Airborne Photo

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Clint Burnham has fashioned a set of 30-odd stories whose common thread
would seem to be the comings and goings of a certain underclass of
Vancouver denizens. The disaffected youth, the dopers, the petty thieves
(interstices among these groups growing smaller, piece after piece) who
populate the stories (mostly told in a harsh first-person voice) bond
together with the holding power of alienation. Burnham’s prose is
sharp and raw, his dialogue full of the cadences and dialects of the
street. His locations—Vancouver’s infamous downtown Eastside, the
sordidness of Surrey—are realistically portrayed.

Unfortunately, the stories come at you with a rush of verisimilitude,
and that’s about it. If there is a deeper meaning intended, it is
between the lines or on a level so personal as to be inaccessible. One
of the successes is “Hamlet,” a surreal take on the son/mother
relationship. Recommended for public libraries.