Guernica Editions

Melanie Janisse's Orioles in the Oranges is the work of a soldier of romance. In a language that enchants as it haunts, Janisse presses herself against the velocity of fate and refuses history's slide into remoteness. Hers is an act of rebellion. She resurrects ancestral ghosts with an archivist's precision, a mourner's yearning, a sensualist's care. She takes lives into her hands - both to examine their ends and to insist on their beginnings.

In this brutally honest debut collection, Melanie Janisse crafts a slow-boiling Southern Ontario thunder to accompany the reader on an emotional migratory path from the delicate swamps of Pelee Island to the vast mud flats of East Vancouver and the hardened, concrete points in between. Janisse's clean and powerful language dredges Lac du Chats for all that's been lost - intentional or otherwise. With astonishing honesty and compassion, Orioles in the Oranges seems to suggest that home is not a house, nor a people, but the series of landscapes that envelope us and call us back over and over again.