Ongoing notes: latelate January, 2018

[what part of Friday's pd day looked like] In case you hadn’t noticed, the date for the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair has been announced. And did you know that this month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Factory Reading Series? We already know this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of above/ground press (there is still time to catch a 2018 subscription, by the by).

Ottawa ON: A number of years ago, Ottawa’s TREE Reading Series opened a series of readings (roughly one a year) of featuring three or four poets instead of the usual one or two, attempting to feature poets not considered ready for a full-length reading as part of the series (I remember disagreeing entirely with the premise when it emerged; why not give them full readings?). Called 'hot ottawa voices,' the series has extended into one they've been calling 'local lights,' for poets without trade collections, but with chapbooks. As part of the most recent of such, held in December 2017, leaf editions, an extension of Tree Press, produced the chapbook LOCAL LIGHTS, featuring work by Chris Johnson, Sarah Kabamba (who was shortlisted last fall for the CBC Poetry Prize) and Rod Peterson (former director of The TREE Reading Series, who began the “local lights” series during his tenure).

home

he smells like home

but these days home smells like war & smoke

she’s tired of burning & the ashes she carries

in her bones are heavy & all her body knows is to run

some nights her body is a battle ground

landmines going off underneath his touch

he carries bombs underneath his tongue

& kisses her like it’s his last breath (Sarah Kabamba)

There is a lightness to Kabamba’s poems that is quite striking, one that blends very nicely with her subject matter, and allowing her poems not to be weighed down entirely. The four poems by Chris Johnson’s poems in this collection work to explore space and rhythm in more overt ways than I’ve seen in his previous work, moving away from tighter prose-poems to a more open form for a deeper exploration into collage, narrative disjunction and accumulation.

My only real complaint about this wee chapbook: why aren’t there any author biographies included?

San Francisco/Oakland CA: From Californian chapbook publisher Drop Leaf Press [see my “12 or 20 (small press) questions” with them here] comes Philadelphia poet Kevin Varrone’s Redemption Center (2017), a collection of short first-person lyric poems:

poem I wrote sitting across the table from you

if I had two nickels to rub together

I would rub them together

like a kid rubs sticks together

until friction made combustion

and they burned

a hole in my pocket

into which I would put my hand

and then my arm

and eventually my whole self—

I would fold myself

into the hole in my pocket and disappear

into the pocket of myself, or at least my pants

but before I did

like some ancient star

I’d grab your hand.

Compared to the prose-pieces in his full-length box score: an autobiography (Furniture Press Books, 2014), the eight poems included here are relatively straightforward, composed as meditations akin to short essays. I say straightforward, but almost deceptively so, writing out a series of turns and turns, skips and short clips, somewhere between the sharpness of rough sketch and carved, polished stone. I’m curious about the shift, and wonder if a full-length collection is in the works; curious to see the shape such a collection might take, especially after his book-length baseball poem.

two birds

if we can conceive of killing

two birds

with one stone

why not then imagine

leaving it un-

            thrown,

two birds

in a bush, un-

leavened & a stone

in a hand, un-

turned, unflown

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Sarah Heady, Amy K. Bell, Jill Tomasetti, Jennifer S. Cheng and Lauren Peck on Drop Leaf Press

Drop Leaf Press began at a round table in a living room. It was a place for making things and for sharing voices and textures. Each of us took turns playing the roles of curator and artist, host and guest, listener and storyteller, critic and teacher. Our press is a council of equal voices, advocating new and emerging writers and artists. We encourage the hybrid and the caught ephemeral, the self-conscious and the subconscious, the worldly and the unworldly. We seek joineries of the unexpected and the overlooked. We believe in flexibility and tactility. We want our books to be gathering places for artists from all locales and genres to join in the gesture of sitting down and sharing something new. And with each new voice, each new book, we create space: we add a leaf to the table, room for more.

Collective Bio: Drop Leaf Press is Amy K.Bell, Jennifer S. Cheng, Sarah Heady, Lauren Peck, and Jill Tomasetti. We met several years ago in the MFA program at San Francisco State, and we are mostly poets (Amy identifies primarily as a fiction writer, and Jill is working on her first children’s book).

Three of us live in San Francisco, two of us live in Oakland, one of us has a small child, two of us have 9-5 jobs (grant writer; copywriter), two of us are preschool teachers, one of us teaches undergraduates, all of us live with our partners, all of us are busy people who like to come together to make books and host readings sometimes. We are friends first and co-editors second.

1 – When did Drop Leaf Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Sarah Heady (SH): It all started in the winter of 2014 when a few of us went to AWP in Seattle and attended a reading in celebration of Berkeley-based, women-run Kelsey Street Press’ 40^th anniversary. Bhanu Kapil, Hazel White, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Rena Rosenwasser read their work and talked, along with Kelsey Street co-founder Patricia Dienstfrey, about how meaningful it was to be published by an all-female collective. Bhanu, in particular, told the incredible story of how fundamentally life-changing it was to have her first book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (one of our very favorites), published by Kelsey Street in 2001, at time when—if I recall her tale correctly—she was working at a McDonald’s in London and had mailed her manuscript to Kelsey Street cold.

There was lots of crying and gratitude and heart at this event, and we all left feeling so amazed at the longevity and impact of this women-run endeavor. When we got back to the Bay, we started talking about what it might be like to start our own little version of Kelsey Street.

Jill Tomasetti (JT): If anything has been a continuous thread throughout our various projects, it’s probably been the “crying and gratitude and heart.” It’s been a few years now, and we have all evolved from earnest young grad students to working professionals who travel all different roads. In response to these shifts, we have worked hard to create fluid yet taut timelines for our projects, maintaining faithfulness both to our authors and to ourselves and to each other. We have a passion for creating beautiful and spacious physical scaffolding - paper, ink, thread, spine - for the poetry and prose that our authors have entrusted to us. Over time we have learned that as a small press, we need to grant each other the same generous blank pages, the time to ponder, to get bogged down by life, to resurface, to find each other again.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

Jennifer S. Cheng (JSC): The Kelsey Street reading helped to crystallize our vision, but even before that we were spending weekends together making things--crochets, craft projects, zines, etc.--and that impetus is at the heart of our endeavors. We would gather on bright afternoons around a table to share food, materials, books, discoveries. We love language, we love tactile objects, we love sharing, so it was natural for us to be drawn to the intersection of these.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

SH: Operating without concern for “the market” and lifting up material that feels vital, for its own sake. At least that’s what I think we do.  

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

JT: We make the majority of our books by hand. There is a lot of physical labor involved. For our inaugural issue of the occasional magazine, OXALIS, we sourced (by which I mean combed through stacks of old posters, maps, wallpaper, cardstock, and art papers at SCRAP in San Francisco) and then cut to size recycled paper for the covers and bound each edition with brass fasteners to speak to the theme of the work, “Hinge.” While we haven’t (yet!) strayed into the seductive territory of letterpress, we have learned multitudes of bookbinding stitches, experimented with waxed thread, embroidery floss, copper wire, sewing machines, thimbles, awls, antique tapestry needles, carved our own rubber stamps, and touched a LOT of paper, in search of the perfect texture. While we can probably never make our authors rich and famous, we can give them these beautifully bound books, especially in the case of our chapbook series, which feel good in the hand and bear the marks of having been carefully and artfully assembled.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?

SH: Haha...we’ll get back to you on this one. I don’t think we know what’s most effective...we just do experiments and see what happens. And I would say “effective” is not one of Drop Leaf’s watchwords, similar to the word “efficient”--but that’s all capitalist noise anyway, right? :) Seriously though, I think of us as spearheading our own sort of “slow literature” movement, which means we just do what we can, when we can, without driving ourselves and each other crazy.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

JT:  This is a great question for us, since we are a collective! We each have different styles of editing that we gravitate towards, and which inevitably causes us each to lean into different aspects of the publishing process. While one person may reliably give great, detailed line-by-line feedback, another may just as importantly step back and see the bigger picture. Someone else may take the lead on design, which will in turn help curate the work and art that fills the pages of a magazine. Another part of our big vision for our little press is that we want to publish work that we are excited about, even if it’s still under construction. So some of our manuscripts may arrive at our door ready to go, while with others we develop a much more back-and-forth working/editing/re-writing relationship with the author. Both have been fun and rewarding. It is really humbling for us when writers we love want to share their raw work and allow us to enter into its conversation.

7 – How do your books and broadsides get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

Lauren Peck (LP): We printed 300 of Jill Tomasetti’s full-length book, PRIMA VERA. We’re in the middle of publishing the fourth book in our chapbook series. Each time we publish is a learning process, so I think we come up with number according to the need. So, it depends on sales and if the author has a lot of readings slotted where the books might be sold. For the chapbooks, we print about 125 books per run, including a smaller portion of hand-embellished copies.

We tend to sell books from the Drop Leaf website’s online store, at readings, and also in local bookstores, usually in San Francisco and Oakland and anywhere that an author might be interested in selling--especially in cases where they live out of state.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

LP: We all do a little bit of everything, rotating tasks according to who wants to take on each project and has time. It’s good in that we’re able to take turns, but sometimes we realize that we have all have full lives, and sometimes unexpected things just come up that might delay this process. This summer, we’re excited to be working with two guest editors, Heidi Van Horn and Maude Tanswai, for our next issue of our sometimes-magazine, Oxalis. We have been working on other projects in the time since our inaugural issue in 2015, so we’re really excited to see how it turns out and to work with these guest editors on a second issue.

JT: Yes, and the idea of including guest editors really fulfills the “drop leaf table” metaphor we began our press with. We want to be as inclusive as possible, and love the thought of sharing both the tasks and vision that comes with putting together a non-traditional magazine like Oxalis.  

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

SH: Editing other people’s books (which I absolutely love doing) has certainly made me a better writer. The discernment and big-picture thinking required of an editor comes into play when putting together one’s own manuscripts. I think also just realizing that there is more than enough universal art-mojo to go around --there’s no need to compete or think that more for someone else means less for you. We’re all on the same trip together.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

LP: We primarily started the press to explore the works of others that really interested us. We did begin by publishing Jill’s PRIMA VERA, but the focus is really on new and emerging authors.

JT: I should probably weigh in on this question! By starting with my book, I think we were also acknowledging the fact that we were all very, very new to publishing and weren’t quite sure what we could promise to others. By experimenting on one of ourselves, so to speak, we were in safe territory. We learned so much with that first book, and hopefully gained a bit of credibility by having a beautiful, complete project on the shelf.

11– How do you see Drop Leaf Press evolving?

SH: Now that it’s been over three years since the idea for DLP was born, I personally have come to accept that we are apparently capable of a lot less, productivity-wise, than I first envisioned--which is actually totally okay. And not just okay, but wonderful. I’m typically very, very hard on myself and have been working on lowering my performance standards in all areas of life. It’s healing for me to have a project that is held very gently and with acceptance of human limitations and the need for rest and wellness. My co-editors really value work-life balance, and it seems we’ve all leveled out to a place where the first priority is always our own sanity and not the achievements of the press, and this has meant a real embracing of slowness and protracted timelines. (That said, we do our best to be accountable and to keep things moving for our authors’ sakes.)

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

LP: I think it’s hard to really say that there was a book we were MOST excited about. I think that the first issue of Oxalis (the lit mag) was the most exciting. It was one of the first works we put out, and we actually went to Scrap together--which is this materials reuse center where you can find all of these unique materials--like paper to interesting prints to old film rolls. We found materials that we thought would fit the theme of the magazine and made different covers for each magazine we put out.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

SH: I thought of Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Corollary Press, which, I’ve gathered, followed a sporadic publishing schedule based on the contours of the editor’s real life commitments and desires. And Kelsey Street, as mentioned above.

14– How does Drop Leaf Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Drop Leaf Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

JT: I see our press as a very tiny stream making its way down the mountains, picking its way over stones, following the lay of the land, as the snowmelt of the previous winter. Our handbound aesthetic can be quite time consuming, yet is very personal and highly textured. It is the work of the poet, of course, plus the designer, and many hands printing, cutting, folding, and sewing each copy. Eventually yes, the stream makes its way down to sea level by joining larger streams in the watershed. Most of our “dialogues” are bumping into travelers, stones, shy animals, weather. We travel outward, but many find us. For me, our best times are when I hear how having copies of her book opens doors to a poet as she lectures across the West Coast, or when a poet writes to us to ask for more copies to sell to the most amazing independent bookstore she found in her neighborhood. Those are the most meaningful dialogues. Sometimes it’s hard not to just give all our books away as gifts to people we know will love them. We just want to put our books in people’s hands and trust that they will do the work of reaching out and sharing themselves. But, on a more practical note, we do love seeing our books on the shelves of our local bookstores, which have their own rich communities. We also really enjoy hosting readings in our community, where we find a real warmth and pleasure of hearing the poets read with each other and share their voices.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

LP: We tend to do one reading for each book launch, and we might combine book releases to feature both authors at once (as we did recently with Lehua M. Taitano and Maxwell Shanley at Alley Cat Books). I think public readings are incredibly important for both the visibility of the press and authors...and also because it’s vital that these works be heard aloud.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

LP: We use our website to really showcase our purpose, the works we are putting out into the world, a blog, and host a store to sell all of these works. There’s also a focus on social media to make our audience aware of what we’re doing and to get them to interact with us. It’s of course, perfect as a promotional tool so that they’ll go to our readings and buy from our online store. Also, we put out an (occasional) newsletter via email and we try to show them other sides of what we do in Instagram and on Facebook.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

LP: We tend to ask people to send their work to us. We might be at a reading or have run across some work online that caught our attention--and that’s what gets us interested in asking others if we can publish them.  As a small press, we just don’t have the bandwidth to really read through a lot of unsolicited manuscripts. Admittedly, we wish we did have more time!

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

JSC: We are deep in the midst of our Chapbook Series, with three titles published and three more forthcoming. Inner River by Tanya Holtland carries us across the breadth of the page and into the depths of our darkest and saturated currents of being; Sonoma by Lehua Taitano is a beautiful and complex love poem examining displacement, rivers, dams, and queer identity; There Are Trees by Maxwell Shanley uses familiar objects, gestures, and relationships to explore the interplay of duration and instant, layers of history and the edge of the present moment. In addition to the regular handbound edition, we also release a smaller number of special editions, which is unique to each chapbook and its voice: Inner River contains certain pages with color ink; stitched into the cover of Sonoma is a burst of embroidery art; There Are Trees incorporates a copper coil in its binding. There is a through-line to the design of all our chapbooks--for instance, all feature cover art and lettering by illustrator and designer Mary Lundquist--but we also honor each text individually with its own aesthetic vision, and as a result the chapbooks span various sizes, layouts, and cover colors. We are a tiny press, so each title and author means something immense to us; a lot of love and curiosity goes into bringing every book into the world.

SH: Keep an eye out for the next three chaps in the series--Rural by Hailey Higdon, Redemption Center by Kevin Varrone, and Hammer & Consort by Roxane Beth Johnson!

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

new from Apostrophe Press: A perimeter, by rob mclennan

If anyone is interested, I have a couple of copies left of this limited-edition chapbook, an excerpt of my forthcoming poetry title with New Star (October).

A perimeter
rob mclennan
$4

A

The property boundary is handmade (shared). Fluid,
and only fluid. Unless
you know precisely where. The skin

and space of white noise (hearth). One hundred foot of fence.

Language is impermanent. We retain nothing, have no
specific form. The latent grass, explode; infect
the yard and underneath the stone-work.

The neighbour’s garden, glistens. Scars. We translate always
from another.


B

Confirm
my personal association. The lawn requires trim,

and so it does.

A sanity short of despair. Lawn ornaments
are temporal. And yet: this sky of relative divergence
upon the written word, my daughter’s

childhood memories. What separates us
no more a thickness

than this house brick. At best, let’s say.

published in Ottawa by Apostrophe Press
September 2016

published in Ottawa for the author’s Patreon supporters, as well as for limited distribution as part of the above/ground press 23rd anniversary reading/launch/party at Black Squirrel Books, Ottawa, September 10, 2016, and PHILALALIA, the three-day small press/art fair, September 15-17, 2016 in Philadelphia PA. Thanks much to Kevin Varrone for his help and support.

The poem “A perimeter” is the title poem from a new poetry title to appear this fall from New Star Books, Vancouver.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Kevin Varrone, Box Score : An Autobiography

errors are part of the game       my dad used to say      to remain sub-

stance in the face of transubstantiality            is pretty much what hitting

the eephusis all about  :   some things cannot be explained by time

or continuance or        we select our documents to tell our stories     I

mean the city   the gulls           the green & way people           quiero & mill

between innings           mr sutcliffe      the stairway from bluff to

hollow remains                        one of the most fascinating dreams one could

have is of all this broad fenland as a great city playground      wrote a

visitor to the neck in the late 1800’s   :  light  a derivative miracle

comes on         howard got the bat head out & hit that one a country mile

there there now           hush hush swing low   there’s nothing but give &

damn & bring me home & carry me home

Philadelphia poet Kevin Varrone’s Box Score : An Autobiography (Furniture Books, 2014) is an extended exploration into the game of baseball, from its history to folk tales to its overall structure, held together through the author’s long-standing relationship to the game. Through telling the tales of America’s Greatest Sport, it allows Varrone to delve into elements of storytelling from his own past merged with long-forgotten elements of baseball trivia, mixed and re-mixed, interspersed amid prose-poems constructed with a series of pauses held together with staccato precision. At the same time, Varrone is utilizing the information of baseball to create an extended sequence of stand-alone episodes of text, being both his own autobiography and a biography of the sport. Through the stand-alone sections, lines and sentences repeat, recur and are re-ordered for the sake of repurposing meaning, connecting fragments and even confounding any suggestion of narrative.

As well, this text exists as almost a transcription of how the book was originally purposed: as an interactive app, allowing for visuals as well as audio from a number of poets across North America, each reading a poem from Varrone’s manuscript. The poems in Box Score : An Autobiography condense and erase time; each section occurs simultaneously, with a review of the app version suggesting that the order in which we read these sections should be seen as fluid, something the nature of literary print publishing tends to reduce down to the suggestion of a single option. What does the lack of interactivity lose us, and what might we, also, gain?

henry chadwick’s headstone     in brooklyn’s green-wood cemetery

reads     father of baseball    before the   ’46 all star game   ted williams

asked rip sewall if he would throw tht blooper   nl manager charlie

grimm put sewall in     & sd throw that blooper pitch & see if you

can wake up this crowd    sewell    who’d been injured in a hunting

accident the day japanese bombed pearl harbor    faced williams

for a three-run homer   (a deluxe version of the pitch sewell called

a sunday super dooper blooper)     it was the only home run sewell

ever gave up on an eephus in 300-plus big league appearances     &

he’d told williams it was coming again    & images showed williams

had run up out of the batter’s box & was therefore an enjamb-

ment     in violation of   6.03  of the official rules of   baseball

which states     :     a batter’s legal position shall be with both feet

inside the batter’s box

Little Red Leaves: Thomas-Glass, DuPlessis and Kaminski

“[D]esigned and sewn by Dawn Pendergast in Houston, Texas,” the little red leaves textile series produces some of the most attractive poetry chapbooks I’ve seen in a while [see my previous reviews of their titles here and here and here], hand-sewn with recycled textiles including bedsheets and other fabrics. Produced in limited edition, these are beautifully-made, and more than worth their weight (I might even be slightly biased, since one of the earlier chapbooks in this series was something of mine, but I don’t really think so). 

In her most recent package, Pendergast sent along Dan Thomas-Glass’ Kate & Sonia (2011), Megan Kaminski’s GEMOLOGY (2012), Lee Gough’s Future Occupations (2012), Kevin Varrone’s Eephus (from Box Score) (2012), Todd Melicker’s King & Queen (2012), Mac Wellman’s The Rat Minaret (2012) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss (2012). It seems as though her productivity has been increasing over the past year or two, which is impressive, especially when one considers that every copy of every book is hand-sewn by the editor/publisher herself. 

Something’s always doubling the double.

Shadows of trace remain intent.

Something explores its own excess.

Something pulses, never spent.

Littler and littler,

seely after seely

only a fine-meshed, mesh-fine net

can deal with this kind of real. Really.

Poetic technology always registers

smallness in the count.

With large-bore machinery, tiny details

are filtered through and out. (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss)

Ottawa poet Monty Reid keeps reminding me (as though I needed reminding of such) that chapbooks are the ground level of where the best writing is actively happening. I’m paraphrasing, if only slightly; how could I ever disagree with him? If he’d seen any of these chapbooks, he’d most likely be even more certain. But what I’m really looking forward to is more work by Pendergast herself [see my reviews of such here and here]; when might that be happening?

Sonia screams against the order

                days insist on packing

into the stretch: minor

impossibilities like toes

arched up to generate

                 space straining to switch

the switch. This possible world

Sonia screams against. I

glance at Kate—where are

                our options? To lift

or light? Shushing by

reflex my art motions

toward quiet. (Dan Thomas-Glass, Kate & Sonia)

Subtitled “in the months / before our second / daughter’s birth,” Dan Thomas-Glass’ Kate & Sonia (2011) is a meditation on the imminent birth of his second daughter, a subject far too common in poetry, yet rarely done well. I’m interested in writing on parenting, yet have noticed that the poems on motherhood (some of the finest from New York poet Rachel Zucker) far outweigh the poems on fatherhood, nearly to the exclusion of the latter. “Kate, Sonia I wanted to write / a poem for you that a mother would write,” he writes, to open the third section, nearly echoing the sentiment. The poem writes out, as his bio confirms, “his wife Kate and their daughters Sonia and Alma (born 9/21/11).” Parenting is a powerful thing, and too often I’ve seen the dismissal of father-specific writing, and even the fear of attempting such. A sequence of eleven poems plus epilogue, his meditation focuses on the small, and the close-to-home, as a kind of sketchbook of thoughts during his wife’s second pregnancy. As the final pre-epilogue poem ends, “Sonia I am sorry for all this moment’s failures.” I’m glad Thomas-Glass has produced this; not as physical, obviously, as motherhood, how does fatherhood become so easily dismissed?

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been composing her ongoing poem “Draft” for some time, so far collected in five trade volumes. The second of DuPlessis’ “Draft” poems to appear as a little red leaves chapbook (her chapbook Draft 96: Velocity appeared in 2011 [see my review of such here]), this poem exists as a kind of call-and-response, composing a binary piece; each poem is paired with an italicized addendum. Is this a call-and-response, or something more akin to Greek chorus? Paired with the poem quoted above is this, her italicized chorus:

I cannot solve what is done in my name. they send 100 million to the killers from my insistent taxes; I sent $500 to some other side. This has been going on for years now. Cannot solve, cannot absolve… And “orange” is not an absolute; it has been worked with—for it itself is generally hybrid. It comes from bud unions and tree grafts and sometimes spontaneous mutations. Fusions of root-stock with something from elsewhere. Much more rarely from seeds. What then counts as “normal”?

The collage aspect of the piece picks from multiple sources, and her “Drafts” have lengthened since the poem first started, years ago. An interesting question: has anyone attempted to write critically of her “Drafts” work as a whole unit?

Dear cabbie, dear comfort

perchance could you drive faster

ruefully abide your own speaking space

we’ll wrangle sweet nothings through that

window if you like it’s only plexiglass

my dear plastic really that keep us apart

just split the avenue open vivisect districts

flower shops mechanics pantries

glow orange green silver as we pass (Megan Kaminski, GEMOLOGY)

Author of four previous chapbooks and the trade collection Desiring Map (2012) [seemy review of such here], Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski’s GEMOLOGY (2012) is a letter to the city, writing out her neighbourhood in a sequence of short lyrics. “Vowels roll drip down thighs / conjunctions across backs,” she writes, later continuing: “Name me modesty / name me vexation[.]” Kaminski’s immediate city is as sensual as it is physical, composing a lyric love letter for a neighbourhood and even city unspecified. Does her love lie in the immediate physicality of wherever she hangs her hat?

Dear night, dear misplaced images

blanketed silver singed crystalline

cold I gather icicles sew flack jackets

encase late night wonderings

parks shadowed sharply street-lit

dear avenue if I follow floor me

carry me and my lost children

wordspent gangrened unburied (Megan Kaminski, GEMOLOGY)