Deep Salt Water is a stirring memoir about loss and abortion, expressed through the layering of imagery from the ocean. In detail at once sensual and sophisticated, Apostolides unfurls the emotional experience of a love affair and unwanted pregnancy, the abortion itself, and her reconnection with the man seventeen years later--a rekindling of love which stimulates this gentle attempt to come to terms with the abortion and its consequences. Moving from a place of intense intimacy to an outward focus that engages with the broader world, Deep Salt Water discusses abortion in all its complexity, rejecting polarizing rhetoric in favour of the unfathomable truths that women hold in their bodies.
With 9 full colour plates of mixed media collage by Catherine Mellinger.

Acclaimed writer and critic Marianne Apostolides is the author of five books and one play. Her current writing explores the contact zone between genres – poetry vs. prose, fiction vs. non-fiction, creative vs. critical; it has appeared in The Walrus, Room, and Bookninja.com Magazine, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2012 Chalmers Arts Fellowship; her book Voluptuous Pleasure was listed among the Top 100 Books of 2012 by Toronto’s Globe & Mail, and her book The Lucky Child was long-listed for the 2010 Relit Award. Marianne lives in Toronto with her two children.

Marianne Apostolides' profile page

Catherine Mellinger is a mixed media and analog collage artist whose works find inspiration in the ideas originated by the feminist artists of the Dada period as well as the early Surrealists, lending to the exploration of dichotomy; real and unreal, beauty and trauma. Mellinger's works have been published in literary magazines, and she has been commissioned by musicians, writers and private collectors. She lives in Waterloo, Ontario with her husband and son.

Catherine Mellinger's profile page

"Deep Salt Water is intimate and sensual, tidal and saline--how can a book be tidal and saline? These words make sense within the environment of the book. Apostolides's language is not of pristine nature but of the anthropocene, our current geologic age of bleached coral and oceans choking on plastics. In light of man-made climate catastrophe, learning this language takes on added urgency."—The Globe & Mail

"...an intoxicating, accretive reading experience, shot through with recognizable truth and a clever use of the splice of precision and interruption to deliver them."—Anakana Schofield