The Two-Headed Calf

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

The Manitoban setting, with its rural and urban contrasts, provides a
colorful and provocative backdrop for these 12 well-crafted tales. With
the imagination of a poet, Sandra Birdsell writes seamless prose,
drawing the reader into a world that is both troubled and compelling.

The title story furnishes a metaphor for the divisions of the human
soul—a soul torn between devices and desires, passion and
propriety—as a woman tries to comfort the ne’er-do-well dying friend
of her mother. In other stories, a single mother spars with a daughter
who is asserting her independence; a woman visits her aging mother and
watches her shreds of independence slip away; a Mennonite family
retreats back from the foreign soil of Mexico, having failed to take
root with the rest of the colony; and a reclusive pair of farming
brothers find their lives disrupted by a woman.

Written by a master of the trenchant detail, this is a book to savor
slowly.