Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two : Pearl Pirie, Sacha Archer + STUMPT 7 + issue eight,

[nina jane drystek, jwcurry + Chris Johnson doing the first of their two sound performances mid-fair]

[see the first part of these notes here]

Toronto ON/rural QC: From Quebec poet Pearl Pirie comes the chapbook we astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), a title the acknowledgements suggest “could be considered a sequel to Sex in Sevens (above/ground, Sept. 2016).” With a poetics that includes collage-movement and haiku, this small collection again works Pirie’s own familiar forms while expanding her nuance, her repertoire, of poetic assemblage, collision, sketch-notes and density. “inside the exquisite loss of everything / except where skin knows sweat,” begins the poem “vacation day,” “time and all else will be someone else’s problem, / here is birdsong and wave crash, // eyelash and breath, lips as if warmed silk / and a hiking up onto one elbow.” Her phrases almost read accumulatively, with the slight disconnect between each one, allowing the poem to exist in the collision between descriptive phrases. What amuses, as well, is Pirie’s further inclusion into the ongoing “Sex at 31” series [see my own notes on the origins of the project here, and my participation in same], her “sex at fifty,” a two-page poem that opens with “perhaps I have seen my last / set of menstrual cramps. // I never needed to collect / the whole bleeding set.” and ends with the couplet: “eight minutes until a / teleconferencing call.”

light on your feet

how did it take decades
for the full moon to catch
you, the sun? your sunspots,
your corona flare of backlit hair
the dinner plate of light
on your chest, and your
shoulder blades as you
rise to turn down the heat
at 9pm, the moonlight is
music scoring your ribs,
and hip notch,
slips with my eyes
down to the horizon
of your fine, sculpted
delectable ankles, arches.

Hamilton ON/Achill, Co. Mayo, Ireland: There is a beautiful compactness to Hamilton (formerly Burlington) poet, publisher, editor Sacha Archer’s latest, the delicately-lovely Second Sight (Ireland: Redfoxpress, April 2025), a title subtitled “(36 Masks)” and produced as a hardcover edition, number 214 in the “C’est mon dada” series, a “collection for visual poetry, experimental texts and works influenced by Dada and Fluxus.” I’m fascinated by these blends of handwritten text and physical object, image, stitch and erasure, and would want to hear far more on his process around such a project, and how far he might take such structures in subsequent work. And while the production for such an object is wonderfully graceful, I do hope there is an opportunity to see these works in larger renderings at some point. As the introduction to the collection offers:

The work of Second Sight repurposes facsimiles of so-called famous/canonical MSS to create masks in what is both a gesture of looking backward and forward. While reconsidering the manuscripts themselves, their relevance and legibility (handwriting and content) to the contemporary reader, the act of creating masks transforms the MSS into surface matter or, raw material, which is to say, the concrete. The mask, being a loaded tool both for its intended use as a transformative piece of costume and for its trans-cultural historical presence, not to mention the colonial exoticization of African masks met in Modernism, primarily in the work of Picasso, makes of the mask a powerful vessel for a leap of faith which is the blind gesture forward, concretizing the MSS via cutting and the addition of banal (read totemic) objects into masks which cannot be worn, but which may reveal.

Stuart Ross, Proper Tales Press

Kingston ON: If you’ve never encountered any publications from Kingston writer, editor and publisher Michael e. Casteels, through his Puddles of Sky Press, I would highly recommend: at any small press fair you might encounter Casteels at his table, quietly staping, cutting, folding and assembling small publications throughout the day, throughout the afternoon. Two of his latest include the envelope STUMPT 7 (64 copies; June 2025) and the Japanese-sewn STUMPT issue eight (60 copies; June 2025), all hand-stamped (echoing jwcurry’s own infamous production, through his 1cent series and other productions via Room 302 Books) by the publisher himself. There is a kind of care, an attention, to publications and processes such as these that photocopied items are simply unable to replicate: consider that this is not sixty-some copies of a single poem, but sixty-some times the publisher hand-printed each poem, each line, in the same way on each slice of carved paper. One has to admire the patience, and the attention, as well as the craft. STUMPT 7 is made up of three poems on cards, one per card: an untitled poem by Hamilton writer Gary Barwin, BC poet Dale Tracy’s “Soft Growth,” and Kingston poet Allison Chisholm’s “Attachment Unavailable,” which I photographed, below:

Most small press publications are very good at offering different elements of pieces by emerging, and established writers, and Casteels works a very nice balance as well, but working from a far different pool of writers than might ever appear across mainstream publishing. STUMPT issue eight, produced with hand-sewn binding, offers a poem each by Keaton Studebaker, John Grey, John Repp, daniel f. bradley, and, on the back cover, which I photographed, below, this piece by David Romanda:
 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dale Tracy

Dale Tracy is the author of the chapbook The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground press, 2020), the chapbook Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018), the chappoem What It Satisfies (Puddles of Sky Press, 2016), and the monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). Her first full-length poetry collection is Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press, 2022). Her poetry has appeared in publications like filling Station, Touch the Donkey, and The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and lives on unceded Coast Salish territory. 

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?

The process of selection for these publications helped me know better which sorts of my own poems I like best. Through that process, I think that I’m increasing my precision when I write.

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

I think that I process the world in a way that is like reading and writing poems. My memory is not great in terms of facts and chronology, even for my own life. I seem to remember around things (pattern, mood, and relationship) more than the things themselves.

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 don’t often have a project in mind. I write and see what happens, with many returns for revision.

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 think in short pieces. A longer project only comes into being when enough short poems call together.

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

I like the communal listening of public readings. It’s a form of attention that feels, to me, uncommon.

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’m trying to answer the questions of how to live and what sorts of things living can mean.

The theoretical concerns involved in trying to answer those questions are something like these:

-what meaning is

-what kind of knowledge poetry can make

-how reading and writing are experiences

-how expectations held in form and pattern shape meaning

-how much to directly express and how much to indirectly enact the ethical responsibilities of entering public discourse

-how experience (idiosyncratic) fits with communication (shared conventions)

-how environments shape the environment of my mental life

-what it is one aims for when it isn’t mimesis (is it ornament?)

-what the relationship between life and art is (since art is part of life)

-what self-reflexive art performs

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think writers have as many roles as people in general do, in that we need people doing all kinds of different things so that we can each get a more complete idea of the world through collected efforts.

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

I wish I could have an editor for all my actions. It’s comforting to have someone else confirm that what I’m doing is working out before it carries on in its life in the wider world.

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

I can’t remember if anyone told me this advice, or if I learned from watching: the best way to write poetry and happen upon poetic opportunities is to be around other poets. (In-person events aren’t the only way—online, on radio, and in the mail have been other ways that I’ve felt part of poetry community.)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I’m trying to answer the same questions in poetry and in critical prose, so I don’t feel the move in that way. Writing in critical prose took a lot more training for me because the conventions are more standardized and because I think in a spiral rather than a linear shape. Spirals are great for poetry.

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

I write for poetry, for teaching, and for research, so I usually have multiple documents open to move between. I’m writing or reading something for most of the day, most days.

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

I learn about something new, usually about biology or physics.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of the pulp and paper mill—not a desirable smell, but it’s a truth of how encompassing industry can be, especially in a small town. 

14 - 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?

Nature and science influence my work the most. I think this is because I use writing poetry as a process to understand things I don’t already understand.

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

The answer to this question is different all the time (I need different writers at different moments). Faced with questions like this one, I panic, and I get the urge to list everything I’ve ever read. I think that the truest answer to this question is that I need a huge diversity of writers and writings for work and my life more broadly more than I need any particular ones.

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

I can’t think of anything! I mostly approach the world with an open curiosity instead of goals. I think that not having specific goals in mind helps me to notice exciting opportunities when they get nearby.

17 - 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 like a job that lets me be moving around outside, like a mail carrier. Unfortunately, my body wouldn’t have put up with that work very well. I’m lucky that I have the job I have and that I can walk to work.

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

I feel best when I am reading or writing. I need that kind of disappearance of myself to recharge for being in the world.

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

Books: Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed; Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread; Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon

(I obsessed over what “great” might mean to people, and then I cheated with three. They’re all novels because I can straightforwardly tell you if I enjoyed reading a novel, but for poetry and plays I find that my feelings about them have to do with what I do with them in my mind after I read—I enjoy putting them into new action.)

Film: Swan Song (2021)

20 - What are you currently working on?

At Kwantlen Polytechnic University, I am preparing to teach a course studying life writing and I am working as part of an interdisciplinary team to foster critical and creative thinking around climate change and social inequalities related to climate.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Dale Tracy, Derelict Bicycles

 

UNDER EVERY MYSTERY, ANOTHER

Thrown from my sled I skid through snow
on my knees. I look back at my tracks before
knowing I’ve come to rest on deer carcass.
Hating waste, I think perhaps I could eat it.
How did it die? There is a dead wolf, mouth
open, too, beneath the thin drift, but it missed.
A handle emerges from the deer’s shoulder:
I pull. The shovel opens the body into a round
tidy room, wood stove still smoking, TV on,
occupant gone.

Following several chapbooks and a critical monograph comes the full-length debut from British Columbia-based poet and critic Dale Tracy, her Derelict Bicycles (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2022), published recently as part of editor Stuart Ross’ series, A Feed Dog Book. Through nearly one hundred pages of short, first-person lyrics, Tracy’s narratives fold in and over themselves, offering a rhythm of furtive quickness, even as she slowly pulls and peels back layers of inquiry. “Breach the fussy haze / and tamp the cloud-winked light.” she writes, as part of the poem “THE ORDER OF MUSTARDS AND ALLIES IS MINE,” “End to end, I’m aging, wrapped in clear / violet film, ushering stunt authority, / the nutshell’s ache.” There’s a kind of carved, honed bounce to her language, rhythm and pacing, a deft way of moving across the line and the page through an array of fables and folk tales, observational sheens and surreal hints. “I ate my own shadow.” she offers, to open the poem “STOMACH END OF THE TONGUE,” “I feel it pulling on the stomach end of my tongue.”

Across a lyric populated with foxes, shadows and flyers posted to telephone poles, Tracy examines physical and psychological descriptions of the body’s usage, employing threads of surrealism almost as a way to clarify, sliding meaning up against uncertainty as a way to reveal conclusions that one might otherwise be unable to reach. “The crooked little valve at the front of my heart / greets you,” she writes, to open the poem “A MILLIMETRIC WELCOME,” “so a little blood leaks through / and back again. The heart’s courtyard grimes / in the wind, the pressure in the vessels. / Anyway, the opposite isn’t pure but emptier.” As part of her 2019 interview for Touch the Donkey, she explains that: “Because writing poetry is for me a kind of theoretical or philosophical endeavour, each poem is prompted by curiosity. A poem helps me figure something out (or at least think about it), so it responds to wonder (as in wondering and as in marvelling) and tries to capture that wonder.” Further on in the same interview, she offers:

Poetry is a way for me to sort out how to live or what I am living; at the same time, a poem often theorizes itself, sorting out in an observable way what a poem can do or is doing. In these ways, I think of poetry as being theory.