Diane Schoemperlen's acclaimed In the Language of Love expanded our expectations of the contemporary novel, using everyday words to deconstruct a young woman's life and loves. In her new short story collection, Forms of Devotion, she again tests the bounds of her craft, creating an arresting and wonderfully readable work that is also a treat for the eye. Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. The illustrations, selected by Schoemperlen and depicting almost every subject imaginable, are wood engravings and line drawings from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In some cases, she was inspired to write the story after studying the illustrations; in other cases, she wrote the story first, then chose or constructed the pictures to accompany it. The result is a playful,sometimes surreal and often mysterious juxtaposition of a historical fascination with anatomy and classical themes with the author's contemporary exploration of everyday people, places and things.
When Charlie Bellerose reunites with his flamboyant brother Nate, after two decades apart, their youthful rivalry seems forgotten. Drawn together again by their failed marriages, trying to survive in a world of long-distance parenting and hopeful reunions, they begin to imagine that they can be a new family of sorts. But Charlies chance encounter with his first love, Holly, now happily married, unravels his past and complicates his present, plunging him back to his bittersweet college days in Montreal and the fate of his best friend Miles, and forward into Nates dangerous attraction to Hollys sixteen-year-old daughter, Riley. Yet even Charlie, with all he now knows about his brother, cannot foresee the violence to come.