Canthius #10 : guest edited by Sanna Wani

 

I was going to rest my hands this afternoon

but they wanted to make something for you I was going to rest in the full sun fold myself into a neat nap shape always I asked for you ran ahead of you asking when if I held you again would I need anything that takes up more space than I could possibly live every time somehow I still ended up with more before I moved you could I wait for you to return to me I am not very patient (Emily Lu)

I’ve always enjoyed going through issues of Canthius: feminism & literary arts [although admittedly I haven’t offered a review of an issue of some time; see my review of issue two here and issue three here and issue seven here and even the interview I did with founding co-editor/publisher Claire Farley after the first issue landed here], and this new issue, guest edited by Sanna Wani with artwork by Eryn Lougheed, offers up an array of stunning new work by a mound of writers both new and familiar: Emily Lu, Sennah Yee, Chimwemwe Undi, M.A. Blanchard, Joanna Cleary, Terrence Abrahams, Jaeyun Yoo, nanya jhingran, Hua Xi, Elizabeth Mudenyo, Dessa Bayrock, Cecil Choi, Devon Rae, Akshi Chadha, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Lina Wu, Hadiyyah Kuma, I.S. Jones, Malvika Jolly, Cassandra Myers, emilie kneifel, Samantha Martin-Bird, Hajjar Baban, Sara Elkamel, Ryanne Kap, Victoria Mbabazi, Yi Wei, ava hofmann, Natalie Lim, Alyza Taguilaso, Conyer Clayton and Hajera Khaja. With a focus on emerging writers (it would seem), it is always interesting to see different writers expand their roles, so I’m appreciating Wani taking on such a project (although admittedly I’m surprised the issue doesn’t include a biography for her as well, to give a reader unfamiliar with her work the opportunity for context; it seems a bit of a disservice to her work as guest editor. I offer, instead, our recent ’12 or 20 questions’ interview). As she writes to open her ”Editor’s Note”:

When we began thinking about this issue, Leah, Ashley, and I agreed that we would forego a theme. We agreed that we wanted to see what came in—and what we loved—to find a theme by chance rather than call. To see what emerged, rather than to coax anything in particular out of the world. The chance to edit this issue was an enormous gift. You know that saying, how you read is how you write? I feel gifted with a new awareness of how to love poetry, which is in all writing, the particular quality of my love, of poetry’s music, and so the world’s, through these writers.

Part of what is interesting, as I move through this issue, is the number of short and uniquely sharp prose poems that appear here, including pieces by Emily Lu, Sennah Yee, Terrence Abrahams and Devon Rae, through her two poems “Conversation with My Lips” and “Conversation with My Tail.” As the latter reads in full: “you are stunted, cut short, hard nub. But sometimes, I sense a quiver, a kind of stirring. The unfurling of your shadow. I long to drape you over me, feather boa, to use tip to text the air. I long to speak through you, old tongue, ripped out.” I’m enjoying the thread that sits through the issue, of a handful of different poets offering short, lyric bursts of prose poems, and curious at how these particular submissions found themselves into and across this particular issue. Another highlight, in an issue of highlights, is Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet Hajjar Baban, a 2021 PD Soros Fellow and MFA in Poetry candidate at the University of Virginia.

What I’ve Since Learned of Mountains

The language a sun unspoken. Hanging in the air,
my father’s brother’s death. The sword, a missed
prayer. Rocks and my instinct
against reason. Why a Kurdish joke
exists, a fire in the celebration. Those gowns
you’ll never wear. Lavender grown there. The distance,
the name of no country found.

Also, Eryn Lougheed’s artwork throughout the issue provides a fascinating counterpoint to the writing, setting lyric aside lyric, thematically linking to the conversations that guest editor Wani invites through her particular curation. As Wani asks near the end of her opening note: “What would you name the theme of this issue, dear reader? You are the you I am always chasing after all, inviting into these pages. I’ll let you have the last word. I’m interested to know what you choose.” So, basically: this is a journal you should be paying attention to. And you know they’ve a bunch of extra content online as well, yes?

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Forge, forget, lovely, lonely. I need my mind pure and my body expired. I want to devour this meal whole and not feel empty. I need to be better than real. I want you to look at me all the time. (Sennah Yee)

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two,

[Zed Press]

See the first of my notes from our most recent fair here.

Windsor/Toronto ON: The second chapbook by Toronto poet and self-professed “peach enthusiast” Terrence Abrahams is the peach poems (Windsor ON: Zed Press, 2019), a chapbook preceded by a wish (Penrose Press), and to be followed, according to his author bio, by “a forthcoming collection of prose poems, published with baseline press.” the peach poems is an assemblage of confident lyric hesitations, halting and exploratory, furthering the line and the line-break in tandem, through prose poems and the more traditional shapes of the lyric poem. These poems are physical, and subtle, yet striking in their posture, even amid uncertainty. “Your language was one I couldn’t speak yet,” Abraham writes, in the prose poem “May,” continuing “and yet I could / see it all over your body.”

riverbank

I sit thinking of all the little deaths

as if I haven’t thought already

of yours, worrying over

what hands might find you

when my hands

leave yours

nearby the dog

is sniffing out rabbits

like him you are wondering

how you can get in on the hunt

In a recent interview with Abrahams on Train: a poetry journal I found this bit particularly interesting, as he said:

I only recently read something Mary Oliver wrote in her essay collection, Upstream. She said, “attention is the beginning of devotion.” If that’s the case, I’ve been beginning my whole life, and I don’t plan on stopping. That keeps me going.

[Anahita Jamali Rad and David Bradford]

Montreal QC: From Anahita Jamali Rad and David Bradford’s House House Press [see their “12 or 20 questions” on the press here] is Stacey Ho’s Green Lines (2019), a chapbook consisting of the fourteen-part essay, the “Anti-Invasion Ecologies,” as well as “HOW TO DRAW A LINE,” a pair of lyric essays on ecology, refugees and metaphor, and how language is used to describe the migration of plant and human. As they write: “Sometimes the cultural categories that divide plant and humans dissolve to form a single class called foreign. This is a minority world anxiety evidenced in all forms of cultural production.” As the opening to the essay “Anti-Invasion Ecologies” reads:

This past summer I was trying out this art experiment which was roughly focused on land-based and intersectional feminist art practices. It happened on Mayne Island, Coast Salish Territories.

We were camping on a site that had previously been an old mill and informal dumpsite, which was in the process of remediation by its current inhabitants. Responding to aspects of this environment that had been impacted by humans, Syr Reifsteck dyed paper using materials introduced to the site through human intervention: rusty bits of metal dumped on site with Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry, two plants often considered invasive to the region. Megan Gerbrandt pulled metal, broken glass, and garbage out of the ground, marking objects with protective symbols to create an installation that led into the forest. Seeking to “unsettle” so-called invasive species, Anthony Meza-Wilson broke down specimens of Scotch broom, separating the plant into pods, leaves, and stems to mirror colonial practices of deconstruction and classification.

I often overheard participants express their distaste for invasives,” whereas I’d always felt a deep affinity for such hardy, weedy plants.