Gutsy writing from a diving heart that knows how to surface from darkness into the liberating play of language. Stories within stories of growing up Other. Brian Dedoras sleight-of-hand narrating offers social recognitions with all the casualness of experience as it hits, hard. Daphne MarlattIn A Slice of Voice at the Edge of Hearing , Brian Dedora frames two looming landscapes, one outer: the Okanagan Valley with its shrug of low hills, its frangible sky, and its lake that may or may not conceal a monster; and one inner: the fragmented terrain of a young man squarepegging his way through the round holes prescribed by church, school, and family. Theres poetry, mystery, cruelty, humour, death, regeneration, and liberation, all refracted through a prism that is resolutely anti-nostalgic. Dedora drags the past without misty-eyed backward looking or anything that reads like recrimination; just a tautly measured parsing of what occurred and the implicit amazement that anyone in midlife feels that somehow one has ducked and dodged at just the right time and managed to make it this far. Bill Richardson