Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

What are the best ways to support political struggles that aren't your own? What are the fundamental principles of a utopia during war? Can we transcend the societal values we inherit? Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a remarkably original, literary page-turner that explores such pressing questions of our time.

A depressed writer visits a war zone. He knows it's a bad idea, but his curiosity and obsession that his tax dollars help to pay for foreign wars draw him there. Amid the fighting, he stumbles into a small strip of land that's being reimagined as a grassroots, feminist, egalitarian utopia. As he learns about the principles of the collective, he moves between a fragile sense of self and the ethical considerations of writing about what he experiences but cannot truly fathom. Meanwhile, women in his life--from this reimagined society and elsewhere--underscore truths hidden in plain sight.

In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.

JACOB WREN makes literature, performances, and exhibitions. His books include Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed; Polyamorous Love Song (finalist for the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and a Globe and Mail best book of 2014); Rich and Poor (finalist for the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a Globe and Mail best book of 2016); and Authenticity is a Feeling. He is artistic co-director of the Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART. Wren lives in Montreal.