See the first of my notes from our most recent fair here and the second of my notes from our most recent fair here.
Windsor/Toronto ON: I’m very
taken—charmed, even—by the seventeen-poem sequence TEST CENTRE (Windsor ON: Zed Press, 2019), a chapbook by the
collaborative MA│DE. As the author biography attests:
MA│DE is a collaborative gesture, a unity of
two voices fused into a poetic third. It is the name given to the joint
authorship of Toronto-based creators Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace, artists
whose active solo practices differ quite radically from one another. MA│DE’s
collaborative writing formalizes a process that began as an extended
conversation between two people newly discovering one another. over a number of
months, the pair messaged, texted, emailed, telephoned, conversed in person,
left links on social media for the other to find, and mailed letters; their
long, exploratory conversations opened up a language-space all their own.
With
each poem, in the table of contents, named after a particular test—running from
the Apgar Test and Bechdel Test to the Turning Test, Emergency Broadcast System
and Rorschach Test—the poems in the body of the collection appear with number
only, allowing for a smooth flow of sequence, even as an accumulation of
self-contained pockets. As the third poem reads:
If coal is white / are some books black / words
cut with a knife / flow up a hill / as
avalanches
do indeed descend mountains / and illiterate
men
read romances for the Devens Literacy test
Kingston ON: Anyone paying
attention to Michael e. Casteels’ Puddles of Sky Press will be well aware of
his occasional illiterature, a
journal of small poems. The latest issue is “eight and a half” (June 2019),
edited and beautifully hand-printed (hand-stamped) by Casteels in an edition of
one hundred and twenty-two copies, it includes wee poems by Kemeny Babineau,
David Alexander, Cameron Anstee, Justin Patrick, Angeline Schellenberg, Conor
Barnes and Charlotte Jung. His publications are very graceful, understated and
carefully put together. You should be paying attention.
A narrow bridge
in the middle of the nigt
fanged (Conor Barnes)
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