Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three : Claudia Souto Cuello (trans. by the author + Stuart Ross,

[Mia Morgan of Coven Editions and Dr. Dessa Bayrock of post ghost press]

[see the first part of these notes here; see the second part of these notes here]

Cobourg ON/Switzerland: Every few months, there emerges further conversation how there isn’t enough literary translation occurring through Canadian publishing (Jérôme Melançon conducted a really compelling interview recently with Yilin Wang, for example, posted over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics), so it was good to see Swiss poet Claudia Souto Cuello’s chapbook, A braced triptych, translated from the French by Stuart Ross & the author (Proper Tales Press, 2025). As the author biography mentions, Cuello “inherited the Spanish and French languages from her Spanish parents living in Switzerland. After working for years as a vegetable grower, she published her first collection of poetry, Marina (éditions du goudron et des plumes, 2023).” The pieces in the collection exist as three poem-clusters that could be three poems, or three cluster-sections—“Cathedral of Leaves,” “A little patch of yellow wall” and “The Ornaments”—each of which exist through a blend of prose-stanzas and individual lines. The structure offers a curious counterpoint of structures within poems, within pieces, that play multiple rhythms, narrative purposes, and declarative sentences. Whereas Cuello’s poems lean into prose poem structures, there’s elements of the extended first-person meditative and declarative line of such as the late Etel Adnan (1925-2021), working a kind of lyric diary of the moment, running through the light and the dark of the current moment, or at least the moments across the time of composition. Might Ross be working to get a full collection of these happening? I would certainly hope so.

When the fog arrived, the timeworn lavoir and the weathered fountain tucked their necks into the hunched shoulders. Alone, circling the trees, tree by tree, I hung my words on the little coat racks of their leaves, like a little dictionary made of dry branches. And so it came to me that I had nothing left to say. Trapped in this bottle-green, to be drunk before winter arrives, my suspended words looked down on me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

{Before the light followed me, I stepped in}