London ON/Kentville NS: It was interesting to hear Baseline Press publisher Karen Schindler read the other night in London from what was described as her chapbook debut, THE SAD TRUTH (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2023). The notion of the “debut” surprised me, as I’d somehow simply presumed she’d had a chapbook or two by now, but apparently not. I’m intrigued by the framing of Schindler’s poems, fourteen first-person lyric narratives prompted by titles that each begin “The Sad Truth About,” offering a kind of echo of, for example, Anne Carson’s classic Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992); some of Schindler’s titles include such as “THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT ENGINEERS,” “THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT FOUR SMALL THINGS” and “THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT FAIRY TALE ENDINGS,” a poem that begins: “Once there was a swan maiden who rose / from the lake to find a young woodsman // standing on the moonlit shore. Is that a heart / in his hands? Or this one: your name // is Charlie and you’re waiting in a bar.” Moving from poems set as prose-blocks to poems set as couplets, there are some interesting variations on how she utilizes space between lines, and there is something that the spaces between her lines allows that doesn’t seem to hold as well in the prose blocks: a halt, a pause, that sets her phrases and moments to sparkle just a bit more; these pieces allow for a finer sense of pacing, of ease, somehow. As the first poem in the quartet “THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT FOUR SMALL THINGS,” “TREE FROG,” writes:
I discover it, as I have
to, in mountain-top cloud forests.
Ranked with those from
other parts of the world,
this one is smallest. Three
toes, two fingers.
A head not big enough for
ears. They say it hears
through its mouth; its
call is a heart-breaking wraak
Looking at it, I struggle
to keep my balance. Six pence,
button, mustard seed. Its
grief will not be determined.
A creature so humble,
hopelessness is its reason why.
The “THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT” prompt she has designed herself suggests a larger project, and it would be interesting to see if this chapbook translates eventually into a full-length collection.
London ON: Another debut presented the other night in London was Kit Roffey’s Civilian of Dirt (London ON: 845 Press, 2023), a selection of thirteen poems of clipped lyric, some of which are dense prose poems, and others stretched-out sequences. “I’m objecting to oblivion.” the poem “Paring Knife, Elastic Bands, Soon” opens, “Wobbly hands resurrecting a crum- / pled aluminum foil ball. Faith-folded inwards. De-compress / until the surface area becomes bigger than my palm.” There’s a propulsive quality to these lines I quite like, a staggered, staccato, swagger impulse that pushes across and down each page, one that manages to continue, almost point-form (or pointillist) across the seven-poem sequence “Ruby-Chewed, EveryDay,” the sixth section of which reads: “None of this trust me there will be no more of self this.” I’m startled by this small collection; you should read this small collection. You should be watching for the poems of Kit Roffey.
Roaming Skin, 2014DropOut
I know where I melt like
plastic
over a Bunsen burner. I know
where
I deplete like fog. Nothing
that comes
and goes is untrue. Temporally
lace
like. The grade school
cult devoted
to earthworms. The height
of my
kicks measured our teeth.
Puddling on
the carpet. I know where
my skin will
settle when final forms
are overrated
and the best I can give
is a wound.
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