Front Table Newsletter 5/12

On this week’s Front Table, discover the time-honored practice of tattooing within Indigenous communities, and follow a journalist turned bookseller as he begrudgingly navigates a new career. Explore microbials that eke out a living in Earth's most extreme locales, join an unnamed narrator as he hunts down a past love through an icy tundra, and "journey-in-place" with a poet during quarantine in Northeastern Ontario. Finally, consider how actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty, and confront the challenges of the unhoused community through a priest's activism in her own churchyard. 

No Straight Road Take You There
(Haymarket Books)
Rebecca Solnit

Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse.


Ice
(Pushkin Press)
Anna Kavan

Ice is slowly covering the entire globe; as the glacial tide creeps forward, the fabric of society begins to break down. Through this chaotic landscape, a nameless narrator hunts for the white-haired girl he once loved - or perhaps wishes to annihilate. Battling a powerful enemy known only as the Warden, he travels through nightmarish and ever-shifting scenes, where the object of his obsession remains constantly just out of reach. She is guarded by the Warden and by a cruel older woman who wishes her ill - but each time the narrator seems poised to rescue her the encroaching ice wreaks violence on her fragile body, or his own base nature sends him hurtling onward in his kaleidoscopic pursuit. Again and again the girl appears, but inevitably she eludes him.


Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community
(Coach House Books)
Maggie Helwig

The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto's Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind.

Encampment tells the story of Helwig's life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society's callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.


One Big Time
(Wave Books)
Lisa Fishman

Here is the author at her most exacting and exploratory, in poems that hew with lyric precision to the immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, language is an alert, mobile life-form in active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. While the poet quests daily for a passageway from one body of water into another, words live in other words ("the hemlock / is a he / today"), and acrostics are illuminations: s-w-i-m is "sleek widening instant's magnet." Surprised by joy, these biocentric poems offer a way of being in the world with wonder and rigor--attentive enough to be lost, unknowing enough to be changed.


Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth
(Princeton University Press)
Karen G Lloyd

Life thrives in the deepest, darkest recesses of Earth's crust--from methane seeps in the ocean floor to the highest reaches of Arctic permafrost--and it is unlike anything seen on the surface. Intraterrestrials shares what scientists are learning about these strange types of microbial life--and how research expeditions to some of the most extreme locales on the planet are broadening our understanding of what life is and how its earliest forms may have evolved.


Service
(Semiotext(e))
John Tottenham

A journalist in his late forties--having lost his job as a consequence of the death of print media--finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common. Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his longtime ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances.


Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity Through Skin and Ink
(Princeton University Press)
Lars Krutak

Tattooing within Indigenous communities is a time-honored practice that binds the tattoo recipient to a deeply felt collective history. More than mere decoration, tattoos embody cultural values, ancestral ties, and spiritual beliefs. Indigenous Tattoo Traditions captures ancient tribal tattooing practices and their contemporary resurgence, highlighting a beautiful aspect of humanity’s shared cultural heritage.