Some press quotes for Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

Some press quotes for Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim:

“This is a deeply moving, challenging novel, and certainly very prescient. What is our obligation to others, particularly those in war-torn countries? How are we implicated through the tangled threads of history? Wren has written an anti-war novel, but it’s far more nuanced and unclear than I think we’d like to believe that the position of anti-war is. … A perfectly positioned novel for the current historical moment.”
– Alison Manley, The Miramichi Reader

“If the personal is political, then isn't the political personal? This was a question that I had throughout reading this reflective and well-written book. No matter where your political beliefs fall, Jacob Wren's new novel demands to be read for its poignant and propulsive nature. And I will double down on Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim on being one of the best pieces of Canadian Literature this year. Just don't let the prize lists fool you. You're smarter than that.”
– Adam Ferris on Goodreads

“In Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Jacob Wren has written a courageous, alarming and utterly original work of fiction. The ethical conundrums it addresses are myriad and relevant, and while it offers no solutions, it is relentless in its exposure of unflattering human truths that many of us, given a choice, would prefer to avoid.”
– Ian Colford, The Seaboard Review

“A Jacob Wren novel is known for several things: narrators undergoing neurotic self-interrogation, a consideration of the gap between theory and practice, and a certain metafictional flair when it comes to signalling the work’s own existence as a radical text. All of these authorial trademarks are sent into overdrive in Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Wren’s introspective protest novel about the role that doubt plays in any political awakening.”
– Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Quill & Quire

“Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is an anti-war novel that reminds us of our complicity in global conflicts, while offering a glimpse of the hope that drives resistance.”
– Ariane Fournier, Maisonneuve

“Jacob Wren’s latest scintillating work of literary fiction, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, is a book in revolt. Wren crafts a bold and unsettling narrative with the kind of clarity to explore ethical dilemmas that are both numerous and timely.”
– Samuel Wise, Montreal Guardian

"Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a book full of discomfort, despair, and uncertainty, as collective organizing can be; but, like collective organizing, it also brims with the energy of argument, exchange, and a staunch belief in alternative ways of living..."
- H Felix Chau Bradley, Montreal Review of Books

"In Jacob Wren’s Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, published in September, an unnamed narrator navigates an unnamed war zone, internally monologuing on morality and pain. These slightly blurrier, vaguer worlds suggest a search for a human universal. While reference-heavy writing is stuffed, like a meme’s compaction of complex emotion and history into a single low-res image, there’s an alternative roominess: space to take ideas past previous or logical bounds, or to articulate opinions that a mutual follower hasn’t posted already. Those ideas are probably harder to sell, and to write."
- Greta Rainbow, The Walrus

"Still, Wren is one of the few “political” writers of quality working in the Canadian small press. If you are able to accept that Dry Your Tears is more a work about the paralysis of western do-gooders than the lives of active revolutionaries, it has considerable insight to offer—particularly on the centrality of faith to radical political activism. In its final third, the protagonist and a character from “the thin strip of land” struggle with the grey lassitude of living in Canada after experiencing revolutionary life. Faith is a phenomenon fed by privation, sparked by opportunity, and sustained by fellowship—to maintain a faith in revolution in the face of the comfortable, mannered aloneness of Canadian culture requires uncommon conviction. Having thus diagnosed the challenge, Wren uses his final act of authorial sleight of hand to move himself out of the way, implying that a younger generation shaped by eroding material conditions, grounded in collectivist principles, and raised without a reflexive shame at its own being will be the locus of a change to come. It’s a notion based on faith as much as evidence, but belief is what is called for now."
- Mulgrave on Goodreads

Plus:
Writer’s Block at All Lit Up
Possible Politics: A recommended reading list at 49th Shelf
Interview with Open Book


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