T.J. Newman’s 2021 novel Falling was a spectacular debut, a brilliantly constructed thriller set on board a commercial airliner en route to its destination.

Newman’s second novel, Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421 (Avid Reader Press, 352 pages, $15), is remarkably ambitious, for two reasons: it’s not a sequel, which means there’s an entirely new cast of characters, and it takes place underwater.

The setup: soon after takeoff, an Airbus A321 goes down in the Pacific Ocean. It comes to rest a few hundred metres below the surface, mostly intact. There are survivors, but they have a limited (and rapidly diminishing) supply of air.

Falling was a straight-up thriller, with a hero and a villain with an evil plan. Drowning is rather different. There’s no villain in the traditional bad-guy sense, and there are a lot of heroes: the men and women who have to create, essentially from scratch, a procedure for rescuing people from a submerged aircraft.

Poetry fans have plenty to look forward to this week at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, with a trio of launches highlighting a range of potent local poets.

Winnipeg members of the Land and Labour Poetry Collective launch I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis at 7 p.m. tonight as part of Thin Air. A number of contributors, including Hanako Teranishi, Cole Osiowy, Marjorie Poor, Ron Romanowski and Myla Chartrand, will read at the event.

On Wednesday, Winnipeg poet and writer George Amabile launches his latest poetry collection, Seeing Things, at 7 p.m., where he’ll be joined by fellow scribe Kristian Enright. Amabile’s latest takes the reader on a journey through wonder, memory, grief and more.

Then on Thursday at 7 p.m., award-winning poet and novelist katherena vermette launches her latest collection of poems, Procession.

Throughout his latest collection, The Idea of an Entire Life (McClelland & Stewart, 80 pages, $25), Billy-Ray Belcourt returns to the idea that there is something radical in the confessional mode: “I believe in the magnificence of a lake in Northern Alberta// and the radical possibilities of telling strangers/ all my secrets.”

Contrary to the manner in which they are sometimes dismissed, sincerity, sentiment and confession are not mere exercises in solipsism or self-indulgence; rather, Belcourt uses these in the service of solidarity and justice. “What others call Sentimentality/ I call Refusing to Suffer Alone,” he writes in writes in Sentimentality.

While the collection insists on the importance of sincerity and personal experiences, Belcourt refuses to reify these. “The self emerges in/ the absence of better/ information,” he writes in Childhood Triptych.

From the start of the collection, Belcourt plays with the distance of autofiction and field notes to call the nature of selfhood into question and unsettle it, creating a tension that drives the collection.