HANDSOME Vol. 4, No. 1

THE INSTRUMENTAL

I am a little

in sailor’s dress

until sailing sad said

I am the hemline see

here, oboe reed—

white and wet, absolute. (Dawn Pendergast)

After hearing the journal’s name for some time, Paige Ackerson-Kiely handed me a copy of the journal HANDSOME, Vol. 4, No. 1, produced by Black Ocean and co-edited by her and Allison Titus. There are incredible works here, most of which are by poets I’ve not heard of, and the lack of author biographies at the back is rather frustrating. Who are these people? This is a lovely designed journal, one of the better looking of the ones I’ve seen out of the United States. Good to see new writing by Dawn Pendergast, a poet I’ve been seeing more and more of over the past couple of months. There are the most exquisite untitled prose poems by Tara Rebele, brilliant and cutthroat erasures by Katherine Bogden, and other striking works by Tony Mancus, Hannah Craig, Becca Jensen, Ricki Garni, Natalie Shapero and Alex Crowley. I ask again, who are these people? I do understand the benefit of a lack of bias when reading work by unknowns; I know some respond to my frustration with the lack of bios with a roll of the eyes, but I always want to know: are there books or chapbooks by any of these writers I should be looking out for?

BECKETT REDUX

I always enjoy reading the last few pages of Samuel Beckett’s biography. Suzanne was nagging him, he was falling down a lot, his eyes hurt, it was hard to breathe, walking was difficult, Ussy was out of the question, he had written Waiting For Godot so long ago it hardly mattered, he fed the pigeons biscotti from his dressing gown, and his last poem started off like this: FOLLY. And that was it, FOLLY, the end, finito. His hands did not shake. And yes, he was indeed handsome, and he was excited about the future.

I always like to add that last part. (Ricky Garni)

Part of the excitement of going through such a journal is in the range of discoveries nestled inside. There seems, I’ve been noticing, a real tradition of the prose poem in the United States that doesn’t exist in Canada in the same way. When she was here for VERSeFest, Paige Ackerson-Kiely suggested that some of the current wave of American prose-poems—in journals such as sentence: a journal of the prose poem, and the writings of a number of poets including Ackerson-Kiely, Sarah Mangold, Sarah Manguso, Elizabeth Robinson and others—could go back to the work of Russell Edson. I’m thinking I really have to start picking up his books.

THOUGH IN ZERO GRAVITY

you must learn to recognize objects standing

on any end. He bought me a drink. I said THIS PEN

CAN WRITE IN SPACE, meaning this pen

explodes on planes. A child traveling alone

was sitting between us solving a What Is Wrong.

Goldfish bowl on hot stove, kid, get

with it. Oh I am a wholly worthless person.

He said WHY IS IT THAT WE CAN’T GET OVER.

We went over it all. I thought a ball

field was a radar screen. Oh I was close. (Natalie Shapero)

I’m also fascinated by the rhythms in the poems included by Liz Countryman, including a section of her poem “HOT AND COLD AUBADE,” that reads:

Everywhere people

said good morning to me from across the street—I was going

that slow.

My gut like a wrong word, the bent crepe myrtle

artless. Elsewhere

people brush each other in coats by mistake, or a man

comments,

Your hair is blowing in the wind!

My only real question: are back issues available?

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Deanna Young

Deanna Young’s second book of poems, Drunkard’s Path, was published by Gaspeareau Press in 2001. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including The Malahat Review and Arc and been aired on CBC radio. She's currently completing her third manuscript, Knowledge from a Previous Life. Born in Lucan, Ontario, she now lives in Ottawa. She recently launched the chapbook Mediterraneo (above/ground press), a collection of three short poems.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book was published when I was only twenty and a student at McGill University. It was a collection of poems called The Still Before a Storm (Moonstone Press, 1984). At the time, it seemed like an incredible opportunity and confirmation, but because the manuscript was published exactly as I submitted it—i.e., utterly unedited by the publisher—and therefore retained all of its raw immaturity, I ended up feeling an almost paralyzing self-doubt for years after. My next book came 17 years later and felt like a first book even though it officially wasn’t. Drunkard’s Path (Gaspereau Press, 2001) gave me that “first book” feeling of pride and achievement. This time, publisher Andrew Steeves certainly had his input, and the book benefited. My recent poems circle much of the same ground as my earlier poems; my preoccupations are the same. What feels different now is I’ve had some life experience, which includes three kids, and am not quite so vulnerable to the bullying insecurities of youth.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Lack of patience combined with an enormous capacity to obsess over details? I adore the way words and individual letters look, and sound, and poetry gives space to those obsessions. Poems can be seductive in their brevity. You think, well, what could it hurt to try writing a little poem? It’s not going to be as big a commitment as a short story, say. And then you’re in, committed, hooked.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The initiation stage for poems varies. First drafts usually come at one rush (driven by the inspiration, I guess), then take a while to develop through countless other drafts. (It’s great that this operation is, for me, now largely paperless.) Occasionally a freak appears and the poem comes together in a few days—or less, as with “The Yard” in Drunkard’s Path. Notes are not a huge part of my process for poems, but of course play a role when I’m writing fiction and non-fiction, which I’ve done a bit of over the years.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Poems begin with a compelling thought or feeling. I hear/see/think something that wakes me up, with its beauty or horribleness, and I rush to capture it in a net of words. After that it’s drafts on the laptop. In terms of poetry, I’m usually working on individual poems for some time before planning the book they’ll fit into. To be honest, I’m wary of the pre-conceived book of connected poems, and even the sequence. Such endeavours can easily become forced. (On this note, Phil Hall’s essay-poem “The Bad Sequence,” in his new volume Killdeer, is instructive—or cautionary.) There are of course books that succeed, and Ottawa poet Nadine McInnis’s Two Hemispheres is one of them. I just reread it and was captivated for the entire read!

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings. For me, they’re about bringing what you’ve been working on in isolation to other human beings, finally communicating en direct. (The idea of someone sitting alone, reading a poem I’ve written and getting something out of it is appealing too.)

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I have no theoretical concerns behind my writing and I don’t usually care for poetry that is theory-driven. The only questions I’m trying to answer with my writing are along the lines of: How did that feel? What was really going on there? Why does it matter? Even as I say this, though, I’m questioning myself. Maybe my theoretical concerns are so familiar I don’t even recognize them anymore. I’m just trying to a write a poem that will matter to someone—to me or to someone else. I think. I don’t know.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
To tell the truth—whether it takes the form of metaphor, symbolism, satire, etc. To entertain. To inspire self-reflection and insight. To keep the memory for future generations; or in case the world ends, we all die, and aliens or other intelligent beings come to mine our artifacts and find out what we did right and wrong—what made us beautiful and what destroyed us.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both, but mostly essential. You have to have the right editor for you, though. If you do, the final product will be so much better. The ideal editor is a proponent of tough love.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t judge another person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Or did you mean advice about writing?

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I’ve done only a little prose—writing for radio, personal essays, the odd review—although I hope to do more in the next year. It’s a good shake-up. I think it’s healthy to take breaks from writing poetry, whether it’s to write something else or just to live. For me, when the time is right it’s a natural shift.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Routine is crucial for me, but what the routine is depends on whether or not I’m working at a day job, as I have been full-time for the last four years. In this context, the only time for writing is evenings (when I’m tired) and weekends (when I also want to be involved in family stuff and have chores to do). My ideal scenario is to work from first thing in the morning (having not seen or spoken to another person, which does not happen unless I’m away on a retreat) until mid- or late afternoon—just like a day-job. I’m at my most intuitive and energetic in the morning. I’m taking a leave of absence from my job as an editor, starting soon, and so that will be my routine. Can’t wait.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I go outside to walk or garden. I bake or rearrange furniture. I engage in the physical world. While I’m doing something else, the solutions are percolating inside. It takes the pressure off.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Outdoor smells. Lilacs in June. A mown lawn. Manure on fields.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Nature, absolutely. The seasons. I lived in Trinidad for three years, not long ago, and wrote little during that time. I tried, but the consistently gorgeous weather left me cold creatively. I missed the Canadian seasons and lost my creative bearings! So I hiked in the jungle and played tennis instead.

Also, dreams, conversations. This is where my poems often come from.

Not visual art or music—although I’m mad about art and if I won the lottery would spend buckets on paintings, sculpture, etc. I might reference either type of work in a poem, but one of my pet peeves is poems about famous (or not-so-famous) paintings and orchestral pieces. Some people will dislike me for that comment.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Some writers and writings that have meant a lot to me are, in no particular order, Alice Munro (well, she is the first), Sharon Olds, Jack Gilbert, Rumi, Franz Wright, Charles Simic; Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons, Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook; Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Beowulf; John Steffler’s The Grey Islands and That Night We Were Ravenous, Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Writing wise: write a book of creative non-fiction. Otherwise: make a coming-of-age movie with a bunch of friends. (I thought of this just now and it sounds like a lot of fun.)

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Oh, so many possibilities. I would want to host a radio show like CBC’s Morning Side (remember that?) or Tapestry. I’ve always been drawn to radio. As a student at McGill in the ‘80’s, I hosted a weekly music show, and I’ve done a bit of freelance work for CBC. After a cottage by the seaside, one of my favourite places to be is in a sound studio. The quality of silence is breathtaking. Otherwise, I’d farm, which was my grandparents’ life and the family business for generations before.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

A creative sensibility? Idealism? Aversion to bullshit. Impracticality. I saw a button the other day that said, “Fight Truth Decay.” It was canary yellow with bold, black type. If I wore buttons, I would get one.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The novel Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, and the film Winter’s Bone, directed by Debra Granik, starring Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m completing my third book-length poetry manuscript. I’m looking for a publisher too.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

jwcurry’s Room 302 Books: list 13 : as random as it’ll get

Ottawa poet/publisher/bookseller jwcurry [photo of jwcurry at the 2011 spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair; see here for information on this year’s spring edition, June 30, 2012] has issued a new list of titles available from his Room 302 Books. See a previous list of titles here, and another here, and list 12 here. To contact jwcurry, call anytime 613 233 0417 or write/show up to 880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Ontario K1R 6R7 “for coffee, conversation, & a look at this (& other) stock.” Well worth the trip.

This is where you should be buying your books.

Here are a few (randomly selected) titles from “list 13” (issued January 18, 2012):

Alphabet #12, edited by James Reaney. August 1966.

Work by bissett, Boyle, Stevens, MacEdwen, Valgardson, Dewdney, Nichol, etc.

$125.00

Alphabet #18/19, edited by James Reaney. June 1971.

$45.00

Avison, Margaret. SLIVERICK, 2^nd edition. 1cent, December 2008.

$.01

Barwin, Gary. anus porcupine eyebrow. Kingston PA, Paper Kite Press, 2009.

$6.00

Coleman, Victor. CAPTIONS FOR THE DEAF. Rumour Publications, 1979.

$25.00

Copithorne, Judith. BRACKETS & BOUNDARIES (CONCReTE & OTHER ACCRETIONS). Returning Press, 2011.

$15.00

Fawcett, Brian. COTTONWOOD CANYON. Caledonia Writing Series, 1975.

$25.00

Gilbert, Gerry. BICYCLE. Caledonia Writing Series, 1977.

$35.00

Irwin, Marilyn. for when you pick daisies. Privately published, July 2010.

$25.00

Nichol, bp. SCRAPTURES second sequence. Ganglia Press, December 1965.

$300.00

Nichol, bp. THE CAPTAIN POETRY POEMS. Blewointmentpress, March 1971.

$75.00

Nichol, bp. THE YeAr OF THE FROG. Ganglia Press, 1967.

$75.00

Suknaski, Andrew. ROSE WAY IN THE EAST. Ganglia Press, 1971.

$75.00

with a selection of other titles by Bev Daurio, Jeff Carpenter, Alice Burdick, bpNichol, Daniel f. Bradley, Wayne Clifford, Pearl Pirie, fingerprinting inkoperated, David UU, Peter Jaeger, Daniel Jones, Dennis Cooley, jwcurry, Jo-Anne Elder, Michael Dean, Ross Priddle, Four Horsemen, David Fujino, Dorothy Livesay, Stuart Ross, d.a. levy, Steve McCaffery, John Newlove, Nicholas Power, Rob Read, Sandra Ridley, Stuart Ross, Bob Grumman, Richard Truhlar, Chris Turnbull, Nico Vassilakis, Frank Zappa and plenty of others.

You can always contact jwcurry directly for information on previous lists, specific authors or titles.

Jordan Fry reviews my grief notes: (BlazeVOX, 2012)

Jordan Fry was good enough to review my most recent poetry collection, grief notes: (BlazeVOX, 2012). Check here for the link, and here for a report on the last time I read in his city (if you are so inclined).

Watch out, I'm back in St. Catharine's in June, as part of the second annual Niagara Arts Literary Festival, for the sake of a reading on June 15th and another small press fair on the 16th.

Ongoing notes: early March, 2012

A photo of me in New Orleans, during recent adventures. Stephen Brockwell and I spent two days in New Orleans before driving up to Lafayette to read at the University, hosted lovingly by Marthe Reed (to whom we are both very grateful). Here I am on the last proper steamboat on the Mississippi River, February 23, 2012 (photo by Stephen Brockwell), enjoying my very first mint julep. I declare…

Has everyone recovered from VERSeFest yet? American poet Ron Silliman comes through Ottawa in March, via the AB Series, and even does a workshop while here. Check here for information onsigning up.

And don’t forget that the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair is June 30, with tables still available. The pre-reading occurs the night before at the Carleton Tavern, with readers tba. Watch for upcoming information on The Factory Reading Series’ events, including a reading and chapbook launch by former Ottawa and current Vancouver poet Rob Manery at the end of May or beginning of June. You won’t be able to help it. For this and any other upcoming Ottawa literary event, be sure to check out the calendar of events at Bywords.ca. Watch, too, for forthcoming above/ground press titles by Phil Hall and Andrew Burke, Kathryn MacLeod and so many others.

Will we see you at my birthday party at The Carleton Tavern on Saturday, March 17? I’ll be celebrating forty-two years and two days (so far) on the planet. Another ten years before I hit the fifty percent mark (you heard me…).

Ottawa ON: Twenty-fourth in Gaspereau Press’ Devil’s Whim chapbook series is Ottawa poet Monty Reid’s Contributor Notes (2012), a sequence of exactly what you might think it is. The first of the nineteen-piece sequence reads:

Monty Reid always reads the contributor’s notes first. Before he even looks at the rest of the magazine. He has become interested in how people imagine themselves. Perhaps he has come to believe that these notes are more dynamic, more provocative, more disturbing even, than the poems.

Through the movement of the sequence of short pieces, Reid turns, twists and even contradicts the consideration of the author “Monty Reid,” turning expectations of self around, while at the same time, working a thread of narrative line throughout the poem. As part eleven reads:

Monty Reid wasn’t always this way. He used to browse through each new issue, reading what caught his eye, going back to re-read pieces, often reading through the entire contents. Now, sadly, sometimes he never gets past the contributors’ notes.

Of the twenty-four in the series so far, this is only the second of their chapbooks I’ve seen, after the Jason Dewinetz title I reviewed a while back. An added bonus of Reid’s small publication (which was distributed for free at the recent VERSeFest), completely beautiful in the way that Gaspereau Press’ publications are, is this paragraph in the colophon:

This chapbook was edited and typeset by Andrew Steeves (who lived in Ottawa for a number of years while he played in a band, wrote poems and cut just few enough classes to graduate from university with a couple of arts degrees) and printed & bound under the direction of Gary Dunfield (whose brother lives in Ottawa) at Gaspereau Press as a number in the Devil’s Whim Occasional Chapbook Series.

Birch Trail, New York: American poet Deborah Poe handmade the small chapbook KEEP (2012) as a small give-away, a second edition distributed as gifts (for which I am apparently to respond in kind). A member of the fourth iteration of the Dusie Kollektiv (as was I), I’ve been very taken with Deborah Poe’s small handmade chapbooks, and the poems inside this small publication exist in “conversation” (as the colophon tells) with poems, pieces and quotes by Brenda Iijima, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Schapira, DH Lawrence and Eihei Dogen, as well as her own work. Her cover photograph, she writes, was discovered in an antique store, date and place unknown, of a group of people possibly residents and/or patients of a hospital or sanatorium. Her colophon also includes a quote from Eihei Dogen’s “Body-and-Mind Study of the Way” from Moon in a Dewdrop (North Point press,1985), that writes: “To study in this manner—understanding that home is no-home, abandoning home, and entering the homeless life—this is not measurable as large or small, near or far. It is beyond beginning or end, beyond ascending or descending. Broaching the subject, it is seven or eight feet. Responding immediately, it benefits the self and others. all this is nothing but the study of the way.”

Keep

someone is born in a room above a street

a border along dried out river between two states

from seize and hold and observe

a dorsolateral frontal cortex arches to air and light

retrieval mediated on right, encoding on left

lace glove, Easter Sunday, a girl

words related to looks

maintain—part history, part roots

the fact of being kept, the act of keeping

cortex cholingeric fibers ascend into frontal lobe

activation along with serotonergic fibers from midbrain

scattered thunderstorms, circuits along sky mind

to take in, receive, contain, hold

to receive with eyes, ears, and mind

to guard, defend, protect, preserve

Reading to Fly to Purchase

(verb and noun coexist)

learning’s persistence revealed at later dates

how to place (what we) keep.

I like the directions her lines move in, while allowing enormous space for what is unspoken to exist between. Just what is kept, or do we keep? “Pay attention.” she writes. “Mind the divide.”

The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011, edited by Priscila Uppal

In other words, if I have a critical bias, which I suppose everyone does as much as we try to remain as objective as possible, I admire poetry that surprises and challenges, that offers a new perspective or piece of wisdom I haven’t previously considered, that interrogates and innovates poetic conventions and genres and reverses the expected, either in terms of subject matter or language or form, or provokes unconventional emotions, that welcomes other fields of knowledge and art forms and methodologies, that reminds me of something important I seem to have forgotten or puts an entirely new thought in my head, that stuns me with exquisite beauty or sadness or profundity or ecstasy, poetry with a vision—whether pessimistic or idealistic—with something at stake, something to prove, something to lose, something to gain.

If I came to this project with any kind of agenda, it was this: to represent the vast range of styles, traditions, approaches, lexicons, genres, forms, influences, voices, and poetic subjects of the contemporary Canadian poetry scene, a diverse and vibrant community full of surprises. Sure, as any Canadian Literature will tell you, we write landscape poems, and love poems, and elegies, and odes, and family poems, and historical poems, fixed form poems, and identity poems (geographic and ethnic and cultural), but lots of poets are writing them in exciting, unconventional ways. We write poems that challenge the definitions of the “literary” poetic canons or centres; we are home to an accomplished visual poetry, conceptual poetry, spoken word and sound poetry scene. We write found poems, prose poems, academic poems, and collaborative works. We are meditative and intellectual, brash and angry, elegant and graceful, nostalgic and reverent, unsentimental and irreverent, serious and politically engaged, locally focused and globally aware. And we’re also funny. Funny, and clever, and playful, and ironic. (Why so few anthologies and literary prizes celebrate the range of humour in Canadian poetry baffles me.) And we are also beginning to engage more in poetic translations. (Even though these are not eligible for inclusion in Best Canadian Poetry for many critically sound reasons—permissions, different evaluative criteria—I would like to applaud those poets who produced many first-rate translations this year, including Di Brandt, Steven Heighton, Erín Moure, Eric Zboya for his algorithmic translations, and more, and the journals that published them.)

-- Priscila Uppal, “Connected Dots: An Introduction to Best Canadian Poetry 2011”

Even years before series editor Molly Peacock founded The Best Canadian Poetry in English through Toronto publisher Tightrope Books, I’d been complaining about it; complaining that if there were a Canadian version, it would ignore most writing across the country that wasn’t held to the mainstream verse of lyric metaphor. I was impressed with the first volume edited by Stephanie Bolster a few years ago, but the further two that appeared (edited by A.F. Moritz and Lorna Crozier, respectively) didn’t exactly prove me wrong. How does holding to a small handful of forms over the large range of what is being published equate to a “Canadian,” let alone a “best”? More of the same, as I’d rightly feared. This new volume, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011 (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2011), edited by Toronto writer and editor Priscila Uppal amazes, in part, because she doesn’t hold to the expected fears, instead including experimental, lyric, visual/concrete and other poetries side by side in a “best of” that doesn’t fall into dismissiveness, into the usual “best of Canadian lyric metaphor.” Uppal’s is a damned impressive list, including fifty poems by such as Ken Babstock, Jonathan Ball, derek beaulieu, Christian Bök, Dionne Brand, Don Coles, Marita Dachsel, Andrew Faulkner, Dorothy Field, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Julie Cameron Gray, Steven Heighton, Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst, Susan Holbrook, Dennis Lee, David McGimpsey, Shane Rhodes, David Seymour, Karen Solie, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Tom Wayman and Christine Wiesenthal, among others. Anyone who pays attention to Canadian writing already knows the wide range that exists here, and simply can’t help but exist, and this is a glorious thing.

My Life as a Canadian Writer.

My first short story, “The Provincial Far,”

was rejected twenty-five times before

it found its home in The Muskoka Review.

From then on it’s all been pretty easy.

I learned the beauty of socialism

from writers so passionate they’d cry

when they didn’t get a grant. We’d go north

and laugh at the thought of Alden Nowlan.

Yes, I have been on the radio!
If you heard that segment of Canada Reads

where a guy recommends the novel version

of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun, that was me.

Now I live and work in Montreal.

All we do is sit in cafés and talk through

the one remaining question of literature:

is it available for free on the internet? (David McGimpsey)

Uppal’s introduction is meaty, long and wide-ranging, and provides explanation and context to a variety of forms included in the collection, writing out sections on “Elegies,” “Memory & Family Poems,” “Intra-poetic Poems,” “Historical Poems,” “Concrete & Visual Poems,” “Scientifically Engaged Poems,” “Common Poetic Subjects,” “Love Poems,” “Poems that Engage with Other Art Forms” and “Political & War Poems,” with each section citing examples from the collection.

E. Coli

You never hear us laughing in produce

aisles, too baffled by your cartful of kids,

your cells and Blackberries. When the oyster

mushrooms send signals by satellite dish,

you’re oblivious. Don’t note the genius

of cauliflower, broccoli, brains cut

the stem, still working. Later, children

laid to rest, you shut down your antennae,

one by one. The TV stays on. Midnight’s

fridge light as the vacuum’s sucked open, and

your faces loom above the crisper glass,

anti-freeze blue, common as moons. Absent

astronauts, pupils in deep orbit, light-

weight targets. Purely, we assure you,

incidental prey. (Christine Wiesenthal)

The structure of the anthology comes from the editor scouring journals from a calendar year, and selecting fifty poems from print and online journals for the anthology, with a further fifty (“Longlist of Fifty Poems”) listed at the back of the collection. Part of the further list of fifty poems include pieces by Ottawa poets Pearl Pirie and Christine McNair, both here for the first time, which is pretty exciting. Another feature of the series are the “Notes and Commentaries,” composed by the author of each respective piece, providing a background of sorts on their pieces. McGimpsey, for example, writes: “I wrote this poem in Los Angelos a few Februaries ago. Some lyric sass, using contemporary Canadian culture marks, about the ways in which the life of a writer is imagined so easy and how beneath that veneer of ex nihilo grace is something not easy at all.” On her “Transcribing the Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson,” Windsor, Ontario poet and editor Susan Holbrook writes:

Gertrude Stein’s handwriting is notoriously unreadable. Taking on the task of editing her correspondence with Thomson meant a long apprenticeship to her scrawl. My co-editor, Tom Dilworth, and I greatly enjoyed ridiculing each other’s attempts at transcription. Many unlikely scenarios were born of our errant readings, the challenge all the more daunting because Stein’s letters accurately transcribed were, in fact, full of everything unlikely, playful, absurd. The most ridiculous mistake had to be mine, when I read that Georges Hugnet was getting “soooo famous” when he was actually getting “50 000 francs.” (Rest assured we spent ten years getting it right, so you can trust the edition!) This poem celebrates the fun of being confounded in the archive.

Seconded only by what Bolster worked in her first volume, this is the closest I’ve seen to a book in this series come to just how interesting this series could be, existing as not only a range of style, form and substance “best of,” but a worthy introduction to contemporary Canadian poetry for the wary, less-informed reader. These are books your timid high schooler should be reading, or your eager twenty-something, wanting to get out into that large world, and see exactly what the hell is going on.

The Last Good Year (a work-in-progress),

I seek coherence, where there seem only fragments. Traces. A snapshot of my mother four or five years before she died, napping with third grandchild, my sister’s second. Rory.

A portrait of my mother. After the funeral, left with flowers, and little else. To paraphrase William Carlos Williams, I am trying to name things, seen. I am working to explain, to clarify. For myself. I am heading into disconnect. My mother is dead.

I would reach out to her openly. And by writing, I might make it fixed. A point-of-view, an aspect. I might make it no longer mine, alone.

Susan Howe in My Emily Dickinson (1985): I am heading towards certain discoveries.

I am writing my mother in parcels, fragments. In parchment. This hole, what I might call a portrait.

I am a ghost through these days, through the house, through the days, hollow. I eat, I sleep, work.

The day she was born. According to various internet searches, Sunday, June 30, 1940, the day she was born, German forces invaded the Channel Islands, marking the only part of Britain the Germans occupied. This was the same day Dale Messick’s classic strip, “Brenda Starr, Reporter,” debuted in print, appearing in a supplement in the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune. From creator Messick’s retirement, the strip continued through artist/writer teams made up of Ramona Fradon and Linda Sutter, Mary Schmich and June Brigman, with its last strip published January 2, 2011. Six months longer than my mother.

This is the book through which I attempt to understand the whole of two lives, mine and hers. By mapping. I sketch, in hopes to draw out.

I hold up Heloise d’Argenteuil’s astrolabe. I hold up Samuel de Champlain’s, lost in a field.

Her daily regiment of anti-rejection pills. Would fill her open palm.

[click here for links to other sections]

Hillary Gravendyk, Harm

HARM

Ahead the sky is winnowed to its smallest feature. Starred with damage, the body. What was promised, what was revealed. A long staircase of wounds. Behind: unseen error. Or accident. Harm winking on, a neon sign that says closed. Pain glued to each window. The rooms shadowed with harm. You offered anxiety, a harness made from care. Curved handle, intention. Harm a kind of adhesive. Skin clusters around the opening, ridged and thick. There are lighter and darker marks. They disclose. Paper echo, gesture. Bleakness along the spine of narrative. Harm flat as a swept floor. As a drawn planet. A bright story is requested. What will be touched? Machines, that flashing support, a threaded needle. And the body, sutured to harm.

It has been a while since I’ve seen a first poetry collection strike so well, and so hard. Harm (Richmond CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2012) is the work of Los Angeles County writer Hillary Gravendyk, which includes a foreword by poet Brenda Hillman, that writes:

Harm is a collection of poems, some in short prose blocks, written in a great burst after the poet underwent major surgery. It is a cleanly and delicately paced volume, its pages sometimes punctuated by asterisks which suggest small flowers, snowflakes or abstract ink-breath. It is quiet, intense, and subtly beautiful work and, following in a long tradition of American poetry, is a book about both human and planetary illness, about the subjective experience of illness and the images that come to someone’s consciousness in a time of illness. Thoughts about personal fate and of the present earth in peril are contagious here. References to hospitals, to medical procedures and conditions are threaded with allusions to plants and to physical landscapes. Interiors trade place with exteriors; the meditating poet comes up for air in atmospheres that are literal and figurative. She transcends isolation and offers—not as palliative but as artistic practice—a sense of calm estrangement that often invokes an “other” in the work of a collective dream.

In a collection built up predominantly of the prose poem, Gravendyk’s Harm writes through the space of illness (according to the press release, Gravendyk received a double lung transplant in September 2009), writing backwards through the dark, so that she might emerge from the other side, much in the way Sarah Manguso’s memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) did on her own years of illness, and American poet Beth Bachmann’s poetry collection, Temper (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), wrote through grieving the murder of her sister by their father. In an interview with Omnidawn editor/publisher Rusty Morrison, included in the press package for the collection, Gravendyk says:

I wanted to offer a new narrative of the physical body constituted in perilous scenes of contact. Harm performs the loss of that fictive division between a unified body and its surrounding world. Terrifying and unlooked-for harmonies emerge in these poems, which dwell in a medicalized landscape where both the body and the land are monitored and laid bare. My intent was to trouble the idea of cure by recasting it in the terms of harm, to shift between warning and error, nature and the body. in the sense of Baudelaire’s “correspondences,” bloodclots externalize into “sunclots” and the air is “rusty with blood.” The book troubles the idea of cure by casting it also as a form of harm itself. Using versions of the prose poem and the lyric, I’m trying to navigate a landscape of extremity both frightening and filled with wonders. […] Part of what this book does is problematize the notion of “cure” by casting it as also a form of harm itself. The title “Harm” wants to trouble easy divisions between cure and harm, landscape and body, wakefulness and sleep. I think Harm drops a small bomb at the entry point of this book, forcing the reader to find their way in a place of partial ruin. That’s the hope, anyway.

There is such an incredible density to Gravendyk’s language, and this collection speaks to strength and frailty, of the human body and the natural world, and count among the finest prose poems I’ve read. This is very much a book of survival, and a deeper comprehension of just how close to the bone it can come. As she writes at the opening of the poem “THE SEVEN SINS OF MEMORY,” “Pain’s absence, like a footprint in snow // but the iron had eaten into my flesh // there was nothing, nothing to record.”

SAFEKEEPING

These were our secrets: samples from a charred heart, beak ligament, sharp fist of serpentine. We traded our phosphorous and filament for a ten-pin lock and were comforted. We knew that the right chemicals could make anything glow, knew that our discoveries were too delicate for exposure, and how distant, how troubling outside our rare cabinets! A little more protection and another specimen: clinging ring of iris, breath-bottle, bone, or scab. It was dangerous but it was ours for safekeeping. We wanted something coarser than blood to course through us: beeswarm and fiberglass. Wanted to glitter and wound and the same time.

a new print and e-chapbook by rob mclennan, published by Free Poetry For

My sequence, "12 untitled and unknown coordinates,
epyllions,
, epithelials" has now appeared in both print and e-form, as the third chapbook publication through American publisher Free Poetry For.

As their website says:

"Free Poetry For is an ongoing series of tiny chapbooks that are printed in a limited edition. When the chapbooks are printed, they are disseminated throughout public space (cafes, airports, buses and bus shelters, trains, waiting rooms, etc. etc. etc.) The purpose of the series is to heighten the awareness of poetry by putting it (poetry) in odd and unusual places and spaces, where poetry isn’t traditionally understood to belong."

You can download a copy, here.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Barbara Langhorst

Barbara Langhorst was born and educated in Edmonton, Alberta. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Alberta and teaches at St. Peter’s College, SK, where she has had the pleasure of meeting many of Canada’s finest writers. Barbara has studied poetry for more than twenty years. Her love of the medium and her particular interest in experimental and avant-garde poetry led her to become a writer. In Restless White Fields, Barbara reflects unsentimentally upon a range of tragedies that might have been prevented; this poetic sequence rends even as it heals.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Restless White Fields is my first book (sounds like my first confession, no?).  I'm finding the attention a little startling.  What changed me was the process of trying to write.  What's different about this work is its focus and experimentation--I wanted to show that, when you've been through a loss, every time someone says something that you can connect to that, you do.  You need to weave something to contain it, something daring, so then it becomes art and you don't have to think of the pain every moment--the accusing ghosts travel with you.  They don't leave, but transform, become companions that share your experience of the world. 

I hope that what I've done will help others who have this response to trauma.  I know that reading kept me going.  

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

My father began writing poetry in his 40s, and I was born when he was 42, so we arrived together, more or less.  I remember him standing and quoting Alfred Noyes when he was leaving for work, and as a three-year old, I'd be sitting in the grocery cart with my poor mother (who was a saint) allowing me to chant, "Look for me by moonlight / Watch for me by moonlight / I'll come to thee by moonlight / Though HELL SHOULD BAR THE WAY!!!"  But he wasn't just a fan of the Victorians and the Romantics...he was the expert on the new math for the school board; loved chemistry, too; painted; and had far-ranging and eclectic tastes. 

The way I turned again to poetry is fairly amusing...I enrolled in university for the first time at 32.  In my second year, I  registered for a half-year class on the modernists, but the reading list had 15 novels, five plays, and assorted poetry.  I bought the whole old-fashioned grocery-style paper bag full of books. My husband saw them and said, "You're never going to read all that in one term, with four other classes!"...I laughed and returned the books--and switched into a course on Thomas Hardy's poetry.

Later, in a different class, someone brought in "Seed Catalogue"...I was amazed and astounded...and hooked. I took every poetry course I could, did my master's on Coleridge and my doctoral work on Susan Howe and Phyllis Webb (and Walter Benjamin; I'm with Hannah Arendt, who claims he "thought poetically"). 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I don't take a lot of notes but collect things (articles, images, memorabilia)  like a crow (they're clever birds!).  I put off starting writing restless white fields for a very long time, but when I sat down and began to write, the whole thing came together fairly swiftly (less than a year).  It was a matter of clearing the deck, making time for writing, and, more importantly, for thinking and seeing.  If there's time for that, then pieces do come together quickly.

I used to think that if I could be like Ethel Wilson (who published her first book at 59), then I'd be happy, so I'm ahead of schedule.  However, there's nothing like a deadline to concentrate the energies. I also thought that Leonard Cohen was ancient at 50 (when I was in my 30s).  It would be nice to put this idea (that I'm not going to tell you about) onto the page soon, as I've been thinking about it for seven years.  I almost started it two years ago, but almost doesn't count.  The pieces I've gathered float to the top of my desk or cupboard every now and then, or a new one arrives...I'll need to put myself in the chair at some point soon.  Last night the perfect opening line came to me, so...  

4 - Where does poetry usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

For me, poetry does seem to be a combination of holding oneself open, training the eye to look for pattern and resonance, sifting through prompts (that seem to arrive mystically) until time and energy coalesce around something. If I find small images I want to create puzzles around and store those, either in notes if I can, or in memory, then that gives me a starting place when time does open up (usually unexpectedly). 

So, did I think "book"?  No!...that arose out of writing courses with fabulous teachers Lorri Neilsen Glenn and Seán Virgo, and work done in a writing group.  However, after I'd done a set of poems and they all seemed to want to answer the same questions with different approaches, I did hope "book."  Now, I did have ideas around which things rattled, yet sometimes events or the approach to a poem or story would change the whole direction. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

The majority of my experience with readings is on the other side--I've been fortunate enough to host so many fine writers through our Canada Council for the Arts readings series at Muenster.  Now that I have to perform, I must admit to a certain amount of trepidation...as a teacher, I'm very comfortable presenting and reading other people's work with great gusto...but what that will mean when I'm out there reading is yet to be seen.  I do enjoy interviews!

What I do know is that teaching is a form of creativity that's not unlike poetry--the assemblage of apparently disparate ideas, encouraging the audience to make connections.  I find that when I'm teaching a lot, I don't need to write, which is unfortunate...I have all the feedback I want at that time, and am mentally played out.  Some people can do both...I admire those people enormously. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Years ago, in my graduate coursework, I wanted to explore the social function of poetry.  People laughed, and said that was a life's work, not a thesis.  They were right, yet even in meditating on this one problem, every book I read or hope to write has its own set of questions.  I am fascinated by Walter Benjamin's theory, particularly of the dialectical image.  The constellations of ideas that resonate (with one another, within the one book and with others, within this one time and at others, within history) are what interests me.  How can we write about events to wake ourselves up to see, or read, what is around us?

For instance, in restless white fields, the final poem is "apocrypha," which explores a moment when four out of ten horses broke through the ice on a dugout and drowned.  No one but the remaining six horses saw it...my images and allusions are invented, based on the fact that someone found the drowned four afterwards...Thematically, it would seem an odd choice (a horse poem) for a book about suicide, murder suicide, international relations, the ill-fated Franklin expedition, and much more...but it seemed the perfect ending for a book that deals with a collection of disasters that no one saw...but perhaps could have foreseen.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I wouldn't presume to tell anyone what she or he should write, though I might say, "look at how amazing these connections are!"  I love so many different styles, themes, forms of writing, especially in poetry, though so much "fiction" or "nonfiction" is poetic or hybrid...I do think that there is room for writers to awaken their readers to new worlds and ways of reading those worlds strategically.

That said, I'm always struggling to get my students to watch CBC or BBC, to learn history as well as innovation.  What's happening in the world needs to be examined and the danger brought forward (everything from the threat of environmental collapse to the threat of geoengineering; the repression of democracy abroad to the repression at home; abysmal poverty amidst heedless wealth; and on and on).

If my writing is centred on anything, it's that we are always witnesses--often after the fact, trying to catch up, prevent the next catastrophe--as Walter Benjamin put it, to "redeem the dead."  Everything that we think happens to us is so much part of the larger theatre...and it's all connected. However, this is not to say that irony and humour can't be a large part of that...my parents taught to love mightily, to feel great joy, even in pain and utter helplessness.  "If you don't laugh, you'll go crazy."

And one thing all writers can do is hope to inspire people to read!! and to write. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I've been fortunate; the people I've worked with have been inspiring and astute, in tune with what I was doing.  I do have a very clear vision of what I'm trying to achieve, so if a suggestion doesn't work for me, I'll say so, but hope to find a solution that's amenable to all parties. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

When I started painting, my first watercolour assignment was very well received.  The teacher liked it, as did the janitor and the other members of the class.  Inspired to be grand, I painted something about six times the size.  Again, the class was encouraging...but the instructor said, in front of everyone, "This is wrong, this is wrong , this is wrong..." going through about ten different elements of the piece.  I was crushed.  Later, he came over and told me something that I'll never forget:  "This is not about you; it's about the painting.  Change those things and it will be good."  Of course, in watercolour, you can never just paint over the last attempt--you have to start from the beginning--but suddenly I was able to detach myself and not take it (so) personally. 

Probably the best advice I've heard about writing was an idea of Hemmingway's: to always leave himself an idea to work on the next day...just notes towards something, to avoid that blank page.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

I haven't had problems in moving between genres...I often start in prose and see something in it that work better in poetry; right now I'm writing in prose in my head, and hoping I can convince it to stay in prose!  But I'm not going to give up if it won't.  I love books like Kristjana Gunnars' The Rose Garden, that cross genres so artfully.

The appeal for me is in the surprise, the glorious experiment of working within certain constraints that might not be typical for the genre in which you are writing.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I've given up trying to have a writing routine throughout the fall/winter session (always trying to stay afloat; my writing life is just a few notes when I can do that, or collecting things towards later work)...but when I do have a stretch of time, I find that if I can be at the computer by 9 a.m., and write until 1 p.m., then I read or garden or whatever in the afternoon, and maybe return to write a bit in the evening.  I'm quite an owl, so like to write from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. when I can, but then that means I need a nap instead of the gardening! 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I read, usually something in whatever genre I'm writing in...or I set formal constraints and experiment with those.  Or I get away from it and do something else, like clean house.  Enough of that and I'm ready to work again!

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Woodsmoke. We didn't have a fireplace, but spent every summer at the lake around the campfire, with my dad playing the harmonica. 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I'm very interested in science, though I no longer know much about it!  I originally wanted to be a vet or a biologist, but developed juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at 17, which meant that I wasn't going to scale mountains and interpret the wildlife to park visitors.  Then I went through a period where I made visual art in a variety of mediums...but gave that up after a hand injury.  All of these things inform what I do, but especially the visual.  Although I hardly listen to music anymore, sound is also very important to my poetry, and the element of surprise.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I love experimental poetry from any era; this is an abridged, scrambled selection of favourite writers:

Sylvia Legris, Sina Queyras, Leonard Cohen, Derek Beaulieu, Jon Paul Fiorentino, John Donne, Dennis Cooley, Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Nicole Brossard, Erin Mouré, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, Doug Barbour, Tim Lilburn, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Don McKay, Fred Wah, Kristjana Gunnars, Bert Almon, Simone Weil, Rumi, Teilhard de Chardin, Teresa of Avila (The Interior Castle), Shawna Lemay, Sue Goyette, Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen, D.H. Lawrence, Jan Zwicky, Allan Safarik, Sue Sinclair, Seán Virgo, Walter Benjamin, Phyllis Webb, Susan Howe, and Robert Kroetsch. 

Great anthologies?   Post-P R A I R I E (eds. R. Kroetsch and Jon Paul Fiorentino) and Open Field:  30 Contemporary Canadian Poets (ed. Sina Queyras)

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Many things, and nothing.  Plant an orchard?  Live in the 19th C?  Become a long-distance runner?  Win LottoMax?  One thing I've been obsessing about lately is the desire to own a pair of alpacas.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would become an environmental scientist, or a doctor, as frustrating as that must be.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I DID do many things else...I write because I love to.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book I read was Shawna Lemay's manuscript, HIVE--it's an experimental poetic novel about a woman art forger.  As for film, I'm sorry to say that the selection here isn't grand.  I did just see and enjoy BBC's North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell.  (Edwardian Farm on The Knowledge Channel, now showing for another 10 or so weeks, is great.)

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am working on a top-secret project that requires me to conduct a lot of self-serving research with almost no possibility of satisfaction--which should fuel the creative process, if it doesn't bankrupt me.  Stay tuned.

Thanks very much for this, rob.  It's been a pleasure.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sarah de Leeuw, geographies of a lover

53055’06.72”N 122043’39.25”W

this tender wound is my missing your body, standing on a lake shore with the sun at my back, my shadow-outline fractured into filaments and halo shards broken into summer fattened fish i dissolve into thick overlapping scales, protective but useless against a hurt that is nothing at all, the nothing of emptiness gaping between rock edges torn apart from millennia of seismic shuddering, of sky wedges visible between red cedar roots upended and hurtled into driftwood with tide stripped-back bark, the nothing of the unlit moon when it rises far from full and we simply trust that what is not visible exists, like you, not here with your hips settling against my lower back you not here with your thumb in my mouth you not here with your hand resting between my upper thighs and you are not a river during break-up full against banks straining through muscled ice blocks nor are you the wrist-thick sturdy roots of water lilies wedged firmly into muskeg bogs warm below the line of decomposition, you are certainly not and this aches.

Prince George, British Columbia writer Sarah de Leeuw’s second book and first poetry collection, geographies of a lover (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2012), predominantly constructed of poems with latitudes and longitudes, is reminiscent of Monty Reid’s own collection writing out specific Alberta same in The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1995). 

A first and second place winner in the Creative Non-Fiction category of the CBC Literary Award, de Leeuw [see her 12 or 20 questions here] is also the author of the magnificent non-fiction title Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2004) [see my review of such here]. Composed in eight sections—distance, place, topography, scale, mapping, contour lines, borderlands and north—de Leeuw’s first trade poetry collection twists the idea of the traditional ‘poems of place,’ skirting above specific site references still as fixed as anything, if you know how to read them.

53055’06.72”N 122043’39.25”W

no one is needed, the horizon a sunset against red osier dogwood or cranberry bogs or the rushing sap of vine maples, bleeding times and i am digging in, deep, under the skin slick as deer fat the freshness of meat hanging ripe guts left in coils on rainforest moss and lichens bristly short-haired and tender with everything i bring myself to rusted waters coloured from tannin i lie back with the gorged body of a tick full from burrowing, we know ourselves better than anyone, a slip down around and into shedding, the deep brown of arbutus bark sloughing slowly as the trunk expands, rhythmic and alone.

In a sequence of physical and emotional geographies, de Leeuw fully and unapologetically embraces the lyric, writing a sequence of prose poems that lick and stretch across the surface of a variety of skins. She writes most of her titles in a geographic specificity that doesn’t reference inside the body of each piece, much like poet Gil McElroy’s temporal displacements in his ongoing “Julian Days” series, replacing de Leeuw’s latitude and longitude with dates of the Julian Calendar. Through the process, they might tell you what happened, but you might not know where, or even when. The poems flow into each other, and the section titles are but poems themselves, each section mapped out with section-title poem written as more linear, more narrative, writing out as Greek Chorus might, before the action of the section/scene gets underway.

MAPPING

Four feet of snow have fallen overnight, the temperature dipping below minus 34 and falling.

A new terrain is born, uncharted lands between my front door and the sidewalk’s edge. Old markers have vanished. I am directionless as I shovel, reduced to guessing where lawn meets driveway, where road meets property line.

Forty-nine days have passed since we made love and then you returned home.

You have since sent me photos of your holidays. I stare at your four-year-old daughter. She painted her fingernails gold. Her grandfather looks like you. In one image, on a bookcase to his left, is a photo of you with your wife, both younger.

I clear a path, shoveling to uncover details stored in memory. The scar beneath your bottom lip. The darkened trail of hair down your abdomen, wet from lying in my bathtub. The tips of your cuspid teeth. The dips of skin between your fingers.

Atlases were once my favorite books. Legends comprised of symbols that made perfect sense and little dogs of all the places I would travel.

The rarity of rhumb lines, stoic in their precision. If I lost confidence I could follow their constancy to the ends of this earth.

Sarah de Leeuw’s geographies of a lover is very much a collection wrapped around a singular construct, mapping out the lyric moments of an affair, nearly as a poetic travelogue. Opening with a quote from Ottawa writer Elizabeth Smart’s novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, another book of a steamy, illicit love with a married man, de Leeuw’s narrator writes out her own love, with a far better ending for her narrator than Smart’s, writing, in the poem “NORTH,” “Your wife and children are no longer a magnetized pull home. // I am no longer an expedition.” But what exactly is this? Whatever story this is, there are elements of difficulty in sympathy for a woman who waits for a married man to tear himself away from wife and children, for the sake of an illicit love. Hers is a highly charged and erotic text that drives the point home, deep, in the earth, writing a passionate embrace between silent stretches, ending with the slightest hint of doubt, as the final poem ends, writing: “ii am left sliced open on my back dripping cum flows towards ground to the san andreas fault line, faulted, my fault but, still, you will leave me, without a doubt.” Is this remorse, or fear of abandonment? And does it matter? It might.