If you can look past the stylistic issues, Corvus is an impassioned, formally innovative twist on the dystopian genre.