I approach a new book by Yau as I do a new film by my favorite auteur director: I don’t watch the preview, I just crave more evidence of the artist’s mind at work.

Charting this particular topography of the down-and-out, Freure picks up the flip side of success and examines it through the specific locality of Montreal.

The arc of the book is one spent living in and thinking about mountains where the landscape is mapped in drawings, traced through walks, experienced through pain, defined in books, and remembered with past companions—human and animal.

Change is inevitable and Sengupta himself sets out as a wandering minstrel to bring out the inner psyche within the poetic canvas. His poems, vibrant with an insatiable zest for life, give readers a healing touch, silence plays the flute, and readers plunge into “solitary stillness” where poetry pervades.

There is no doubt that these poems are brutal—harsh in their insistence on wanting to document what happens on the other side of an abusive relationship. By channeling the voices of so many other “hysterical” poets, Skaja shows the resilience and power in confessing the past.

If the act of writing is one of discovery, then in a similar way, these poems act like a compass, tracking north, west, sometimes sideways, and even underwater.

In this beautiful poem, almost a personal creed, Lewis brings together science, nature, and our own consciousness. Who are we when “twenty questions” or a thousand bring no definitive answers?