Ongoing notes: the Ottawa small press book fair (part one: Ferno House),

Another Ottawa small press book fair has come and gone, an event now eighteen years old (something I still find completely amazing). Here are some of the items I picked up during this year’s event. Watch here for information on the spring 2013 event, most likely to happen later in June (and announce around February or so).

And congratulations to Adrienne Gruber, who won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award! Hopefully I can get my hands on a copy of her book at some point.

Toronto ON: Ferno House might not have won the bpNichol Chapbook Award this year (neither did above/ground press, obviously), but the fact that they had two publications on a shortlist of six titles is impressive. Spencer Gordon was up for his own chapbook [my review of such lives here], as was Toronto poet and AvantGarden Reading Series co-organizer/host Liz Howard’s first chapbook (skullambient) (2012):

(Steinian aphasia)

I that I am thy.

At thy happenstance of atoms.

Were the where of my happening into happened.

But only slightly.

So many, so manlike, multiplying thusly.

Into a permanence of flux, disconcerting.

Sister.

Sister none.

Other than the keeper.

Of another heart bleeding in December.

Boys.

Some of those boys who know no boredom.

Golden, even, in the significant design.

Sing glyph.

Sing slow creep of limbs and neural tube.

Gone too far too few in fathers.

A husbandry of worms between.

There.

Over there.

The sigh almost silenced.

Thereby a maple tree. (Liz Howard)

I’m startled by the pure electricity of the language, a poetry that perhaps needs to be heard to fully appreciate the cadences and wordplay. Howard’s poems embrace the abstract with concrete language, strafing the familiar with disconnects that alter perception, into a kind of hyper-familiarity. I’m taken with the way she uses information and twists it, playing with the sounds and meanings, such as in the poem “ (may-tea-non-state-is-abhor-original) ,” where she writes “bienvenue / the residential school / —or ancestor, ascended” (p 16). Already in a second printing, this chapbook strikes as an incredible debut. The last page of the final poem in the collection, the four-page “ Psychogeography),” reads:

I slept in voices of smoke

by the woodstove in the basement

of our house by the cemetery

to be small and dreaming parallel

to ceremony and decay

sometime ago I found

the body of a métis fur trader

in the hunting shack back there

in the woods where I guarded

him like a treasure

Chapleau         vexation and myth or

                        rabbit under the scrap car

                        or fox corporeal or

                        a mother and ravens

Toronto, now

this breathless forest.

I was also able to pick up copies of Shannon Maguire’s Fruit Machine (2012), Andrew Faulkner’s mean matt and other shitty people (2012), as well as the anthology For Crying Out Loud II: Another Anthology of Poetry & Fiction (2010). In her Fruit Machine, Shannon Maguire, about to launch a second poetry chapbook with above/ground press, writes of a dark and largely forgotten part of Canadian history that destroyed multiple lives. As she writes in her “Notes”:

The Fruit Machine was a battery of psychological and physiological tests developed during the 1950s and 60s by Carleton University psychologists Frank Robert Wake to “scientifically” detect whether someone was a homosexual. At the time, homosexuality was deemed a threat to national security and authorities sought reliable ways of identifying and expunging lesbians and gay men from the civil service as well as other professions. Fortunately, the tests never proved conclusive, but the harm that their development and underlying assumptions caused was felt in the LGBT community.

Needless to say, thousands of people in the public service, military and police lost their jobs during this period, and the stain of the fruit machine can still be felt in certain corners of Ottawa. Because of this potentially loaded title, I’m not sure it aligns with the work in the chapbook, and even works to distract away from the rich variety within. The title seems to have been pulled only from a single poem, salvaged from a slight reference towards the end:

VOLUME

of queen with circus & coo

with wolf-velvet, blackmail

to rim with prowl for fish for flute

with bell of fruit in swing to sew

her tearoom & top fish

her swing & trade with mother-punk

of cruise wolf, of queen wolf, of punk prowl,

fish-wolf queen for velvet bell

whole sew bull

sew bull sew …

with normal words

like breast & blond & stiff & newspaper

radiator farm asphalt politician hammer

erect child cigar fight & stroke

like tearoom fight & breast fruit

like swing stiff in blond fish

like camp politician with mother-punk radiator

like top men hammer blond on asphalt

fight blond for top

blind blond with trade cigar

all part of a lexicon

of aversive substances & shocks

change in size of pupil

of the fruit machine

by the fruit machine

for the fruit machine

subdivision did

The poems within explore systems of language, perception and sensation, with a sprinkling of her favoured “wolf” scattered throughout. Maguire is very much a fan of structure, and experimenting with structure throughout, such as in the poem “Pleasure,” where she playfully echoes a binary played from Robert Kroetsch’s The Sad Phoenician (1979), a structure more recently played with by Amanda Earl in The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (above/ground press, 2008). As the notes at the back of the collection claims, this chapbook is “part of a book-length ‘exploded sestina called Myrmurs.” Shortlisted previously for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing, she already she has a first full-length trade collection out in the spring, fur(l) (BookThug). I am very much looking forward to seeing what she ends up doing with larger structures, and the larger canvas.

existing independently of zip-stripe; openness of destination

if she loved a man on Tuesday; epiphytes rather on Saturday

if she only undergoes a not entirely determinable series of women

admiring them for their inkjet streams & analytical coups

if anarcho-sundicalist organizers appeal to her & mother

            is in a state nursing home

if by sunrise the next day the girl escaped drowning

then she takes moisture from the air; that kissed all she saw

            in the factory (“LETTERS”)

Author of Useful Knots and How to Tie Them (Toronto ON: The Emergency Response Unit, 2008), Andrew Faulkner is one of the Ferno House editors and co-editor/co-publisher of The Emergency Response Unit. To my knowledge, he hasn’t had a chapbook out in some time, and his poems on terrible people explore a range of characters and voices, some of which work and others that don’t.

IL MIGLIOR FABIO

If you are what you eat then I

am the ass of a high school cheerleader,

high on boredom, behind the bleachers

after school. I am listening to robot rock at dawn

in a Ferrari made of glass. My body is hairless,

strong as OxyContin. I sweat oxytocin.

I gather the wind in my pipe and puff, puff.

I will not pass. I transpose your love song

from C-major to apathetic. I’ve consumed the future.

My farts articulate the past. The secret fifth chamber

of my heart weeps for your scoliosis,

but style does as style is, so I’ll be cruising

the night with my gilded twelve-foot dick.

I hope you catch my drift, emphasis dick. (Andrew Faulkner)