Jerome Sala, Glop: Poems

 

from A Guide to TikTok
                                                —After Kenneth Koch 

Look at this TikTok video.
There is a tiny dog in the foreground.
There is a tiny dog in the background.
The tiny dog in the background yells
to the tiny dog in the foreground:
“Hey, what is your name?
What is your name?
What is your name?”
The tiny dog in the foreground
finally hears the tiny dog in the background.
The tiny dog in the foreground yells back:
“Toby!
My name is Toby!”
The tiny dog in the background yells back:
“Fuck you, Toby.”

I have to admit, upon opening New York City poet Jerome Sala’s latest, Glop: Poems (BlazeVox Books, 2026), I caught the first poem, and was immediately prompted to share a photo of it with at least half a dozen friends via text. As an opening poem, there is something quite remarkable about it, including the absurd ridiculousness of the narrative. The poem strikes, clearly. The first full-length collection (unless there’s something else I’ve missed) since the publication of How Much? New and Selected Poems (Beacon NY: NYQ Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Glop: Poems presents itself in three titled clusters of shorter poems—“Searching,” “Headlines” and “Poetic Economy”—Sala’s is an approach to narrative lyric oddities and the surreal that connect his work to the work of other contemporary poets such as American poet Ron Padgett and Canadian poet Stuart Ross, akin to a particular flavour from within the New York School. “I know where I’m going / when I walk with a zombie.” begins the short poem “In the Key of ‘I’.” “Once I was a male war bride / now I am an idiot, walking / through an ice storm.” With poems for or after Kenneth Koch and M.S. Merwin, and further referencing Huckleberry Hound, Marianne Moore, Charles Darwin, Vallejo, William Bronk, Auden, Joy Division, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, Blade Runner and the Fantastic Four, Sala writes to and through his literary heroes and pop culture icons, individuals both real and invented that figure heavy across his imagination. His poems are populated, set as responses to his immediate world, one that lays heavy in books and other media. “the dead stay that way / only momentarily,” begins the poem “Football World Reacts to Famous Coach Getting Fired,” “soon they command / the attention of suitors // a married corpse / is a born-again value // those under the whip / of the resurrected boss / scoff at the rumor / of his demise // they can feel his new life — / he takes it out of their hides [.]”

The key to Sala’s poems is almost one of perspective, of perception; offering poems-as-little-essays that each work against any kind of expectation, but also each work toward a kind of narrative inevitability. Once the poem lands at the end, the distance travelled makes complete internal sense, even if one could never have imagined the ending from the beginning. “What’s the opposite of a still life?” he asks, to open the poem “Smokin’.” “Maybe the Museum of Television and Radio / where I’m watching old commercials / for cigarettes. These elaborate plugs / look like ads for psychedelic drugs. / A woman lights up and her yard / becomes a blooming meadow. She’s pleased: / above her brain are budding trees.” Where might this poem finally land, you ask? His poems are inquisitive and quietly joyful, offering poem-bursts not always short but certainly immediate, composing a layering of lines that almost overwhelm at times, piling observational lick upon observational lick like an old pro, wildly inventive and intelligent, forever fiercely young at heart.

Bladeless Fan

The breeze propels itself
as all things do
from out of the void. 

In this case an oval —
a form that recalls
the oblong box
of Poe’s story. 

But instead of a corpse
the oblong fan
registers the absence
of any body
or any blade
offering instead
a zero —
that breather
between positive and negative. 

A moment of
the new
from which
a cool wind blows.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alison Gadsby

Alison Gadsby, a first-generation Canadian writer and literary chatterbox, currently living in a multigenerational home on Treaty 13 land in Tkaronto/Toronto. Author of story collection Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026), other short fiction appears in Literary Heist, Blank Spaces, The Temz Review, The Ex-Puritan, Blue Lake Review, and more. Her novel, Dreams of the Weary is forthcoming (Palimpsest Press, 2028). She holds an MFA from the UBC, and a degree in English Literature & Creative Writing from York University. She is the host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series, and co-host on the literary radio show, HOWL on CIUT. Find out more at www.alisongadsby.ca and www.junctionreads.ca.

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

Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive is my first book of stories and to say it’s been a long time coming may be an understatement. I’ve been writing stories since abandoning my dream of becoming a professional actor/sketch comic and then moving to the UK with a dude I just met (we’re still together). I turned a few sketches into stories and thought, when I get back to Canada, I’m going to become a celebrated author. My first story was published in 2019.

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

In my undergrad and MFA – I went to university when I was 38 – I focused on poetry because I loved it growing up (my dad loved it) and I thought if I could home in on language and the lyricism and beauty of it, I might be a better short story writer. I’d love to be a poet because poetry has the power to press pause on my life, but I don’t know if I have the talent.

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?

When I write short stories, they usually come out in a few hours. Then I sit inside one of two thoughts: 1) that was a stroke of literary genius or 2) well that’s five hours of your life you can’t get back. Regardless, I don’t read it again for a couple of weeks. When I open the file, I revise as I go and let it sit again for a few days. When I go back the next time, I’ve usually thought about the original idea, what I’d hoped to do and how it’s ended up. Sometimes it is some kind of literary magic, and other times it’s like watching a pair of sunglasses fall into the lake.

I consider the idea-making part of my process and this is constant. When I’m driving long distances, which I do often, when I go for a walk, or when I’m in the middle of a conversation, I might say to my husband, text me this: palm reader con artist can’t see the grief carving out a hole between the head and the heart lines. This character sat in my head for months before the story came to be (not literary genius), then I revised it about ten times and started sending it out. It found a home and comes out in May.

For novels (I have five of them), it depends. The one that comes out in 2027 (or 2028) took me ten years to write. It’s a complicated character-driven story that explores disability activism, facial and body difference, and a mother’s deep love and fear for her daughter born with a facial difference. My MFA thesis will never see the light of day; I wrote a romance one summer; I wrote a mystery set up north (that I actually think I’ll return to) and a time-travel novella (where I put all my feelings about losing my dad) was accepted a couple of months ago, but I’m holding off publishing it because of timing with the novel. And I am currently writing a novel about a massage therapist, that is (in a speculative way) semi-autobiographical (at least that’s what my mum thinks).

The easier (and shorter) answer to this question is that I am writing all the time and depending on my brain, other commitments and self-imposed deadlines, I’m either writing a story or revising a novel. I’m doing the latter right now.

4 - Where does a work of prose 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?

If all my dreams come true, there will be a short story renaissance in Canada and for the rest of my life I will be able to write weird, dark and totally unhinged short stories, and if that’s the case I’ll wake up every single day and write a new wackadoodle version of this unreal life for readers to parse: does she want me to like this character or hate them? The answer will always be neither. I always want you to harness your empathy, sympathy or your basic humanity and find a reason for that character to exist just as they are.

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

Nope. Nope. Nope. Ironic, since I run a reading series and absolutely love listening to authors read from their work, but when I read my own, I stand outside myself and analyse the whole scene like the worst theatre critic you can imagine: who does this person think she is, nobody wants to hear this garbage spoken aloud, holy shit has it been five minutes yet, because who decided reading this section out loud was a good idea, and sit down lady, sit the hell down.

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?

Unconsciously, I put together a collection of nineteen stories, from a pile of maybe fifty publishable pieces, that have good characters doing bad things and bad things happening to good characters. I didn’t know the stories were filled with people struggling to survive and I hadn’t even thought about how many of them contained water, swimming and that they explored the ease with which some people live in this world as it is (like it's as easy as breathing) until an editor read them.

It isn’t a novel idea. But for the most part, I want the world to be a more empathetic and sympathetic place. I had a father who, on paper, I should have hated, but I didn’t. Despite the childhood abuse, the casual insulting ways he scrutinised me as an adult, and that I never heard the words I love you (even though I pleaded with him to say it, or at the very least say it to my brother weeks before he died) I know that he loved me, and I loved him. His life was bombed out when he was a year old and he spent his entire life trying to climb out of the crater.

Mostly, I think (certainly with the novels) that people are never just one thing. Malevolence isn’t something that can exist in and of itself, benevolence doesn’t exist as pure altruism, and empathy and sympathy shouldn’t be impossible goals.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Unlike some conversations that happened around the film festival in Berlin and Wim Wenders’ assertion that artists “have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians” and despite Nick Cave’s very narrowed response, I do believe him when he says art is “something we approach with awe and wonder, that humbles us whilst also enlarging our hearts, that works its way into our souls and spirits, guiding us towards what is good, beautiful, and true.”

In a world where we have freedom-of-speech-for-some, and people like Cave get angry because the Adelaide Writers’ Festival is “vaporised in a mushroom cloud of cowardice, performative outrage, self-righteous posturing, cancellations, counter-cancellations, mob trots and general narcissistic silliness” but not angry when a Palestinian author is cancelled, it seems only some of us are actually outraged at the current state of the world. When the author’s freedom-to-speak is deemed too risky for the event organizers, doing the right thing is left to the artists, and clearly people like Nick Cave (upsetting because I like him) doesn’t believe artists should stand up for anyone but themselves, that we should leave the politics for the politicians, shut up and write. Well, I say fuck that. I cannot stay silent while arts leaders, administrators and politicians are incapable of doing the right thing because we’re on the brink of a global fascist takeover where the only speech not silenced is the polite smiling complicity of those who only care about themselves and money.

This is art in a capitalistic system, I guess, with financial incentives, political implications and the silencing of some voices. Artists have been sucked into it, and the choice is to be politicians or silent witnesses. In a capitalistic prize-driven culture that only values art when it wins something, when it’s longlisted, shortlisted or honourably mentioned, artists are catering their work to fit, to be accepted or to win – that is also a political decision. So, if we all decide to participate in this system, then we must ask ourselves, are we comfortable not knowing where and how that money is made? What is your art worth if humans die to reward it, if protestors are punished trying to make it better, and if other artists are hurt, excluded or blacklisted because the moneyed keep saying, do it our way or you don’t do it at all?

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have always been in a workshop of some kind and have always been open to the idea that my writing can be better with an objective view of it. I loved working with an editor.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t rush it. Writers send stories out before they’re ready; they query agents and publishers with unprepared drafts, and they rush the ending because they just want it done and out in the world, and I think some even hope that a publisher will see what they tried to do and help them achieve it, rather than putting in the work to DO what they need to do before sending it out. A writer once shared the timeline of a published novel (8 years) and then said if they’d focused on the writing, revision, workshopping, beta readers and research at the start instead of after all the rejections, they probably would have gotten it published sooner.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

I love short stories and would write them for the rest of my life if I could, but a novel is an entire world unfolding in front of me, so I love them too. I don’t find it hard to move between stories and the novel, mainly because they’re doing different things and I feel the difference the moment I enter a story.

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?

Because I have reading deadlines, I usually work around that schedule. For example, if I have a Junction Reads and a few other interviews, I put those books into the calendar and write around them. I usually sit down by 8:00am and then I take the dogs for a walk around 4:00pm, but this isn’t an unmoveable routine. I live in a multi-generational home so if I look outside and see my 84-year-old mum trying to move a heavy rock or climb a ladder to take down the birdhouse, I don’t just sit here staring out my window.

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

Books. Always books. I have favourite short story writers whose books I love. Elaine McCluskey’s Rafael Has Pretty Eyes came to me at the perfect time. I needed to read a character-driven collection that showed the funny, vulnerable and devastating reality for some people. Carleigh Baker is literally inside my mind sometimes with the ways she writes women, and of course Anuja Varghese, Kim Fu, Téa Mutonji, Lindsay Wong, Cary Fagan, Damian Tarnopolsky, the list is endless and I have to stop because if I keep going people will wonder, why I didn’t mention their book, so I’ll just say if you’re s short story writer in Canada there’s a pretty good chance I read your book, so thanks!

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Apricots. I grew up in St. Catharines and down the street from our house this guy had a farm that he refused to sell to a developer, so on the border of my little subdivision we climbed trees and made ourselves sick on unripe apricots. I don’t eat them now, but when I smell an apricot that’s where it takes me.

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?

Music. My MFA thesis was written listening to Natalie Merchant’s Ophelia after my main character came alive listening to the titular song, over and over and over. When in the car on long drives, the music is blasting, the mind is blowing around all the ideas.

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

Family is everything to me, so my siblings and my mum exist in any free second, I’m not thinking about writing or the writing community. I have a handful of very close writer friends and because of some serious trust issues have many other literary friends who I mostly think are just being polite. But I’d be nowhere and nothing without the literary community I’ve built for myself – and hopefully for others.

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

Write a collection of poetry. Know anybody who’d want to read some weird dark poetry?

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?

If we had money growing up, I would have gone to university after high school and become a lawyer, and now I’d probably still be living in poverty fighting for prison abolition and/or doing pro bono work for people who protest arts awards funded by big banks trying to art-wash their dirty money.

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

I have been dreaming up worlds in which to escape since I was a kid. If I’d known this was open to me, if my dad had given me a pen and paper instead of bookmarking stanzas to memorise in an anthology of dead poets, I may have done this sooner. This was always in me, it just didn’t feel like it could be for me.

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

Last great book is hands down, Saeed Teebi’s You Cannot Kill Our Imagination. As a white woman sitting in my small, privileged world, I weep when I consider all the artists whose words and creativity have been wiped off the face of the earth.

Last great film is Hamnet probably. Predictable, maybe. But we watch series usually and just finished Detective Hole, which was co-created by Jo Nesbo, which is probably why they did such a great job on it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

The massage auto-biographical novel…lol. I’m currently changing it from past to present tense and then sending it to someone to see if it is structurally sound. Then I work on a final close edit of Dreams of the Weary before sending it to the publisher for their edits. Also, a collection of short stories with people who commit little crimes, or do bad shit, because they can’t spend too much time looking at their own sadness (it’s going to be much funnier than Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive.)

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Phoebe Wang, Relative to Wind: On Sailing, Craft, and Community

A rope on a boat is never a rope—it’s a line, sheet, or halyard. The boat doesn’t turn left or right but to port or starboard. If you’re walking to the front of any watercraft, you’re going forward to the bow. When you’re moving toward its rear, you’re moving aft to the stern.
            You could draw a boat and label it, but why do that when you can pick up boat words the way a child might? By pointing up at the spreaders, the spars that act like crosstrees extending from the mast. By curling your fingers around the shrouds, the boat’s wire rigging. By remembering that the lifelines are the vinyl-coated wires around the perimeter of the boat when you grab onto them to steady yourself. By pestering the skipper with questions—What’s this? What’s this? Your eagerness earns you a spell on the tiller, and you feel the weight of the water streaming against the rudder. Trip over one of the hard, small parts of the boat and land on your knees, swearing and embarrassed at everyone’s quick concern. You’ll remember the cleat, block, or winch like the name of someone you instantly dislike. Not knowing these names is as clear a sign of a landlubber as wearing sneakers that leave skid marks on the deck. Not knowing means you’ll be corrected until you do.

Lately I’ve been reading Toronto poet Phoebe Wang’s Relative to Wind: On Sailing,Craft, and Community (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2024), a memoir around the author’s experience as part of a sailing crew on Lake Ontario, an experience that seems to provide the author with the foundation to more easily navigate both anxiety and other elements of her life, from attending expectations as a published author, elements of family and employment or even writing itself. “After finishing my MA in creative writing, I couldn’t find full-time work, so instead I tutored in Richmond Hill and Vaughan. I sat on the edge of my train seat, worrying that I wouldn’t make my connection en route, calculating whether I would make rent that month, how much longer it would take to find a publisher, whether it was still worth it to scrawl poems while the Viva Blue bus bounced up Yonge Street. I relieved myself of the pressure to publish as quickly as possible, to instead focus on the vision of my manuscript that felt most true to itself. I was surprised to be making gains, turning out drafts of poems that sounded as close as possible to what I had intended. By easing up on myself and following my intuition, I set a course toward a more natural and sustainable routine.”

This is Wang’s third published book, after the poetry collections Admission Requirements (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2017) and Waking Occupations (McClelland and Stewart, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The prose moves easily, at a lively pace, offering a lovely music just underneath the surface, holding the attention with a propulsion and a thrum. I like very much how this book begins with language, using the fact of learning a new vocabulary for this new process as an opening into and through the narrative. “Language can function as both a barrier and an entry point into an identity,” she writes, early in the collection, “and in the case of the language of sailing, it kept me out before it let me in. Its arcane impenetrability felt purposeful, like a code. This inaccessibility maybe a result of its etymology and how its meanings have diverged from English words of common usage.” To engage with the language, and the etymologies of such, of course, is to engage with those histories, and the implications within, as she acknowledges a colonial past, one that, as she is deeply aware, holds a ripple effect into the present. “All of this colonial violence—conscsription practices, hierarchies of rank, naval wars, and transport of raw resources—has steeped into the language like tea leaves in scalding water. These were the same seamen and ships that held enslaved peoples in cargo holds, encountered Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, mapped coastlines, and claimed harbours for shipping ports. The English language also travelled by sea, as much as import as systems of government, laws, and policies. British ships brough opium to the ports of Hong Kong, the islands where my family lived with the sound of the waves at their doorsteps. Remnants of this history are still present in nautical terms and saying, many of which have entered everyday language.”

She writes of sailing, but also elements of attempting to write, find work and sustain balance, and engaging a space not traditionally populated by women of colour. Approaching both writing and sailing, as well as multiple elements across her life, Relative to Wind articulates Wang’s journey to finding her footing, even in rough waters. Not to wrestle the storm, perhaps, or her own anxieties, but to learn how to navigate them. As she writes: “The air around us is constantly heating and cooling, and periods of apparent calm are only temporary. Our environment may appear still and windless from our vantage point close to the Earth’s surface, but the prevailing condition on this planet is motion.”