Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two : Pearl Pirie, Sacha Archer + STUMPT 7 + issue eight,

[nina jane drystek, jwcurry + Chris Johnson doing the first of their two sound performances mid-fair]

[see the first part of these notes here]

Toronto ON/rural QC: From Quebec poet Pearl Pirie comes the chapbook we astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), a title the acknowledgements suggest “could be considered a sequel to Sex in Sevens (above/ground, Sept. 2016).” With a poetics that includes collage-movement and haiku, this small collection again works Pirie’s own familiar forms while expanding her nuance, her repertoire, of poetic assemblage, collision, sketch-notes and density. “inside the exquisite loss of everything / except where skin knows sweat,” begins the poem “vacation day,” “time and all else will be someone else’s problem, / here is birdsong and wave crash, // eyelash and breath, lips as if warmed silk / and a hiking up onto one elbow.” Her phrases almost read accumulatively, with the slight disconnect between each one, allowing the poem to exist in the collision between descriptive phrases. What amuses, as well, is Pirie’s further inclusion into the ongoing “Sex at 31” series [see my own notes on the origins of the project here, and my participation in same], her “sex at fifty,” a two-page poem that opens with “perhaps I have seen my last / set of menstrual cramps. // I never needed to collect / the whole bleeding set.” and ends with the couplet: “eight minutes until a / teleconferencing call.”

light on your feet

how did it take decades
for the full moon to catch
you, the sun? your sunspots,
your corona flare of backlit hair
the dinner plate of light
on your chest, and your
shoulder blades as you
rise to turn down the heat
at 9pm, the moonlight is
music scoring your ribs,
and hip notch,
slips with my eyes
down to the horizon
of your fine, sculpted
delectable ankles, arches.

Hamilton ON/Achill, Co. Mayo, Ireland: There is a beautiful compactness to Hamilton (formerly Burlington) poet, publisher, editor Sacha Archer’s latest, the delicately-lovely Second Sight (Ireland: Redfoxpress, April 2025), a title subtitled “(36 Masks)” and produced as a hardcover edition, number 214 in the “C’est mon dada” series, a “collection for visual poetry, experimental texts and works influenced by Dada and Fluxus.” I’m fascinated by these blends of handwritten text and physical object, image, stitch and erasure, and would want to hear far more on his process around such a project, and how far he might take such structures in subsequent work. And while the production for such an object is wonderfully graceful, I do hope there is an opportunity to see these works in larger renderings at some point. As the introduction to the collection offers:

The work of Second Sight repurposes facsimiles of so-called famous/canonical MSS to create masks in what is both a gesture of looking backward and forward. While reconsidering the manuscripts themselves, their relevance and legibility (handwriting and content) to the contemporary reader, the act of creating masks transforms the MSS into surface matter or, raw material, which is to say, the concrete. The mask, being a loaded tool both for its intended use as a transformative piece of costume and for its trans-cultural historical presence, not to mention the colonial exoticization of African masks met in Modernism, primarily in the work of Picasso, makes of the mask a powerful vessel for a leap of faith which is the blind gesture forward, concretizing the MSS via cutting and the addition of banal (read totemic) objects into masks which cannot be worn, but which may reveal.

Stuart Ross, Proper Tales Press

Kingston ON: If you’ve never encountered any publications from Kingston writer, editor and publisher Michael e. Casteels, through his Puddles of Sky Press, I would highly recommend: at any small press fair you might encounter Casteels at his table, quietly staping, cutting, folding and assembling small publications throughout the day, throughout the afternoon. Two of his latest include the envelope STUMPT 7 (64 copies; June 2025) and the Japanese-sewn STUMPT issue eight (60 copies; June 2025), all hand-stamped (echoing jwcurry’s own infamous production, through his 1cent series and other productions via Room 302 Books) by the publisher himself. There is a kind of care, an attention, to publications and processes such as these that photocopied items are simply unable to replicate: consider that this is not sixty-some copies of a single poem, but sixty-some times the publisher hand-printed each poem, each line, in the same way on each slice of carved paper. One has to admire the patience, and the attention, as well as the craft. STUMPT 7 is made up of three poems on cards, one per card: an untitled poem by Hamilton writer Gary Barwin, BC poet Dale Tracy’s “Soft Growth,” and Kingston poet Allison Chisholm’s “Attachment Unavailable,” which I photographed, below:

Most small press publications are very good at offering different elements of pieces by emerging, and established writers, and Casteels works a very nice balance as well, but working from a far different pool of writers than might ever appear across mainstream publishing. STUMPT issue eight, produced with hand-sewn binding, offers a poem each by Keaton Studebaker, John Grey, John Repp, daniel f. bradley, and, on the back cover, which I photographed, below, this piece by David Romanda: