Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part two, : Conyer Clayton + brandy ryan,

[left: Gary Barwin, signing his new selected fiction collection with Assembly Press : see part one of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Hooray small press!

Toronto/Ottawa ON: The latest from Kentucky-born Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton (following two trade poetry collections and six prior solo chapbooks) is the chapbook KNEELING IN OUR NAME (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), a chapbook-length sequence the acknowledgements offers as “the first of a three-part series of interconnected poems.” The poem, the poems, here are evocative and visceral, writing grief and loss and enormous love. “My mother’s name is mine and buried in my throat.” she writes, to open “iv.,” “Her name is buried in my throat. / You scratch at her when you call to me. / When I kneel on the carpet. / When I stretch my neck to reach her. / When I reach into my throat to touch her.” Set as an expansive sequence, Conyer moves from short lines to lyrics set closer to prose poems and scatters of lyric clusters set across the page, offering a narrative that writes parental loss as physical, interconnected and devastating. “But I couldn’t do a damn thing to help. It hurt / right here, pointing, right here, kneeling. / right here, still.”

Browned edges.
Water droplets

on the corners
of the windows

I wipe
like a sermon.

Every day
like a sermon

The temperature
drops.

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Every day
like a sermon

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Like a prayer to
something

Toronto ON: It was very cool to watch brandy ryan work on further erasures throughout the fair, sitting at the Gap Riot Press table next to mine. The author of three previous chapbooks—full slip (Baseline Press, 2013), once/was (Empty Sink Publishing, 2014) and After Pulse (w Kerry Manders, knife|fork|book, 2019)—ryan’s latest is the visual erasure in the third person reluctant (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024). There is a curious blend of erasure and visual collage in ryan’s pieces, offering full-page reproductions of prose pages (a paperback of some sort; google doesn’t provide easy answers as to what this book might be) with the bulk of the text excised via coloured marker, overlayed with what appear to be full-colour glossy magazine images. ryan works an overlay across pages (and what might be ‘chapter headings’—“LITERARY DIVERSIONS,” “LITERARY CONSUMPTION” and “LITERARY POSSESSION”) with a text that suggests a commentary on gender, body autonomy and agency, and rage. “uncomfortable in ///// anger / the object of / her / housewifely / high profile,” ryan writes, mid-way through the collection, “display / a performance / a sharp observation, /// put on / like a ‘mask’ / they are ‘putting on their face’) […]”