CALL OF THE WILD:
Moose & Pussy: Dirty, gritty, literary

The definition of “erotica” has been recycled more times than a cum rag. It’s been cleaned up and academicized to appease prudes, romanticized to placate suburbanites and disguised to mean anything that’s not porn. That’s why you’ll love Ottawa’s newest erotica magazine, Moose & Pussy – straight-up dirty writing, and editor Jeff Blackman doesn’t care what genre you call it.

“Some say erotica means softcore and porn means hardcore,” Blackman tells XPress. “It’s labels for the same thing, and I don’t think too much about it.” Read more…

Matthew Firth’s Suburban Pornography (Anvil Press, 207 pp.)

Matthew Firth’s tales of degenerate one-night stands

“Relax, girl. It’s just like taking a big shit. Only in reverse.” These are the lines I recite readily and adoringly when I’m asked about the best in contemporary Canadian pornographic writing. It’s from Mingus Tourette’s 2004 book Nunt, which features on the front cover a nun in a gas mask with legs spread and wearing stilettos. The collection of prose-poetry is held up to Rimbaud and Bukowski for its rawness. But now, with the release of his new collection of short stories titled Suburban Pornography, Ottawa’s own Matthew Firth is being hailed as “Canada’s Bukowski.” But does Firth deserve the title?

Compared to Nunt, the front cover of Suburban Pornography sucks. It features a white-picket fence around a suburban house, and in the bedroom window over yonder is a silhouette of a naked lady. But there’s nothing cliché about the front-cover literary endorsement by author Dan Fante, who says of Firth’s talents: “He can write like a sonofabitch.” That’s serious praise coming from the son of writer John Fante, famed Los Angeles novelist and screenwriter, who Charles Bukowski praised and then reintroduced to the world in 1980.

What makes Suburban Pornography so memorable is the brutally honest snapshots of the inner-city ill-privileged and sad-sack suburbanites who fuck, suck, bleed, bruise, cruise and search for love among the loveless. Firth writes about garbage men, bus drivers, soup kitchen clients, neighbourhood perverts, waitresses and prostitutes who work in gritty Ontario towns, and are poisoned by lousy jobs and damaged relationships that keep them too tired, or busy, to contemplate their social conditions.

Sex comes cheap in Firth’s stories. Sheila Crawford sucks cock in the alley. Eddie blows ex-cop Craig in the shed. Steven fucks with mental-case Kathy. For example, in “The Summer of No Love,” Firth captures insolence in language stripped of ornament that bites bitterly:

“I lifted her skirt. I licked two fingers and then stuck them in. I jammed them in as far as they would go, then rotated them round and round to loosen her up, to make room. I pushed her legs further apart. I grabbed her ass. I slapped it. Slapped it hard. I pushed her feet apart. I stood behind her and pressed my cock up and down her ass cheek. She tensed. Then I pushed my cock lower and stuffed it in. She splashed in the dishwater as she braced herself. I fucked her like that…I pushed her head forward. I fucked her this way, then came and stepped away…I watched my semen run down her leg. I grabbed a tea towel and threw it at her. Then I turned and left.”

Folks yearn for redemption, glory and revenge just beyond their grasp, which might shake them out of their malaise. Like classic Bukowski, it never comes. If the reader wants resolution, too fucking bad. “Resolution is an artificially imposed device, like mouthwash,” Firth tells XPress about its sanitizing consequences. Things are never so clean in this caustic Firthy world. (It’s fitting that he names his chapbook publishing company Black Bile Press.)

Firth wrote two previous short-story collections and co-edited the short-fiction anthology Grunt and Groan: The New Fiction Anthology of Work and Sex. He insists he’s not a writer of porn or erotica. “I write realism,” he says, “which includes a lot of sex.”

Nonetheless, Firth is a proficient pornographer who wraps powerful language around provocative scenes as snugly as a condom on a very hard cock. Sure, it’s way safer sex than in Nunt, but I’d rather take two Canadian Bukowskis to bed than just one.

Book launch November 18, the Manx Pub, 370 Elgin Street, 5 p.m., free.

– Sylvie Hill

Jennifer Whiteford’s Grrrl (Gorsky Press, 252 pp.)

Whiteford’s channels her own rock star dreams through the novel’s riot grrrl

Play. Stop. Rewind. Jennifer Whiteford’s distinctive debut novel, Grrrl, is like a killer mixtape from the early 1990s that you want to play over and over again.

Grrrl chronicles teenaged Marlie’s rock star dreams and curious crushes that lead her into an underground world of punk rock, riot grrrls, and a dangerous relationship with an older indie rocker. It’s all channelled into Marlie’s ever-present diary entries that are put together seamlessly to create a jolting coming-of-age tale that is positively addictive. After you race through the 252 pages and swoon from the book’s closing lines, you’ll crave more Grrrl, it’s that grrreat.

The novel grew out of Whiteford’s own high school journal and was based on characters she’s fictionalized from the years spent writing to musicians. “When I got really obsessed with an album, I’d write them [the band] a letter,” Whiteford tells XPress. “What I really wanted was someone to pay attention to me as a teenager and respond.”

Whiteford’s rock star mentorship program worked wonderfully: It plugged her into the Toronto downtown music scene, whereas teenage life in the suburbs made her feel disconnected.

Many passages, including the book’s opening lines – “My stereo ate my favourite Pretenders tape today” – come from the formulaic teenager world of young adult fiction with its self-absorbed and inconsequential observations. But soon it becomes evident that we’ve landed in a literary universe far more sophisticated than a pissed-off teenager pining for Chrissie Hynde.

Marlie’s complaint conceals the universal dissatisfaction with life at the end of summer before starting grade 10: “I can’t think of anything else I want to listen to,” Marlie writes. “I’m feeling really indecisive lately about everything, not just music. I don’t know how I want to dress, how to cut my hair, which music to listen to and who to hang out with.” Whiteford frames the problem and develops the resolution cleverly through superb character development and nail-biting episodes.

Marlie’s Uncle Ben, who works at the downtown Sam the Record Man and his girl-band role model girlfriend Sheena, help Marlie on her journey of self-discovery by taking her to Seattle. There, she discovers the riot grrrl movement that ignites her transformation.

Wikipedia defines “riot grrrl” as “a movement encompassing zines, festivals and hardcore punk rock music groups, known for its feminist stance.” The genre first appeared in the early 1990s as a response to punk machismo.

While at a riot grrrl event, Marlie thinks maybe she’s a lesbian, but also learns how to make maxi-pads at a MoonGrrrls workshop. She freaks out: “I’m totally connected to the moon! Everyone is!” This infectious glee at newfound knowledge endears us to the Marlie character in precious interior moments.

When Marlie returns home, she’s frustrated: “I want to be living in THE CITY not the suburbs!” she sneers. “I want to dye my hair crazy colours and play in a band and go to concerts and have other girls around me who want to do the same things!” So she starts an all-girl band with her friends.

Part of Whiteford’s own point here is that finding yourself “comes from finding your place in a scene, this idea that you’re becoming an expert in something.

“Marlie’s not listening to the Sex Pistols or The Clash,” Whiteford adds. “The thing that really takes her in is the band that she’s a part of. She doesn’t worry about punk cred. Marlie is driven by her riot grrrl politics.”

This speaks to Whiteford’s experience as a female writer living in Ottawa. “I know about riot grrrl. I know about this scene,” she says authoritatively. “I’m going to be unapologetic.” Fierce but fair words for a city where the music scene, often dubbed a boys’ club, would crumble just because of a loud-mouthed girl.

Moving to Ottawa six years ago got her interested in Ladyfest, and in 2000, Whiteford travelled to Olympia for the first Ladyfest. “I saw all the bands I ever wanted to see,” she says, “learned to skateboard and did lots of cool stuff and came back and said, ‘I’m going to write a book now.’”

Grrrl is a valuable contribution to Canadian literature because it tenderly expresses the struggle of girls who adore music and are desperately seeking a way in.

For guys who love books about music, there’s Nick Hornby. For the girls, it’s Jennifer Whiteford.

Jennifer Whiteford launched Grrrl on Saturday, June 3, at the Manx Pub (370 Elgin St.). Visit www.matildazine.org for Whiteford’s online zine.

Grrrl is published by Los Angeles, California’s Gorsky Press, the drivers behind the Perpetual Motion Roadshow and the on-line independent music magazine, Razorcake.

– Sylvie Hill

Festival fluke puts femmes first this spring

Every event tends to have its show-stealers, and the all-women Writing Life series at this year’s Ottawa International Writers Festival is looking like a serious contender. The series consists of three interactive evenings with authors in conversation about their craft and their books.

“It was not a conscious curatorial decision,” says Sean Wilson, organizer of the Writers Fest, about the all-female lineup. “There was great stuff by men, but what really grabbed our interest and imagination was many of the books by women. It was a pleasant surprise.”

Also interesting is that seven of the nine women in the series are first-time novelists. “They all emerged at the top of their game,” says Wilson. “These are highly accomplished and readable books.”

The Writing Life series kicks off with Madeleine Thien, Anar Ali and Ami McKay on Wednesday at 8:30 p.m.

“We come alive when we share our opinions,” says Thien, author of the short story collection Simple Recipes, which throws the reader into the wild winds of changing relationships and gut-wrenching, love-drenched worlds. “It’s exhilarating to meet people who have read the book. Sharing mental landscape is magical.”

In her new novel, Certainty (launching April 22 during the festival), Thien uses history to tell of two memorable love stories. “I approached writing short stories by centring around dramatic moments that were charged and intense,” she says from her home in Quebec City. The difference with the new format is “there’s now greater room for nuance and to develop characters.”

On the all-woman Writing Life series, Thien suggests that shoptalk can be universal in its appeal. “This is because the process of shaping a story asks the writer to go beyond gender and step across boundaries for characters.” What you have then are “blurred lines, so it’s not clear where gender fits into that.”

Writing Life continues on Thursday April 20 with Linda Holeman, Susan Glickman and Martha Baillie, then Alayna Munce, Alison Pick and Leah McLaren take over Sunday April 23.

If anything, the spring edition is proof we’re seeing a whole new generation of women writers on the Canadian scene. “It points to the fact that perhaps women are able to recognize fiction as necessary where men tend to pick up more non-fiction,” Wilson says.

Author Tim Ward, who on April 18 asks “Is God a man?” during the first Big Idea event with Anne Hines and The Pagan Christ author Tom Harpur, will pick up the woman theme Wednesday evening when he reads from his non-fiction novel Savage Breast.

Ward writes a daring and frank interpretation of the goddess movement and offers a thoughtful and personal account of one man’s guess as to why some men are afraid of the feminine divine. Ward describes the new book as a “real-life Da Vinci Code type quest,” claiming it’s the first exploration of the feminine face of God from an explicitly male point of view, and of how goddess archetypes affect men’s relationships with women.

In addition to all the first fictions, many of the authors will be featuring releases so new the ink will hardly have had time to dry. “The dual festival format (in spring and fall) is really paying off,” Wilson says, because it responds to a trend in the publishing industry where the book world is launching books year-round instead of waiting until the fall. “We’re getting authors whose books are a bit older, but also the ones that are hot off the press.”

All readings at the Library and Archives of Canada, 395 Wellington Street, $15, $12 student or senior, $8 festival member or $60/$40 for passes, www.writersfest.com.

– Sylvie Hill

Dan Savage’s Commitment (Dutton/Penguin, 304 pp., $35.00) vs Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia (North Atlantic/Frog Ltd., 296 pp., U.S. $25.50).

Savage – ON COMMITMENT AND THE ULTIMATE BENEVOLENCE OF THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE

In his new book, The Commitment, scandalous and sensible syndicated Savage Love columnist Dan Savage thinks about tying the knot with his lover, Terry Miller. But there are a few battles to fight first.

“We’d just gotten D.J. off to bed, and Terry and I were sitting on the sofa, having a beer, and watching South Park – the usual gay lifestyle stuff. We would have gotten around to sodomy too, if I hadn’t brought up the budget.”

Finances, wedding cakes and invitations – the usual wedding concerns. Add to that Dan’s fear of jinxing a good thing.

The fact that their anniversary party/wedding reception planner, Caroline, married her husband in the same banquet room then later divorced him when she discovered he was a coke addict is just one jinx too many for Dan.

But “nothing can fuck you guys up but you guys,” she says.

She’s not the only one who sees it that way. Dan’s loveable mom, family, friends, and Dan and Terry’s six-year-old son are all for the couple celebrating their big gay love, but Dan wonders, Why get married in the first place?

So he reflects on the dangerous state of modern love by comparing it to his grandparents’ day.

Big differences, all except for one – the United States of America still aren’t bending on same-sex unions. Incompatible couples, wife beaters and cheaters can get married though, as long as there’s a man and a woman.

In Commitment, Dan Savage exposes this ridiculous side to legal marriage with intellectual rigour. And his compelling and clever arguments that show up the inconsistency and ludicrous irrationality parading as reason and law in the American system will leave you aghast with disbelief at the behaviours and sad state of our anti-gay-marriage neighbours to the south.

When Savage quotes Prime Minister Paul Martin, you’ll be very proud to be Canadian.

Even more educational is what homosexuals in a positive, healthy, committed relationship reveal to us heterosexuals about the myth of completion, monogamy and other delusions.

“Without the option of making a spectacle out of our commitments… we were forced to simply live our commitments,” writes Savage.

“Our relationships were taken seriously… by virtue of their duration… not by virtue of promises we made before the Solid Gold dancers jumped out of the wedding cake at the reception.”

Brezsny – PICKIN’ UP GOOD VIBRATIONS

When times are tough, and we’re down on our luck, many of us turn to Mom.

She’ll say things like, “As long as you’ve got eyes to see the blue sky, ears to hear the birds sing and legs to walk, life ain’t ever that bad.”

But when you’ve cried eyeballs out of their sockets, your ears are bleeding from your own shrieks, and you fantasize about getting into an accident just to see how many send flowers, you need a stronger dose of mantras.

Enter Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings. He’ll convince you that the universe is inherently friendly and out to help, not haunt you.

Next to Savage Love, Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology is one of the most widely syndicated columns in North American alternative newsweeklies. And with his new book he offers up a 296-page smorgasbord (i.e., personal thoughts, poems, mottos, news briefs, prayers, oracles, homeopathic medicine spells) designed to make you rejig your outlook on life.

He reminds you that Picasso popped out of the womb blue and was left to die until an uncle puffed cigar smoke up his nose, which revived him.

He’ll order you gently to stop taking things for granted: “In your kitchen, appetizing food in secure packaging is waiting for you. Many people you’ve never met worked hard to grow it, process it, and get it to the store where you bought it,” he writes. “The bounty of tasty nourishment you get to choose from is unprecedented in the history of the world.”

Always lyrical, the stream-of-consciousness and artsy passages flow without ever trivializing deep meanings. Other times, the impeccable and straight-up discussions tackling capitalism and cautioning against selfishness are the welcomed wisdom of a nurturing friend, which is what many consider Brezsny.

But he warns that being positive is a hard job. “If you cultivate an affinity for pronoia,” he writes, “people you respect may wonder if you have lost your way. You may appear to them as naive, eccentric, unrealistic, misguided, or even stupid.”

Time to replace hotel Bibles, and maybe Mom, with a copy of this sucker.

– Sylvie Hill

Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Married Call Girl (Three Rivers Press, 318 pages, $17.95)

Love, lust and funds found south of 79th and 2nd

“How much can – or should – one person get away with?”
~Nancy Chan, Call Girl

When it comes to sex, you get what you pay for. But Ottawa-born New York writer and former call girl Tracy Quan always gives that little something extra.

Her latest novel, Diary of a Married Call Girl, is the follow-up to her runaway hit, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, which has been optioned for a movie to be produced by Darren Star, creator of HBO’s Sex and the City. It tells the story of infidelity and topflight hooking that Quan’s fictional alter-ego, Nancy Chan, escapes to during the day.

One hook: Nancy’s got two lives – the first is as respectable wife who runs her husband’s shirts to the dry cleaners and cooks him fancy meals. But outside of cooking in the kitchen, Nancy stirs up something a lot spicier with kinky old men south of Seventy-ninth and Second. And husband, Matt, doesn’t have a clue.

“The journey from hooker to wife doesn’t require a passport or a visa – not if you stay in Manhattan,” says Nancy, boldly. “There are no checkpoints or embassies. It’s supposed to be like moving from Ontario to Quebec. Or California to New York.”

“Supposed to be,” but when Matt wants to have a baby, like a border patrol it threatens Nancy’s freedom to cross boundaries easily.

Crossing over to prostitution is classic Quan. She’s very comfortable with sex work and she credits Ottawa, which is mentioned in the book, for her positive view of the career. She told XPress in a recent interview

that she grew up in the Glebe but she would see prostitutes downtown: “Knowing prostitution existed in the city in places that were appropriate was healthy and it was good for me, and I didn’t internalize hang ups about prostitution the way some people in the suburbs do.”

Quan first introduced Nancy Chan’s hooking through weekly installments on Salon.com. She kept it a secret from her own partner because, she said, “I didn’t want the energy from our relationship to interfere with my creativity.

“A lot of people would say there is a big difference between writing and prostitution. But I don’t know that there really is,” Quan said. “It’s about work and self-expression and whether this is more important to you than catering to a certain image that you have in a relationship.”

Extra-marital sex helps contain Nancy, who fears she is losing her “self” by being married to Matt: “Could I have become, in less than a year of marriage, the total embodiment of everything that causes a man to see hookers in the first place?” she worries. The deep notion of the “true self” is also explored through Nancy’s exchanges with the other hookers in the novel, characters who Quan said represent different parts of her.

Having a secret life may be reprehensible to some, but by sexualizing the theme of independence Quan seduces the most principled reader into understanding how the search to – using Quan’s words – retain your independence and focus on your work, and be a shrewd survivor, is often at odds with love.

Here, Quan delivers fluid, easy-to-read airport novel prose; suspense and Prada-big city backdrops typical of a popular television series; and hot sex scenes of quality porn. Like any successful writer, or hooker, Quan has staying power and her book deserves a place in everyone’s bedroom-and bookshelf.

For a good time, read Tracy Quan.

– Sylvie Hill

Aviva Cohen’s Sex and Sublimation (Tritonia Press, 213 pages, $19.99)

Aviva Cohen’s debut novel gives art and authenticity a highly sexualized once-over

Sex and Sublimation is a literary gem that shines light on the role and responsibility of the feeling person in contemporary society. A text both stylistic in its postmodern delivery yet endearing for its simplicity (you can read it in a night), it will satisfy your craving for that long-awaited conversation about art and artists.

Indeed, Cohen’s debut novel is a superior contemporary Canadian contribution to the discussion of creative urge and personality development – a topic that gained popularity in the 1930s through psychologist and writer Otto Rank’s seminal text, Art and the Artist.

Sex and Sublimation is a gripping account of a cynical 23-year-old urban female looking to secure physical and spiritual survival in Brixton, U.K. The story follows Ria in her tight leather jacket as she explores the meaning of love, life and art through conversations in coffee shops, bedrooms, art galleries and in the council estate flat she shares with marginal folks.

Throughout her journey, she experiences a lot of anxiety, arguably because, by Rankian standards, she is the neurotic-artist type who suffers a burning inside: “It is that we have the gift of feeling deeply. Of sensing acutely. A curse when confused. A curse when unable to distinguish.”

Her sore stomachs and migraines are testament to her fight to create a meaningful existence in a power- and money-driven jungle. Her recourse and resulting depression, “punishment for thinking outside of the many labelled boxes.”

The book focuses on the need to sublimate these vibes into something productive or at least socially or culturally acceptable. But only at the end when Ria picks up a paintbrush does she begin to accomplish that.

Until then she has sex with strangers, which brings her little pleasure: “‘Just relax,’ Sandy’s finger on my clitoris. Pushing hard. Moving jagged…” She can’t come. “Then he plunges his body on mine. Inserts his scoop like a shovel in the grotto, scraping.” She’s left feeling used, but considers sex a place where “at least here I find something alive…”

And yet, at the expense of feeling “something alive,” comes disillusionment: “Don’t be naïve girl. Not even here is there anything that isn’t automatic.” Ria confesses, “I don’t want to become hard, closed down,” and hungers for connection. But she later undercuts vulnerability with a quirky, “When in doubt: screw! Like so many before.”

Unusual in the exploration of women and casual sex is Cohen’s substitution of moral judgment upon female promiscuity with a subtext of neurosis, practical discourse on the toxicity of apathy, and Ria’s “desire to see patterns that we are all trapped by.”

These are big topics, but Sex and Sublimation is punctuated by singular humour, that any threat of lofty pretension is blown apart by our protagonist’s candid, and endearing observations-like how she thinks “shitting” is the “last truly creative, independent, act” in a world of pretentious vernissages.

It all boils down to the courage to recreate a happy life. Ria issues a challenge: “Is it so terrifying to look totally afresh at the possibilities of who we are and what we are capable of?” Cohen’s nailed it. Time for you to answer the question.

– Sylvie Hill

Emily Pohl-Weary’s A Girl Like Sugar (McGilligan Books, 232 pages, $22.95)

Empathizing with the Apathetic

- “You’re one weird dude, Sugar.”
- “Weird is way better than cute or sweet.”

Young People’s Press touts Toronto’s Emily Pohl-Weary as “an unconventional and modern-day hero to many young female writers.” She is the editor of the anthology, Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, and co-founder and editor of the art and lit magazine, Kiss Machine: A Conga Line of Culture. You may also recognize her name from Broken Pencil magazine, where she was a former editor.

She’s been on tour this month promoting her first published novel, A Girl Like Sugar. Its sleeve describes the novel as a sexy and spirited coming-of-age tale of a girl named Sugar who struggles for the lead role in her own life after the drug overdose of her rock star boyfriend. Problem is, the age in “coming-of-age” never comes.

The shoe-gazing indie chick, Sugar, tries to get on with life by working retail at Record Teen. She befriends a scenester Korean skater and moves in with a dominatrix and a DJ roommate. She converses and fucks the ghost of her dead superstar partner, Marco (full marks for expert detailing of a young woman’s masturbatory experience). Eventually, she starts making films and this helps her get over the dead dude and bond with the new one (the skater).

Through all her troubles, the narrator makes the observation that “growing up is all about dealing with complicated situations and becoming a little less fragile each time.” But the meaning is lost on readers who endure her consistent Avril Lavigne tough-ass attitude of “whatevers” throughout the book, making it impossible to see vulnerability through the apathy or any sign of evolution or growth. The disconnect is present even in the closing line of the book: “The day Marco died, Sugar didn’t exactly bawl her eyes out.”

But Sugar is apathetic, so what’s the point here? The lack of sophisticated plot structure leaves gaps and there is no moral about growth and recovery. I won’t sugar-coat it: Sugar may be Ms. Cool but she’s an annoying character.

“I’m just continually surprised when people have a strong response to Sugar,” Pohl-Weary told XPress. “After spending days and days in my apartment, writing this novel, it’s almost inconceivable that others – people I don’t know personally – will invest in the story enough to be swept up by it.”

Pohl-Weary explained that she set out to make a so-called “apathetic” young woman into a three-dimensional character. “There aren’t too many female characters like Sugar available in literary works,” she said. So kudos to McGilligan books for supporting engineers of the cultural creative.

Contemporary author, Michael Turner, compares the book to an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with its “deadpan prose that draws on a messy bedroom of cultural references.” For those who don’t mind pop-culture overload, the book is an opportunity to expand cultural horizons. If you want a window into the lifestyle of movie buffs, vegans, zinesters and anarchists from downtown Toronto, then A Girl Like Sugar is the book for you. Otherwise you may just get irritated.

– Sylvie Hill

Emily Pohl-Weary’s edited anthology: Girls Who Bite Back (Sumach Press, 332 pp.)

Girls Who Bite Back unrolls the female roll model: Superchick Anthology takes on feminist pop icons

“Everything I know about feminism I learned from pop culture.”
~Sophie Levy, Manifesto for the Bitten

The notion of inequality between the sexes is underlined by indisputable facts: in the ’80s there was only one Smurfette; She-Ra didn’t get as much airplay as He-Man; and Herc! Herc!’s Helena was a fucking idiot.

Thankfully the ’90s gave us Buffy, Xena, Lara Croft and Yoshimi (she battles the pink robots). This year, welcome Toronto’s Emily Pohl-Weary, the writer-editor of Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks (Sumach Press).

Noticing the lack of strong, intelligent girls in television, movies, comics and video games, and questioning who we can look up to as we age and pass beyond the Buffy years, Pohl-Weary made like Jem, assembled over two dozen holograms and launched her mission to spy on these pop culture female role models.

And Ka-POW! The result is this stellar collection of essays, fiction, poems, comic strips and artwork on female superheroes. It’s 332 pages of stories and vignettes (varying from three to 15 pages), by women and men, about superchicks in a multitude of contexts ranging from domestic prowess (Crisis Girl in Spring Rolls) to depression (Ready to be Strong?).

This is a young woman’s Bible and a (wo)Man’s Guide to Survival with females of our times. It encourages the reader to appreciate feminine brawn and offers alternatives to Britney Spears or Strawberry Shortcake.

If this is a feminist manifesto, then it’s a very fair one. It does not kick the balls of our male compadres and even holds some women accountable for sullying the image of girl power. Poet-artist Sonja Ahlers describes in one of her poems how irritating it is when female assertiveness goes over the top: “A machine gun of a girl shooting out the words Girl Power was the stupidest thing I ever saw … CRINGE CENTRAL MOLARS WITH FILLINGS CHEWING ALUMINUM FOIL. & another Super Bitch is born … TOTALLY TEDIOUS.”

Others consider race in their discussion of girl power. Candra K. Gill wrote ‘Cuz the Black Chick Always Gets it First, which explores the dynamic of race in Buffy. And Ottawa artist Eliza Griffiths plays with sexiness in Karate Girls by painting her fighters half naked.

Girls Who Bite Back redefines women beyond the traditional view of the female as helpless princess waiting to be rescued by a male hero. If you’ve ever been called a “princess” you’ll know what a slayer feels like when she wants to drive a stake through the heart of a soul-sucking vampire. And hey, why be princess anyway, when you can be Queen?

Killer instinct is pretty hot. But as Lisa Rundle cautions, “superbabes are stereotypical heterosexual male sex fantasies writ large and as much as they kick ass, they wiggle it.”

Though, given the choice of being a porn star or a comic book heroine, if they’re the same in sex appeal, I’ll pick the ass-kickin’ telepathic ninja fighter slayer chick, any day.

– Sylvie Hill