Montreal QC/Cobourg ON: Lovely to see Montreal writer and translator Peter Dubé’s new chapbook through Proper Tales Press, FLORALIA (2025), subtitled “Eleven Ekphrases for RM,” a note that references (on first reading, as the chapbook is dedicated in part “in memoriam RM Vaughan”) the late Canadian poet, fiction writer, filmmaker and critic RM Vaughan (1965-2020) [see my obituary for him here]. Each poem floats across such lovely prose poems, some set in blocks while others in paragraphs, such as the poem “Easter Lilies,” that begins: “In imitation of orbit. In appetite for revelation. An exposure. An unveiling. A pair of searching pools of light course with brutal regularity, descending from this pair of isolated towers: luminous raptors plunging from the peaks to scan a landscape. Each one as broad as a man’s reach, if eager to encompass what he sought. First one swirls by, and then the next.” I must have missed the publication of what his author biography offers, “his most recent work, a novel in prose poems entitled The Headless Man (A Feed Dog Book/Anvil Press, 2020),” a title I’m now curious about; edited as well by Stuart Ross through his imprint at Anvil Press, the book was apparently shortlisted for both the A.M. Klein Prize and the ReLit Award. As Dubé offers as his “Author’s Note” at the end of FLORALIA:
The body of work collected here, as a series of ekphrastic poems, is one effort to bring together my practice as a poet and my years of work as an art writer. The poems were composed using a personal, indeed idiosyncratic, method combing Gold Dawn-style scrying with surrealist automatism in order to capture or create a particular aesthetic space and moment.
The RM in the title, appropriately enough, also brings together two figures in a single form. The first RM is, clearly, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, an artist whose work has long been an interest of mine and whose well-known flower photos are the inspiration for this sequence of prose poems. The other RM is my dear, late, and much-lamented friend RM Vaughan, with whom I shared many discussions about writing, art, magick, the complicated relationship between them, and many other topics. (We were both chatty types…) This chapbook is written partly in hour of your friendship, and in memory of those exchanges.
Kingston/Ottawa ON: I’m frustrated I missed this chapbook by Kingston poet (and first Kingston poet laureate) Eric Folsom, his Lift Bridge: A Garland of Anti-Ghazals (Ottawa ON: catkin press, 2020), as I had long ago produced (and even ran a second printing) of anti-ghazals by Folsom through above/ground press, his NORTHEAST ANTI-GHAZALS (2005/2011). The notion of the English-language variation on the Urdu form of the ghazal has run through Canadian poetry for decades, prompted by John Thompson’s posthumous Stilt Jack (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 1978), with a further thread of “anti-ghazals” begun through Phyllis Webb’s Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984) (both of these works in full can be seen through each of their still-in-print collected volumes, from Thompson’s through Goose Lane Editions and Webb’s through Talonbooks). Set as the “anti-sonnet,” the English-language play on the ghazal usually works incredible distances in narrative between couplets, and I would be curious to hear Folsom’s thoughts on how he approaches the form (especially one he’s been working on, occasionally, for such an extended period of time), from ghazal to anti-ghazal, stretching his narrative out across couplets, a leap of thought in that single open space between them. His poems offer poems without excess, each sequences of narrative straightforward lyrics that allow for that open space, where the poem truly begins to set.
MAY POSSIBLY
Grind coffee finely, pour
powder from the grinder’s bowl,
Tip the mill and tap,
wipe the inner surface clean.
Empty this head of despair
and pretension, shut down
The surly old voices and
listen to what’s really outside.
What if I replace this
bad feeling with colour, replace
The colour with sound,
then write down the sound?
Broad lapels on old
jackets, tulip petals flopping open,
The baby knuckles of
lilac buds uncurl like newborn hands.
The green leaves of grass
spear the hurricane fence;
Your voice singing, the
floorboards creak in counterpoint.
My dreams wordlessly
repeating, desire your dreams
Take shape like rock
candy crystalizing on string.
Columbia SC: Winner of the 2020 Oversound Chapbook Prize, as selected by Brandon Shimoda, is Alien Year (Oversound, 2021) by Louise Akers, a Brooklyn-based poet that appears to have published a full collection since, ELIZABETH/THE STORY OF DRONE (Propeller Books, 2022) that I’d be curious to get my hands on. There’s a subtlety I’m enjoying in these short pieces; an ease, one that allows for a sharp, quiet wit and series of turns. “I find it hard to believe I am going to die,” she offers, to open the poem “THE PASSION,” “an animal in an accident rich environment: / a priori foundation, a limited / foundation.” Her turns offer straightforwardness but are anything but, providing a clever density of lyric thought that require multiple readings, even across a clear sense of music across each line.
AS SEQUELS
For us while longing,
no single horizon can
remain
distinct. Science topped
/pummeled
into patience becomes
torture.
The self retreats
to the position of hell,
which I don’t find very
brave,
despite its warmth.
As for dying, I know you.
We will live,
patiently as taxonomical
strangers,
losing all reality as
sequels
to your silence.
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