Gravity Lets You Down

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson Polytechnical University.

Gravity Lets You Down is a collection of reviews, ruminations,
reminiscences, and first-person short stories about political activists,
street life in Toronto, and brushes with madness. Helwig writes
movingly, with a strong political conscience, about the brutality in the
world that many people feel helpless about: “you have to try to
express some sense of morality somehow.” Her work is infused with this
sense of morality, and also of religion in her reaction to the
atrocities in East Timor, her apocalyptic feelings at the start of the
Gulf War, and her relations with friends and lovers. She paints a vivid
picture of life in cheap basement flats where looking after oneself
takes second place. Many readers will enjoy this latest collection.