Ongoing notes: The Fisher Small + Fine Press Fair (part three, : Amanda Earl/Matthew Walsh + Ambrose Albert,

See part one here, of course. And part two. And my report on the event. And we will see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 14, yes? And the reading the night prior? And, I suppose you might wonder, why am I only covering two publishers across this range of notes? There weren’t any other chapbooks I managed to pick up! I mean, I can’t review what I don’t see.

Ottawa/Toronto ON: I’m always intrigued to see collaborations, especially from poets of whose work I am already fond, so was pleased to see Amanda Earl [see my review of Earl’s latest here] and Matthew Walsh’s [see my 2025 interview with Walsh here] call-and-response collaboration Slutflowers (Toronto ON: knife fork book, 2026). “I have this concern with my own death / that I feel in my bones,” begins the poem “Scythe and Fate,” “especially it has / taken up a spot in my ilium bone, placed / above my acetabulum. I feel that it’s / a poet’s job to think of the existential, mark / down that what confuses me into a notebook which / I can burn before my death or not.” Slutflowers is an assemblage of short poems composed via a technique borrowed from American poet Terrence Hayes, “a technique of using words from an existing work for end words of a poem.” Gestural, performative and sly, these are poems riddled with self-conscious desire composed via constraint and resistance, even as they allow themselves to not follow their own rules. “I am missing some of the lines on my hands / for palmistry. I drink out of them,” begins “Palmars,” “cupped / below the faucet, from the heart and life over / and over ad nauseum.” As Earl offers in the acknowledgments, writing: “Matthew approached me with this method as a way of writing our collaborative chapbook. I suggested we use as our source, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (1963), one of my favourite deviant resources. We assigned each other ten random pages. If we felt like it, we responded, in some way, to each other’s poems.” And while one might speculate on which poet composed which piece or pieces, as a straight back-and-forth between the two, I think there is something to be said for refusing to place any poem with one over the other.

Scattered

Tonight dear reader, I am tired of being wooden.
A man I met writes to me of dude books which are effigies
I’d like to burn because how often I feel other
by my lack of inclusion and am just one of the masses
of women disappeared by the canon as if we are the same
nothings not as sweet as these dudebros want us to be but
fundamental
to their nonsense is all of this resentment.
We don’t have the luxury of being contemplative.
They relegate us to quietism.
I wish them the same.

Toronto ON/Fredericton NB: The latest from poet Ambrose Albert is the chapbook cross/faded (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), a collection of twelve sharp-edged first person lyrics. “they call the phenomenon ‘the brain zaps.’” begins the short poem-burst, “coup de foudre,” “I call it the air before a thunderstorm. / metal on your tongue. scent more / ozone than petrichor. harsher. / you’re all sweat and dizzy / from the buzz. the crackle of it.” Albert’s lyrics hold the tone and tenor of monologues, quietly performed, but performed nonetheless, holding gesture and truth across carved lines of syntax and angles, including the poem “top surgery and it’s completely different but also still / top surgery,” that includes:

it’s theorized the missing appendages from Greco-Roman statues
were a result of censorship. everyday wear and tear. trans ancestors
entrust me a chisel, there’s an angel in the marble to be freed.

 

Ongoing notes: The Fisher Small + Fine Press Fair (part two, : R. Kolewe + Erin Conway-Smith,

See part one here, of course. 

Toronto ON: Oh, how lovely to see this new title by Toronto poet R. Kolewe [see my review of his latest here], the chapbook HOLONOMY (Toronto ON: knife fork book, 2026), a cluster of fourteen delightfully-packed and short prose poems. “Porch sketch, penciled showers slant with the scent of rosemary. Postscript rather than prelude,” begins the opening poem, “Rosemary,” “moist hours mix eternity into fallen ordinary order and escape. Can you name the clouds all grey and dusky?” Kolewe’s work has long been known for expansive projects across the long poems, composing large works underneath the umbrella of a big idea or turn of phrase, and the internet provides that holonomy (a word I hadn’t known prior) refers to the change in a line or object’s orientation when returning to itself, such as running a line across the earth’s equator. The holonomy is the curve itself, as the line or object returns back to that point of origin. “Rare earth remainders scuttle,” begins the poem “Lively,” “worn scow flocks skew wings named widening full scarlet Geneva. Pause fluid lustral stochastic review.” Are there more of these pieces, somewhere? Might a larger, full-length manuscript be in the works? Kolewe works quietly, it would seem, but rarely in such small containers, so I would hope there are more of these on the horizon.

Narrative Approach

Sheer diffract predestination cover, stratocumulus portcullis memory alembic door ajar. Pale glow effect. Beginning future chiptone plastic, unbegun catenary cross canvas melancholic two-step (three four time.) Proof suspended: every edge derivative: bereft infinity knifeblade uniform field fiction patch, no torsion etc. Ambient classical approximation. Laurel ardour triage. No probability amplitude, no perpetual help, no polyhedron forever oyster idol factory isn’t about anything is. Communities stir and name themselves. The human heart alas, the neighbourhood, the pitcher broken at the fountain. Too fast.

Johannesburg, South Africa/Toronto ON: From poet Erin Conway-Smith, born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario but living in Johannesburg, comes the chapbook-debut, the extended poem VELD SENSE (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), a curious two-sided structure on each page, with single, chapbook-length line running mid-way between, comparable to how Darren Wershler’s The Tapeworm Foundry (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000) held a single, book-length line along the bottom of each page, alongside the main element of the book’s text. The main thread of this particular work is assembled via a curious assemblage, almost a collage, of short lines and phrases, allowing sound to playfully bounce around through language, geography. “Cape Town with cousins,” she writes, mid-way through, “not mine.” Or a bit further down the same page: “You get / a new pair of shoes, // you experience a minor lift.” As the chapbook-length sequence opens:

Heavy hung the spiral
in early but not that early
air. This is me, after all.
Yesterday was so loud.
To my right, tray go-away birds
mobbed a sleepy owl. To the left,
a 15-foot-high water feature
after some oke crowbar’d 

the meter open for the metal.

 

A generating unit each at Tutuka and Majuba have tripped. Reminder to

 

The air cut with spirals this season,
repeating at medium distances
at regular through not predictable
blips. Perception: least of my problems.
Sprung graffiti insistently tug.
The sound is sideways-turned, shaggy to even.
The quality is tin.
A spiral doesn’t settle, it just stops. 

But it is March, and still they haven’t.

 

Ongoing notes: The Fisher Small + Fine Press Fair (part one, : James Lindsay + Jenny Berkel,

Another Fisher fair! I’ve already posted my report on the event, and, unfortunately, I’m unable to get into Toronto further this fall for the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market or the TIFA small press fair [see my posts from last year], but don’t forget our ottawa small press book fair on November 14! With corresponding event the night prior at Anina’s Café, of course [details to reveal themselves soon, but readers with new chapbooks already include Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and Lisa Fishman]. Here are some notes from a couple of items I picked up this time around:

Toronto ON: Good to see new work from Toronto poet James Lindsay, the chapbook-length Choral Coral Carol (Knife Fork Books, 2026), a single poem set as an extended accumulation of wayward, meditative lyrics set as long-lined couplets. There’s such a music to his responses, as the poem begins, immediately establishing his scene: “Here we are, wheat with no breeze, uniformed in unison / Primed and tuned yet starved of something sounding // Like a call and response, a staycation in lukewarm / Ominous spy waters. What have you been working on?” There’s a kind of catch-all element to the narrative progression, as though anything and everything is fodder for his particular lyric thought, one step and line immediately following another, across an element not only of song and lyric movement, but a process shared. As he writes, mid-way: “Careful / With the shapes you make your hands into when trying to move // Sound around. If we’re going to get this right, we’ll all have to / Make our voices stride to where the sun is stepping away from // Like the dancers we’re not allowed to distract, but hit their marks / In winking shimmers. Let’s make a line. Who cares who’s first?”

London/Toronto ON: From London,Ontario-based poet and singer-songwriter Jenny Berkel (and my introduction to her and her work) comes the chapbook Colossal Wreck (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), an assemblage of thirteen first-person narrative lyrics, and a follow-up to her chapbook debut, Grease Dogs (London ON: Baseline Press, 2021). “Between you we are pressed.” she writes, to open the poem “O Night, O Sky, O Sea,” “Beneath you we are puny // bags of blood rolling / your currents. We ooze // to you. Let loose / to you. Take your open // -ness as invitational, / a bitch in heat.” There’s a music to it, one propelled by lyric but held by action. There is such a direct and precise narrative line, perfectly aimed, to Berkel’s lyrics, one that shoots like an arrow, piercing the pure heart of any subject. “Inside a mouth run / out of air,” begins “Voice Lessons,” “sibilance / and hum. Serpentine / lullaby, soundless vowels, / a shape with nothing // born.”

ongoing notes: mid-May, 2026: Dale Martin Smith + Ben Robinson,

You know the ottawa small press fair occurs in a month or so, yes? I already know you’ll be there. Or that zoom-interview that American poet Cole Swensen is conducting in a few days from now, via the Brooklyn Rail, with myself, Misha Solomon and Jennifer Baker on above/ground press? Oh, you should register for that. 

MN/NC/ON: The latest from Toronto poet Dale Martin Smith (who has a title with Wave Books forthcoming, don’t forget) is the chapbook Figures of Speech: Wide Infinity (Eden Prairie MN/Durham NC: Polis Press, 2026), a sequence of equally-sized-and-shaped stanzas, composed as lines that layer, accumulate and tilt across boundaries. You might already knew Smith as the author of a whole slew of titles, including the chapbook Blur (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Sons (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2017) [see my review of such here], and the full-length titles The Size of Paradise (Knife|Fork|Book, 2024) [see my review of such here], which was up for the Griffin Prize, and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], among others, and the poems of this particular title suggest a far larger project, which could be speculative, or even hopeful, on my part. The poem extends, wraps and bleeds, almost as notes taken during a single or series of family visits, attending family meals and catching world news, numerous threads finding themselves woven into these particular poem-notes. “Magic naps cautiously in light / black fur white inside what’s / left annual family holiday visit,” he writes, “turkey sauce and copper wine / cooking gear the pie crumbs / familial banter or touching of / cell phones and flat screens [.]” The poem, the sequence, frames itself in his childhood home within an infinite moment, an immediate present, of conversation and televised football games, reports of drone strikes and bombings in Gaza, the Persian Gulf; the traces of his father’s recent death and his widowed mother, there in the house. It is a sequence of grief, and its traces, both his and his mother’s and everything else, simultaneous. As the poem begins:

An hour till boarding crab
grass grey wind forlorn or
just plain loss like light
sleep I can’t remember getting
old going for broke in
the poetry engine no one
could tell I was real inside
altered rhythm thickweed and spurge
how hard then set loose
on a blank continent no
promise but gusto a word
unflattens reality whatever that is
in media zones others dying
our leaders pay to drone-kill
with illusion of non-complicity unlike
orcas in the Red Sea
or Persian Gulf wherever pleases
them to sink ships they
go rightly at war with
nothing I believe in today
inside the many photo-albums I
look through with Mom in
afternoon post- and pre-death return
to “moments” where time opens

Hamilton/Toronto ON: The latest from Hamilton poet Ben Robinson [see his 2024 ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the chapbook [A] Sensitive Man (Toronto ON: Knife|Fork|Book, 2026), following titles including his two full-length collections The Book of Benjamin (Palimpsest Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] and As Is (ARP Books, 2024) [see my review of such here]. The poems in this chapbook-length cluster respond to fatherhood and masculinity, and in attempting to navigate both in healthy ways, offering an interesting tether to works such as Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse (mentioned above), among others. “I didn’t think I was really a dad,” he writes, as part of “Has Anyone in Your Family Ever,” “more / a person who happened to have kids // until a bachelor party where I was making / lunches, wiping spills, laying blankets over // puked-out men. I folded Lou’s hooded towel / and pressed my elbow into the jamb, // stretch my hips for the morning commute.” It is just as much a suite of becoming a father as in being one, learning (as do we all, in regards to parenting) as we move through the steps. It has been interesting to see more poets approach conversations on fatherhood, offering a perspective and openness far different than those of a generation or two past, with poets such as Andy Weaver and Jason Christie, for example, providing their own conversations through the process. Robinson’s poems are gentle, complex and inquisitive, able to hold a great deal across what reads as straightforward thought-lines, writing daily tasks such as haircuts and dentist appointments. There is such a gentle way he writes of dailiness, what for so long might have been seen as too mundane to be captured in writing. As Robinson discussed in a 2023 interview conducted by Kevin Andrew Heslop for The Miramichi Reader:

I’ve been working with Al Purdy’s “sensitive man” as a draft title for my new poems, but maybe less ironically than he was wearing it, or with a different kind of irony. Yeah, I think I *chuckling* really am just a sensitive person. I’m realizing that more and more. I feel things deeply, and I find the world overwhelming in a lot of ways. And maybe this gets to what we’re talking about, this transcription of the real. This almost Bernadette Mayer idea, that the material is all out there and it’s utterly compelling. But at the same time that it’s compelling, it’s overwhelming, right?

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part four, : Neil Surkan + Beverley Daurio,

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here]. Might we see you later today at the ottawa small press book fair? We’ve been doing this for more than thirty years now, if you can imagine.

Toronto ON/Nanaimo BC: From Nanaimo-based poet Neil Surkan, following the full-length poetry collections On High (2018) and Unbecoming (2021) [see my review of such here], both from McGill-Queen’s University Press, as well as the chapbooks Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017), Their Queer Tenderness (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Die Workbook (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2024) [see my review of such here] is Ruin (knife|fork|book, 2023), a title I clearly missed when it first appeared. One might think, with at least two chapbooks I’m aware of over the past couple of years, might a new full-length collection be on the horizon? These are short, rather tight, first-person lyrics that run through meditation, reflection and family, whether working a long, extended, poem-long sentence-thought or compact lyric. I’m curious to see how the poems here might fit with his work from, for example, Die Workbook, what the shape of that potential full-length might be.

Reflection

I’ve come to the mirror and seen
myself for the first time 

in years, not as I fear
others judge me mid-chore 

or with love, but as
a creature who peers 

frankly, knowing neither shame
nor the threat of heaven.

Toronto ON: I’m very pleased that Toronto writer Cary Fagan has been producing a series of reprints and reissues as part of his chapbook press, Found Object, with one of the more recent titles by Toronto writer, editor and publisher (of the late and legendary press The Mercury Press) Beverley Daurio, A Broken Cup (2025). A Broken Cup is excerpted from her full-length poetry collection If Summer Had a Knife (Toronto ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 1987), a book, obviously, long out of print. I’m curious if this particular selection exists as a kind of “selected poems,” akin to a “best” of what that particular full-length had to offer, nearly four decades on, or if an assemblage of poems salvaged into a form that felt self-contained (or a bit of both, really). Without knowing the source, it all becomes speculation. “I am a slow writer; the poems in A Broken Cup were composed over several years,” Daurio writes in her short introduction, “Thoughts from a 505 Dundas Streetcar,” “within this newly electric and alive city. These poems may not seem political, but their very existence felt to me incredibly daring. I love Basho and Hopkins and Thomas and Plath, but I was hungry for writing that breathed the air of this place and time.” Further on, she offers:

Re-reading these poems, I am reminded of these times with fondness, of the living and charmed world created by so many caring, brilliant, open-minded people, and the unwavering light that shines from the lanterns they carried.

Before this re-issue, I actually hadn’t been aware that Daurio wrote poems, far more aware of her as the author of fiction (and one of the finest editors of same, through her time as a publisher). The poems have a timeless quality to them, both of their time and immediately fresh, offering clipped narratives across distances, pointed phrases and descriptive patter. I keep hoping from further prose from her, aware that it has been years since she’s released any new work, and this appearance of a reissue does make me hope that there might be further work possible What other gems might be hiding in Beverley Daurio’s files?

driving into winter 

dear mom: just a note to tell you i missed you
by a few hours, went through stop signs,
cranked up the radio, but when i got in
there were three cars in the driveway
and dad was in the hall closet with his face
in your coats, he was hugging your coats.
the whole way up i was driving into winter,
not a slow or subtle winter, there’s just
snow
suddenly. 

not the heart of winter either though
the highway’s rather like a spike
and you can fancy somehow driving it
that there is such a thing as control. 

steven and gregg had eaten and nana poured me a brandy
which i didn’t spill, thanks to the shape of the glass.
the green walls were hung with your
natures mortes, also the painting of the empty
café. nothing really dead in any of them,
no acknowledgement of withered apples lying
useful on the grass, no presumption
of comparison.

dad said the nurses sat you up in bed and
combed your hair. i wish i had a picture
of that. otherwise, it’s so easy to pretend
otherwise.

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part three, : Sadiqa de Meijer + Ben Berman Ghan,

[MLA Chernoff at the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market, receiving copies of their brand-new above/ground press title]

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here]. Will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 22? Will we see you at the pre-fair reading on Nov 21 at Anina’s Café?

Kington/Toronto ON: Presented as Kingston poet and non-fiction writer Sadiqa de Meijer’s Joanne Page lecture at Queen’s University, October 29, 2024, is the chapbook-length Fieldwork (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2025), which becomes a curiosity, given how recently her collection of essays, In The Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] appeared. “I remember only one conversation with Joanne Page,” the piece begins, “although we saw each other before and after. This encounter happened at the edge of City Park in Kingston. She looked at me, squinting against the sun, and said, We read your essay, we all read it and thought it was really good, we were surprised at how good it was. She was on the organizing committee of Common Magic, a conference celebrating the life and work of Bronwen Wallace. I had submitted a piece about reading Wallace’s work during my early years of living in Kingston and had called it ‘Arguments With The White World.’”

This lecture feels, in many ways, an extension of that collection, offering her thoughts on writing, Page’s work and Kingston thoughts, and thoughts through and around writing and thinking, all prompted by the Page Lectures, and the work of the late Kingston poet Joanne Page (d. 2015). In case you were unaware, the Lecture series was originally founded by Phil Hall during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 2012, with lecture chapbooks, the “Fieldnotes,” originally produced by Maureen Scott Harris (with lectures in the series by Don McKay, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Elizabeth Hay, Stan Dragland, etc.), a series since moved onto Kirby’s knife│fork│book. It is rather striking how far de Meijer has come as a writer of non-fiction prose over the past few years, able to weave such musical thinking across such a stunning prose lyric, one heartfelt and grounded in curiosity. As she writes:

This lecture was written. I wrote it in a series of rooms that have left their quiet tracks. The kitchen was sunlit and my mind accelerated. The chair was uncomfortable and I disputed myself. I answered the door and a phrase was lost to me. I used the fast pen, my fingers pushed buttons. Knowing the text would be read out loud, I wrote differently than I would for an essay, because you as the listening cannot insert your own pauses, or read the same line two or thee times over. I didn’t make them, describing occurrences from another millennium and country—writing is miraculous in its dissembling of space and time. I couldn’t tell you what I intended without it, because my mind is unpracticed in what an oral culture would require. We live where settlers attempted for hundreds of years to eliminate orally transmitted languages like Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka, and this was also a violence against the profound linguistic capacities of their speakers. Writing is rigid.

 

Guy Elston (with Jeremy Luke Hill to the left) announcing Hill's 'Microchimaera' (Baseline Press), as the winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: The latest from Calgary writer Ben Berman Ghan, author of a novel, two collections of stories and a novella, is the chapbook of poems Behold the Dead (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), providing an interesting stretch of literary genre. Might a full-length poetry collection be far behind? Ghan’s poems stretch across narratives, allowing line breaks and silence between lines, attempting few words but across distances. With meditative elements of breath, staccato pulse and hesitation, composing open space as carefully as he places words. There aren’t many examples off the top of my head of prose writers that move into poetry—the late Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, certainly, and Kemptville, Ontario writer Michael Blouin come to mind—and there are elements of Ghan’s lyric still firmly held in a foundation of prose narrative, although one he works to punctuate with open space, as the two-part poem “Annihilation” begins:

My body is a river

annihilated

in the hungry eyes of men.

 

Black waves hide a word, a body:

            Dissolve. 

                      Drown.

 

Becoming is the cruellest sensation. 

 

Bloody mouths

drinking in.

 

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part two, : Jacob Alvarado + Drew Lavigne,

[a corner of my table at the TIFA fair, including the shortbread cookies I made] 

Again, this blended sequence, as the weekend of back-to-back small press fairs was a bit of a blur. [see my first post on such here] 

Toronto/Mississauga ON: The debut poetry chapbook by Mississauga poet Jacob Alvarado is I Can Make It All Up To You (Toronto ON: Knife│Fork│Book, 2024), a collection of poems that write around their subjects, their initial prompts; less a sense of being evasive than simply working a different kind of clarity. “Bowie made his deathbed with Kendrick in his headphones,” begins the poem “How Many Times Does An Angel Fall?,” “a shipwreck saluting its reflection. // 3:16 AM: my head hits a wall. / Confetti bursts from my ears like ripped toilet paper.” There’s almost an element of the English-language ghazal (John Thompson, et al) in some of Albarado’s lines, allowing a leap between lines, between couplets, allowing the space between as much narrative space as the space itself. There are times that I do want the author to push further, just to see what else is out there, but there remains a clarity through Alvarado’s lyrics, one that finds itself the occasional wisdom, sharp lines that poke through, such as the final line of “Me and You and Awkward Silence,” that reads: “Depression is a room full of cereal bowls.” I am intrigued by this debut; intrigued by where this particular author might venture next.

Branches

His hands: dew leaves, iced tea, a waterfall.
Dares and truths are both dreams. Two choices; one flesh. 

My shoes were faded by the soaked suede
of summer strolls through sweet grass. 

A clearing. Of throat and brush. 

My legs were oaks. My knees; a forest-fire.

The sun was my heartbeat. Its rays my veins;
its heat my pulse. 

His eyes: acorns, aloe, alcoves.
Needles rained from pine-trees: self-clouding. 

The breeze flew around me but not through me:
    grease in a dewdrop.
Palm sweat: a waterfall, an avalanche, inevitable. 

His back: smooth, steady, slicked. A rockface. 

His mouth: The Devil dawned into God,
The stab of Eden’s gatekeeper, the sun. 

A hickey is a mark of belief.

TIFA fair: Jay MillAr of Book*hug Press, Leigh Nash of Assembly Press + Michael e. Casteels of Puddles of Sky Press

Moncton NB/Toronto ON: From the current poet laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick, Drew Lavigne, comes the chapbook EveningDress (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), a title that appears to be his debut, chapbook or otherwise. Lavigne offers poems of narrative richness and gestures that suggest performance, offering descriptive thickness across long lines and evocative meaning. “There is a dress by Paul Poiret,” he writes, to open the title poem, “which I first saw / in James Laver’s Costume and Fashion: A Concise History. / It was called ‘Evening dress: Il a-été primé.’ A fashion plate / from the Gazette du Bon Ton, 1914. / I was ten, and had never seen anything like this / turquoise pleated tunic, over a wrapped hobble skirt, / fastened with a gilded oval gem, bands of the same / fabric twisting down the arms, clasped at each crossing / by round jade jewels.” There is such careful narrative unfolding, unfurling, through his lyrics, one that might provide as much comfort on the stage as on the page.  

Round Mirror

It was easy then to walk into the sky
with my mother’s gilded mirror,
stolen from her dark room, held in my hands outside.
Startling then to find in the disc
that everything was upside down.
With little effort I could fly,
or walk among the branches of trees;
then jump from cloud to cloud: going higher,
seeing everything in a way that was strange and new.
Not understanding the danger of falling.
I tripped on the root tangled ground.
I saw the rolling sky, the black trees, the hard earth,
my face like a desperate man, seeing blood.
I fell into the mirror, shattered on the ground.

Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise

 

Dear lord king godly death maniac.
I’m just filling space with phatic utterance.
Surge for entry, dense roots strangled in clay.
Word by word weave Fat Tuesday’s brassy balance.
Liminal king of antiquity’s sunk mores.
Now winter braces hymnals with waste.
No gloves to love with or glow into.
Spin toward disaster—here we so
take it wildly. Listening beyond
where one’s self pretends plantation. Sensuous
cashmere or Thermore. Flannel sheets and wool
the kids wear threadbare. Dream vocal warden’s
venal agency making room for the dead.
A new wind enlivens uncertainty.

I’m intrigued by the latest full-length poetry title by Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). The Size of Paradise follows prior full-length collections Black Stone (effing press, 2007), Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform Press, 2014) and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as numerous chapbooks, including from Riot / September 2016, an Inside Out Journal (above/ground press, 2019), and at least two with Kirby’s knife|fork|book: Sons (2017) [see my review of such here] and Blur (2022) [see my review of such here]. The Size of Paradise is composed as a kind of book-length sonnet-scape or sonnet suite, one hundred pages of one hundred untitled poems. These are pieces composed through constraint, albeit one focused more on a gymnastic language than I’ve seen of his work prior, offering an array of poems that each sit self-contained, as a kind of repeated response to a particular prompt. “Promised bomb falls at each step and the dead / persist in long slumber,” he writes, half-way through the collection, “cohabitants / of earthly paradise. Circle the many / objects composing you, insistent / collection folding me in.” There’s a collage-echo to the sentences and phrases assembled here, and I’d be interested to hear how these poems began, almost expecting a response involving the daily motion of composing a poem with the only constraint being the sonnet, a consideration of duration and of writing itself.

I’m curious about the way Smith pushes at the boundaries of the sonnet form, stretching and extending outward in waves, the edges of these poems moving nearly as would lungs. As well, to move through these poems is to move across duration in an interesting way, through the very act of writing, and of reading. “To write is a / residue like beauty,” he writes, early on in the collection, “a deformity / one adapts.” A few pages further: “I can barely sense duration.”