White World
By Saad Farooqi (Cormorant Press)
Reviewed By Salma Hussain
In Namrata Poddar’s article, “Decolonize the Novel: Writing Against Western Strictures of Realism,” published in the , Poddar questions the gate-keeping reception of novels from diasporic writers who experiment with form and utilize fragmentation, discontinuity, and the perspective of multiple characters. American writers like Matthew Salesses, Junot Diaz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and many more have also memorably reflected upon and critiqued the traditional (and limiting) themes, tropes, and structures of the Western novel. Closer to home, poet and academic Irene Marques has recently written a lengthy, incisive essayWestern understanding of what constitutes “proper” storytelling.
Enter White World, a speculative novel by author Saad Farooqi, released in 2024 and set in a future, violent, dystopian state of Pakistan which shares an authentic depressing familiarity with the turbulent Pakistan of today. In nonlinear, puzzle-piece style, Farooqi gives voice to multiple characters. Farooqi chooses characters who have long been denied a voice, rights, and dignity in the mainstream Pakistani establishment: religious minorities, trans women, women who wish neither marriage nor biological children, apostates, and more.
Not just for its content but also for its form, White World is a novel unlike any other that I’ve read. As the epigraph makes clear, Paul Aster’s Book of Illusions is a heavy influence. However, while Auster’s influence is littered everywhere, White World is a novel that is uniquely Farooqian. For one thing, there is a revolution simmering in the background that climatically boils over into a blazing inferno. Time moves in a dizzying spiral in White World and the narrative jumps from the past to the present. Seemingly unconnected scenes reveal their links gradually in beguiling fashion. The novel is jam-packed with gun fights that move at breakneck pace, but the mystery of who these characters are and what broke them apart reveals itself gently. At the core of the action is a tender love story between two shattered souls who have lost each other and must find their way back through forgiveness and understanding. Or must they? Are they perhaps destined for an alternate not-quite-fairy-tale ending?
What most fascinated me about this book was its creativity in telling the story of present Pakistan through the lens of a future dystopian Pakistan—no small stroke of genius. This set-up lends itself brilliantly to a discussion about the current treatment of religious minorities, LGBTQ+ communities, resource distribution, wealth disparity, and more. From the distant, fictional future, Farooqi situates and dissects the real-life historical events of Ordinance X and Operation Searchlight, as well as the very creation of Pakistan itself.
Farooqi made a wise choice in employing a visceral and bloody writing style, for how else to capture the reality of present-day Pakistan? Pakistan is a country that began with a particularly bloody start, from the 1947 Partition and a violent military operation shortly afterwards to Operation Searchlight in 1971. That operation directly precipitated the 1971 Bangladesh genocide where three hundred thousand to three million Bengalis were killed and around ten million fled to neighbouring India as refugees (mostly Hindus), which led to the Bangladesh Liberation War and finally to the establishment of the independent state of Bangladesh itself. Since its inception, Pakistan has been marred by instability and violence—an endless loop of martial laws, assassination attempts, and military coups have either befallen or have been used by successive leaders. Problematically, the country is also kept in a chokehold by its indifferent elite and by leaders who confuse power with religion, while innocent, ordinary civilians are caught up in the crossfire daily.
White World is a singularly distinctive and creative look at what happens to individuals, communities, and countries when dehumanization and violence are allowed to run rampant. Other countries (doing the same) may wish to take note.
BAIT & SWITCH (Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and Views on Canadian Poetry)
By Jim Johnstone (Porcupine’s Quill)
Review by Keith Garebian
Why bother with poetry, asks poet, editor, and publisher Jim Johnstone in the introduction to his essay and reviews collection Bait & Switch. His answer is that “poetry is an irresistible force, a guiding principal for those to whom it matters.” The word “principal” may not be a misprint because poetry to Johnstone is a primary form of entertainment and a fundamental way of interpreting the world. His collection consists of four essays, fifteen reviews or review articles, four conversations (separately with Shane Neilson, Stewart Cole, Ian Williams, and Blair Trewartha), and five miscellaneous pieces, four of which are critical appreciations of Earle Birney, D.G. Jones, and the Revisioned New Brunswick Chapbook Series.
Johnstone enters the thoughts of these poets, understanding that each makes their own decisions about theme, strategy, and devices. Consequently, his critical analyses accommodate radical differences in poetic temperament and character, whether these are rough, darkly wise, nobly easeful, or slim, tight, and precise. He has his favourites, of course, including Michael Prior, Ian Williams, Karen Solie, Don McKay, Carmine Starnino, Souvankham Thammavongsa, and Tolu Oloruntoba, basing his preferences on language that is flexible, supple, and rich. Although he rejoices in poetry that brings him the new and unexpected (as in bill bissett at his best or Ben Ladouceur’s debut collection, Otter, or Thammavongsa’s “compact epiphanies”), he is not a champion of mere fashion. Nor are his aesthetic standards conveyed in the manner of a majestic expert who brooks no challenge. For him, there is neither a single fixed meaning nor a woolly-headed subscription to words being slapped onto paper. And his reviews, which are longer than what most poets receive, crystallize his keen critical sense—his ability to summarize literary character, as in his summing-up of Karen Solie: “What makes Solie different than most English-language speaking poets is that her work moves with a speed that’s uncommon among serious practitioners of the art … Solie’s carefully controlled unpredictability suits her subject matter, and makes her poetry seem seamless despite its narrative dichotomies.”
Though he doesn’t fully convince me with his case for science and poetry as symbiotic disciplines, and he loses me when it comes to scientific equations, Johnstone is never absolute and is always on the side of the immediately human. He shows how in his own life the delineation between science and poetry is less fixed, jumping from anecdote to critical explication to enhance his suasive force. Johnstone decided to become a scientist, he tells us, after viewing James Whale’s film adaptation of Frankenstein (1931)—blissfully unaware of Mary Shelley’s original fiction. The first poem he remembers reading is Margaret Atwood’s “This is a Photograph of Me,” where Atwood’s use of parentheses made it seem as though the protagonist was speaking underwater in a mode of water burial. Now, as an expert poetry critic, Johnstone wittily imagines what would happen outside the photograph: a forensic anthropologist investigating the body’s DNA with the help of a team of lab technicians trying “to determine if the drowning was an accidental death or a homicide.”
Johnstone’s foray into memoir and literary interrogation evolves as if by jump cuts—the first coming by way of a chance meeting with Ian Williams on a subway ride to Finch Station in Toronto. The encounter changed the direction of Johnstone’s life by motivating him to commit to poetry and to give up his chosen academic field of reproductive physiology. He earned a MSc while also publishing poems in magazines. “Unconsciously, the language I’d spent years learning as a physiologist seeped in, drastically changing the style I’d developed a few years earlier. My continuing education also reinforced the idea that science, in particular, used specific metaphorical paradigms to express knowledge,” Johnstone writes. He went on to publish poetry collections that skillfully explore extreme physical and psychological experiences, such as illness and addiction via science or medicine. And he praises scientifically inclined poets such as Williams, Liz Howard, and (early) Christian Bök for their intuitive, integrated verse.
Johnstone’s critical sense refuses what he calls the bait and switch (his title for a probing essay on Bök): that action of misleading expectation by false promises or guarantees. But balance rather than sweeping denunciation is his critical signature. Recognizing Bök’s Oulipian design in Eunoia (the highest-selling poetry collection in Canadian history), where all poems are created with severely constrained techniques, Johnstone offers a well-considered put-down of the same poet’s project The Xenotext for its “cross-disciplinary implications”: “Bök delivers a collection of poetry that’s only tangentially related to the experiment described […] It’s a curious about-face for a poet who’s insisted, time and time again, that his research will change the game […] Bök’s verse has always been traditional, despite his fondness for lofty concepts […] When he decides not to reach into his poetic toolkit, he’s simply another scientist at the mercy of a Power Point presentation.”
Though it is possible to challenge some of his verdicts on certain poets, there should be no disagreement on the value of Johnstone’s critical or editorial interventions. I have been fortunate to have him once as the editor of a small chapbook and I applaud his commitment as editor/critic. Here he is on the subject: “Accepting a manuscript for publication is like exchanging vows. The publisher commits to the work in question—for better, for worse—and the author promises to enter the bookmaking process in good faith.” A pity that there are so few poetry editor/critics with Jim Johnstone’s generous-hearted, right-minded perspicacity.
Inside the House Inside
By Rosalind Goldsmith (Ronsdale Press)
Review by Brittany Coy-Pinnock
Rosalind Goldsmith’s Inside the House Inside exists in the space between moments where fear lives and apathy ferments. It offers a startling portrayal of poverty, homelessness, climate change, abuse, and mental illness through snapshots of people who occupy the peripheries— those who polite society pretends not to see for fear of becoming them.
Goldsmith is a Toronto-based writer who has written radio plays for CBC Radio and has had her short stories appear in journals in the UK, the US, and Canada. The anthology is a series of experimental flash fiction stories that explore the last resort of one’s survival instinct: a withdrawal into the mind.
Some stories are more narrative in nature. “Forsythia” opens the collection with a couple who have lost everything but their most basic possessions. They navigate the silence swelling between them in the heat on their drive to anywhere. We learn little about their backstory except those details that make it near-identical to anyone else who has had to start over. Lost jobs, accumulating mortgage payments, burn out—the specifics don’t matter. They followed the rules and failed anyways. Goldsmith invites us to survey the ashen remains of their lives, so we can observe devastation in words unspoken and perhaps—barely there and hidden in the what-ifs of hindsight—a hope for new growth.
Other stories lean more abstract, settling into the crevice between poetry and prose, where Goldsmith demonstrates deft control of metaphor and imagery and an ear for rhythm. There is unsettling whimsy in “Worse,” where thoughts imprint and linger in the molecules that make up a person’s breath and transfer to those around them in glimpses of disconnected mirages. Fleeting connection is portrayed, not in the swinging highs and lows of milestone celebrations and mourning, but in junctures of stillness where two eyes meet and understandings pass.
The anthology’s titular story, “Inside the House Inside,” uses precise imagery to depict a childhood of neglect and abuse resulting from—or maybe exacerbated by—a parent’s illness: “And down the years, first scant then fleet, she’ll carry all of this with her: sick mother, raging father, and the old wooden house structured up inside her.” The protagonist escapes the house and the powerless girl she used to be but remains a hostage in a cycle of abuse that claims yet another victim: her daughter.
Like the characters centred in these stories, Inside the House Inside is unconventional. This literary risk of a collection is meant for readers who want to feel things and aren’t too hung up on whether or not those feelings are pleasant. It is about the brute savagery of survival. It is about the complicated haven our minds weave out of denial and delusion and hope and love after our cries for help go unanswered.
The collection’s power lies not in its beautiful prose and haunting elegance, but rather, in how those elements weave familiar portrayals of apathy and disconnect that allow poverty, abuse, and illness to fester in a society of generally good people. It triggers a startling confrontation with the self by rallying us to look when we might otherwise avert our gaze: a senior with dementia, our neighbour’s eviction, broken children whose innocence has been stolen by adults who know better.
Admittedly, several of these stories left a grimy taste in my mouth. I saw myself in the other who chooses comfortable ignorance over messy and inconvenient community. It shamed me for the times I avoided eye contact with an unhoused person and told myself it was because I had no change. In other stories, I recognized myself in the protagonists who quietly insist on surviving after being stripped down to the essences of themselves in a world that refuses to acknowledge us without the material things that hoist us on transient pedestals. In the same breath, it concedes the resilience of the human spirit—the compulsion to emerge from a dark silence with our trauma embedded in our DNA like scars and our coping mechanisms girded like armour in order to demand another day on this earth.
Survival is filthy and ugly; no one escapes without loss. For those who can bear its unflinching indictment, Inside the House Inside serves as a reminder that our power resides in the moments where we see our fellow man’s hand outstretched and decide whether or not to reach back. With a singular command of language and prose, Goldsmith shows again and again the indomitability of the human capacity to survive.
Story Is a State of Mind: Writing and the Art of Creative Curiosity
By Sarah Selecky (Assembly Press)
Reviewed by Krista Carson
Sarah Selecky’s craft guide, Story is a State of Mind: Writing and the Art of Creative Curiosity (2025) is, per the author, “an invitation to write with your entire being” (p. 8). Selecky, author of Radiant Shimmering Light and the Giller-prize nominated This Cake Is for the Party, teaches creative writing programs online and offers her similarly named Story Is a State of Mind coaching through her Sarah Selecky Writing School. Selecky holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and has studied at the Humber School for Writers.
Any creative writer can benefit from this craft manual. Yet, for students in the Humber creative writing community, Story is a State of Mind provides a unique chance to learn from a well-respected alum, gaining insights into her struggles and successes in the Canadian literary landscape.
This book presents concise, instructive essays with solid advice and exercises to inspire and encourage writers. While structured sequentially for creative writers to follow the typical book-writing process from start to finish, it can also be used nonlinearly—an asset for the flexibility it affords. The short chapter sections enhance readability. A skim through the table of contents reveals a thoughtful journey, and Selecky’s approach throughout feels gentle and nurturing, complementing her themes of slowness, rest, curiosity, and peace.
The book focuses on a few guiding principles: creative curiosity, whole-mindedness, and flow state. Selecky describes creative curiosity as “a mindset of open exploration and wonder through which you actively seek out the true nature and direction of your writing project” (p. 15). In one personal essay, Selecky details her relationship with writing as a child and teen and describes how she experienced what we might call writer’s block and a subsequent disconnect from the joys of writing because of a focus on the external validation that tags alongside seeking publication—a relatable struggle for many in creative domains. Eventually, Selecky found that through her teaching, and prioritizing curiosity, she could help others navigate similar challenges.
The author describes whole-mindedness as “a state of integrated awareness where you can sense the internal signals from your body, like your heartbeat and breathing, at the same time as the signals coming from your external environment, like the smell of popcorn and the sound and vibration of a phone buzzing” (p. 29). While this state is valuable for the clarity and focus it enables, it is also a useful conduit for accessing flow. Flow state, a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a well-studied phenomenon across numerous academic disciplines, from psychology to neuroscience and from kinesiology to performing arts and music. Selecky emphasizes the enjoyment of writing in flow, along with exercises to welcome flow into the writing process.
Beyond flow, Selecky touches on various other states of cognition and consciousness, including attention, deep noticing, awareness, trance, and presence—crucial considerations in our fast, tech-saturated, distraction-laden culture. She focuses on mindset and underscores the necessity of tapping into sensory experience and embodied wisdom. Emphasizing the interplay of intellect and intuition in the creative process, she makes room for creativity’s delightfully inexplicable and mysterious aspects. The outcome is perceptive and generous, with apt anecdotes that reveal a writer and teacher who leads by example. The book’s holistic approach, practicality, and flexibility are certainly strengths. That said, while it is easy to appreciate the clean simplicity of reading without the distraction of footnotes, endnotes, or in-text citations, in certain cases—especially when Selecky discusses psychology or neuroscience—she might have cited sources directly to bolster key claims.
Overall, Story Is a State of Mind is a refreshing addition to craft and creativity guides. Selecky foregrounds joyfulness, wonder, openness, and magic, which reminds us why we’re doing this work in the first place.
