ottawa small press book fair co-founder James Spyker + Ottawa poet Grant Wilkins
Montreal QC/Ottawa ON: It is always good to see
new work from Ottawa poet and performer Grant Wilkins [catch a recent essay he wrote on his work here], and his latest chapbook (and to my immediate knowledge, his first non-above/ground press chapbook, beyond the privately printed hardcover The
Kamouraska Codex: A Preliminary Translation with Commentary that he
self-produced in 2019 in an edition of fifteen copies) is the chapbook-length
sequence LEGENDARY THINGS (in which Phyllis Webb sings Motörhead to Basho)
(Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2025), a sequence “variously gathered,
sifted, nicked or otherwise drawn” from Webb’s The Vision Tree
(Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1982), Basho’s On Love and Barley – Haiku of
Basho (Penguin Books, 1985) “and the lyrics of various songs by Motörhead
(Lemmy Kilnister et al.).” “That weather-beaten skeleton / at the secret heart
of your poem / has nowhere to hide,” he writes, to open the second page of the
sequence. Half a page down, offering: “Laying there drunk on the cobblestones /
I studied your graceful script / Sans serif and righteously stoned [.]”
There is something quite fascinating in the way Wilkins approaches his recombinations, finding new threads through not only the source material he selects, but the collision of what might otherwise seem contradictory sources, from “The echoes of music and poetry / are shredded by summer’s end / and the bombs going off at night” to “I’ve lost my passion / for burning skies / and riders wearing black [.]” There are other poets working creative work through similar processes of recombination, providing both original works and threads of critical response to their source materials, including a couple of recent titles such as Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Toronto poet R. Kolewe A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023) [see my review of such here], not to mention Philadelphia poet and critic Laynie Browne’s ongoing work [see an interview I did with her on such here; see my review of her latest here]. Wilkins is doing some interesting things, and I very much hope he keeps going. I want to see what he does next.
Ottawa poet (and Brick Books tabler) Manahil Bandukwala and Ottawa poet Mahaila Smith
London/Toronto ON: Okay, so Baseline Press wasn’t
actually at the small press fair this time around, but this chapbook landed in
the mail around about the same time (and they’ve been at fairs before, so it
still totally counts). The latest from the press is What if Maybe and other poems (July 2025) by Toronto-based writer Salma Hussain, a poet and fiction
writer, author of the debut young adult novel The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan
(Tundra/Random House, 2022). A sleek collection of nine poems, the pieces
in What if Maybe and other poems follow a trajectory of the narrative,
first-person lyric, but one that holds to smallness, to precision; one that
speaks in points of light across distances, step upon step upon step. “Math was
not math until / the Greeks saw the
value in how the Arabs used zero,” she writes, to open the poem “THE VALUE OF
ZERO,” “They needed zero / for calculating prayer times / for weighing za’ka:t
dues / for shirking interest // but also / they were counting stars / mapping
patterns in the light beyond their grasp [.]”
I’m curious, intrigued, even, about Hussain’s lyric precisions, and would be interested to see what she might do in the space of a full-length collection. Her lines pull the stretch between small and expansive, often simultaneously, in interesting ways. There’s a fine line between her poem’s ungencies and propulsion, and the ability to hold to the moment, to stand peacefully and utterly still. Or, the first two stanzas of the poem “SCREAMSONG,” that begin:
Belligerent with the
nurses I pulled
the feeding tube out of
my nose
like a birthday party
magician pulling out yards of silky
red ribbon
from an upturned top hat
The white coats recommend
a two-week residential stay
at a physio rehab
clinic but I insisted I be sent back
home
I felt then and I know
today that I have two little daughters who unknowingly
unwittingly are the only gurus
I need(ed) for my healing
We signed a mountain of
release forms
liability waivers other papers
and my trembling husband bit
his lip his tongue the entire drive
home
No comments:
Post a Comment