What We’ve Liked This Year: An End of Year List // The Ex-Puritan Editors

By The Ex-Puritan Editors

Catriona Wright, Poetry Editor

In East and West, Laura Ritland's debut collection of poetry, contradiction becomes a way to navigate the world. Divided into four sections, each named after a cardinal point, this collection slips through time—a homesick nautilus exists alongside Vincent Van Gogh and young people in a gentrifying Vancouver; through space—from Holland to Toronto to an airport, everyone's favourite placeless place; and through elements—from the depths of the ocean to the bird's eye view of a carrier pigeon. By constantly roving, these speakers are trying to find somewhere to fit in, some idea to cohere all their disparate identities, but they remain haunted by the sense that they are "an exile of a nation / [they] never belonged to." The speaker in the title poem offers potential solace: "Stay anywhere long enough, / and the contradictions resemble love." With many subtle winks at poets past, the language throughout this collection is fresh and sonically satisfying ("thorny rotundas of barnacles"!), and the expert line breaks disorient the reader ("the world wasn't created in the span of one / mistake"), forcing them to live in the contradiction Ritland celebrates.

Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens by Hosam Aboul-Ela

Noor Naga, Fiction Editor

Last week, a stranger came up to me on the subway in New York to ask about the book I was reading: Hosam Aboul-Ela’s hot-off-the-press Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens. I started to say something about Orientalism by way of explanation, but he didn’t know the word and wanted to talk about the Knicks and college basketball instead. Irony: Domestications is a critical work of scholarship about the solipsism and myopia of American cultural production. It traces the bloom of US Imperialism from World War II until today, using a range of disciplinary lenses: post-colonial, literary, political, historiographic, etc. Everyone, American and otherwise, needs to read this book because the fingers of the phenomenon Aboul-Ela describes have touched every corner of the globe—unfortunately.

The Small Way by Onjana Yawnghwe

Ted Nolan, Interviews Editor

This is a collection of poems as memoir (or is it autofiction?). The speaker’s partner is transitioning, and the speaker’s accepting that, but also finding confusion and grief. She never ceases to support her (now former) partner in their own journey, but her early resolve slowly, painstakingly, poem-by-poem, breaks down and reveals what “tears at the stitches / that, so far, hold / this heart together.” No one is to blame here, yet the speaker’s pain at being left alone is so palpable. Tragedy is at the centre of this book. But it’s never far away from love and the persistence of memory. The sadness never truly lifts from The Small Way, but it is endured, and not for nothing: “We may be just a blinking star / dead millions of years ago. / But the light, the light. Still it shines.”

Can We All Be Feminists? ed. by June Eric-Udorie

Kailey Havelock, Essays Editor

2018 has been a great year for non-fiction anthologies: Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay; American Like Me: Reflections On Life Between Cultures, edited by America Ferrera; and the comparatively less-discussed Can We All Be Feminists? edited by June Eric-Udorie. The remarkably young and insightful Eric-Udorie has curated 17 distinct voices with cohesion beyond that of many single-authored essay collections—no easy feat. Articulating intersectional feminist issues through both theory and personal anecdotes, each essay grapples with the question posed by the book’s title and refutes easy answers, providing a vital reminder of (or introduction to) all the ways in which this term is fraught for those that the movement neglects and excludes.

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Nellwyn Lampert, Associate Essays Editor

The Feather Thief combines historical non-fiction and investigative journalism in a thriller with a social conscience. As he investigates a strange and unusual heist, author Kirk Wallace Johnson delves into humanity's obsession with beauty and our desire to possess nature's bounty for ourselves. The Feather Thief is an entertaining and thought-provoking read that will appeal to fiction and non-fiction lovers alike.

Zolitude by Paige Cooper

Myra Bloom, Reviews Editor

My pick is the weird and wonderful Zolitude by Paige Cooper. The collection—Cooper’s debut—flew out of left field onto major prize lists. I was floored by its range and erudition. In each story we glimpse a tiny hermetic universe, inhabited by strange creatures and governed by its own unique set of physical laws. Cooper's prose is razor sharp and suffused with old-world broodiness, lending Zolitude the feel of something out of time and ultra contemporary all at once. It's a perfect read for these cold dark days.

Ambient Technology by Ashley Obscura

Jason Freure, Publisher

“With a tiny turquoise stone / Tucked in my bra / I am vibrating / At the frequency of ice.” The world of Ambient Technology is understood through the elements and natural things: fire, water, flowers. There’s an ardency and honesty to these poems that reminds me of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets. It’s not a kind of poetics that’s taken seriously in Canada right now, but I think that’s a shame. There’s a trend in Canadian poetry to envelope emotions in extended metaphors until you wouldn’t recognize it anymore, a trend to which Obscura offers an alternative. Not all of Obscura’s lines land, but that’s the risk of using plain and naked language.

Little Fish by Casey Plett

André Forget, Editor-in-Chief

At the beginning of Casey Plett’s debut novel, Wendy Reimer, a 30-something lapsed Mennonite from Winnipeg, receives a bombshell phone call that reveals her deeply Mennonite grandfather to have potentially been, like her, a trans woman. Though readers might expect a set up like this to deliver a narrative that delves into the past to explore hidden pain and meditate on the meaning of family and inheritance, what follows is both more challenging and more psychologically complex. In this affectionate and unsparingly candid story of two months in the life of Wendy Reimer, Plett accomplishes something many novelists try for and few achieve: she wrings poetry out of the prosaic and reminds us that ordinary life is both darker and more numinous than we think.