What I Want to Tell Goes Like This is an intensely original first short story collection from acclaimed poet Matt Rader. The last story All This Was a Long Time Ago is the 2014 winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders Award for fiction from The Malahat Review and other offerings from the collection have appeared in Event The New Quarterly Grain Joyland Forget Magazine and the Rusty Toque.Raders command of tension is masterful in these dark offkilter stories that are largely set in the context of the workinglabour class in and around the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island BC. They alternate between exploring the history of severe labour struggles in the area over a century ago and the presentday experiences of people sliding through transitional ambiguous moments in their relationships and sexuality. The juxtaposition of the two time periods seems to hint at the echoes of the harsh violent legacy of the earlier age and its power struggles that continue to resonate in contemporary life.In What I Want to Tell Goes Like This we are witness to the controversial shooting death of infamous union activist Albert Ginger Goodwin by a police constable in 1918 to the squalor of tent cities erected on the Royston Bay mudflats during the Great Vancouver Coal Strike of 191214 to two boys experimentation with sexual violence at the end of a secluded logging road and to clarity and companionship found in a small cabin by the sea as a son cares for his dying fathera rough man who abandoned him when he was eight. In Raders artful tales of grit and mystery danger never feels far away. show more