Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part three, : Annick MacAskill + Jay MillAr,

[see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Hooray small press! And I’m hoping you caught that above/ground press was being represented yesterday in Mississauga, with Christine as table-proxy at the Ampersand Festival? She was also on a panel, discussing her brand-new book! Dang, I wish I could have been there.

Halifax NS/Toronto ON: I was curious to engage with the carved lyrics of Halifax poet Annick MacAskill, her small chapbook five from hem (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), set as five short, sharp lyrics that each take as their jumping-off points opening quotes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 AD), as translated into English by MacAskill herself. “blazing in my marrow / laid down the quiver to / greed the god in long fa- / miliar grasses wet / before his carbon-grey,” she writes, to open the poem “Upon losing my gold star & being confronted / by Diana, I, Callisto, tell my story.” This isn’t the first time MacAskill has slipped into Metamorphosis, having done same through her Governor General’s Award-winning third collection, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The poems here are extended, nearly breathless, composed as short-lined single stretches of thought and utterance running down the length of a page. As the poem “Together together together together together / together” begins: “once just another girl / -friend the goddess cursed me / worse than mute stripped me of / my girl power gossip / my place in the gaggle / resented my prattle / garrulous once but trick / her so now only soak / up the words of others [.]” Whereas that collection moved through Metamorphosis as a way to articulate a particular loss, these poems are no less intimate through their own explorations, an unfolding of fathers, female relationships and love that teases at something far larger I look forward to seeing, once the larger shape of the narrative is published as a full-length collection. As the first third or so of the poem “The snake bites they sting, yes, but are not, / strictly speaking, the worst part of this” reads:

not my silken farewell
or the blush pinpricks so
faint the world could hear or
see through shade & fog me
like a token blotted
the end of it & I
slipping asked so faint too
his frame now & that lyre
almost but don’t fade those
songs mere aftershocks tin

Toronto ON: Given how many years I’ve composed birthday poems (including my own recent Gap Riot and № Press titles), I’m intrigued by Toronto poet Jay MillAr composing his own meditations on making the half-century mark through Offline: Fifty Thoughts for Fifty Years (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), produced as #11 of Anstruther’s Manifesto Series. Composed with introductory paragraph and post-script, MillAr offers his thoughts on fifty numbered single-paragraph prose-commentaries, set as one thought immediately following another. There is a curious way that MillAr attempts to find ground through a suggestion of disconnect, even flailing, putting one foot down and seeing where the next might lead. Part five, for example, reads: “When I read older novels, the past has been filed into touchstones that are recognizable, almost orderly. Unlike the present, which is multifarious and unwieldy, overflowing. How will this mess be distilled and commodified by our collective memory fifty or a hundred years from now?” His is a pause, a checking-in, to see where he is at and how one might interact with cultural and temporal shifts, an introspection of and through time and space. “Can one live autonomously and independently off-grif in a major urban centre?” he asks, as part of the tenth section. MillAr muses on moments and movements, writing on agency, the long shadow of American culture and politics, community, seasons, literature, disposability, institutions, etcetera. There’s an anxiety here as MillAr works through where we’re at, and where we might be headed, slowly boiling to death (as a frog in a pot on the stove) in and through a sequence of situations that might not be okay. He offers no answers, but pushes the very question, and questions. As the essay, the prose-manifesto, opens:

A sensation brought on by the anxiety of our age rubbing up against the inescapable reality that I am quickly approaching my fiftieth birthday: I have lost the plot. The world, or at least the human world, since this has only ever been a human world to the extent that even the non-human things around us are still human, feels out of control. And so I find myself undertaking a retreat: I will turn away from the world into a series of texts meant to represent my thoughts summed up as a series of moments. Every time I have the urge to share something on social media, I will add it to this list instead. My hope is that these texts will become a pathway, pebbles, or crumbs by which I can engage with, and perhaps even to return to, the world. Thinking is a practice that requires patience while mastering fear.