books

April 2008
Conundrum Press
ISBN 1-894994-32-9
978-1-894994-32-3
5.5x7.5 inches, 140 pages
Short Stories / Lesbian
$17 CDN / US

Each of these stories is a glimpse into a young woman’s life, spoken in her own voice. The backdrop is poverty, desolation, abuse, and addiction. These are young women who roll pennies to buy toilet paper and roll their own cigarettes, who watch the mail for the welfare cheque and watch their boyfriends out of the corners of their eyes. But these women also watch their own children play in parks and wading pools, and watch the horizon for other women, other possibilities. Drunk, cigarette-roughened, laughing, determined, and despairing, Mayor writes with razor-blade precision in the voices of these overlooked women. These are finely crafted stories of resilience and hope from an award-winning author.

March 2004
Conundrum Press
ISBN 1-894994-02-7

Set in the Winnipeg skinhead scene of the early 1990s, Cherry is an unsettling account of a woman's negotiation of violence, memory, and identity. Mayor deftly employs the technique of pastiche to craft her story: newspaper articles, notes, photographs, letters, and even appointment slips are used to signify the multi-layered nature of her narrative. At its heart, Cherry is a story about a romantic relationship on the precipice of chaos. The unnamed protagonist falls in love with an enigmatic young skinhead and spirals into a frightening state of unreality. Her world is reduced to a cycle of drugs, abuse and an endless series of rooming houses which she is forced to call home. These addresses become the chapter titles; Mayor literally uses the decrepit buildings as the structures on which to hang her narrative. The narrator tries to write her way out of her desperate situation, infusing moments with a vibrant and transcendent beauty to ensure her survival, and in doing so invokes the streets of downtown Winnipeg with the precision of a poet and the cunning of a satirist. Cherry is a punk rock bricolage, a poetic novel, a loss of innocence story, and an ode to the city of Winnipeg.

"A startling read from the perspective of a young woman who saw it all from the inside. Cherry is a novel that exposes the shocking reality that is the racist right." — Warren Kinsella (author of Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Networks)

"Chandra Mayor's vivid, sensuous language evokes the wind-torn city of Winnipeg haunted by violence and longing. This first novel bears witness to a powerful transformation as a terrorized young woman begins to recognize the fierce desire for life that's growing within her. Beautiful and harrowing and ablaze with poetic intelligence, Cherry is a rare work of lyricism and danger." — Catherine Hunter

Praise for CHERRY:

"With poetic economy, Mayor spins a tale of misplaced love and harrowing abuse." — The Globe and Mail

"Mayor's prose is razor-sharp, perfectly suited to her subject matter. There are no flowery CanLit metaphors, no devices, just direct, bold writing." — Ottawa Express

October 2002
Cyclops Press
ISBN 1-8941770-12-6

Short-listed for three Manitoba book awards.
Winner of the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award

"Invoking Sylvia Plath, these poems enter precarious landscapes—physical, mental, seasonal—where the individual must negotiate a place. Chandra Mayor’s poetic skills are confident, her vision fearless, and her voice clear. This is a strong debut." — Sarah Klassen

August Witch, Chandra Mayor’s debut collection of poems, takes the reader into realms of problematic desire, revised domesticity and psychoanalytic complexity through texts that span diverse poetic terrain, from the lyric to the narrative-based long poem. What links all of the poems in this collection is the theme of boundaries: between self and other, desire and body, "breath and reason." Mayor’s poetic voice is at once confessional, playful and linguistically sophisticated.