Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part one, : Devon Rae + Norma Cole,

Once more, Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press helped curate and organize the annual Small Press Market as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors! And I was totally there for that, with a swath of recent above/ground press titles and my new short story collection with University of Alberta Press and Christine’s new hybrid memoir with Book*hug Press. Naturally, there were plenty of amazing publishers and items there as well [see my two notes from last year here and the four posts I made around the first year here], including Anstruther Press, Gap Riot Press, knife|fork|book, Gordon Hill Press/The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc., room 302 books, Proper Tales Press, Book*hug Press, Nietzsche’s Brolly, serif of nottingham, etcetera (with Simulacrum Press and Puddles of Sky Press unable to attend this time around). Don’t you wish you could have made it? At least there’s another small press fair coming up in Toronto (Mississauga, actually)that I’m participating in soon, for those folk who wanted to catch some further small press excitement (where Christine is on a panel with her new book as part of the same event/festival that day). And you know about the 30^th anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair happening on Saturday, November 16, yes? OH, AND IF YOU ARE IN OTTAWA COME OUT TO THE LAUNCH OF MY SHORT STORIES TONIGHT!

Here are a couple of items I picked up at this year’s event:

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: I’ve been an admirer of the work of Vancouver poet Devon Rae for a while now [see my interview with her via Touch the Donkey], so was very pleased to see a copy of her chapbook debut, THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS WITH MY BODY (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). Rae’s work, at least what I’ve seen, is leaning into what I presume will be an eventual full-length collection of very sharp prose poems around the body, with titles such as “My Lips,” “My Left Leg,” “My Left Shoulder” and “My Breasts,” offering narrative threads and conversation almost as a kind of update on what the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was playing with across his Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1987) and eventual, posthumous, organ music: parts of an autobiography (Black Moss Press, 2012). Rae’s poems offer a conversation with and around bodies very different than Nichol’s serious play, one instead that works through and with the differences and culturally-loaded complications of women’s bodies; she writes bodies as both physical and emotional space, one impacted far too often from the outside. “That elsewhere so close we can almost / touch it.” she writes, as part of “Conversation with My Night Body.” These prose poems are damned sharp, and you should be paying attention to them. Rae packs enormous amounts in very small spaces, yet her poems are composed with a deceptive ease of lyric and propulsive flow. As the poem “Conversations with My Uterus” reads:

You are shaped like the child I may not have. I think of myself curled up inside my mother years ago – the fullness of her uterus and the emptiness of mine. Sometimes, I want to return to that dream place. I know she loved being pregnant, I’ve seen the photographs, belly swelling in an Armani dress. And I wonder if I too will become a kiln or remain a vacant room.

Dani Spinosa, Gap Riot Press

San Francisco CA/Toronto ON: Oh, the delight of a new title by Toronto-born American poet, translator and visual artist Norma Cole [see my review of her 2010 To Be At Music: Essays & Talks here], her chapbook RAINY DAY (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). Another of Toronto poet and publisher Kirby’s gracefully-produced items, RAINY DAY is a collection of twenty-one short, sharp lyrics offering a myriad of narrative directions across few words and very short spaces. As the poem “Critical Miss” begins: “permanently / beyond chagrin // intrinsic—what is / trinsic?” Alternating between prose poems and slightly longer sequences against short bursts, Cole composes the long line of each poem across a kind of condensed point-form, offering a rhythmic sequence of bursts held in breath, almost as hesitations, or a lyric caught in the lungs. “the darker / room // he talks / blocks,” the unpunctuated four-page poem “NO ACCOUNT SYLLABLES” writes, “of space / and // books of / time // I think / your // hand on / paper // least exercise / leaves [.]” Her lyric compactness clusters, stretches, holds breath. All of which, of course, makes me eager to think that we might be closer to a further full-length by Cole at some point soon, hopefully.

Mum’s the Word

saturation not able inside the magnitudes
scorpion suppression oppression falling failing
oblivious silent objects