Calgary AB: Parry Sound ON: The debut publication by Monica Kidd’s Whiskey Jack Letterpress is the gracefully-produced Guillemots Gillemets: AUDUBON IN LABRADOR: some poems (2023), by Parry Sound, Ontario poet Jack Davis. There’s much to celebrate in this lovely and sleek publication, including the fact that Davis’ work is not only searing in its attention to detail, and the fact that he doesn’t publish that often [see my review of his full-length debut, Faunics, published in 2017 by Pedlar Press, here]. A note at the end of the chapbook offers that “This piece is composed solely of words contained in select entries from John James Audubon’s journal of his travels along the coast of Labrador in the summer of 1833, making illustrations to complete his BIRDS OF AMERICA.” What is it about Audubon that always gets the poets worked up? Not long ago there was Béatrice Szymkowiak’s full-length debut, B/RDS (Salt Lake City UT: The University of Utah Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] set as an erasure project of Birds of America (1827-1838), and even Andrew Steeves mentioned an Audubon project he was working on as part of his own ’12 or 20 questions’ interview (whatever became of that project, Andrew?). There is something intriguing about how Davis moves from the short, sharp lyric moment to a continued moment in this particular seven page, seven poem piece, offering a detail of small somehow stretched or continued. The small moment, touching and touching down once more, again, and continued. As well, there is something reminiscent of Robert Kroestch’s own The New World and Finding It (1999) in terms of letterpress, book structure and poem structure, each page and poem of Davis’ work three couplets long, set on the right page:
Inside this linen
enclosing a skin of tolerable French
braided with a grouse for
its maker
I am of a peaty nature
fed by the drainage of
decomposed truths and
opinions I would call a song
What I know full well is
renewed every few minutes
like the shy accuracy of
drawing ‘somewhere’ on a map.
Vancouver BC/Chicago IL: I’m always pleased to see new work by Vancouver-based American poet Katie Naughton [see also her above/ground press title], and her latest is a second singing (dancing girl press, 2023), a chapbook-length extended suite of lyric fragments, stanzas and moments extended across an ongoing stretch and thread and thought. “this is the moment / of crisis / this is / the crisis” she writes, mid-point in the collection, offering grey spools of lyric across climate, capitalism and the “formal histories” of personal space, geography, being and loss. As she speaks as part of a recent interview for the Colorado Review blog, referencing her pre-Vancouver time in Buffalo: “At Buffalo especially I’ve been exposed to very socially conscious poetry, or work that is very interested in thinking about positionality and forces beyond the individual that shape the conditions of individual life. I started thinking about how to contain those in poetry, and how to write from a place of relative privilege or being somewhere in the middle in a way that doesn’t just reinforce the oppressive system that you are both negatively affected by and also, at least relatively, rewarded by.”
look at the trees their
August shade
from the window of your
life your one window
from the bedroom from the
stairs
you went up and won’t
come down again
the heat, the house, the
laundry and breath
done there
your minutes transit the
house from the bed
of all Augusts
same silent heat wind sun
shade still
of time gathered there,
that room
I lay on the floor
your child and not
the blonde wood and white
linen
soap and ceiling
you had a room once
a bicycle a dusty road
the oak shade the sun
in another state
as children
as I did
do
Houston TX: I’m intrigued by the chapbook WORD HEART (2023) by Mexican and Peruvian-Quechua poet (currently studying in Japan) Yaxkin Melchy Ramos, translated from Spanish by Arizona poet and translator Ryan Greene. According to Greene’s author biography, this chapbook was produced as part of a project to translate (and presumably publish) the first three books of Ramos’ five-part “constellation-book,” THE NEW WORLD. I’m intrigued by the lyric Ramos (via Greene) offers, one filled with beautiful optimism; open-hearted, writing light, especially across the dark. Ramos’ narrative “I” is one filled with resolve and optimism, even when wading waist-deep in grief.
BLANKETS
I’m out of my mind when I
sleep
because poetry is a song
where your axles sing
over the asphalt
I travel toward the
thought of your mouth
when I see how the hills
run and
I leave them in my dust
I travel by night
while your stomach is
your heavy heart
and it rolls down the
highway like a ship across the Moon
and you hear an identical
word
and tomorrow will be the
day the beds
in the houses
in the hospitals
in the bedrooms
in the childhood kneeling
on the blankets
will end up in our heart’s
folds
piling up day after day
unwashed.
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