Ongoing notes: early February, 2024: Clare Thiessen + Nicole Raziya Fong,

We’re half-way through our big VERSeFest fundraiser, with an array of amazing perks still available! And keep an eye out on an announcement of our upcoming (shorter) spring festival (with most likely a further short burst of events in the fall, before, hopefully, returning to a full-size festival in spring 2025). And did you see that the dates for both 2024 editions of the ottawa small press book fair have been announced?

Wolfville NS/Vernon BC: It has been a while since Gaspereau Press sent me any chapbooks, so the only ones I’ve been encountering are the ones passed along by authors, and Vernon, British Columbia poet Clare Thiessen recently sent along her tiger poems (Gaspereau Press, 2023), a collection of short, sharp prose poems on, as you might already have guessed, tigers. I am intrigued by the cadence, the structure, of these prose poems, offering each line/phrase as a kind of burst that accumulate and layer into a kind of portrait or scene; how different might these pieces be if her lines were shifted between poems, or in a different order? “you world begins to shrink based on the tiger’s potential / whereabouts,” she writes, to open the poem “eyes peeled,” “you learn from your older brother he goes to this / gas station      you learn from a friend that he frequents the cafe / near her work      you have heard me may be living on a road that / you now avoid [.]” There is some intriguing movement in these poems, and I would very much like to see more of her work.

only belly-height

no one sets up a cage for the tiger      even after they have
inklings      even after worries      even after proof and admis-
sion      instead cardboard boxes are set up around the tiger with
little gates      if he should so choose to wander around      the
cardboard is insufficient they realize eventually      so perhaps
a white picket fence instead      it stretches up to the tiger’s
belly      looks quite clean from the inside

“Kansas”/Tiohti:áke/Mooniyang/Montreal QC: The latest I’ve seen from poet Nicole Raziya Fong is the chapbook FLIGHT MODE IN THE CITY (Spiral Editions, 2023), a numbered edition of one hundred and twenty-five copies produced by Ryan Skrabalak’s Spiral Editions down there in Kansas. Utilizing sidebars, alternate-sized and overlapping fonts, font-size, text and split narratives, Fong’s poem utilizes a kind of process-text: not incomplete but in a kind of motion. In this chapbook-length poem, they offer a lively notation of lyric and sketched-out thought, response and revision. How does a poem hold such obvious movement? This is very much a poem in motion set on the page, which is not an easy consideration to achieve.