Smack-dab in the centre of this long hot summer, we at TheWinnipeg Review bring you reviews and features that focus firmly on the interplay between the mind and the body. As the playful theme for this issue, our twenty-fourth, suggests, Books Never Melt—but our utterly corporeal hearts and minds may not be so immune.
Our fierce slate of new book reviews probe such intimate—and more broadly political—issues as reproductive freedom, transgender experience, adoption, mental health and cross-cultural anxieties about the things people do to one another’s bodies. Our New Works section welcomes award-winning novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, with an aesthetically and emotionally stimulating short piece that considers age, beauty, alchemy—and, yes in fact, feces.
For many cities across Canada, recent weeks brought LGBT Pride celebrations and in response, our feature for this summer issue considers the position of queer and trans writers in Canada’s cultural body politic. In these days of increased gay visibility in the mainstream, how much easier or more equitable are things for LGBT writers seeking to have their voices heard alongside everyone else?
We asked a diverse panel of trans and/or queer authors, and the answers may—or may not—surprise you. This month’s fiction excerpt—from Maritime novelist Darren Greer’s latest, Advocate—also contemplates a complexly queer perspective on the body and its discontents: in this case, past and present reactions to HIV, as Greer describes it, “a dodecahedron and coloured green, with small barnacles all over it,” but nonetheless an entity whose sociopolitical impact has transcended its biological shape, colour and texture.
We hope that this seasonally sweltering issue of the Winnipeg Review will reach out and touch you—body and mind. As always, your comments and feedback on our contents are not only welcomed, but heartily encouraged.
A Bawdy Politic
Columns
By Shawn Syms
Smack-dab in the centre of this long hot summer, we at The Winnipeg Review bring you reviews and features that focus firmly on the interplay between the mind and the body. As the playful theme for this issue, our twenty-fourth, suggests, Books Never Melt—but our utterly corporeal hearts and minds may not be so immune.
Our fierce slate of new book reviews probe such intimate—and more broadly political—issues as reproductive freedom, transgender experience, adoption, mental health and cross-cultural anxieties about the things people do to one another’s bodies. Our New Works section welcomes award-winning novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, with an aesthetically and emotionally stimulating short piece that considers age, beauty, alchemy—and, yes in fact, feces.
For many cities across Canada, recent weeks brought LGBT Pride celebrations and in response, our feature for this summer issue considers the position of queer and trans writers in Canada’s cultural body politic. In these days of increased gay visibility in the mainstream, how much easier or more equitable are things for LGBT writers seeking to have their voices heard alongside everyone else?
We asked a diverse panel of trans and/or queer authors, and the answers may—or may not—surprise you. This month’s fiction excerpt—from Maritime novelist Darren Greer’s latest, Advocate—also contemplates a complexly queer perspective on the body and its discontents: in this case, past and present reactions to HIV, as Greer describes it, “a dodecahedron and coloured green, with small barnacles all over it,” but nonetheless an entity whose sociopolitical impact has transcended its biological shape, colour and texture.
We hope that this seasonally sweltering issue of the Winnipeg Review will reach out and touch you—body and mind. As always, your comments and feedback on our contents are not only welcomed, but heartily encouraged.