Laser Quit Smoking Massage

Cole Nowicki
Newest Press, 2024
136 pages
ISBN: 9781774390900
$21.95
Reviewed by Daxton Comba

Cole Nowicki’s Laser Quit Smoking Massage is as much a meditation on growing up Canadian in the era of digital technology as it is a journey through Nowicki’s personal life. Through a series of intimate essays, he draws the reader in with strange observations, distinctive metaphors, and personal history, all told in the eccentric voice of the man who created “The Pile.”

Beginning with an essay on small-town Canada pride of place, Nowicki’s insight, dry humour, and off-the-cuff tone, is conversational and apropos for a skateboarder. Still, there is the professionalism of a newspaper columnist in the prose, which often achieves a poetic quality. In trying to recall the name of an actor he says, “I could feel the piece of grey matter where the name was supposed to be, dull and cold, like a dead bulb in a string of Christmas lights.”

Nowicki has a wealth of strange life experiences, and relatable yet peculiar tales investigating the nuances and eccentricities of the community and the individual’s place both inside and outside of it. He tells us about being shaken down by his neighbours, his family’s stoic secrets and conspiracy theories, and the peculiarities of the Canadian psyche. 

In the book’s second and more unconventional half, Nowicki explores online job postings and brushes with the dark side of marketing on social platforms. Nowicki’s offhand comments find beauty in “amazing facts about camels” amidst a landscape of clickbait articles.

The essays are also a love letter to skateboarding and a tour through difficult chapters of his childhood. Nowicki knows when to share an anecdote and when to call upon strange and disparate facts about birds struggling to eat starfish. He routinely supports his anecdotal claims with the cheeky “I asked Google,” but also cites books, CBS news footage, and Saskatoon’s City Planning Department.

Cole Nowicki is a Canadian writer and journalist. He was born and raised in Lac La Biche, Alberta and relocated to Vancouver where he works as a publisher and managing editor of fine. press. He was lead writer for Post Radical, a documentary series exploring skateboarding culture, and his work has appeared in The Walrus, Vice, and Catapult. He is the author of the weekly newsletter Simple Magic and his previous book Right, Down + Circle: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, was published by ECW Press.