Sharon McCartney writes about relationships, almost always in terms of loss, and her first book’s epigraph from Frost (“Here are your waters and your watering place/ Drink and be whole again beyond confusion”) is an articulation of her method. The book begins by tracing a genealogy of knowing, with the poet describing herself as a fetus, a something that is “nothing yet.”

The following quotation is taken from the book’s climactic scene. Blomkvist, the hero, has been captured by the Villain, Martin Vanger, serial killer. Blomkvist is manacled in the theatre of operations in the basement and is about to be buggered before the slicing and dicing proper begin. The Heroine, Salander, has climbed into the house and on her way down to the basement has armed herself with a golf club. She swings and breaks the Villain’s collarbone.

Gwendolyn MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941 to a mother who spent much of her life in and out of mental health institutions and a father who died young from alcoholism. She dropped out of high school – to study on her own terms – and eventually taught herself Arabic, Hebrew and Greek. (It’s worth noting, if only to appreciate the symmetry, that she later wound up with corresponding lovers for each language.) As a young woman in the early sixties, she earned a reputation as a precocious regular at Toronto’s legendary Bohemian Café, where she wowed Margaret Atwood and other early CanLit luminaries with her powerful readings – and where she also met Milton Acorn.

The Mountain Clinic is tagged as a novel, though both at first glance and after close reading Harold Hoefle’s book reads more like a wanting collection of linked stories. Going Dutch is usually an amicable decision, but inevitably there will arise some disagreement over who foots how much of the bill. When a book is assured and self-contained such an argument becomes flimsy. As Mary Swan put it to me, sheepishly and exhaustedly, when I pressed her if The Boys in the Trees was either a novel or a book of short stories (a question I suspect she was forced to field often during all that Giller fuss): “Can’t it just be a book?”

The relationship between the Journey Prize Anthology and its parade of nominees is devoutly mutualist; the anthology offers young writers a safe and tasteful home and the writers, in turn, provide an exceptionally bright and cheerful welcome mat to lure the passing reader. And who wouldn’t love the invitation to the boisterous little party going on inside, audible for miles around? Two of the three jurors for the 2008 Journey Prize had stories featured in past editions, and this volume’s first ten pages, as well as its jacket, collect enthusiastic statements exclusively from past nominees. Elyse Friedman, quoted on the book’s back cover, calls the anthology that featured her in 2003 “one of the best showcases for short fiction in Canada.” Alissa York, who won the $10,000 prize in 1999, describes the Journey Prize Anthology as “a national tradition of literary discovery.” And Yann Martel, in the feistiest and most provocative statement of them all, declares that “for young writers, it’s the Journey Prize or nothing.”