Ongoing notes: mid-September, 2025: Claudia Coutu Radmore + Kim and Léa Roger Abi Zeid Daou,

September, once more. Keep in mind: The Factory Reading Series later this month, featuring Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O’Reilly, who is coming up from Texas, Michael Lithgow (who recently returned to Ottawa from half a decade in Edmonton) and Ottawa poet Ben Ladouceur (launching his new above/ground press chapbook). There are probably other updates to keep track of as well, but it can be hard to recall everything. I say: check out www.bywords.ca

Ottawa ON/Montreal QC: There are moments going through Ottawa poet Claudia Coutu Radmore’s work that I’m occasionally surprised by, whether the chapbook I produced through above/ground press, or this latest title, someone is lying (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2025); moments I’m surprised her work isn’t better known than it is. Over the years, she’s had chapbooks I’ve heard of through multiple presses, from Alfred Gustav Press to Apt. 9 Press to Shoreline Press to Aeolus House Press to Catkin Press (and even garnered a bpNichol Chapbook Award), but full-length collections I rarely hear of, as though she’s finding presses that are underselling the quality of her work. someone is lying is a collection of poem-blocks, each piece set as single stanza prose poems. Her poems offer a propulsion, one with precise angles and a delightful attention to sound and collision. Listen to the opening of the poem “raw vocabulary and water,” for example, that jangles across the lyric: “from a place beyond thought / where language originates in / where it resides procedure takes / us halfway there after that w / need raw something feels each / thought crumbles falls to pieces […]” Going through this work reminds me of Amanda Earl, another Ottawa poet doing stellar work, under the radar for long enough that it begins to frustrate, wondering what certain editors might be thinking. A smart editor at a small press, I should think, should be putting some of these chapbooks together into a full-length collection.

CO: I’ve been moving through siblings Kim and Léa Roger Abi Zeid Daou’s collaboration, The Taste of Sun (Ethel Zine, 2025). Both are PhD candidates and extensive creatives, with Kim also the author of the chapbook You are Memory, and I Archive (Cactus Press, 2023). The Taste of Sun is a collection of four pieces of short prose with an epilogue. “My dad tells me to always remember the big picture—the point—while also adding my special touch.” opens the title piece. “This story is the perfect example of a flashbulb memory, which I learned about in an Introduction to Cognition class.” This is a book about family, about fathers; a heartfelt exploration and declaration of love and admiration. “My dad was always ahead of time. He felt in his heart,” continues the title piece, “what is right, equitable, and just, long before the culture catches up. He taught me love is beyond time.” These first-person pieces are curious in their approach to form, a blend of postcard fiction and first-person postcard memoir pieces. As well, I would be curious as to what the original prompt for such a project was, and if the two of them have been working on further of these. I could see a full-length collection of these, certainly.

Epilogue

On our walk

Dad hands me a daisy.

He holds my hand.

And closes his eyes.

In his warm palm

I feel close to my heart.

I asked what he thought,

As he looks at the blue of the sky.

He says thank you thank you thank you.