Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two, : Jordan Davis + Ethan Rein Vilu,

[Grant Wilkins; see part one here] Be aware the next ottawa small press book fair is November 14 at Tom Brown Arena, yes? Even though I haven’t properly announced it, I’m already getting vendors. And don’t forget that myself and above/ground press will be attending the Fisher Library Small Press Fair in Toronto on September 19, yes?

Ottawa ON/Teaneck NY: Further from russell carisse’s sider0xylon press is the small chapbook SORRY, GOD by New Jersey poet and editor Jordan Davis, a poet I’d very much like to see further from [see my review of Davis’ latest full-length collection here]. SORRY, GOD is a chapbook made up of sixteen short, accumulated and untitled poem-fragments, a long poem composed via one step against another in sequence. “If you think about the future / everything gets worse but,” he writes, early on in the sequence, “if you think about other people / you have a chance / of not being the reason / everything gets worse [.]” The title suggests a kind of lyric act of contrition, yet the piece opens more into a suggestion of how to approach being an interacting with the world in a positive and constructive way, instead of simply being the problem, as it were. As the sequence opens:

How does it even happen
I was right there
paying attention, even!
and right in my blind spot — 

complete understanding
blipped out of existence —

[Christian McPherson, author]

Ottawa ON/Calgary AB: It is good to see new work from Calgary poet and editor Ethan Rein Vilu, THE LONESOME GLORY (Ottawa ON: Horsebroke Press, 2026), an assemblage of what appear as sonnet-variants, following chapbooks DRAWINGS FROM BEFORE THE RED YEAR (Anstruther Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] and A DECISION RE: ZURICH (The Blasted Tree, 2020). The seventeen poems that make up THE LONESOME GLORY speak on horseraces, offering specific lyrics on “Kentucky Derby, 2003” to “Starlet Stakes, 2022,” the Belmont Cup and “Yearling Sale, 1954,” writing in and around poems set within that particular world, but from different temporal points, which becomes curious in itself. Why so much movement across time? The poems bounce around perspectives of not a singular event but a larger, ongoing culture, which is curious to see. “For some,” the poem “Kentucky Derby, 2003,” begins, “it was an eden pierced / by world-weariness.” Vilu writes of horseracing in ways transcendent and intimate, mundane and glorified. While the moments that Vilu writes are interesting, I’m uncertain how these moments connect to each other, beyond elements of structure, and the loose content of horseracing. What is the purpose to this assemblage, what is the structure? There are moments I wish the narrative was less straight and more nuanced, more subtle, such as the poem “Starlet Stakes, 2022,” that closes:

She was denied her fairy-tale ending,
and yet her brave narrative prevails.
the race possessed the rhythm
of a legend—an arc unwinding
deep across the Orange County sky.

 

[Jay MillAr, Book*hug Press] 

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one, : Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross, + Monty Reid,

[Manahil Bandukwala at the Brick Books table; Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner at the Assembly Press table] Another small press book fair! Do you remember my notes from last fall on the ottawa small press book fair [see parts one, two] or my combined notes on Toronto's TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market [see parts one, two, three, four]? So much small press! And our next Ottawa fair will be Saturday, November 14th at the Tom Brown Arena, so be sure to mark your calendars. Did you know there’s a zine fair coming up in Sherbrooke, Quebec on July 4th? (a handful of issues of Touch the Donkey will be available there gratis, by the way) And apparently there’s another Fisher Library Small Press Fair in Toronto on September 19^th!

Ottawa/Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross have been working a curious sequence of chapbook-length response projects (all part of a larger manuscript-in-progress, “THE SHOOKY SESSIONS (A Litany),” a handful of such appearing recently in print [including titles through above/ground press, № Press and Vallum’s Chapbook Series], one of the latest being Shooky Session 4 (with allergies) (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, June 2026), subtitled “Paul Celan, Selections / 11 December 2023 / Sarah Burgoyne’s Place.” Each chapbook-length project, it would seem, is composed as a collaborative response to a poetry title pulled off a bookshelf at random, this one being Paul Celan’s Selections (University of California Press, 2005), edited by Pierre Joris. As the note at the back of the chapbook offers: “This chapbook presents poems written during the fourth of seven listening poetry sessions that Stuart Ross and Jason Camlot held between December 5, 2022, and December 18, 2024.” With the other prompt-titles in the sequence, Celan is an interesting selection, given the work can’t help but be a richly generative text. The notion of the “response text” is one that runs the length and breadth of literature, including what one might term straight translation to more abstract translations, from bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire to Erín Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Anansi, 2001) to more recent mis-translations by Montreal poet Hugh Thomas. Not that a response is the same thing as translation, or even mis-translation, but I would say the ideas are certainly related. Siblings, perhaps.

As well, Ross is one of but a handful of writers (I would include Gary Barwin in such as well) who seem to be constantly, even perpetually, pushing the boundaries of their own comfort and possibility through projects, including collaboration, all of which can’t help but feed into either author’s solo work. I am very curious to see this eventual published collection, and the way each chapbook-length project might play off each other, possibly. As the poem begins:

The divers are crowned by halos.
They are not brainless,
nor are they flames of vegetable.
Let’s dance around my eyes,
celebrate my glorious decapitation,
my glistening kisser.

Ottawa ON/Grand Lake NB: In case you were unaware, New Brunswick poet russell carisse [see my recent interview with carisse here] has started a chapbook press, sider0xylon press, which debuted at this most recent ottawa small press book fair. One of the first titles is the sequence OPERATIVES by Monty Reid, hand-sewn and produced “on a 1929 LCSmith & Corona Standard #8-12,” each copy individually typed and numbered in an edition of fifty copies. Throughout this ten-part sequence, Reid invokes a slow and considered lyric unfurling that works perfectly in this format, each short section on its own page, allowing each line to properly absorb. As the opening piece, titled “Brush Pass,” reads:

You never know what you’ll be given.

You might not feel the slightest touch
as the messenger passes. 

You never know where it came from
although you suspect a source. 

Your job is not to know. You are the form
the message takes, every time.
 

ongoing notes: mid-June, 2026: Joshua Wilkerson + Zoé Mahfouz,

We will see you at the ottawa small press book fair this weekend, yes? Reading on Friday at Anina’s Café and fair itself on Saturday at the Glebe Community Centre. Can you believe we’ve been doing this for more than three decades? There’s probably other stuff too. Oh, I’ve been posting a slew of interviews with above/ground press authors via the above/ground press substack, and starting to post sections of an extended journal from my week-plus at the Banff Centre back in May, so there’s that.

Brooklyn NY: From Brooklyn-based poet, editor and publisher Joshua Wilkerson comes the small chapbook FUME LAPSE (Brooklyn NY: Urizen, 2026), an assemblage of odd, quirky, first-person descriptive narrative poems and texts that shimmer, ever so slightly, against the light. Wilkerson’s lyrics are quiet, bubbling with wild energy just underneath the surface, offering a thinking in real time lyric sentences. “I remember my father woke me up from my tent to say the earth’s shape is curved, round,” he writes, as part of the second “Fuse Lapse” poem, of which there are several scattered through the collection, “like a stone column. I remember he said the earth rests on water, like wood, that the first animals were enclosed in thorny barks: cockles, moon snails, pear conchs, serpent stars, speaking and singing.” There’s a way these poems set underneath the skin, become hard to shake. “Everyone is obsessive / Just to different degrees,” begins the poem “Two Cities,” “That’s why the years went by so fast / Overhanging branches stroke the trains as they pass [.]” These are poems that pass through memory and intimacy, carefully set and considered, writing with the exuberance of considered youth, from only the slightest distance. Or, as that same, second, four-page sequence “Fume Lapse” ends:

I remember my father woke me up from my tent to show me
Alpha Centauri through the telescope – its four year old light
against my eyes. I read that somewhere, I overheard that, I made
that up, then furrowed it into the dull thunder of this painting,
which is a poem, which is another subway ride to work.

Chicago IL/Paris France: From acclaimed French writer Zoé Mahfouz (with a new book of short stories out this year, apparently) comes the chapbook Borges Must Be Rolling in his Grave (Chicago IL: dancing girl press, 2025), a series of intriguing constraint poems, most of which are held to the boundaries of four-line stanzas, with poems of three or four stanzas, most of which are centred upon the page. “Zero-gravity teardrop cocoon / No atoms to carry a sound wave,” begins the opening poem, “THE SUN BEARER’S POLLEN,” “The cataracts of the Nile boon / A cloudy-lens deprivation cave.” Form, as much as anything, seems to be the purpose here, and there’s even a haibun included, for good measure. Mafouz’s poems are propulsive, simultaneously energized and restrained. Composed as explorations of boundaries, and variations on constraint, but one that revels in a precise pattern of sounds and syllables, writing a lyric so tight not a wasted word, sound or stutter. These poems might just need to be heard.

BASAL GANGLIA DOMINION

Cheek by jowl, Hypnos with pink granite
Crumbling uranium, isotopes of potassium
Shadow-melding insectum plight
Coral keister befalls cysts, maelstrom. 

Foreign sycophant involving crawling
Like sand through a ravaged hourglass,
Oviparous, birthing bricks intestines,
Sun-blood trade, egest in flasks. 

Defer the harvest amidst matchboxes,
Scraping from under the dermis,
Chewing nutrients, anemia outfoxed,
Dry-cough Clozapine blunts. 

Insecticides tropho-goner,
Lethargic, excoriated palms,
Asclepius’ urinalysis qualms,
Delusional parasitosis collar.

 

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: mid-April, 2026: Carlos A. Pittella + Corey Page Martin,

Poetry month! Have you been catching the daily poems posted over at the Chaudiere Books blog? Or the weekly interviews posted via the above/ground press substack? Or the weekly posts in the Canadian Poets Series via Peripety and/or Tronies? There’s a lot going on, as you most likely know. And will I see later this coming week in Victoria? I’m apparently doing two readings and hosting a podcast, live on stage! All through Planet Earth Poetry. That should be pretty cool.

Lethbridge AB/Toronto ON: The third chapbook and debut manifesto by Brazillian-born and Lethbridge-based poet Carlos A. Pittella is Dante’a Bureau: A Deformalist Manifesto (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), a curious lyric and layered essay that counterpoints a thread of Dante and Saramago against a commentary around the difficulties around attempting to garner a passport one can’t travel to, due to an outdated passport. “The last Holy Roman Emperor died and the First Florentine Republic legislated a new balance of power,” Pittella writes, as part of the first thread, “requiring new rules of representation for landed aristocrats, merchant magnates, lower nobles, bankers, artisans… Bureaucracy was just budding when Dante projected its ideal form. Hell is a rational dream.” Counterpoint that against the other thread on the same page, that begins:

It took me eight years to get my Northern passport
By jus soli I already had one from the South.
By jus sanguinis I could apply for other ones.
By marriage I could’ve got one more but then
would have had to swear I revoked all others.
I started the new passport application
but the agents at the consulate
didn’t really want more citizens
so it took years to reconstruct my genealogy
with birth & marriage & death certificates
all notarized & translated
from a believable ancestor to myself.

Toronto/Kingston ON: Another title from Anstruther is by Kingston poet Corey Page Martin, the sleek chapbook JIM (2026), which appears to be their debut. JIM is a suite of poems that respond to the death of the author’s father in 2010, as the first piece, “Suddenly,” offers his obituary: “MARTIN, James Edward – Passed away / suddenly on December 1, 2010 in his 43^rd / year.” Composed as a chapbook-length elegy, the poems assemble, cluster, accumulate, writing through and around this central point, sketching errant truths and pressure points, play and open space, and new spaces that have yet to be filled. “we buried him in the backyard,” begins the poem “On father’s day,” “construction-paper / coffin // garden-stone tomb // he was supposed to be a goldfish / but he was blue / then white / then dead [.]” In certain ways, this is entirely an assemblage of poems on form, as Martin works through grief and loss from a variety of angles, playing with shape and structure, from a variation on Wallace Steven’s infamous 1917 “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” to poems composed through erasure, grids or found material. As the fifth poem in Martin’s sequence, a clever riff off memory, loss, their father and a particular beloved song by The Beatles, “Thirteen ways of listening to ‘Blackbird,’” Martin writes:

with a different voice every time

 

Ongoing notes: early April, 2026 (poetry month!): Andy Butter + Maria Cyranowicz (trans. Malgorzata Myk,

Another VERSeFest, come and gone. But most of our sixteenth annual festival was livestreamed, so if you missed any of it, be sure to catch either via our website or through our YouTube channel, yes? And now it is poetry month! Be aware that we’re posting a daily poem (at 3pm, Ottawa time) once more across Aprilvia the Chaudiere Books blog. Who might be first? Who might be next? And I’m reading later this month in Victoria, British Columbia, by the way, through Planet Earth Poetry, as well as hosting a podcast (recorded, on stage) while I’m around. Are you around?

Brooklyn NY: I’m just now working through American writer and editor Andy Butter’s debut chapbook, To Circumambulate A Sacred Lake (Brooklyn NY: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2025), a curious and extended chapbook-length lyric meditation. Butter has a good sense of the extended lyric, the long line, stretching out as far as possible across multiple pages, which almost makes me wonder if this poem is (or will be, or can be) far more than what is presented here, within the boundaries of this particular chapbook-sized unit. If Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” was attending the space of that landscape, so too, Butter’s poem, providing a similar shape through articulating an outline, slow and careful and almost delicate. As the poem, subtitled “[Allowing the materials their errors]” begins: “Here is where I start after ending. We walked, turned and touched. / Here we held and the trees of paradise lurched.”

We ran around Lake Superior—the center of the universe.

 

Our footprints a pearl-string of pressurized gravity wells.

 

We ran through rain, through broad open glades,

nights we knew the moon was near.

Rising as incense in a cathedral, slow and sluggish,

our voices tittered like old monks. In minutiae, in daily minuets,

 

within minutes skin sloughing and the egress of love,

we slept beneath the shroud of mosquitoes a buzz thin as muslin.

Poland/Texas: It is curious to see more work from Polish poet, literary critic and performer Maria Cyranowicz, translated into English from the Polish by translator Malgorzata Myk, as the chapbook a species of least concern (El Paso TX: Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024), as generously passed along from the translator (and through Polish poet, translator and critic Kacper Bartczak, recently in town for VERSeFest). The poems hold themselves as accumulations of long thought-lines, set as one foot following another, into a depth or a darkness or a particle of light. “and then I understood,” begins the poem “funeral,” “I am Alexander and he is Fanny / it’s me who is following still following the absent father / I keep saying damn it or much worse / smiling through my teeth to those stroking my [.]” As part of a folio of eight Polish poets at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics from 2024, Cyranowicz writes: “To me, language is a social construct inside of which the speaker of my poetry is bound to be trapped and to which they are frequently subjected. Linguistic conditioning, which entails the socialization of individuals to such ‘delusions’ as religion, education, politics, or even literature, does not proceed without oppression.”

the forty third sunset
watched by the Little Prince 

 

when I open my eyes the sun is still shining,
a small rusty orb close to the evening;
I’m turning it in my thoughts like a hot potato,
it’s setting too fast beyond the thin line of eyelids. 

the horizon fills with blood. I can’t not look.
I touch it with my eyes: it’s pulsing. I smile a little.
I’m trying hard to feel less sad.
I’m rubbing eyelids with my fingers and I don’t feel
reluctance in me, only astonishment.
there’s something beyond this line. there’s something in this color.

Ongoing notes: late February, 2026: Roberto Harrison, Abigail Garrison + Hugh Thomas,

By now you’ve heard that VERSeFest is coming up in a few weeks, yes? And hosting poetry workshops with Calgary poet Sheri-D Wilson and Toronto poet Paul Vermeersch! Spaces are still available! You should sign up to those. And did you hear I’ve a new poetry collection out later this spring?

MI/Kingston NY: From Milwaukee poet and editor Roberto Harrison (and the first publication of his I’ve seen) comes Posthuman Native: The Orchid (Kingston NY: Spiral Editions, 2025), an assemblage of poems each composed with lines that accumulate, stacked like cord wood. “a stretch of the body / ghosts matter in the light / of the shadows,” begins the poem “end mark for recursion,” “we / signal the afternoon / without a place to be outright / we make noise in the river / wood is out everywhere / in stacks of keys.” Through a heft of lyric, Harrison ebbs and flows through the query: what does it mean to be post-human? There’s a pacing, rhythm to these pieces that reads pulsed, almost unrelenting; a collage of layered lines that really shine across the lyric. And in the centre of the collection, eight full-colour collages that burst through. Each poem is thick, both in density and size, each of the eighteen poems assembled here far too large to large to include here (although there is a shorter one in Spanish, which does intrigue). There’s an urgency to Harrison’s poems, one fueled by a fierce intelligence and ongoing meditation on who we are and have become, and where, instead, we should be. We should, we could, be so much better. As the first half of the poem “patterns speaking,” reads:

what has made me move
to allow the streams to feel like blood
flown for the birds, for the hummingbird
night? my bodies stand to allow
discussion of the number, my bodies
remain outside in the afterimage
of darkness, when I speak, there is
another to stand within, there is another
to remain outside in the water. of all
the above ground monuments, I do not
have a single white flag for surrender, I
do not know what the symbol is to return
again, to the faltering display of human
arrogance, my revolver does not turn
and I do not become like the river
that we know. I do not become
like the fine gold that another planet
makes us move around in, in the exception
to winter I become again what I am not.

America, somewhere: A further title produced by b l u s h produced “in an undisclosed number of copies) in their “illicit zines” series is FUGUE (summer 2025) by Abigail Garrison, an individual described online as “a poet and artist living in Mexico City.” FUGUE is composed as a sequence of fifteen numbered short bursts of first-person molologue/meditation, slowly moving and stretching across and within a particular held moment. “the barrel forms / a perfect circle” Garrison writes, to open poem “vii,” “pacing back / the quest / crossing the / fragrant / churchyard / I go / uphill / uphill / desert clouds / buffer in / fabulous / mirage rippling / distant / like the sea [.]” There is a distance the poem, the narrator and narration, reaches for, but one that can’t ever be reached, purposefully stretching to see what might lay behind the horizon of the next moment. The lyric holds pause, slow and deliberate, even purposeful, in its meandering. Or, as the first poem in the sequence reads:

uninspired except for
objects I keep
candlesticks
linen sheets
silver rings
in a dish
in a dish
memory cards
moonstone
a desert wind blows across
my field of vision
tousled
night after night
I come to town
in red silk shorts

Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: From perennial favourite Hugh Thomas comes the new translation They Want to Steal My Name by Henri Michaux (Cobourg ON: Proper Tales Press, 2025). For some years now, Montreal-based Thomas has been working translations of poems from languages he doesn’t read or understand, utilizing the source material as a kind of jumping-off point into something entirely new and original, playing a surrealism of mistranslated poems across a small array of chapbooks (including some through above/ground). Although, given how long Thomas has lived in Montreal, this does read a straighter (relatively) series of translations, offering a new line of thinking across work already working a surrealism by the late Henri Michaux (1899-1984), a writer, poet, and visual artist of Belgian origin who lived much of his adult life in Paris. The poems here have the flavour of certain titles produced over the years by La Presse (a press I haven’t heard of in some time, are they even still around?). The poems are built with a prose structure but lyric line, one infused with a curious blend of elements, both straight and surreal simultaneously (with shades of Stuart Ross, also). I would hope that Thomas continues on this particular trajectory, I would love to see these pieces find a home in a full collection.

They want to steal my name

As I was shaving this morning, stretching out and lifting my lips a little to get a tauter surface, affording a good resistance to the razor, what do I see? Three gold teeth! I, who have never been to the dentist!

Ha! Ha!

And why?

Why? To make me doubt myself, and then to take my name of Barnabas from me. Oh, they’re pulling hard on the other side, they’re pulling and pulling.

But I am also ready, and I hang on to it. “Barnabas,” “Barnabas,” I say, softly but firmly, and on their side, all their efforts are reduced to nothing.