Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one: Bardia Sinaee + George Bowering,

Another fair has come and gone! Thanks to everyone who participated, from exhibitors to volunteers to readers to audience! And did you see I made shortbread? Be sure to save the date for this November, when the fair will turn thirty-one years old. That’s pretty exciting, yes? I’m already working on dates for June and November 2026 (which feels a million years away, I know). And of course, see my reviews from last fall’s thirtieth anniversary ottawa small press fair here (parts one, two, three), or last fall’s Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (parts one, two, three, four) or even my notes from last spring’s ottawa small press book fair (parts one, two, three). So much small and micro press activity! Here are the first of my notes from what I picked up this time around:

Ottawa ON: The latest from Ottawa poet Bardia Sinaee, author of Intruder (Anansi, 2021) [see my review of such here], is the chapbook Flinch (2025), a title, according to the colophon, “was co-published by Skunkworks and Horsebroke Press [a press run by Ottawa poet Jeff Blackman] in Ottawa in May 2025 and distributed as issue 33 of These Days Zine.” There’s almost a wistful distance, a wistful quality, to these poems, offering a bit of distance across first-person observations so deeply personal, even intimate. “I can’t / remember why / I walked into / this room,” the poem “Still Life” begins, “with its / packed-away smell / & painting / of a water mill [.]” There’s such a lovely and delicate nuance to these short musings, these short narratives, one that holds an edge but not by displaying that edge; one that provides a clarity beyond clarity, and into a far deeper understanding of beauty, and life, such as the last three stanzas of the two-page final poem in the collection, “Love Poem,” that reads: “I don’t / miss the cancer / or the ward / but the time / we snuck into // the shower / we thought / would be our / last together / I loved shampooing / your hair // it was like / breathing / under water [.]”

Household items

after receiving the literary prize
I upgraded to ocean-friendly tuna
I finally cleaned the microwave
then thinking better of it
ordered a new microwave 

spruce tips in antique pinch bowls
reed diffusers in lavender oil
I curated the air
carrying on like I had always
known refinement 

we are instructed to do the negative
the positive is already
within us, wrote Kafka
who would have liked
to be a loaf of hard bread 

that’s why I keep my mind
smooth as a pearl
grown from a splinter
a poem is not a wild animal
roving the page 

a poem is not a journey
it is always already here
anyone can access it
with only a few household items
& ten thousand dollars

Phil Hall, Canadian poet

Vancouver BC/Cobourg ON: From Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press comes an odd assortment of poems from Vancouver writer and troublemaker George Bowering, the chapbook Phil Hall (2025), a collection with a photograph of Perth, Ontario writer and editor Phil Hall by Paul Elter on the front and back cover, as well as within, although the poems in this collection may or may not have anything to do with that particular Phil Hall. These are poems by Canadian poet George Bowering that reference Canadian poet Phil Hall, playing with a slightly fictional Phil Hall that may or may not resemble the actual writer. As the opening piece, “Notes on the Life of the Canadian Poet Phil Hall” begins: “Phil Hall once took a jar of sand from a beach on the west coast of Costa Rica to Chad and emptied it into the Sahara. A companion reported him as saying, ‘Find that, you arseholes.’” These pieces are delightfully odd, with narratives running from the entirely plausible into the completely implausible, running a fine line between the two until, of course, Bowering takes the whole surrealist play up a level. With poem-titles including such as “Phil Hall and the Chickadee,” “Phil Hall and My Mother,” “Phil Hall’s Macaw” and “The Mallade of Phil Hall,” this is a delightfully odd and entertaining small collection, one I entirely recommend you pick up a copy of. Although, I probably should have asked: What does Canadian poet Phil Hall think of all of this?

Phil’s Fiction

Over a warm October week in Oliver I wrote a terrific love poem to my wife, who was visiting friends in Cumberland.
            Then one afternoon it rained, so there was no orchard work, so Phil Hall sat down for an hour and wrote what I knew was a better poem for her.
            They were nice about it. They sent me a postcard from Cumberland.
            I decided to quit poetry and wrote a story about lost love and orchard work.
            Phil wrote a story while having lunch with some of my Vancouver friends. It won a prize in a Victoria literary magazine.
            Over seven years I wrote a novel about a matricide in Vancouver. It made the short list in a national creative writing contest. Phil came in the winner. And wrote three other books on the short list under pen names.
            They sent me a nice postcard from Ottawa.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Bardia Sinaee

Bardia Sinaee was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives in Toronto. His poems have appeared in magazines across Canada and in several editions of Best Canadian Poetry. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph, where he was nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medal. His first book is Intruder (House of Anansi, 2021).

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook, published ten years ago by In/Words, gave me some of what I wanted, which was validation, and a lot of what I needed, which was friends. At the time, In/Words ran a magazine, a micro-press, weekly writers’ circles and monthly open mics. My poems were all over the place, but more importantly they emerged out of a constellation of friendships and rituals that gave me a social context. I’d never been truly close to anybody after my family and I left Iran. In/Words changed that, and the chapbook was a token of that change. My first full-length book, Intruder, emerged out of a different set of circumstances: precarity, displacement, cancer, fascism, COVID, all the fun stuff.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I wrote some poems in high school, and worked on poetry, fiction and journalism as an undergrad. At some point in those early days, I found I wasn’t interested in images or characters or narratives as much as I was interested in working with sentences. The sentence is a foundational and infinitely pliable structural unit for building meaning. So I spent ten years using sentences to make poems, resulting in Intruder. More recently I’ve also enjoyed creating characters, settings and events, which is to say writing fiction.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I like to do one thing at a time. A piece will start quickly, but fleshing it out is usually a slow process. I also revise as I write — for better or worse the two things are inseparable for me — and this slows me down, but it means the first completed draft already includes significant revisions. I like to jot down notes, though I rarely refer back to them. I don’t really work on projects.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I’m drawn to language without provenance. A voice or a phrase gets stuck in my head, an inexplicable string of words appended to an idle thought, or something I misheard on the bus. I take that fragment of language and roll it along the floor of my mind until it accumulates other detritus. I try to invoke the voice that would produce such speech and see what else it says. I pair it with unrelated fragments. All of these approaches necessarily incorporate the world into the poem. I go through phases. Eventually I collect the poems into a chapbook or book so I can share them with people.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy doing readings. Of course the best part of a reading isn’t the reading; it’s the part after the poet finally shuts up, when you get to catch up with people and joke around and be part of a loud, lively community. The readings themselves aren’t part of my creative process, but that communal feeling is invaluable.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I don’t pursue a particular question when writing just as I don’t pursue a particular tree when walking through the park, but I still like to walk among the trees. Some questions I return to in my work, albeit obliquely: Who are we? What do we value? How do we draw meaning from what we do? What are we scared of? Where do we find joy?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I suppose the only absolute obligation any writer has is to write. The “larger culture” seems more ravenous than ever in its propensity for recuperating and nullifying any opposition to it. Corporations exploiting slave labour in Asia and Africa underwrite arts organizations across North America. Weapons manufacturers and oil companies publicly vow to advance racial justice. You have to build a wall around yourself to withstand this barrage of hypocrisy, to live and work, and you become atomized. I hope writers can help alleviate people’s alienation from one another. They’ve certainly helped me.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Both. While I try to be a thoughtful writer, I make a million little decisions that I’m not entirely conscious of. My editor for Intruder, Kevin Connolly, was very good at subtly making me conscious of what I was doing. That was essential. The difficulty of editing lies in making the work more considered, more refined, without extinguishing the spontaneous spirit and sense of play that guided it into being. But ultimately it’s art, not air-traffic control, so if you make a bad call it’s not a tragedy.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Epictetus said, “If you want to be a writer, write.” This is helpful advice if you take it very literally. That is, if you want to be a writer, get in the habit of writing anything at all. You don’t have to pour your heart out. Take a look outside and write down what you see, like someone sketching a bowl of fruit. How do you approach it? Top to bottom? Left to right? Pick a news story and situate yourself in it. What do you hear, smell, feel? Get in the habit of considering these questions. This won’t necessarily produce great writing, but the goal is to exercise coordination between different parts of your brain. Then when a great idea comes along, when your heart is ready to burst, you will have the skills to write about it.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It depends on my work schedule, which right now is largely out of my hands. I can’t afford to turn down work. If I don’t get many classes to teach, I sit down and write as much as I can. If I’m teaching and tutoring a lot, I usually don’t have the time or mental energy to sit at my desk and treat writing like serious labour, but I’ll try to get in a state of mind more conducive to writing, such as by going for a walk.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I like to read and I like to walk around outside. Neither one is always generative, but they’re both enjoyable.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Fenugreek.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes, all of those things. Plus economics.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

There are too many important writers to name. Some writers I’ve enjoyed lately are Edgar Allan Poe, Simone Weil and Donald Barthelme.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would love to see the Pacific Ocean.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would have liked to be an ornithologist. People who don’t like birds can go to hell.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Writing gives my life meaning. It helped me process my cancer diagnosis and years of treatment, it’s a means for apprehending the simultaneously life-giving and alienating conditions of modernity into which I was born — and it’s fun. Writing is no substitute for love or human interaction, but I haven’t found another pursuit from which I derive so much spiritual gratification.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Great book: Remainder (Tom McCarthy, 2005). Great film: Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954).

19 - What are you currently working on?

Stories and poems. If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll also read my book.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Bardia Sinaee, Intruder

 

You pulled my hair because you care.
Suffering won’t make me beautiful like the people
buying menthol chest rubs at the pharmacy 

or the trees that drop used band-aids everywhere
then feign death for a season.
I grind my teeth not knowing what to say to you. (“BAND-AID”)

Award-winning Toronto-based former Ottawa poet (and In/Words editor) Bardia Sinaee’s long-awaited book-length debut is Intruder (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2021), a collection of smart, crafted, lyric narrative poems, rife with image and storytelling. “This / is my desert island mood,” he writes, as part of the poem “ALTHOUGH I AM ALWAYS TALKING,” “as free, surely, as I have / ever felt.” Later on in the same poem, offering that “Love / outside of habit / is occasional, punctuated // with fatigue, / like the weather.” The poems that make up Intruder offer an assemblage of short scenes or stories composed via the narrative lyric, thick with verve and detail. “You’re in a quiet place between / school and unemployment,” he writes, to open the poem “HIGH PARK,” “lying / down in the park with a scarf / over your face. I’ve brought a big, / boring book to press flowers in, though / these dandelions are awfully / juicy, don’t you think?”

Intruder is structured in three untitled sections of shorter poems, bookended at either end of the collection by a single poem, both of which speak to blood, bloodwork and injections. “If you have trouble keeping track of time,” he writes, as part of the opening poem, “BLOOD WORK,” later offering that “No one will hold it against you / It’s like when you were younger / Someone is keeping an eye on you / It’s getting dark and someone is driving you home [.]”

As the press release presents, Sinaee works structural influences from a number of poets: “The first section, consisting mostly of plain-spoken poems about city life, is influenced by the poems of James Schuyler and Karen Solie. The second spools out in a sequence of imagistic sixteen-line poems that progress via quiet observation and associative logic, and it takes its cue from works like John Ashbery’s Shadow Train and Ben Lerner’s The Lichtenberg Figures. The poems in the third section are slower, minimalistic, and aphoristic, at times reminiscent of the work and style of Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe.” While I understand that the bulk of those potentially picking up a debut collection by a Canadian poet might be previously unaware of their work, but that is an enormous amount of weight to put on a debut; I know there are certain arguments to be made for placing a book within a particular context, or offering how a book might be structured, but Anansi has published enough poetry titles over the years that some of us might already suspect the quality and potential poetics and structures of a poetry title with the Anansi logo upon. I would also be curious to know how much of this, how many of these names, were offered by Sinaee himself as his own structural influence, or offered after the fact by another. The poems are more than strong enough to exist on their own, without overlaying such a weight of expectation. “How harrowing the prospect,” he writes, to open the poem “DEPOSITION,” “there may be no clandestine agency after all, / only our clamouring until we’ve built / something we’d sooner take up arms for // than name.”

Pain interrupts my thinking. Drowsiness leads me in loops. I give up on Moby Dick, then on Teach Yourself Mindfulness. My head aches all the time. If the internet works well, usually before and after the daytime hours when the outpatients downstairs are using it, I watch old sitcoms on my laptop. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul …. I check my email. I apply for EI sickness benefits. Meals are either overcooked or refrigerated to the point of near-freezing because the absence of white blood cells means I have no immune system. I bear my being without defenses. Tuna sandwiches, inscrutable stews and steamed vegetables arrive on a tray beside a cold, unripe banana beaded with condensation. I give up on The Big Book of Quick Crosswords. The same people deliver and collect the trays, politely avoiding eye contact. (“TWELVE STOREYS”)

Throughout the collection, Sinaee plays with the notion of intrusion, sidling up to ideas of the outsider, the intruder and the interloper, from his experiences with cancer and two and a half years of chemotherapy, the history of the Middle East, culture and the solitude of cities, and simply living in the world as a human being. How does one see the world as from the outside, or even one’s own body? “This is not the travesty of early trials,” he writes, to close the poem “ABERRATION,” “this is not the oblong rug with eyes, the horned flower spraying blood, / or the strip of skin inching back toward its dish to die—only / a tentative being, translucent and exhibiting adaptive boundaries.” How does one consider the intruder, when one’s body itself is the world? Sinaee works through and references a variety of boundaries and intruders, and the health and moral implications that run throughout, from the invasive and destructive, to the boundary itself protecting that which has itself been rendered toxic. Referencing the prior American President to open the poem “NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN,” he writes “Only the truth will stand on the other side, / and I am the truth itself.”

The Capilano Review 3.41 (Summer 2020)

Spiritual

We asked the world if it was alive. “Oh,” the walls said, “we aren’t religious, but we are spiritual.” We thought we must be hallucinating, but then the wine rumbled in our stomachs, our lamp reached back to Persia, and the bath tried to drown us. “Once the world turns on, good luck turning it off,” said the drugs in our palm. “Plug your ears,” the future said, “hold your hands in front of the screen, close the ancient texts, none of it will help. Good luck.” (Liam Siemens)

I spent a week away from my desk, which allowed me to catch up on a bit of my journal reading, including going through The Capilano Review 3.41 (Summer 2020). I’m always interested to see what The Capilano Review has going on, and this issue is their “open issue,” featuring multiple works of poetry, prose, artwork and interviews. As Matea Kulić offers in her “Editor’s Note” on this issue’s themeless theme: “We soon noted, however, even admits pieces we had initially considered light or humorous in tone, a shadow side—an uncanny edge, a surrealist blow. Mourning, both individual and collective, emerged as a major theme. While inevitably ‘there is this holding on’ (Andrea Actis), the contributors to this issue consider how one form of life must be grieved for another to grow. As Andrea Javor aka Mystic Sandwich writes, it ‘isn’t the end of the world; it’s the end of a world.’”

Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton and Toronto poet (formerly Ottawa, where he was part of In/Words Magazine and Press) Bardia Sinaee co-won the 2019 Robin Blaser Poetry Prize and both have poems included in this issue. When Conyer is good, she is very good: “A crowd is a sharp cut in the rocks. / What came in on the air this morning? / Dung and past lives. Rejected // pollen, poor seeds, such statistics / for life, and we don’t even know how / water is drawn up.” (“Habitual”). I am very curious to see Sinaee’s full-length debut, Intruder, which is scheduled for spring 2021 with House of Anansi Press. “It was the summer of whippits and ketamine,” he writes, to close the third of his four poems in the issue, “Cadillac,” “Every other guy had a Goku tattoo // but only I could ride around on a cloud / because I was pure of heart [.]”

Otherwise, much of the work that jumped out of me from this issue were prose poems. For example, I’m gratified to see new work by former editor Andrea Actis, along with the discovery in her bio that she has a debut poetry collection out next spring from Brick Books. Having only seen bits and pieces of her work over the years, I am eager to see what this debut might hold. Her extended prose sequence, “Soul Ash,” is quite magnificent, and begins:

And you know you get everybody you want in there. And you can keep it and spread it. Yet I feel that somehow this might be just having no material parts of them. Like a really smart person making the argument for her. So then that’s blinded by his belief that it is soul to these people? So very. Dispersed. But what sense slews why soul might simply be what I remember of someone and love of them? I remind her why my love no I don’t have investments I’m looking to protect them.

Another highlight had to be the shorter prose sequence “DEEPING YELLOWS,” a piece by Sheung-King (an author with a novel out in October with Book*hug) that remained with me for longer than I had expected. The turns in the piece are quite compelling. As the piece begins:

I light a joint, which is illegal. Getting high in the shower with me is a bucket. The bucket is upside down. My phone is playing the song Yellow Magic (1978). Warm water from the shower lands on the back of my neck, runs down my chest, and drips from the tip of my penis onto the bucket, making an empty sound. Years later, I hear the same sound in the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017). In one scene, Sakamoto is seen standing in the rain holding a bucket over his head and listening to the sound of the rain landing on the bucket. His bucket is blue. Mine is yellow.

Montreal writer Gail Scott is interviewed at length by Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain, an interview conducted at the Quartermains during a reading tour Scott was doing last fall. The interview, centred around a newly-published revised edition of Heroine moves into some interesting territory, including tying Scott’s work and attention to more contemporary engagements, from Robert Glück and San Francisco’s New Narrative, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Richard Wagamese, Jordan Abel and Liz Howard, and Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be?. The interview closes:

MQ: You’ve mentioned that avant-garde practice has risen up and fallen back at various points in the twentieth century. Can you talk a little more about that?

GS: The avant-garde reappears cyclically, in conjunction with other factors. Often you hear people referring to the notion of avant-garde as dead or passé. I agree that the term is problematic, but it is useful for demonstrating that the emergence of radical poets, those whose sense of urgency is forcément in relation to the socio-political situation of a given era, is inevitable. The avant-garde emerges in company with radical social movements that, themselves, advance and recede. Its lessons are eventually partially absorbed, as are those of social contestation. I started writing in a period of significant social change that spawned artists and writers looking for new modes of expression. In art and politics, there is reform and revolution. The former is well-meaning, liberal, and not prepared to give up profiting from power structures such as capitalism and racism. Then there are movements, and they often come from justice-seeking minority groups, that understand huge upheaval is required for there to be real, systematic change. I believe we have come back to that time again, and with it a new generation of artists, a new sense of urgency.

And did you know that there’s a new biography of Robin Blaser? I’m still trying to get my hands on a copy, but Jami Macarty reviews it, at the end of this issue: A Literary Biography of Robin Blaser: Mechanic of Splendor, by Miriam Nichols (Palgrave, 2019). As she offers: “Nichol’s biography vitalizes Blaser, the poet, and his poetry, while also offering particulars of his life in his words, such as the first time he opened ‘the door to a mysterious man with a mustache, dark glasses, a trench coat, sandals, his feet painted purple for some incredible reason.’ That ‘mysterious man’: Jack Spicer. When Blaser and Stan Persky broke up, Blaser complained that Persky ‘took the curtains.’ Nichols also shares particulars from her personal history as Blaser’s student, colleague, and friend, such as ‘Blaser’s preferred white’—Chablis, and his penchant for shopping—‘he found a pink jacket that became a favorite.’ All the while, Nichols stays wholly true to her intention to offer a literary biography, pairing Blaser’s ‘distinctive discourse of poetry’ with her distinctive discourse of biography.”