Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Theobald, Wise, Braune, Smith, Coulton, Hall, MacDonell and Kaplan,

Anticipating the release next week of the eighteenth 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 seventeenth issue: Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, and Janet Kaplan.

Interviews with contributors to the first sixteen issues (over one hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: 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 eighteenth issue features new writing by: Ryan Eckes, Samuel Ace, Stephen Cain, Howie Good, Dani Spinosa, Rusty Morrison, Lupe Gómez (trans. Erín Moure) and Allison Cardon.

And of course, copies of the first seventeen issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Ongoing notes: Canada Day, 2016

Happy Canada Day! I’m behind on everything, as you might imagine.

I’m attempting to be less behind on some of these reviews (again). I’ve yet to start going through the material I picked up at the most recent ottawa small press book fair, but hope to be getting into that soon. Otherwise, are you checking out the activity on some of my other blogs, whether the ottawa poetry newsletter, above/ground press, Chaudiere Books or the “Tuesday poem” series over at the dusie blog?

I think we’re going somewhere for brunch today. Not sure yet. Maybe something else as well.

It only takes us an hour, these days, to leave the house at all…

Brooklyn NY: I’m quite taken by New York City poet and doctor Jennifer Stella’s debut poetry collection, Your lapidarium feels wrought. (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), a small suite of erasure poems, all of which share the same title. Who is this Jennifer Stella? Her line and breath breaks are stunning, staggering and staccato-precise. I want more.

Your lapidarium feels wrought

After bus to plane to train to

          bus, street

          sweeping dictates horse-like

                    machines. It’s much colder

          in Colorado. Typhoons

          are only signs, but curbs

are hydrant glass. Once

          I am driving, I

          drive. The Pacific

is far from

          momentum, my Pacific is so

                                        close

Philadelphia PA: I like the twenty-six poems that make up Laura Theobald’s odd edna poems, produced (undated) in an edition of one hundred copies by Gina Myers’ Lame House Press.

XI

edna read a book by mark twain. “i will never be a book,” she said.

edna looked in the mirror. all twelve of her eyes blinked.

The poems, titled via Roman numerals, exist as self-contained moments that, as they progress, give a sense of movement, almost as a flip-book constructed out of poems (instead of images).

XIV

edna couldn’t decide whether to be a princess or a scoundrel. “if i was a scoundrel,” edna thought, “i could ride a raft downriver. if i was a princess, ii could ride the back of a horse.”

“i wish i was the elephant man,” she said.

edna rode a raft down the river in her mind for 15 yrs. it was a lot like driving.

when edna woke there was nothing left. her sheets were blue like a river and she thanked god. “god,” she said. “for the sheets.” there were screams coming from all around her but she didn’t know why.