PREFACE
Karen Mulhallen

ANNALS OF TRAVEL
Douglas Rodger - An Indolent Abroad in Viet Nam

ESSAY
David Mason - The Protocols of Used Bookstores

FICTION
David Burke - Union Station
Lauren Carter - Ghost Story
Ian Cockfield - Site Remediation
Joy Huebert and Mark Nixon - Storylines
Jenna Kalinsky - A Simple Astrology
Michael Mirolla - Mothers and Daughters
Susan Mockler - Fractured 
Leslie Palleson - The Lines
Ania Vesenny - Imagined Proximity to Death 

POETRY
Roxanna Bennett  - Navigating Our Worth 
Heather Craig - My Mother’s Cooking; Where The Hollow Lies 
Kirk Gonnsen - Lousy Love
Glenn Hayes - Lonely Hearts Club; Sunday Night with My New Family
Sean Howard - sun life (toronto catchers)
Michael Pacey - Lark 
Daniel Scott Tysdal - “The Big List”

PORTFOLIOS
Patrick DeCoste – Brave New Worlds
Allan Harding MacKay – The Nocturnal Series

2010 COLLINS PRIZE AWARD WINNERS
Leslie Vryenhoek - Letitia's Cold Footsteps 
Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst - Eating Quince with Musicians 
Myna Wallin - Death, Wildlife and Taxes 

Back of the Book
Contributing Editor’s Column - Alberto Manguel
Contributors’ Notes
Co-Editor’s Diary - Rebecca Payne
Production Editor’s Diary - James Hatch
News and Notes
Advertisements

Some nights, we chase sleep across
the half empty bed. Moth eaten nights,
dawn a distant country. So a woman will hold loss
to her breasts, tenderly, and turn her face from light.

Other nights, anchored to the earth
by someone else’s body, sleep like a mother
comforts. We have navigated our worth
by the map of skin worn by another.

Mornings, the commuter crush,
smeared faces, bleary eyes. Newspaper,
coffee, last cigarette before work’s bleak rush
diminishes us from vigour to vapour.

Hours flicker dark and light across the planet’s face,

the moon that’s married to the world, wed by gravity’s grace.

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

Saturday

Back in Buenos Aires. The sensation of coming into a realm of ghosts never disappears when I’m here; it becomes expected. I think I know what I will feel, what I will see. I had not gone back there more than half-a-dozen times since I left the city in the late sixties; only in the last decade I returned regularly, to see my mother, who has since died.

To wander through a city I once knew so well, now changed, of course, and see it mapped out in memories, anniversaries, above all in absences, more solid by far than the new stone and glass, has an oppressive, nightmarish quality from which I can’t escape. Many of my friends are gone (tortured, killed, exiled, “disappeared”), many of the writers I knew in my adolescence are dead, many of the buildings have been torn down. In classic literature, travels to the Underworld are always a singular experience, never to be repeated. Maybe that is why, when I return to Buenos Aires now, I have the feeling of a single extended visit interrupted by periods above ground, at home in France, in the real world. One of my friends calls this “the complex of Persephone.”

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

I knew a girl once who led me on a wild goose chase through Manhattan. She was fucked up, not her fault; her mother wore gold shoes. We worked together at an industrial design firm in Buffalo near the Canadian border. I was just an assistant and didn’t want to get involved. I filed, made their calls, did the three-ways from Tokyo or Nice or wherever the execs, the clients, were making deals. I did fine, I did my job. She was the one who seemed to like me, needed a friend, whatever. She’d get her hair and nails done at the nicest salon in town, like three hundred dollars for everything, and they made her look matronly; it wasn’t my responsibility to tell her, but her nails were always at different lengths like ballerina-pink carousel horses: long-short-long-short. I sort of thought the fancy nail people would at least make them uniform. I guess they figured “free to be you and me.” It’s her money.