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: the ottawa small press book fair (part one, : Tamsyn Farr, emily shafer + Yoko’s Dogs,

[Michael e. Casteels, Puddles of Sky Press]

Another small press fair, come and gone; and have you been catching my posts from the recent participation in both the TIFA Small Press Market and Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market? [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here; see my fourth post here].

Wakefield/La Pêche QC: The latest from Pearl Pirie’s phafours is Crime & Ornament: poems (2025) by Tamsyn Farr [see her “six questions” interview from last year this time], a chapbook debut by the self-described “degenerate, straggler, marauder, buffoon, confidence trickster, latent criminal, pathological phenomenon, and poet who goes around Wakefield, Quebec, in velvet hose with gold braid like a fairground monkey.” I had a landlord back in the late 1990s who was the “Village poet” of Wakefield, I wonder if she knows Phil Cohen? “America was Kmart the Beautiful / when I was seven and in love / with Teddy Ruxpin.” she writes, to open the first poem “Cross Border Shopping,” a poem around memory, composed beneath the shadow of the current political climate. Her poems in this short collection offer depiction, response and memory, writing first-person poem-thoughts across narrative stretches, playful patter and sharp turns. Or, as the first quarter of the poem “Lovin It” reads: “Piercing gun cocked: pop goes / the sheen of a flat world // conspicuous, daubed / in all-angled light. // A footnote in the fiscal year / liquidates the wax museum // in some sun’s hollow centre. / Now two-thumbed hands // shake at rates reflecting / the cadences of the real world. // The death rattles’ goo goo / ga ga: the last dead giveaway.” I am intrigued by her use of political and cultural touchstones, riffing references and exploring multiple shapes and forms across this assemblage. I am curious to see what might come next, certainly.

Ornaments Wanted: Dead or Alive

On the mantle, a BBQ lighter. It came in a pack
of two: red and blue. Its long, flame-tipped finger
lights the fireplace. Left too close, it later catches
fire and explodes and leaves specks of soot over 

the whole goddamn house because that’s how hot
fire gets, hot enough to blow up the fire-maker
and ash-festoon every surface. And at the blue
fire’s centre is six months or years of sad and
unfiligreed time: to hose you down and feed you
peanuts, to talk to your druid therapist, to recall
that hangover nap on the toilet in a bathroom for
employees of the research unit of the psych
hospital, to be gainfully employed, to step into
the cold shower like a chest-beating Swede and
fantasize pleasantly about being fed into a wood
chipper. Mulch-me becomes the beadwork on
another disenchanted century. 

He wasn’t wrong to look for the ornament
embedded in the object. He wasn’t wrong that
fads lead to landfills adorned with dated kitchen
cabinetry. Every Hummel figurine is haunted.
Snipped from their forests, my indoor trees
yellow around me. 

(For the love of Christ, go water your plants).

Cobourg ON/New York NY: From Stuart Ross’ infamous Proper Tales Press comes New York City-based Rochester, New York poet emily shafer’s chapbook debut, it’s too early for poetry (2025). There’s a clarity to her lyric I find charming, a straightforwardness that still bends in the light, offering a slight pull on the line from gravity. Her poems really do feel akin to full-length sentence-thoughts, stretched across a canvas to shape across pause, interruptions, turns and twists. “Midnight ivy holds this house / together but I squeeze / out through the cracks,” she writes, as part of “the Munchmuseet,” “If you didn’t want to blossom, you should have told me so [.]”

August 

Jessica works at the Met
every day editing
exhibition photographs, so we go
out on weekends to some bar
in the Bronx for wings and syrup
-y soda. I can’t yet tell
if the waiter has had such
picky customers before, tearing
apart and rearranging the menu, but he seems
to mind
            only us.
At midnight I see the moon
over Van Courtland Park out the empty
train car window and she says
it looks like me and I rest
my head on her shoulder
            as the I train takes us home.

Montreal QC: I’ve long found collaborative quartet Yoko’s Dogs [Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis and Jane Munro] a curious aberration, offering an ongoing conversation between a larger grouping of collaborators than the usual two or three, paired with the fact that they’re all individually well-established and published writers, and the fact of their sheer ongoingness, perhaps comparable only with their contemporary, Pain Not Bread [made up of the collaborative trio Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton]. Yoko’s Dogs formed in Montreal in 2006, and has since published titles including the full-length Whisk (Pedlar Press, 2013), and chapbooks Rhinoceros (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and Caution Tape (Collusion Books, 2021). Their latest is the chapbook Lunchbox Poems (Turret House Press, 2025), a title composed as an extended sequence of short, fragmented and accumulative lyric bursts. “can you put your feet up and relax,” they write, mid-way through the collection, “if the footstool is an anteater [.]” Their declared intention sits within the structure of the English-language haiku, but their lyric feels a bit more expansive than that, pulling at the boundaries of where the lyric meets a clipped, meditative density. Not straight haiku at all (again, in the adapted and otherwise imperfectly-translated English-language parlance of an original Japanese form), but something expansive, and ongoing. Not simply one small moment held, but held in a loose kind of sequence.

on the phone with my mother
I pull skin from
a slice of salami 

full snow moon, your other name is
hunger

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three: Jamie Sharpe + Monty Reid,

Here are some further items I recently picked up as part of our thirtieth anniversary ottawa small press book fair [see part one of my notes ; part two of my notes]. So many things! Maybe you should come out for the next one in June?

Comox BC/QC: Curious to see a new phafours chapbook by Comox, British Columbia poet Jamie Sharpe, his Michael Hofmann: Poems (QC: phafours, 2024), following a small cluster of titles, including five full-length poetry titles through ECW Press. As the opening note of the small collection offers: “I was forty. I lived in an unassuming, but comfortable, vinyl-clad box in a small Vancouver Island town. I’d completed an English degree, then an MFA. Somehow, I authored five books. Then I became Michael Hofmann. […] Six-months after this puzzling transformation, as abruptly as it began, it ended. A modest sheaf of poems, written while I existed as Michael Hofmann, remained the residue of altered days.” As he describes living an ordinary enough life with wife and two small children, there’s a curious element of this apologia that might seem entirely familiar to anyone feeling the accumulation of life-shifts, no longer who they once were; an evolution of being and becoming, entirely natural through moments of wondering whatever became of one’s errant, fleeting youth. Or perhaps a writer with a handful of books, wondering if an evolution is required; if the writing requires a shift into or towards something other, else (this is all speculation, possibly; or overthinking on my part. Perhaps I take his framing too seriously). Is this Sharpe attempting to adapt certain elements of style from the German-born translator, critic and poet Michael Hofmann, working to step into a voice beyond his own? As a writer, an artist, one needs to evolve, certainly. Is a change as good as a rest?

One in a Row

The Northern Lights are gone, leaving
Streets as the stars scar..

As insects increase, Southerners
Fall on boulevards. Even my kids try,

With disgusting, sincere voices, to make names
With their awkwardness.

I first turned to night, as coincidence.
Succumbed to the census by accident.

Saw our constellation in a hospital,
Free. Mutilation, flash your whip

With its two golden hooks: one in vain,
The other, across dumb distance, in lace.

The poems offer a curious shift on the work from his prior publications, one that might be less of a singular shift than part of a larger move into or towards other structures, one step following another. It will be interesting to see where this particular direction might lead.

Ottawa ON/Montreal QC: Ottawa poet Monty Reid’s latest is Vertebrata (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2024), a chapbook-length sequence on some of the makings and doings of some of his inner workings of late, including issues he’s had with his back, one shoulder, arm: enough that he’s no longer able to play or perform music. “Articulates at the Luschka joints.” begins the small poem “CV3,” “Little Germanic teeth / subject to degeneration. // And the foramen / little Latinate windows / gradually closing themselves. // And the nerves die / twitching with their languages. / Their little languages.” Composed as short, compartmentalized and numbered sections: seven poems in a sequence titled “Cervical Vertebra,” twelve poems in the “Thoracic Vertebra” sequence, and five poems in the “Lumbar Vertebra” sequence, followed by the singular poems “Sacrum” and “Coccyx,” the penultimate of which reads, in full:

The federated bones have a single voice.
They do now.

Sacred bone, buttocks bone, broad bone
The bone that survives.

You sit there
and I am there for you

like a shovel in your pelvic girdle
to shovel all the shit

out of your sedentary life.

Reid has long had an attention to the smallest detail, and the ability to extend a particular thought or sequence of thoughts, offering sequences and even collections that feel akin to a single, extended sentence-thought, holding a balance between the minutae of cause and effect, the physical and the metaphysical, bone against bone and the abstract idea. “Sit on the disc / of collagen,” writes the poem “T6,” “where the metaphysical arteries / don’t penetrate // until you become / yourself. // Every bone / needs its cushion // which you are now.”