Ongoing notes: late August, 2026: Elizabeth Clark Wessel + Joseph Donato,

Ah, the summer’s almost gone, isn’t it? Leonard knew what he was talking about.

I keep mentioning this fall’s ottawa small press book fair on November 14^th, as well as the Fisher Rare Book fair on September 19 in Toronto, but I’ll see you at either or both, yes?

Stockholm Sweden/Normal IL: At slightly more than fifty pages, it seems hardly fair to refer to Sweden-based American poet Elizabeth Clark Wessel’s latest, Everything Small Is Moving (Normal IL: Spoonfuls Chapbooks, 2026), as a chapbook, a title that follows her full-length debut None of It Belongs to Me (Boston MA: Game Over Books, 2024) [see my review of such here], as well as at least one other chapbook, first one thing, then the other (2018), published through Daniel Handler’s Per Diem Press [see my review of such here]. The poems assembled here have heft; are short-lined, punchy; assembled as long, extended and accumulated sentences into formidable poem-shapes. “I have given my best years to the banal,” the opening poem, “Happier 2,” begins, “To the long morning and the light a certain way / To daydreams and procrastinations / The hours of mid-afternoon have been like a drug / So has listening to the same song on repeat / It went fastly / The months collapsed like lungs [.]” Her poems are remarkable assemblages, filled with striking moments that hold together in impressive ways, such as this couplet that falls into the title poem, writing:

I’m writing this on the phone
I use to keep you or throw you away

Toronto ON: I’m intrigued by Toronto poet Joseph Donato’s latest, the chapbook-length NO ONE SHOULD BE HAPPY WHEN I’M NOT (self-published, 2026), a first-person lyric of monologues and performative gestures; a flailing sense of the line contained only through perseverance and craft. Across lines that can cut quick, Donato snides and mopes across an observational lyric of mood, one that progresses across youth and a lived-in experience. “I’m at that age when the world’s against me / I’m face down in the swimming pool,” begins the poem “THE WORST THING TO EVER / HAPPEN HAS HAPPENED TO ME,” “Arthur frees the sword then stabs himself to death / He’s so dramatic // sunk-cost fallacy / dunk tank clown [.]”

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR
CRUISE SHIP SINKS 

Is it someone’s job to stop the music
Death scored by disco drowns
the screaming but now music
is violent, too 

How do I learn to breathe underwater
how do I live in a fishbowl 

Maybe I should have been scared
of the ocean but God
I love to swim 

Someone please
cut the music
the party’s
over