Baby I Love You

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

These well-scripted, very short stories portray a moment’s monument in
a few hundred words. Some stories are realistic, some surrealistic, and
the characterizations, symbols, metaphors, and similes manage to please.


Ukrainetz knows the tools of her trade. Her narrator finds worlds of
drama in a fish tank or in eloquent battles with a mouse. Meanwhile,
images of the Canadian landscape and weather prevail: “... the sky
caught up in the branches of naked, gnarled trees, like sheets left
decades in one-storey motels, yanked from old mattresses, washed grey
and hung from splintered pegs.” Yet the narrator dances through the
night, sleeps and dreams poetry, wakes to pursue erotic fancies.
Self-fulfilment may come through childbirth, sex, love, or perhaps the
tantalizingly ambiguous final story: “Then she woos me soft with
fantasies; then she rues me hard with lies; then lures me quick with
kisses; then dances me slow with facts. I am held aloft by it, this
gentle sadness passing, through this time of years marked by
januaries.” Her vision is literate, the torments and small delights of
an indomitable life force.