Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part one,

[Invisible Publishing, on point (so to speak) (being invisible]

Given how excited I know you are about this weekend’s ottawa small press book fair (whether the reading on Friday night or the fair itself on Saturday), I thought it might be worth discussing some of the things I picked up this past weekend as part of the annual Meet the Presses event in Toronto! [If you wish to see my notes from last year’s Meet the Presses event, see the link here]. And congratulations to former Ottawa writer Chuqiao Yang for winning this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award for Reunions in the Year of the Sheep (baseline press)! [see my 2015 Open Book profile on her here; see my review of the chapbook here]

Cobourg ON: Stuart Ross (who will be at the ottawa small press book fair this weekend) furthers his way to forty years of continuous chapbook production through Proper Tales Press with Kingston poet Dale Tracy’s chapbook Celebration Machine (2018), a chapbook produced in an edition of 125 copies. The author of a scholarly title, With the Witness: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017), this small chapbook appears to be her poetry debut, a collection of short, first-person lyrics both composed directly and slant, writing in the most lovely indirect way. I like the quick movement of her lyric, and the casualness of her line, as she writes to end the short poem “Serious Living”: “If a violin sounds sad, is it?”

Don’t Look for Eunice de Souza’s Life

in These Poems

I won’t look for your life

in your poems,

but can I look for mine?

I’m asking because

I accidentally already

saw something familiar

about knowing, so not

only did I look and see

and know, but then I knew

about knowing too.

I hope you don’t mind I’ve put

your poem in my poem.

I’ve been careful

to leave out your life,

except in the exergue

of my address.

Calgary AB: From Kyle Flemmer’s The Blasted Tree comes the chapbook (another debut, I would think, given the author biography doesn’t specify any other titles) The Landscape We Left on Each Other (2018) by Lauren Elle DeGaine, produced in an edition of 40 copies. There is such a musicality to DeGaine’s work, moving from the lyric to prose poems, one with an energy that sparkles, and even crackles. Her poems manage to write uncomplicatedly on complicated things, something that could be mistaken for simplicity but is anything but. Much like Dale Tracy, this is another poet I would very much like to see further work from.

We Went to the Forest to Fire a Gun

I flick the lighter and picture your footsteps, treading snow and carpet pathways. The music I’m listening to brings memories of green and yellow days and I think about showing you this— I sing and blow smoke. We walked on a damn trail and smelled the earth: decomposition and the ache of things freshly growing. Back home, there were blood stains on your sheets, but you didn’t seem to mind. These are the gory moments of my life, paternal words flung like shards, my own voice a monstrous blade, now a ribbon of grass, but I turn monsters into you. I colour my new memories with you and they taste like fresh water and sweat and blue light and spliffs. Bright sky and bullet shells hitting ground and you holding my hand. These gorgeous spring days threaten us to be careful of summer.