Hello, Horse

(Paperback)

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Description

Taut, stylish stories take on big moral questions from surprising perspectives.

A teenagers job mucking stalls at a dog track takes a strange turn when his co-worker finds a new religion at odds with winning streaks. Two brothers set out in search of fame in the icy waters of a subarctic lake. A pregnant high school student tries to make rent by winning the Unitarian Churchs Annual Young Writers Short Story Competition (No foul or off-putting language permitted). An incarcerated man considers the nature of choice between shifts with his fellow inmates at Nations at War, the ultimate live-action experience for tourists eager to learn about the Canadian Civil Warnevermind the fact that there was no such war when the fake blood spatters so dramatically.

Spanning states and provinces, and featuring an apocalypse, a coterie of ghosts, nuns on ice, and an above-average amount of dogs, the stories in Hello, Horse consider sundry sins and the search for redemption, justice and the impulse to hold to account, the mirage of authenticity and the decisions we makefor better and for worse.

Reviews

Praise for Richard Kelly Kemick

"Kemick convincingly wrests the sublime from the trivial. He manages, astonishingly, a tone both earnest and ironic, with details and insights that are lively, unexpected, funny, and poignant."
National Magazine Awards

Richard Kemick spends a summer in Alberta's Bible Belt where it may be easier to find God than a vegetarian meal. There, he confronts age-old questions about belief with near-miraculous freshness, honesty, and humour. A deeply personal investigation of the blurred border between faith and imagination.
Marcello Di Cintio, author of Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers

Laugh out loud funny . . . Kemicks own faith or lack thereof is . . . one of the deeper themes that courses beneath the comedy.
Calgary Herald

Wisecracking, earnest, and charmingly obsessive, Kemick introduces himself here as a poet who believes in something larger than his own self, and so is a poet to watch.
Nick Thran

Author Bio

Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His limited series podcast, Natural Life, is an intimate and unexpectedly honest documentary on his cousin, who is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan. Richard is also the author of I Am Herod (also on audiobook), which takes readers undercover at one of the worlds largest religious events, and Caribou Run, a collection of poetry. He is the recipient of multiple awards including two National Magazine Awards and the Writers Guild of Albertas 2019 Award for Best Short Story. He lives in Rossland, British Columbia.