Ongoing notes: The Fisher Small + Fine Press Fair (part one, : James Lindsay + Jenny Berkel,

Another Fisher fair! I’ve already posted my report on the event, and, unfortunately, I’m unable to get into Toronto further this fall for the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market or the TIFA small press fair [see my posts from last year], but don’t forget our ottawa small press book fair on November 14! With corresponding event the night prior at Anina’s Café, of course [details to reveal themselves soon, but readers with new chapbooks already include Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and Lisa Fishman]. Here are some notes from a couple of items I picked up this time around:

Toronto ON: Good to see new work from Toronto poet James Lindsay, the chapbook-length Choral Coral Carol (Knife Fork Books, 2026), a single poem set as an extended accumulation of wayward, meditative lyrics set as long-lined couplets. There’s such a music to his responses, as the poem begins, immediately establishing his scene: “Here we are, wheat with no breeze, uniformed in unison / Primed and tuned yet starved of something sounding // Like a call and response, a staycation in lukewarm / Ominous spy waters. What have you been working on?” There’s a kind of catch-all element to the narrative progression, as though anything and everything is fodder for his particular lyric thought, one step and line immediately following another, across an element not only of song and lyric movement, but a process shared. As he writes, mid-way: “Careful / With the shapes you make your hands into when trying to move // Sound around. If we’re going to get this right, we’ll all have to / Make our voices stride to where the sun is stepping away from // Like the dancers we’re not allowed to distract, but hit their marks / In winking shimmers. Let’s make a line. Who cares who’s first?”

London/Toronto ON: From London,Ontario-based poet and singer-songwriter Jenny Berkel (and my introduction to her and her work) comes the chapbook Colossal Wreck (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), an assemblage of thirteen first-person narrative lyrics, and a follow-up to her chapbook debut, Grease Dogs (London ON: Baseline Press, 2021). “Between you we are pressed.” she writes, to open the poem “O Night, O Sky, O Sea,” “Beneath you we are puny // bags of blood rolling / your currents. We ooze // to you. Let loose / to you. Take your open // -ness as invitational, / a bitch in heat.” There’s a music to it, one propelled by lyric but held by action. There is such a direct and precise narrative line, perfectly aimed, to Berkel’s lyrics, one that shoots like an arrow, piercing the pure heart of any subject. “Inside a mouth run / out of air,” begins “Voice Lessons,” “sibilance / and hum. Serpentine / lullaby, soundless vowels, / a shape with nothing // born.”