Gillian Wigmore, author of Glory, on Suture

This is “gruesome, passionate, great work,” art that makes no effort to slow down or look back, this is work that tests limits, pushes boundaries and ultimately breaks down walls of propriety and tradition to get it right. Ekphrasis has never been so gory or so tender. Brewer sees what making art costs the artist, in body and in soul, and lays it out so the audience has to face the heart and lung on the canvas, the blood caked between the keys on the keyboard. 

Presenting a brilliant and shocking new world whole and bare to the light, that never once doubts its brutality and beauty, Brewer asks us to look at ourselves and what we build anew.

Brewer’s characters brim with humanity – they falter, they break shit, they build beautiful art – none of them asks permission to ruin what they need to in order to make art that “hurts the way it hurts to be alive,” that’s about more than the blood, the bones, the organs that are ripped out of the body to make humans feel what it’s like to be human.  

There are so many ways that blood is beautiful and Brewer showcases them all – small dried fireworks in the cotton of a collar, fresh pools spreading across laminate, smeared and swirling in a bathtub drain – there is no privileging of the beautiful over the visceral, and this way Brewer requires that we consider “the catalogue of the touches, smells, textures, glances, scents, colours that define the feeling” of being human. In spliced stories fraught with the terrors and pleasures of the everyday and the great, fundamental questions all at once, we follow characters into and through the fires of their love, lusts, trepidations and die-hard dedications to themselves and art. The noticing involved in each of these stories makes me reconsider what can and should be done in Canadian writing. Here is Nic Brewer quietly dismantling what we accepted as the parameters of writing, and here is a new world full of possibility. 

I read this book with wonder – Brewer’s confident prose swept me along. Hers is sure, sharp writing that doesn’t flinch from tenderness, and Suture is fearless in getting it true when rightness doesn’t come into it. I felt this book in my body. I ached (in my heart and bones, along an old, spidery scar that split my chest in two) long after I set it down. What a privilege to read this work. Congratulations to Brewer and to Book*hug, both