Michael Redhill Short Story Collections
Lake Nora Arms skillfully navigates the "blue hallways" of memory and longing, drawing on tastes and touches as if for the first time. It immerses and envelops us in a mythical place that readers have wanted to return to ever since the book was first published. As Redhill writes, "I want you to sleep in Lake Nora Arms" - and now you can.
Light-Crossing is an electric field of love and attraction, where invisible currents conjoin, cross, and charge the atmosphere with possibility and latent tension. Whether discussing the love between father and infant son, a man and the woman he spots from afar, or a husband and wife, the poems pulse with eroticism and the sweet accretions of memory.
Redhill conjures up many unexpected twists in ten richly textured stories that range from the darkness of family silences to the hilarity of people caught in their own snares. With his unflinching attention to emotional detail, Redhill proves once again to be "a writer of considerable humanity and insight" (A.L. Kennedy).
A muscle’s “twitch force” is a measurement of its energy potential. It’s history dependent: you can forget it, but it’s engraved on you where you can’t see it, and all it wants to do is repeat. Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Michael Redhill’s first collection of poetry in eighteen years, Twitch Force has a gnomic, satirical, and lucid intelligence. In “Ingredients,” heredity’s recipe is told via short-form family narrative; in “My Arrangements,” a stolen laptop battery leads to an encounter with the Israeli Olympic women’s beach volleyball team; while in “The Women,” human beauty is parsed down to the level of chromosomes: “I’m beautiful; I have my mother’s feet. The women who change into men are beautiful men who were once beautiful women.” This is poetry concerned with love and its loss, despair and hard-won hope, knowledge and essential mystery, aging and timelessness. Readers are cautioned: ideas that present as self-explanatory may be closer than they appear. Twitch Force is a stunningly realized return to the form from one of Canada’s bravest and most original poets.