Thursday, March 07, 2019

post ghost press: Deglane, Jordan + small poems for the masses



what’s left of the wild animals,
the rainforests, the savannahs,
will eat human corpse after corpse
until their descendants no longer
hear tales of the soft-skinned
two-legged monsters. (Wanda Deglane)

I’m pleased to see the emergence of another micro poetry press, especially in Ottawa, over the past few months, with publications appearing regularly by post ghost press, “a tiny publisher of microchapbooks and other strange projects, committed to publishing something new, weird, and lovable every month.” Three recent publications I’ve managed to get my hands on include the anthology zine small poems for the masses volume one (September 2018), things that will happen after the end of the world no one will be around to witness, a poem by Wanda Deglane (2018) and CALCIFICATION by Susannah Jordan (2018). I really like the updated 1990s cut and paste feel of these tiny zines, full-colour sheets of images with text literally cut and pasted in as strips. small poems for the masses volume one is the first volume (obviously) of a series of small anthologies focused on the small poem, and this current volume, at least, includes a single poem per poet, one to a page, with pieces by Alex Everette, Frances Boyle, Juliana Rupchan, Kristin LaFollette, Katy DeCoste and Erin Emily Ann Vance—but for Boyle and Vance, the contributors to all three of these publications are entirely unknown to me, and the lack of author biographies, a peeve I seem to forever hold, is less of an issue here (although it makes it far more difficult to provide links for authors, if I have no idea where they are situated, or anything about them). This is a press that appears to favour and focus on the emerging, and there is a good energy to these small publications, one that easily comes through every publication.

athena

when we drive the ravine rushes by
you sound lost feel lost are lost in
your red flannel your levis your doc martens
everything orange and blue blurry
and neat– something about fall feels
lost– and dirty– like a t-shirt shed in the
backseat of the volkswagen and never
taken inside to be washed like the coffee
cup you keep reusing without rinsing
because it’s just coffee without any milk (Katy DeCoste)



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