Another
year has come and gone! And we will see you this weekend at the 25th
anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair, right? The reading tonight and/or the fair itself tomorrow?
Toronto ON: The poems collected in
Toronto poet, editor and publisher Hoa Nguyen’s latest offering, the chapbook ASK ABOUT LANGUAGE AS IF IT FORGETS
(knife│fork│book, 2019), appear different than the work I’ve seen from her previous
full-length collections. The poems in ASK
ABOUT LANGUAGE AS IF IT FORGETS shift from the predominantly shorter,
meditative lyrics of As Long As Trees Last (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2012) [see my review of such here], Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008
(Wave Books, 2014) [see my review of such here] or Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books, 2016) [see my review of such here] to poems a bit more expansive and storytelling, with lines pulling and
even stretched apart, such as the middle third of the poem “Why This Haunted
Middle And Door Hung With Haunted Girl Bones,” that writes:
Go into your tree roll on a rabbit fur blanket
Refuse to eat for thirty days plus ten days
Unremembered does it matter
Misremembering the baby she lost a different baby
(unborn
never born the unnamed)
This rain reminds me of rain
There
has long been an element of Nguyen’s work that has featured remembering,
memory, loss, melancholy and acknowledgment, but there is something here that
feels heightened, almost as though the text of some of these pieces have been
crafted from interviews (or even family story, perhaps), citing more specific
and sprawling details than before. In these poems, a story is developing, and
one I would very like to know more about, such as the poem “Mexico,” that
includes:
She named her stand Mexico
and
Minh came by often
would send his soldiers there to buy drinks
from her Mexico
Mexico became the most popular
juice spot on the river
but sometimes his soldiers
were
boisterous and caused trouble and other
merchants were jealous
of her success Minh too
wished to control her
and insisted later that she move
away from her Mexico to Saigon
to be near him
and next
was that
Thorold/Burlington ON: I’ve been increasingly
interested in the work of Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese (he had an above/ground press title earlier this year, as well, with two more forthcoming), the most recent title
being tekster (Simulacrum Press,
2019). Through his work generally (and this title specifically) Cortese
explores both accumulation and accent, punctuating and excising, all of which
make for fascinating visuals that might be difficult, or even impossible, to
perform aloud (but it would be interesting to hear, if he was willing or able).
He is also one of more than a couple of younger poets that have emerged over
the past couple of years who focus their work on the blending of visual poetry
and constraint (British poets and Penteract Press co-publishers Anthony Etherin
and Clara Daneri, and British poet Lucy Dawkins being further examples of the
same). For example, the poem “ROTO,” a poem I could only imagine as a
typesetting nightmare, opens: “mióşiş šøws hiş homõ shims” (and I don’t even
have every typesetting symbol on my computer to replicate this properly). The
effect is stunning, and deliberately overwhelming, and further considerations
I’ve seen other poets explore (including Gary Barwin), but nowhere near this
far. Cortese’s description at the back of the collection writes that “ROTO consists of a phrase exhibiting
reciprotational symmetry (and which, as such, serves as a sort of
axially-inverted palindrome), followed by a loosely-constrained lipogram
composed exclusively of letters found in that reciprotationally symmetric
phrase.”
aphet
‘im
‘er
‘twixt
‘tis
‘n
‘twas,
‘verse
‘tween
‘rents
‘n
‘cause
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