I love Theresa Kishkan

It's happened to me only rarely, that I've forced myself to ration out the reading in a book, so much pleasure am I getting from time in its company.

The short stories in Alistair MacLeod's Island were one such case, where I wouldn't read more than one story a day after I'd made it three stories in. Tim Bowling's The Witness Ghost was another, this one volume of verse so vastly more potent in my eyes than his earlier books.

And Theresa Kishkan's Phantom Limb is the newest in this very small list.

Grounded as well as lyrical, materialist as well as philosophic, these essays are just knock-me-down beautiful. I'll do a review when I'm done them all, but it may be a while. I can't bear to put this book down, finished, as soon as I might if I read straight through.

Phantom Limb was nominated for the Hubert Evans BC Nonfiction Book Prize this year, and I'll be jiggered if it doesn't win. Admittedly, Robert Bringhurst has always been a critical favourite, Don Gayton's gardening memoir is sure to be terrific (though I haven't yet picked it up), and the juggernaut of The 100-Mile Diet is both seriously well written and broadly influential. But only one of the nominees is a book that for years I'll think of giving to those close to my heart to share something of what I think it means to be alive, and that's Phantom Limb. I'm SO buying more of her work.