Duck Island
- Steve Weiner
- Publication date: 2023-07-04
A young man returns to the town of his youth after a period spent on the road.
Unable to rekindle a high school flame, Cal Bedrick, who is Jewish, soon meets a very nice Catholic girl, Frannie Sinkiewicz, who falls hard for the troubled young man. Their courtship leads quickly to a marriage that fills their acquaintances with doubts.
The young couple's story is set against the backdrop of a fictionalized Wausau, Wisconsin, when the Vietnam war is drawing to an end. Duck Island is peopled by a cast of small-town archetypes: Frannie's conservative family including her brother / patriarch, Joey, manager of the town's convenience store where Cal gets a job; Father Leszinski, the parish priest; Mr. Dula, who manages the men's shelter where Cal washes up; Frannie's best friend Wendy Gabrilska, and an assortment of war veterans, Indigenous people, immigrants, the town's merchants, and local low-lifes who populate Wausau.
Like a David Lynch film, Duck Island vividly contrasts a society whose liberal surface conceals a troubled soul, which is revealed as the novel's events unfold.
Male Pregnancy in Reverse
- Tom Prime
- Publication date: 2023-09-30
Male Pregnancy in Reverse, a long poem "in 5 Acts", transmutes a disturbing and sometimes horrifying experience—albeit one which is only ever obliquely and allegorically described—into a dazzling and heady literary puzzle.
Wielding a rich and suggestive vocabulary largely drawn from Elizabethan literary texts, but working within a tradition that includes Rimbaud and Mallarme, Tom Prime revels in a lexigraphic bubblebath that combines visual poetry, typographic moves, fragments of a play, a cast of characters that include Brayne-worme, Volpone, Baby and Mother, and uneasy-laughter-inducing silliness.
Misguided
- Perry Bulwer
- Publication date: 2023-09-07
A unique first-hand account of a life spent in the Children of God, a/k/a The Family, a millenarian doomsday sex cult under the sway of a charismatic leader, David Berg.
In 1972, Perry Bulwer, a naive 16-year-old growing up in Port Alberni, a mill town on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, dropped out of high school to run away with the Children of God, one of a number of millennial Christian cults that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s. Soon, Perry was preaching the cult's doomsday message on the streets of some of the largest cities in the world.
Bulwer takes the reader on an extraordinary trip through the world of biblical literalism, fundamentalist endtime fantasies, paranormal spirituality, evangelical extremism, ritual abuse, and liberally interpreted biblical teachings that were used to justify licentious sexual doctrines, evangelical prostitution, and child sexual abuse.
Along the way, we learn about the inner workings of the CoG, a/k/a The Family, and the machinations of David Berg, a self-declared endtime prophet who claimed to be personally mentioned in the Bible, and that God spoke through him. Berg predicted the imminent destruction of America, the appearance of the Antichrist in 1985, and the Second Coming of Jesus in 1993. Berg died in 1994, before various law enforcement agencies around the world caught up with him.
Perry Bulwer escaped The Family in 1991, managing to escape the cult's tight control while living in Asia. Returning to Canada, he tried to pick up his life where he had left it off two decades earlier. Through education Bulwer lost his religion, turning from religious extremist to secular humanist lawyer, fighting for the rights of sex workers and drug users living on the streets of Vancouver. Haunted by his own past, Bulwer became an advocate for thousands of second-generation survivors of the cult's child abuse and psychological trauma scattered around the world.