It is October 1983 and eight-year-old Abigail Wren has gone missing from a tiny Ontario town. In the crosscuts and fragments of each day’s news, word of the abduction filters into the troubled Fitch family household. Roland Fitch becomes unhinged by long kept secrets, while his wife Eva, turns inwards, tracing the aftermath of her own surgically precise loss. In the days and weeks following Abigail Wren’s death, the Fitch children, Andrew and Isabel, are increasingly left to parent themselves. As the already tenuous boundaries between family members are slowly effaced, once solid definitions— of the child, the adult, and the body—come unmoored.

Jenny Sampirisi is the author of the novel is/was from Insomniac Press. She is the Managing Editor of BookThug where she also edits the Department of Narrative Studies imprint, which focuses on innovative prose. She is co-director of the Toronto New School of Writing, a series of reading and writing workshops designed and facilitated by working writers. She teaches English Literature and Composition at Ryerson University. Croak is her “rst poetry collection.

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