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Alison Pick. Question & Answer. [poetry],
Canada: Polestar/Raincoast, $12.95, Pages 112, ISBN 1-55192-623-7.

Alison Pick. The Sweet Edge. [fiction].
Canada: Raincoast, $15.95, Pages 290, ISBN 1-55192-783-7.

   Both Alison Pick’s poetry and fiction are exquisitely crafted and has a haunting quality to it. Even the most normal everyday object is lifted and given a brush of soft-edged feel. All this she does neatly and simply by employing the essential lucidity and sparseness of language itself.

   Take, for example, a section from the beginning of her novel The Sweet Edge: “It’s thirty-five degrees outside, the first day of July, but inside the gallery it’s cool. The air conditioner makes a sound like cream being whipped. There is a sleek black sofa and low coffee table ...”. This novel is about two people — Ellen and Adam — “struggling to determine the future of their own relationship”. Adam, an outdoors person, is on a solo canoe trip to the Arctic over one summer while Ellen works at an urban art gallery. Each through their own private ways make sense of their relationship and its ultimate denouement. Her writing in this book is crisp and poetic.

   Question & Answer, her debut volume of poetry, employs a very interesting strategy. She picks lines that form the basis for her “questions” from poems by writers she admires — Erin Moure, Louise Gluck, Mary Oliver and others — and then goes about delineating the process of finding their “answers” and their implications. She employs a range of forms — free verse, couplets, prose poetry, sequence form and others, eventually letting the “road carry us home.”

   Alison Pick is a remarkable young writer to emerge from Canada — her work is intelligent, energetic, poised and sexy.