Roberts’s readings are both original and politically engaged. She deftly combats charges that Rohinton Mistry’s refusal to represent his “host” country in spite of the accolades it’s bestowed upon him—to “pay up”— makes him a bad guest. Drawing parallels between Mistry’s representations of political disenfranchisement in India and his public excoriation of cuts to social-welfare programs under Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution,” Roberts makes the case for the political efficacy of a cosmopolitan citizenship that stands in two places at once.

Digressions like Roberts’ discussion of the idiosyncrasies of Canadian film distribution in her chapter on Carol Shields are less carefully considered. And provocative as the book is in tracing the delicate steps of writers such as Michael Ondaatje, granted honorary citizenship for works that needle the nation now hailing him as its own, its shifts from literary analysis to reception history can be jarring. Still, this is an important study—a smart look at border-crossing books about border crossing that is attentive, as Roberts says about Yann Martel, to the “radically simultaneous” potential of Canadian identities.

However, Niedzviecki’s short-paced narration too often meanders back into the exhausted clichés of the last decade: “Peter usually stopped at Starbucks for a coffee and a muffin. In class they had talked about the corporation as a tool of patriarchal cyborg capitalism.” In “Special Topic: Terrorism,” he repeatedly draws attention to the fact that in the abundance-of-information age, everyone’s a kind of hypocrite, but the message is ultimately lost in the insufferable exchanges of characters who can’t seem to think for themselves.

From God’s unappreciated assistant in “Doing God’s Work” to the repressed mortgage broker from “Real Estate,” Niedzviecki’s characters are weighed down by deferred redemption. God’s assistant plans and prepares his revenge, the broker calls a mysterious man about a mysterious girl, but the ends of both stories are withheld, almost as if with a shrug. Still, Niedzviecki’s wit, at the peak of its subtlety, has echoes of early Bret Easton Ellis: “Next year [Peter] would graduate. He’d never had a girlfriend. He was thinking vaguely about a career in law enforcement.”

The first section in Sam Cheuk’s Love Figures, “Punctum,” is the strongest. Punctum is a term Roland Barthes developed in Camera Lucida for a photographic detail that produces a personal emotional response, even a sort of pain, that connects the viewer to the subject: it’s his counterpoint to “studium,” a photograph’s cultural, political, social context. The focus of this section is in the wounding, the way parents hurt children when they are young, and how those children redirect that hurt back on them as they grow older. It mercilessly explores the way people hurt themselves with memories, cutting themselves until the blades are dull and smooth as pearls. “Punctum” discusses deaths, small and large, sudden drops from great heights or slow wastings in hospitals.

But like anyone uncertain and in love, Love Figures apologizes for itself too much. The titular section, “Love Figures,” begins with an explanation of the trouble with love poems—they open the writer up to the pitiless gaze of the panopticon, in hope that the object of one’s affections is among the observers—and then writes them anyway. I can’t help but read them all through that lens of critique, with an eyebrow raised to all the tenderness. Love here is stilted and apologetic. Throughout the book, it is the anger that hits home more than love.

Drawing from her own experiences working in an office, Rosenblum creates characters who, despite their canned lunches and obligatory office parties, are anything but dull. Anyone who has ever worked inside the partial walls of a cubicle, ignoring the constant hum of a computer, while counting the minutes until lunch, will easily relate.

There is Clint, a contract employee, slurring his words as the result of an infected wisdom tooth he can’t afford to have pulled. There’s Andrea, the new hire, who is “straight out of school” and “as jittery as a jailbreak.” And among the most memorable are Mark and Sanjeet, the company’s CEO and COO, who are likely to blame for the company’s demise.

Rosenblum has crafted a reputation as a Canadian writer to watch for, especially after her 2008 collection of short stories, Once, earned her the Metcalf-Rooke Award. The Big Dream only accelerates this expectation. Each short story is rich with memorable dialogue, capturing the empty banter, complaints, and flirtations that often fill the halls of an office. Rosenblum’s natural dialogue and descriptive prose result in a collection that successfully depicts the complex balancing act between home and work that so often define the lives of office workers who struggle to stay afloat inside and outside of their cubicles.

Notions of identity in an age of globalization are visited throughout: “tell us who / we become in the bubble / wrap of our beholders,” Miki writes. The homogenizing force of globalization is not without resistance, however: a Tokyo food vendor’s specialty is served “only here.” In the same long poem, “Viral Travels in Tokyo,” Miki prescribes a kind of individualist retreat as vaccine against the viral spread of uniformity and commodity culture: “we need to place / our mind inside / our mind so that / the rhythm takes / our voice.” Miki’s speaker is both 21st-century tourist, “an unreliable / witness to fashion,” and a prophet in the marketplace, decrying current societal obsessions.

His language—elliptical, paratactic—is critical theory with line breaks. It often deflects comprehension, permitting only fragmentary understanding painstakingly teased out. Its relationship to its own methods is ambiguous. One can’t help but read the “docile insights / of the forlorn cultural critic eating / concepts on the planked boardwalk” as reflexive commentary.

Then Ismail joins a writing class at the University of Toronto where he meets Fatima, a girl the age his daughter would have been, who also belongs to his Indian Muslim community. When Fatima’s parents kick her out because they learn she’s queer, Ismail’s near-empty house presents a convenient (if not entirely comfortable) solution. Meanwhile, Celia, a recent widow, moves into the house across the street. Celia, battling her grief and her Portuguese community’s strict rituals of widowhood, finds herself drawn to Ismail. Ismail, who mostly shuns (and is shunned by) his neighbours in Little Portugal, finds he’s less fractured in Celia’s company. As Ismail’s relationship with the two women deepens, his demiexistence gradually fills with ripe, rewarding chaos.

With a quiet, inward-looking analysis of Ismail’s life, Farzana Doctor‘s Six Metres of Pavement asks how mourning can make way for grief when it’s cemented in by guilt, and if memories can be defanged. Simmering in the background is a remarkable portrait of immigrant Toronto. As an Indian in a Portuguese neighbourhood, Ismail is a double immigrant, and the narrative marks the myriad ways Ismail experiences the city as insider-yet-chronic outsider. With this second novel, Doctor confirms her adeptness at burrowing deep beneath the surface of things—and her gift for relating her findings with humour and grace.

The Dirt Chronicles is a delicate alloy of Burroughs and Gallant, walking an uncompromising line where the homeless, the junkies, the punks, and the dispossessed are one and all pushing against a threat sometimes left to vague societal pressures but otherwise embodied in the interweaving stories’ antagonist. The King, a sadist vice cop with a thing for rockabilly bent on breaking the dignities and backs of our heroes, is the Toronto underworld’s answer to Dr. Satan.

Her characters carry chips on their shoulders and monkeys on their backs, from the whipped and broken crackhead Darcy to the fragile, indomitable Ferret to the tragically incarcerated Eddie.

When they’re bent or broken, Dunnion narrates enough pain to pass sympathetic jolts to her reader. A visceral and violent book that could have set out to shock is instead touching. The dance between her characters’ strengths and weaknesses is compelling, readable, and tempers the handful of potshots she takes at the world of the well-fed and gainfully employed.

Booker’s inaugural short-story collection comes highly anticipated after her 2009 Writers’ Union of Canada award for short prose. Up Up Up pokes into the lives of ordinary people who could be sitting next to you on the subway, perusing their memories and picking out the quirkiest parts. A clown comes out of retirement to teach a course as she goes through a painful divorce, only to find she hasn’t lost her madcap mojo after all. A woman fresh from a breakup judges speed-dating partners on what kind of coat hangers they buy.

Booker cites Lisa Moore and Miranda July as influences, and both are present here in her sparse, exacting prose, staccato sentences, and whimsical plot lines. She chooses to spin apt metaphors instead of dousing her characters in emotion. Her characters are reflective, refreshingly free of self-indulgence or self-pity.

Her light tone doesn’t always sit well. One can’t help thinking: shouldn’t a 14-year-old have a less placid, more erratic reaction to an abusive boyfriend? The book’s not all sweetness and light, but amid the struggles these characters face—rape, divorce, obesity—after reading Booker’s stories, there’s a sense you’ve just discussed something important, and it’s okay to leave with a smile on your face.

After Patrick Furey, a heartbroken and bullied gay student, hangs himself in his bedroom, there is no minute of silence, no special assembly. Instead, his school’s closeted principal forbids staff to share any information, fearing a teen suicide would damage the school’s reputation and possibly spawn copycats. Furey’s death may happen in the first few pages of Suzette Mayr’s fourth novel, Monoceros, but it echoes from cover to cover. His empty desk forces students and staff to contemplate the finality of his death, and the fact that they hardly knew the troubled student at all.

Suzette Mayr skilfully crafts each chapter from the perspective of one member of her colourful, but flawed, cast of characters. Furey’s secret boyfriend, Ginger, suppresses his grief to keep their relationship hidden, especially from his jealous girlfriend, Petra, who had scrawled “u r a fag” on Furey’s locker before he died. There is also Faraday, Furey’s unicorn-obsessed classmate, who wishes she had done something nice for Furey before he died, like written him a note saying “Hi” or donated her virginity to him.

In a tragedy laced with humour, Mayr engages readers with her meticulous attention to detail, providing vivid descriptions of not only her characters, but also the heavy emotions—grief, confusion, aching—churning inside them. Monoceros may spark a visceral reaction in some readers, especially as the unnerving words “faggot” and “homo” roll off characters’ tongues with teenage ease. But mostly, it is a thought-provoking tale of a boy who chooses to take “charge of his own ending” and the interconnected web of lost souls he leaves behind.

The contributors’ list features Canadian and American voices such as Vancouver filmmaker-author Amber Dawn, feministing.com’s Miriam Zoila Pérez, and Toronto literary darling Zoe Whittall.

The bright spots are many, but the most affecting essays are the ones that veer into the personal: a sexworker femme’s memories of her butch lover; gay club culture in the post-Stonewall riots era; attending a relative’s stag rather than the doe; wondering if breast reductions or testosterone injections make you less butch than trans and butches with babies.

Other entries are little more than Livejournalling, diary declarations about the Self, or laced with academic speak. Swinging from one end of the narrative spectrum to the other can feel confusing, but the message as a whole is that butch and femme are not two identities, but the work of many individuals who have created themselves in their own images.

Persistence isn’t just about gender performance. It weaves thoughtful threads about class, race, disability, pop culture, and media into an oft-parodied and stereotyped modern queer culture. It’s a worthy collection that brings nuance back to notions of dykes, femmes, butches, and lesbians all.