Onion Man is an intense and masterly sculpted series of linked poems set in southern Ontario in the late 1980s a time in Canada when the recession lay like a lead weight on the shoulders of young people, leaving the future bleak. The poems are told from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl working for the summer as a labourer at a corn canning factory, and they follow her relationship with her factory job, her boyfriend, her alcoholic mother, her terminally ill grandfather, and the man who every night peels an onion and eats it as if it were an apple. The Onion Man doesn t speak English and is tormented by the other workers. After his son dies, he commits suicide at the factory, and the girl finds his body. This traumatic event causes her to rethink the direction of her life. This sparse and powerful poetic debut, weaves a tale of heartache, dissolution, and coming of age.