Canadian Brash: New Voices in Fiction, Drama, Poetry

Boyd Holmes is an editor with Dundurn Press.

Canadian Brash is an anthology of recent plays, poems, and short
stories, many of which are reprinted from the Toronto fringe tabloid
what magazine. In his lucid introduction to the book, Sherman, an editor
at both the tabloid and Coach House, describes Canadian Brash as a
literary publication that, like what magazine, should appeal to
“nontraditional” readers. It would be a mistake, however, to label
this book as avant-garde: although its topics, from homosexuality to
prostitution, are common to modern avant-garde writing, its design is
pleasing and professional, and its five authors, all new, are hardly
radical experimenters in structure or technique.

Canadian Brash does not, however, usually live up to the packaging.
Lynn Crosbie’s eight poems ramble and wander (“hieroglyph dolls, are
the syllables / of the dirge. a pentecost / of sound from evolution.
like / an appendix or gall bladder, / useless pink, speech grinding /
into silence. the last I make, / I have started from the feet. / they
are rosy and winged”). In contrast, Peter McGehee’s stories are
tightly composed, with an appealing wit (“A local chiropractor . . .
sings an original folk song in a very original key”). Unfortunately,
McGehee’s frequent sexual descriptions are gratuitous: what he intends
as erotic is just plain pornographic. Rick Hillis also presents five
fictions; all are slightly overwritten, and sometimes strained (“Her
bony fingers clutch the mirror propped on her lap. The bright cast
surfaces from under her bedcovers like the stern of a sinking canoe”).
Hillis does, however, occasionally command considerable descriptive
power, particlarly at the end of “The Summer Tragedy Report.” Of
David Demchuk’s two short dramatic monologues, the first, to be
compelling, needs crisper diction; the second, with its graphic sexual
language, tries too hard to shock. This book’s final contributor,
playwright Sally Clark, emerges as a better dramatist. The first scene
of her selection is possibly unnecessary, but Clark’s otherwise
careful editing makes her play’s comedy succeed nonetheless.