An excerpt from

Terrorist Letters
by Ann Diamond

First I learned to shoot the buttons off mailmen and others wearing the uniform of Canada. Later I would fling myself under snowplows, emerging flat as a child's mitten. I hid in the blackened drifts of winter's debris, coughing up particles from tarpaper lungs, spitting them out on the fractured sidewalks of spring. Homeless shades were my cronies. I hid, ate, slept with doomed species. As the last desperate years of my apprenticeship unfurled I perceived that this compulsion had already killed half my generation while we few survivors now limped in meaningless circles, mere shadows drained of substance. It seemed all wrong somehow but it had grown too late to slink back to decency. That would be purest treachery a form of failure a certain invitation to literary defeat. The other writers were penning hymns to snowflakes, love, machinery, human purity. Only I wallowed in negation and death.