[Aoife and Rose, colouring during post-fair clean-up]
Here’s
another batch of items I picked up at the most recent ottawa small press book
fair [see part two of this list here;
see the list from the prior fair here]; and you saw I’m doing same recently
as well from similar gatherings from Toronto’s Meet the Presses [see my most recent post on such here],
right?
Windsor ON: I am intrigued by
Toronto poet Hanan Hazime’s debut poetry chapbook aorta (ZED Press, 2018), moving from the paced lyric poem to a more
rushed, and even breathless, prose style. A poem such as the full page single
stanza prose poem “holding my breath in seawater” is a wonderful rush of words,
threatening to overcome and even drown, especially against the three-line
fragment on the following page: “across muddy fields, / their dismembered
hearts ached, / still longing for peace [.]” Composed as, quite literally, a
book of the heart (the poem “eat my heart out,” for example, or “he arted heart
strings”), there are parts of this that do feel a bit uneven, and in need of
further editing/tightening (as well as the removal of the occasional cliché),
but there is enough in the writing here to make me want to see what else she is
capable of.
kintsugi
or the art of repairing broken hearts
lately I see my reflection better in shattered
mirrors as I’m searching for the fragmented pieces of me of I of myself of you
of us but a hole can never be whole again and I can’t line the fractures in my
atrium with gold or repair the tears in my tendons the way the Japanese
decorate their broken pottery because my heart is no ornament and it cannot be
remanufactured and my wounds are not wilted flowers to be watered back to
health and even though the heart is one of the first organs to form it still
takes nine months to fully grow a human so why was I born at six then what a
miracle they said why she’s as tiny as a doll but I was no porcelain figure no
I was soft tissue malleable bones barely functioning lungs and sometimes I wish
I never learned to breathe on my own never left my mother’s womb but that’s not
the point no when my favourite tea cup cracked in half I could not mend it I
could not glue the ceramic back together with gold lacquer because I’m too
broke to afford precious metals to afford lavish therapy and people like us
from broken systems broken families broken bodies and broken brains cannot be
fixed because humans hearts are not manufactured but grown
Kingston ON: It is always a
pleasure to see what Michael e. Casteels is up to in his Puddles of Sky Press,
and one of the items I collected was illiterature, issue eight, with the tag-line “a journal / of rubber-stamped poems.”
Produced in an edition of one hundred copies, there are ten small publications
in the envelope of this issue (I’ll let you begin the math on the impressions
he would have had to hand-stamp), with new works by Conor Barnes, Ben Robinson,
Kate Siklosi, LeRoy Gorman, Michael e. Casteels, Robert R. Thurman, Conyer Clayton, Gabriel Bates, Zane Koss and Robin Wyatt Dunn. As Dunn’s poem,
produced in a black slice of paper, folded, reads:
some swan
doubted
the black deep
Brooklyn
poet (and Canadian expat) Zane Koss’ poem exists in an even smaller envelope,
titled “STATEMENT OF POETICS,” with a quote by the late American writer Joe Brainard on the front that reads: “Sitting here only a few feet away from the
ocean it’s hard to think of anything to say (except ‘ocean’) so I guess I’ll
stop.” His poem has an enormous amount to unpack in such a small space, and
reads:
nature poetry is impossible
because where would all the
words come from, and be
sides? its always got to get
to
the people somehow
There
is an enormous amount of care that comes through a publication such as this,
both through editorial and production (akin to jwcurry’s offerings, or Cameron Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press) that make this item, especially through the limited
edition, one of the more intriguing from this year’s event.
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