Rag Pickers by Blaine Newton

Review by Kat Autiö | Infocalypse Press

Reading Rag Pickers felt like existential ASMR, humming deliciously somewhere between comfort and unease. The uncanny correspondences begin quietly: a dying man burying jars of coins just to leave behind a pattern, a woman reconfiguring the stick figures on her minivan to redraw her life, an elevator opening on nothing at all. These small ruptures in the ordinary accumulate until the book starts to vibrate — not with plot, but with self-recognition. Praised by CBC for its wit and humanity, this book also explores the deeper frequencies of entropy, recurrence, and the quiet endurance of meaning after certainty falls away.

Newton writes about the people who keep living after meaning has evaporated: the mathematician still tracing patterns in the static, the woman reading a stranger’s anger sewn into her coat, the performer mouthing his act to the wind, and the woman in the pasture talking to cows because they, at least, won’t interrupt. The work is often funny, sometimes bleakly so, but it never feels cruel. These are not broken people; they’re temporal archaeologists, digging through the sediment of their own lives. Newton’s characters don’t transform; they loop. They rehearse the same gestures that no longer save them but still keep them tethered. They perform their existence with ritual precision, like they’ve made peace with the fact that repetition might be the truest form of prayer. It’s existential, sure, but not grim. Newton’s world hums with grace and futility in perfect unison.

Newton’s prose has an engineer’s precision and a poet’s restraint. He doesn’t announce emotion; he builds the scaffolding and lets you feel the air around it. His sentences are beautifully aerodynamic and stripped of drag, though sometimes that polish keeps the heart at arm’s length. When he loosens that control, though, the stories breathe differently, like an engine finally idling into warmth.

In “A Limited Run”:

“He begins to claw ineffectually at the collar that is already open, to loosen the tie that is not there, when a noise quiets him — so distant but recognizable, like rain on the horizon. It swells, bouncing off the walls of the alley before resting on him, covering him. Comforting him. And he feels a calmness as he melts into the sound, floating for the briefest of moments on the applause and laughter of the far crowd.” — p. 176

It’s an exquisite image, this death rendered as surrender, but every choice is gentle, and carefully anesthetized. Even claw loses its violence under the weight of all that calm. There’s no rupture, no harsh consonant or breathless syntax to let the moment wound. The diction is devotional, not desperate. Newton is choosing this distance, but it’s also the place where the prose could push harder, where one fractured word could make the stillness hurt.

If he had lingered there, just a beat longer in the human aftermath, rather than the theatrical one, "A Limited Run" might have deepened from elegy into eulogy. The story’s restraint is its strength, but it also withholds the full weight of the collapse it so carefully builds toward.

Contrast that reserve with this moment in "Conversations with Cows" where Newton lets his prose bruise. When Kate fumbles with her lighter after revealing the truth:

“Kate tries again to light her cigarette, flicking the spark wheel again and again to no effect — finally hurling the lighter past the fence into the field. She takes the cigarette out of her mouth, breaks it like a promise, throws it to the ground at her feet, and as she looks at it there — as he watches her stare at this perfect white cylinder, now a broken checkmark — the tiny shreds of tobacco spilled on the ground like entrails with no future to portend.” — p. 64

The sentence is a masterclass in escalation: hurling, broken, portend — each word lands with the weight of a small catastrophe. The verbs are muscular, cinematic; they crack through the rhythm of the scene like sparks refusing to catch. Even the image of the “broken checkmark” feels accusatory, a visual punctuation of failure.

Newton’s language here doesn’t just describe anger or grief — it performs it. The syntax unravels with her, the hard consonants striking like the flicks of that useless lighter. The repetition of again becomes a pulse, a skipped heartbeat inside the prose. By the time the tobacco “spills like entrails,” the writing itself seems to bleed. In moments like this, Newton abandons observation for embodiment; the prose stops analyzing despair and starts to become it.

That same oscillation — between control and release — structures the collection as a whole. The stories in Rag Pickers speak to each other in recursive murmurs, replaying questions that don’t want answers. Newton isn’t chasing transformation; he’s tracing orbit. His characters circle entwined ideas, each pass a little closer, a little truer. Read as a whole, the book feels like déjà vu made tender. By the end, you’ve walked through a gallery of still lives that somehow breathe. Nothing resolves, and yet everything reverberates. You close the book feeling the way you do after waking from a long dream: disoriented but newly convinced that time doesn’t move forward at all, it just folds beautifully, stubbornly back on itself. Rag Pickers is an ontological hymn with a sly grin, full of echoes, equations, and small mercies. It’s proof that repetition isn’t the end of meaning, it’s how meaning remembers itself.

See also the CBC Books review of Rag Pickers , praised for its wit and haunting humanity.