Category: Milkweed Editions

Review: Northern LIght: Power, Land, and The Memory of Water

4/1/2021

Unearthing the Foundations of Home
Review: Northern Light: Power, Land, and The Memory of Water

Christina Cullen

Kazim Ali
Memoir
Milkweed Editions, pp. 200
Cost: $24.00 (hardback)

Author Kazim Ali reminds us that, like layers of sediment in the earth, generations of lives are inscribed within the land around us. In his memoir Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, Ali weaves a detailed meshing of historical events, personal accounts, and his own experiences as he searches for answers to the series of questions that led him to Cross Lake and the Pimicikamak community.

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A Father's Enigmatic Past

10/2/2014

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Review: Cures for Hunger
A MEMOIR

Christina Schillaci

Cures for Hunger: A Memoir
Deni Y. Béchard
Nonfiction - Memoir
Milkweed Editions, pp. 315
Hardcover Cost: $24.00

In Deni Y. Béchard’s memoir Cures for Hunger, the reader is introduced to the author as a young boy enamored with his father. The author’s father, André, harbors a wild thirst for danger that burrows in his personality and threatens his family. We see this in the opening scene when André takes his children to sit in his truck over railroad tracks. As the train barrels toward the family, André pretends the truck has stalled until the last possible moment. Antics like this one terrify and thrill his children. Then there is the darker side, the sunken eyes and secrets. After the family’s escape from André—and that’s how it felt, kids packed in the car, speeding across the Canadian border in the middle of the night—Béchard blames his mother for taking him away from his father. In the years leading up to his fifteenth birthday, Béchard discovers pieces of André’s criminal record and resolves to move back in with his father. His hope to quench his fascination with André’s past is shadowed by the realization that his father is not the same man he remembers from childhood.

Béchard explores what it means to be in limbo between craving a father’s love and being repulsed by his lifestyle. In his memoir, the author appears troubled, wanting nothing more than a strong patriarchal figure as he picks fights at school and writes dystopian fantasies in his bedroom. But his redeeming qualities are limited.

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Review: Northern LIght: Power, Land, and The Memory of Water

A Father's Enigmatic Past

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