When Things Get Worst

When Things Get Worst is the story of a young woman from a world of horse dealers and stone pickers, religious zealots, and gratuitous killers. It is the evocative tale of those who, having lost everything else, retain their dignity in a declining, often dissolute world. Haunted by death and her local history, by religious ecstatics and cynics of the Word, by the repressed who are raping the countryside, as if farms were no more than gravel orchards, this young woman continues to move forward. In the face of the vengeance that others are wreaking on life, she never loses faith in herself, her family, or in the earth, on whose behalf she finally, in a moment of apocalypse, acts. Sensual and perfectly pitched in its depiction of thought in a language that is specific to the rhythms of southwestern Ontario, When Things Get Worst is a moving, lyrical testimony to the force of the human spirit.

Kathleen McCracken is a Canadian poet, who was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry in 1992, for her collection Blue Light, Bay and College. Her other collections have included Reflections, Into Celebration, The Constancy of Objects, A Geography of Souls, Mooncalves, and Tattoo Land, and her poetry has appeared in The Malahat Review, Poetry Canada Review, Exile Quarterly, Poetry Ireland, The Shop, Revival, Abridged, New Orleans Review and Grain. She lives in Northern Ireland where she teaches English and creative writing at Ulster University. Barry Callaghan is the well-known novelist, poet, and person of letters who has been included in every major Canadian anthology, and his fiction and poetry have been translated into seven languages. His fiction works include The Black Queen Stories, The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings, When Things Get Worst, A Kiss Is Still a Kiss, Between Trains, and Beside Still Waters. He has multiple volumes of poetry, and the memoir Barrelhouse Kings. His non-fiction is Raise You Five, Raise You Ten, and Raise You on the River. He lives in Toronto.