12 or 20 (second series) questions with Courtney Bates-Hardy

Courtney Bates-Hardy is the author of Anatomical Venus (Radiant Press, 2024), House of Mystery (ChiZine Publications, 2016), and a chapbook, Sea Foam (JackPine Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Event, Vallum, Room, PRISM, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal, among others. She has been included in The Best Canadian Poetry 2021 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is queer and disabled, and one third of a writing group called The Pain Poets.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, House of Mystery, was proof that I could do it, I could write a book and get it published, and people would even read it. My second book, Anatomical Venus, was different from the first because I really wanted to take my time with it and be picky about the poems I included in it. House of Mystery was very inspired by fairy tales and the ways I could mix them with stories from my childhood and young adult years. Anatomical Venus became much more concerned with the chronic pain I was experiencing after being in several car accidents and I started to write about disability and pain through the lens of movie monsters and anatomical art.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I can’t recall if I wrote a poem or a short story first when I was young, but I kept going with poetry in a way I didn’t really with fiction or non-fiction. It’s much more difficult to find sustained amounts of time for fiction and non-fiction, so I’ve stuck with poetry. I love poetry and what I can do with it that I can’t do with fiction or non-fiction, and my brain tends to think in poetry-sized chunks, so it works out pretty well.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It really depends on the poem. Some poems come quickly and appear looking close to their final form, some need more notes before I even start writing and go through multiple drafts, and other poems change completely from conception to final draft and might not even look like the same poem.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Typically, I have an overarching idea for a book in mind but it might shift and change as I start writing the individual poems and do more reading and see what comes up.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

They should be more a part of my creative process. I try to read my poems out loud while I’m editing to get a sense of them but reading them for an audience gives more information about how the poems are landing—what lines are working, what parts are funny, which poems resonate. But there are always some poems that I’ll never feel comfortable reading at a public event, if I feel they’re too personal or too emotional to read though. I enjoy doing readings, although I do get nervous. I’m always happy to hear from the audience about what resonated for them, even if it’s just in the “hmms” and “aahs”.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

In Anatomical Venus, I wanted to answer the question about disability posed by Amanda Leduc that I included as the epigraph to the book: “What sort of happy ending can be found in constant struggle?” The final poems in the book are my response to that question.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I write because I enjoy it and because I like to create meaning and art out of my life and my interests. If other people read my work and feel that I have captured something that they have felt or experienced, that makes me happy. If they read my work and it shows them something they haven’t felt or experienced before, that also makes me happy. I’ll leave the question of the Role of the Writer in Modern Society to the philosophers and greater writers than I.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I find it essential. I need an outside eye to tell me what they see in the work and what they don’t. Sometimes I need that extra little push to put something on the page that I’ve been dancing around in a poem. I worked with Jennifer LoveGrove on Anatomical Venus, and her feedback was immensely helpful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

My supervisor for my Master’s thesis was Kathleen Wall, and she told me that if I ran into a problem or a block in my writing, to put it in my back pocket (figuratively speaking) and let my subconscious work on it for a while before returning. It’s served me well.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a regular writing routine. Work takes up a lot of my time and energy, which is why it took eight years to finish and publish my most recent collection. I write when I can, when inspiration hits, when I go to writers’ retreats, and whenever I can type something into my notes app.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My reading. I’m always reading something, so I’ll turn to other books for inspiration or to learn more about something I would like to write about.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of my girlfriend’s hair, my cat’s fur, and good food cooking on the stove.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Absolutely, you name it: visual art, film, tv, nature, science, music, ballet, on and on. Some of the inspiration for poems in Anatomical Venus came from the tv shows Penny Dreadful and Hannibal; monsters from Godzilla, Hellboy II, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Blob; and anatomical art by Ercole Lelli, Eleanor Crook, Jaques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Oh my goodness, so many. Amber Dawn for her queer poems, Amanda Leduc for her writing about disability and fairy tales, Joanna Ebenstein for writing about the history of the anatomical Venus in the first place, Sandra Ridley, Katherine Lawrence, and Jennifer LoveGrove for helping to shape the collection at different stages in the process. I’m also endlessly grateful to my writing group, The Pain Poets.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to go on a writing retreat at Banff, I’d like to be guest editor for a literary magazine, and I’d like to publish some of my non-fiction someday.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Considering my full-time job is in marketing and communications, I don’t know that I would be doing anything else except writing. I thought about other things: teaching, publishing, library sciences, but they all circled around writing or reading in some way. If I could write full-time for myself, that would be a dream come true but that will have to wait until I can maybe, someday, hopefully retire.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I loved any kind of art growing up, but writing drew me in because I felt like I was better at it than things like drawing or painting. I had a poem published in the school newsletter in grade one, and that was it, I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I recently read Jes Battis’ forthcoming collection of poetry, I Hate Parties, and I’m very excited to read at their launch in September. It’s a beautiful collection, so tender and meaningful, all about growing up queer and autistic. I also loved Joelle Barron’s new collection, Excerpts from a Burned Letter (historical lesbians!), Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers (queered Biblical poems!), and Kayla Czaga’s Midway (stunning poems about complicated grief).

I just watched Alien: Romulus in theatres, and I loved it. I’m a big fan of the Alien movies, so I was pleased to see a new Alien movie that was so much fun to watch and paid tribute to the previous installments. Monkey Man with Dev Patel was another great one I watched recently that was a total surprise.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on my next collection of poetry, which doesn’t have a working title yet. So far, it’s about my experience of coming out as queer and polyamorous and reckoning with the religious trauma of my past while also celebrating the joy and care of having two loving partners. I’m doing a lot of reading on queer and lesbian figures from the past that I think will come into the collection in ways that remain to be seen. It’s a fun stage to be at and one of my favourite parts of the creative process.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

four recent (short) essays: Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross + Christine McNair,

As part of a work-in-process, "reading in the margins: a writing diary," I've been posting short essays on the works of prose writers on my enormously clever substack for a while now, with recent pieces posted over the past couple of months on the work of Canadian writers Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross, and Christine McNair. Part of the thinking of these pieces was a way to explore prose writers who have affected my own thinking, and my own writing. While I've a small handful of further essays currently in-progress, you can also check out prior pieces in the same series, on the work of Jean McKay, Gail Scott, Joy Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Kristjana Gunnars. Where might it go next? It is one of but a handful of threads I've been exploring through substack, which I've been attempting to treat like a kind of weekly column: "the genealogy book," a non-fiction book-length genealogical project exploring some of these newly-discovered biological threads, counterpointed with the genealogical threads I was raised into; "the green notebook," a kind of day-book of writing and thinking; "little arguments: stories," a sequence of short short stories, possibly as a follow-up to The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014); and an ongoing flurry of short stories, including what might be a follow-up to my new collection, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). There are also a couple of other projects/threads in there, but I won't give away everything here (this is where the curious might explore the site to see what might be, across the last two years of my weekly postings). It is free to follow me there, although I'm posting every third or fourth piece for paid-members only.

Spotlight series #102 : Gale Marie Thompson

The one hundred and second in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan and Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kevin Gallagher

Kevin Gallagher is a poet, publisher, and political economist living in Greater Boston.   His most recent book is And Yet it Moves (MadHat, 2023) and recent books are The Wild Goose, and Loom. His poems and reviews have appeared in the Partisan Review, Harvard Review, ArtsFuse, Green Mountains Review, and beyond.  Gallagher edits spoKe, a Boston area annual of poetry and poetics.  He works as a political economist at Boston University.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I started identifying as a poet when I was twenty, but didn’t publish a book until I was forty.  I had published poems in the Partisan Review and the Harvard Review a decade earlier but in those earlier days I spent more time focusing on publishing the work of others through the magazine compost I co-published.  When I turned forty I published two chapbooks,  Isolate Flecks with Gloria Mindock’s Cervena Barva press and Looking for Lake Texcoco with Mark Lamoureux’s Cy Gist.  When I held those collections in my hands they propelled me with affirmation and inspiration.  Now And Yet it Moves, published by Marc Vincenz’ MadHat Press, is my eighth book—my fourth full length book.

And Yet it Moves is quite different than my last book, The Wild Goose published by Paul Marion.  The Wild Goose was (largely) written when I was a poet in residence at the Heinrich Boll cottage in Achill, Ireland for two summers. I’m a quarter Irish if my last name didn’t give it away and my father had recently passed.  That book is an exploration of Ireland, my life with my father and beyond.

And Yet it Moves is a pandemic book.  I was shaken by the denial of science and reason in the United States but like Seamus Heaney during ‘The Troubles’ I saved my descriptive rage for the kitchen table but wanted to engage differently as an artist.  As I say in my introduction, this was not the first time we lived in such an era.  I delve into the Medici era in this book, a poetic journey of the rebirth of wonder followed by its denial manifest by Galileo’s imprisonment.  The book is a series of poetic monologues of that time, telling that story.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Our mother took us to the library every weekend and we had to get books.  I read mostly fiction and was taken by Orwell, Thomas Wolfe, Mark Twain.  I read poetry in school but would never pick it up on my own—until I heard Bob Dylan and it was all over.  Wow did he fuse the ‘raw and the cooked’ into one inside and out with a new post-modern sensibility but a meter that sang on its own.  From Dylan I worked backwards being most struck by Williams, Levertov, Rexroth, Patchen, PAZ, Seamus Heaney, O’Hara, Walcott, John Brooks Wheelwright, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Olson and others before I hit a wall in the early 20th Century.  Then I time machined to Homer, Virgil, and Catullus.
 Through Rexroth I entered the world of Tu Fu, Li Bai and Japanese poets too.  Non-fiction is another story.  I’ve written nine books on the global economy.  Let’s save that for another day.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

There are two kinds of poems I write.  The first are those that just hit me, I’ve referred to those as ‘lightning bolt’ poems.  Something happens or I see something or reflect and then comes what David Hinton calls ‘contact’ and boom I start writing and yeah perhaps 80 percent of what happens when the lightning hits my tree stays on the page in the end.

The other kind of poetry I write are more ‘projects’ as you say.  My first book like that was LOOM, also published by MadHat.  That book, in method, is the most similar to And Yet it Moves because it is an exploration and conversation with a history to make sense of the present—an ‘archaeology of mourning.’   The older and busier I get—rhyming ain’t the day job—the more important these projects are because they are always there for me.  At this point in my life I’m dodging a lot of lightning bolts.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

To finish where I left on the last question I guess, for the lighting bolts I end up collecting those in loose books.  The ‘projects’ are seen as books.  My book Radio Plays published by Dos Madres is somewhere in the middle.  It is a collection of shorter set pieces many of which were lightning bolts—or short storms!

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

A poem doesn’t work for me until I’ve read it looking into a pond of eyes and seeing if I can connect.   Readings are essential for me.  I don’t think I’ve published anything I haven’t read in public or at least walking around my house beforehand.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I think we are all asking who are we, where are we, what are we doing, what are we being.  Like Duncan and Olson I see poetry as an open field for these questions.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The poet is the point of contact with a reality revealed in the creation of the poem and shared.  

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Most publishers and editors I have encountered either don’t like the book and won’t publish it or like the book and largely publish it as is.  Actually, And Yet it Moves is an exception.  The poems were originally all fairly straight sonnets but Vincenz helped me hone them a bit more to true projective verse and they are now more like those of Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer.  Since they evoke the ruins of the Roman Empire in Renaissance Italy I am calling them ‘ruined sonnets!’

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Don’t try to be someone else.  Sing your own songs and most importantly in your own voice.  Everyone’s is unique and each person is equally incredible.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I work full time.   For the past five years I have had the privilege to be a poet in residence each summer for a few weeks but I use that to take things to the finish line.  In my case I turn off the work laptop at around half time of the Celtics game with the sound off and start working on my poems.  If the game is close I stop the poems and bleed green.  If not I can go on very late sometimes or hit a wall and go to bed.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

As I said earlier, the longer run ‘projects’ are what I move to.  I also write reviews, most recently for the Arts Fuse and Harvard Review… That can help.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The robust smell of my German Shepherd, REXROTH!

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

And Yet it Moves is all of the above—triggered by science, but there are poems in there about Michelangelo, Vasari, Botticelli.  In the background the New York painters of the 1950s and slapping away on a big canvas above me when I write.  On many levels I am engaging with climate change in this book, so nature is there.   In The Wild Goose I evoke Dr. John playing his piano and Desolation Row is always playing in the background.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I listed a bunch earlier in our conversation.  I go back to those the most but am always on a new quest to learn something new.  Homero Aridjis is the poet I have been diving into the most lately, as well as Cid Corman.  I’ve been reading plays a bit more than poetry though, particularly Brian Friel and August Wilson.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Play for the Boston Celtics!

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

NBA Basketball Baby!  But that’s a joke, I’m five foot nine.  That said one of my best friends’ grandma was the Red Auerbach’s secretary and I majored in Physical Therapy for a few semesters thinking I’d be the trainer for the Celtics.  Poetry broke through.  

I should say that part of the motivation for all this is a social justice.  The poetry can go in one way, action in the other.  In my day job I work as a political economist trying to get the institutions of global economic governance to align with the goals of financial stability, human wellbeing, and environmental sustainability.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I played instruments when I was younger.  My mother had us in art classes all the time too.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

That’s new?  I just read Ron Padgett’s DOT, Bernadette Mayer’s Milkweed Smithereens, and the new selected poems of Larry Eigner edited by Jennifer Bartlett. Best book though I’d say has been Homero Aridjis’ new Self Portrait in a Zone of Silence.  Wakefield Press has just come out with an incredible crop of Max Jacob in translation that I recently reviewed for Harvard Review.  Great film?!  My son and I had a blast yesterday watching The Instigators.  Was great to know every neighborhood it was shot in!

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am almost finished with another archaeology of morning, perhaps in some way it is a prequel to the book LOOM I discussed earlier in our conversation.  This book deals with the Tempest of the settlement of Massachusetts, the translation of its land and people to the West, and to the final battle that confirmed colonization.  A truth that lies in the names of so many roads, rivers, and streams here, but is never discussed.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Maria Hardin, Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether

 

GLOSSOLALIA

the bees are dying—can you feel it? i want
to press my tongue gently against green mesh i want
to bite softly into a sponge of any color i want
to rip & chew & spit that sponge bit out of my mouth
when it becomes small & hard & no longer satisfying the rose
is a rat the rat is a rose
saturn is rising in the 8^th house

Self-described on the back cover as a “hallucinatory debut” by Swedish-American and Stockholm-based artist-poet Maria Hardin is Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (Notre Dame IN: Action Books, 2024), a collection of sharp scalpel cuts through the short lyric. Hardin writes dreamscapes and dream scrapes, playfully quick, goth and gestural, savage and sketched. She writes with a swagger, minimal and explosive; her poems might be short, but she manages to physically pull the lyric apart, piece by piece, whether dismantling lines or words or all of the above simultaneously. “abstracting this girl / self follows me to iDeath,” she writes, to open the short poem “HEART OF LIGHT,” a reference most likely citing ease and possibility, and not, say, the post-apocalyptic commune setting “iDEATH” from the late Richard Brautigan’s classic novel In Watermelon Sugar (1968). “an exquisite corpse / trembling in narrative,” she writes in the poem “NAISSANCE DIARY,” “i / unwrite my body / x / x [.]” Her sketches are less point form or density than the achievement of hammering lines and lyrics until they actually shatter.

 

 

 

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part four, : Charlotte Nip, Jesse Eckerlin + Ayaz Pirani,

[left: Ken Norris + Jay MillAr in conversation ; see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here; see part three 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. I am frustrated I missed last weekend’s fair through The Ampersand Festival! But there will certainly be other fairs, I’m sure (and Christine did a fine job running proxy at the above/ground press table). And don’t forget the thirtieth anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair is November 16, yes?

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: The chapbook debut by Vancouver poet Charlotte Nip is Acne Scars (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), an assemblage, the author notes at the end of the collection, was a “decade in the making [.]” Nip’s poems offer themselves as a sequence of collage-sketches, observations, first-person commentaries and scattered lines, held together as a kind of scrap-book lyric accumulation. “Eliot said it was the cruelest month,” she writes, to open the poem “April,” “but he lied. It’s where I find / myself again, and again, and again. I never get lost because April / births like a malignant tumour. I turn 24.” There’s something intriguing about watching this particular emerging writer feel her way through lyric form, from first-person descriptive commentary and observation and staccato phrases, composing pieces leaning closer into prose poems, more traditional open lyric and even hand-drawn lines connecting thought to thought. Or, as the poem “Persimmons” begins:

we are
a soft bird
a man
with no taste

Montreal QC/Toronto ON: From Montreal poet Jesse Eckerlin, following We Are Not the Bereaved (2012) and Thrush (2016), comes ALMOST NOTHING (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), a sequence of a dozen short, dense lyric bursts. The chapbook-length sequence opens with a couplet on the first page—“Fire in the province— // A car without brakes”—and continues along that same slow unfolding, offering precise and specific language. Each self-contained koan offers a sheen of haiku, composed of lines that might connect but on the surface seem, potentially, disconnected, allowing the reader to fill in certain spaces. “Chisels in my mouth,” the third page/section reads, “Extracting the wisdom teeth // Your lost disciple [.]” There is a certain clarity provided by these poems that is quite intriguing, offering small twists and turns, some more effective than others, but enough that I am intrigued to see what and where Eckerlin lands next.

Conversations like rooms

filled with empty music stands

Toronto ON: The latest from Tanzania-born and California-based Canadian poet Ayaz Pirani (an expat poet comparable to Ken Norris, who also spent years publishing predominantly or even exclusively in Canada while living and working in the United States), following the full-length poetry collections Happy You Are Here (Washington DC: The Word Works, 2016), Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Toronto ON: Mawenzi House, 2019) and How Beautiful People Are: a pothi (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as at least one chapbook, Bachelor of Art (Anstruther Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is the chapbook NECROPOLISBOROUGH (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). NECROPOLISBOROUGH is made up of eight short first-person lyric narratives, offering a plain speech of uncomplicated language woven through narrative wisdoms. “Even the ones I didn’t reach.” he writes, speaking of teaching and being taught, attempting to mentor and being mentored, across the poem “Beloved Infidel,” “Perhaps not reaching them / reached them and / was what they needed.” There’s a quiet power to and through Pirani’s lines, and one can’t help but be charmed by the opening line of “Smart Car,” that reads: “My car drove away honklessly / to live with another family.”

Camus’ Door

My door is plainspoken
without if or but
or doubt. No squeak or yawn.
Puritan by nature
my door is best wide open
or fast shut.
Ajar is too fanciful
for my door.
Door-pain is real
and there’s loneliness
finding yourself
two-sided. Grief too
in the phallic bolt.
My door hangs on
ancient purpose.
A look then a lock
between yes and no.
Swing then swing
between right and wrong
is my door’s fate.

And, according to the author biography at the back of this small collection, Pirani has a collection of short stories forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press, which is pretty exciting.