Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part five,

[post ghost press]

See the first of my notes from our most recent fair here and the second of my notes from our most recent fair here and the third of my notes from our most recent fair here and the fourth of my notes from our most recent fair here. You don’t even know how much fair we have here. Can you believe the fair will be twenty-five years old this fall? And did you see I’ve already announced the date?

Ottawa ON: I’ve been enjoying the progression of Ottawa poet and editor (In/Words magazine and press, Canthius) Manahil Bandukwala’s poems over the past year or two, especially in what I’m seeing in her latest chapbook, Paper Doll (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2019). This is a collection of ten increasingly-precise poems on culture, language and identity—speaking to belonging, connection, conflict and disconnect)—through the small moments and meditations around family, travel and school. As she writes in the poem “I can’t shelve my race to study for a midterm”: “Always remember / animals are not for humans and your language / is not for you. Your tongue can’t bear the music.”

What better place

to shed my skin

than here? What better place

to reclaim skeleton

steam off white particles. This is where

we’re golden. Surviving bridges

while we bleed out

broken trails

for others to follow. These are my siblings

my aunties and uncles

sisters

looking for reclamation. They drip

on the patches I have left,

build upon the trail of others. (“II,” “Heat”)

[Canthius]

Toronto ON: I’ve also been quite taken with the long, lyric streams of Toronto poet and editor Khashayar Mohammadi’s latest, Dear Kestrel (Toronto ON: knife │fork│book, 2019), a collection of fourteen self-contained lyrics held together through a sequence of eight numbered “Dear Kestrel” poems, writing out a series of epistolary gestures: “lately / each affinity becomes love / moistens to lucidity / prosthetic / to the body / the comradery of stale breath” (“Dear Kestrel III”). Mohammadi’s poems are fluid, expansive and curious, embracing both gesture and meditation, and seeking out answers to a myriad of unanswerable questions. Or as a section of “Dear Kestrel IV” reads:

Dear Kestrel,

last night I saw a little girl

dragging a toy truck

tethered to her wrist

Was that a poem Kes?

Is this?