No Credit River by Zoe Whittall

No Credit River by Zoe Whittall

Memoir / Prose Poetry / Autofiction
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
5.5 x 8.5 inches
78 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN 9781771669078

Trade Paperback
$22.95
(In stock)
SKU: N/A Categories: , , , ,

“It is a confusing thing to be born between generations where the one above thinks nothing is trauma and the one below thinks everything is trauma.”

From acclaimed novelist and television writer Zoe Whittall comes a memoir in prose poetry that reconfirms her celebrated honesty, emotional acuity, and wit. Riving and probing a period of six years marked by abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation, No Credit River is a reckoning with the creative instinct itself.

Open and exacting, this is a unique examination of anxiety in complex times, and a contribution to contemporary autofiction as formally inventive as it is full of heart.

Praise for No Credit River

No Credit River is a masterful expression of queer heartache. Zoe Whittall writes with self-possessed and unmitigated emotion. She writes both with urgency and the sagacity that comes with a dark-night-of-the-soul level of reflection. The lyrical prose firmly holds the weight of the book’s themes. I love the gutsy musicality of the writing. I am particularly moved by Whittall’s use of motif and refrain to remind us of the cyclical nature of love and grief and healing.” —Amber Dawn, author of My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems

“In No Credit River, Zoe Whittall pulls us into the eddies of attachment and alienation, eros and elegy, and an ever-present slipstream of love we can never fully inhabit or abandon. The softly abraded memories are mapped by an ars poetica that signals both an experimentation with form and a grief-tempered, arresting honesty. These poems are an exploration of connection and loss, and the bonds that fray and fortify the self. No Credit River is a testament to our queer and artistic communities—profoundly thoughtful, coursing with intelligence.” —Ali Blythe, author of Stedfast

“Whittall’s return to poetry has been well worth the wait. Call this a collection of prose poems, call it autofiction, call it memoir riddled with metaphor, call it names, call it whatever you want really, as long as you call it. These poems embrace contradiction like lovers who have broken up but still won’t let go; they fill the wasteland between the phrases ‘nothing is traumatic’ and ‘everything is traumatic.’ No Credit River is one of the most electrifying collections I have read in years.” —Hannah Green, author of Xanax Cowboy

Press Coverage

2024 Fall Poetry Preview —Quill & Quire

54 works of Canadian nonfiction to check out this fall —CBC Books

Fall 2024 Books Preview: 25 books worthy of a place at the top of your to-read pile —Toronto Star

What We’re Reading: Staff Writers’ Picks, Fall 2024 —Hamilton Review of Books

16 Books for Women’s History Month 2024 —All Lit Up

“In intimate vignettes that weave back and forth through time, the memoir No Credit River covers the aftermath of a life-altering breakup, addressing themes of queer relationality and sexuality, aging, pregnancy, and loss with intelligence, wit, and devastating candor.” —Bella Moses, Foreword Reviews

No Credit River deserves all the credit for not just encapsulating the complexities of queer relationships, bisexuality, middle age, or for writing a successful ‘poetry-prose memoir’ hybrid, but for making heartbreak real and anxieties that often get hushed apparent: things that make human beings human, and sad, and vulnerable in tender, moving poems that demand rereading.” —Chris Banks, The Woodlot

“Rich with fierce intelligence and a deep intimacy, Whittall’s sequence of diary-poems unfold and meander, and there’s an ability that I admire about her (or her narrator, alternately) ability to be present, whether discussing the wish to possibly have a baby, the devastation of a break-up, or seeing an elk outside her window at Banff Writing Studio, all while allowing the blend of daily life and writing life to shape and inform.” —rob mclennan’s blog

Two Poems: No Credit River by Zoe Whittall —All Lit Up

About the Author

ZOE WHITTALL is the author of the short story collection Wild Failure, and five bestselling novels includ­ing The Fake, The Spectacular, The Best Kind of People, Holding Still for as Long as Possible, and Bottle Rocket Hearts. Her previous poetry collec­tions include Pre-cordial Thump, The Emily Valentine Poems, and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life. Her work has won a Lambda Literary Award, the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award, and been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She has worked as a TV writer on the Emmy-Award winning comedy show Schitt’s Creek and The Baroness Von Sketch Show for which she won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award. She was born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec and now lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.