Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Cunningham, Unsworth, Koss, Fong, Robinson, Ghaffar, Daneri + Hofmann,

Anticipating the release next week of the twenty-fifth issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the twenty-fourth issue: Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri and Ava Hofmann.

Interviews with contributors to the first twenty-three issues (over one hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming twenty-fifth issue features new writing by: Mary Kasimor, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Jason Christie, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Donato Mancini, Guy Birchard and émilie kneifel.

And of course, copies of the first twenty-three issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

the new quarterly #110

I’ve been reading through the most recent issue of The New Quarterly lately, another in the shortlist of Canadian literary journals I’ve become rather fond of, with the benefit of the fact that my girlfriend is a subscriber, featuring impressive new works by Elizabeth Hay, Soraya Peerbaye and Asher Ghaffar. I’m always amazed at just how much I like in each issue, reminded of just how much many literary journals don’t really appeal to me these days. There was even this poem by Patricia Young, in the midst of six others of her works.







Over Lunch I Ask Three Friends What Their
Mothers Said To them About Sex

It was a funny way for God to arrange things.

Would you like to see my diaphragm?

Here’s the book on chickens. (Patricia Young)

Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay has an interview in this issue, conducted by Hannah Albert, alongside two creative non-fiction pieces, a form I’ve longed for her to return to. Her “city as redhead” essay on Ottawa is one I’ve been fortunate enough to already read, submitted to Chaudiere Books some time ago for an anthology of Ottawa writers writing on parts of their city (the book is still building, currently). In the interview, she talks further on her part of our shared city:

My children hate Ottawa. I defend it, sometimes tepidly. I’ve never fallen in love with Ottawa. I am fond of it. One longs to fall in love with a place. My children would say I’m settling for too little and they may be right. I am comfortable here and there are views that soothe and delight me. If you stand on Pretoria Bridge and look down the canal in the winter, you could be in a painting by Breughel. Close to Ottawa, very accessible, are lovely woods and fabulous swimming lakes. And the city itself is fairly slow-paced and relatively quiet, which suits me. Also, history-filled.

A few years ago, before she relocated to Toronto, poet Soraya Peerbaye took a poetry workshop I was running at Collected Works. She was already well-developed in her craft, and needed (I thought) someone outside of her immediate circle to tell her how good she already was.

You are sure of nothing except lunar phases, and rainfall.

The transcript ends at the edge of the eelgrass meadow:
you measure the exact salinity; the mineral composition,
from the water you take from her, against

a thin white line hemming a girl’s jacket.

Everything resists interpretation.

You read silt, how it accumulates on the green blade,
the side sheltered from the current. (Soraya Peerbaye)

It’s very good to see her moving out into further publishing, with already a few significant publications, from TNQ to Red Silk, as well as a first poetry collection forthcoming from Goose Lane Editions. When might this book finally appear? She is included in the current issue alongside Joan MacLeod and Heather Spears, each writing about the murder of BC teen Reena Virk, from Heather Spears’ poems, a section of the play The Shape of a Girl by MacLeod, and excerpts from Peerbaye’s “Tell.” As she writes in her part of Grace Johnstone’s interview/article “Writing Against Absence”:

Soraya: I am reading other writers who have responded to that question [of witnessing and the artist’s responsibility to the historical record] through their life’s work, and I don’t feel I can add to their profound insight. The only thing I can say is that the “historical record” is a tricky concept. It is not neutral; it comes from a particular morality. In [relation to the story of Reena Virk’s death], I feel a responsibility to the transcript—to the record of the witnesses’ words—whether they lied or told the truth, whether they remained silent.

I won’t write out the whole piece, but Asher Ghaffar’s poem “The Master Bedroom” is magnificent, and worth the price of the issue alone. Listen to this, stanza four of five:

He is getting married, so the painters
arrived, or his mother is getting married
because she is arranging his marriage.
He is already married to the walls
they’re scraping. His mother is getting
married without his consent and he is being
scraped without the wall’s consent.

The issue also begins with an appeal to write to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Hon. James Moore, to keep literary journal funding going, and journals themselves alive. Even if you don’t care for some of these magazines specifically, you should do this.

Asher Ghaffar’s Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music

Ever since he was a child, he knew he was meant to learn how to ride the tiger, like Durga. He is not a Hindu – much less a shaman. In deep sleep, there was insentient bliss. From this he discerned that the self has no fixed boundary. It could wander into other countries, into disparate yarns. It was unmarked in dreams. It didn’t belong to race or class. It was borderless. (“On the Question of a Borderless Body”)

Anyone who wants to see a poetry collection working a more complex construction than usual should be going through Toronto writer Asher Ghaffar’s first collection, Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2008). Writing the body and the land, Ghaffar writes locations into dislocations, where one has neither completely left one place or completely entered the next, exploring the body through space and a body of poems organized into five sections, writing “Induction,” “Deduction,” “Conduction,” “Production” and “Disruption.” Ghaffar’s Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music is a narrative that threads through immigration and the dream of immigration, writing such wonderful dreams that sometimes fall in on themselves. This is Ghaffar writing between Canada and Pakistan, and exploring the space where language and cultures meet, clash, overlap and even begin to blend, whether writing “O Canada of hinge narratives. O Canada of opening and closing doors.” as the last line to the first poem of the final section, “Predictably, the House Was Not There” (pp 81-86), or writing:

Ears become eyes. Eyes become touch. The senses become a recipe
From a house torn down, a distraught man-as-child drinking curdled
Milk in Amristar where he met two Canadians
And gave them his Atwood. (“Dog Days”)

With final poem “Pre face” and penultimate poem titled “Chapter One,” it is as though Ghaffar has managed a poetry collection that wraps the end up into the beginning, that ends at its own point of origin, deliberately disrupting whatever narrative threads have existed up to this point. Are endings, still, what one expects in a collection of poems?

The name of ours caught almost,
almost terrible. We will not hear it
turned inside out, frozen for a moment
at a threshold. We will not hear absence
upon fossilized absence, the last footsteps
to leave the room, the strum of blood
through vessel upon vessel.
How the body persists,
building itself on the tomb of labour. (“Meanwhile, A Continent Away”)