Press Release from Biblioasis
Canary
by Nancy Jo Cullen
What has to die before you force yourself to change?
That’s the question facing the always quirky and often-queer characters of Canary. From the communal showers of a hot yoga studio to seedy pubs on Vancouver’s East Side, from Catholic merchandise salesmen to hitchhiking teenage lesbians, the people and places of Nancy Jo Cullen’s debut are asphyxiating slowly on ordinary life. Things aren’t all darkness, however: in this joint-smoking urban underground, where families and relationships threaten to collapse almost daily, the stories of Canary also flash across the families, communities, friends and strangers, from whom unexpected kindness comes as a breath of fresh air. Trashy but poignant, comic and profound, Canary hangs luminous above the coal-heap of fiction debuts—and proves Nancy Jo Cullen a writer of astonishing depths.
About the Author*
Nancy Jo Cullen is the author of three collections of poetry. She has won the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Grant for Emerging Gay Writer and has been short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award, and the W.O. Mitchell Calgary Book Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing.
To find out where Cullen is reading next, click here.
*Also a contributor to Plenitude Magazine, Issue 1!
