Ongoing notes: early June, 2025: Elizabeth Marie Young + Hannah Brooks-Motl,

We will see you at the ottawa small press book fair this month, yes? June 21, at the Tom Brown Arena; and the pre-fair the night prior, at Anina’s Café? You know you want to. The best of the small press in Ottawa since 1994. And don’t forget to sign up (free!) for the above/ground press substack! There’s even some further big interviews coming up on there over the next few weeks with authors such as Jason Christie, Michael Sikkema, Monty Reid, Micah Ballard and Lydia Unsworth; that’s pretty cool, yes?

Boston MA: The latest from Boston-based poet Elizabeth Marie Young, a poet I hadn’t heard of prior to this, is the chapbook-length poem 349 THINGS I DON’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT RIGHT NOW (2024), the sixth chapbook by American chapbook publisher clones go home. This poem is exactly what the title suggests, an accumulation set as stanzas, one after another, offering a propulsion of item after item that reads as delightfully surreal. As she writes: “The Plastic Ono Band. Whether a wolf with / polypropylene teeth will drag my dad into the River of / Lethargy. The Backside Rock ‘n’ Roll. What it’s like to be / on fire.” Wonderfully inventive and playful, the poem is expansive, endlessly extensive and ongoing, and after a while, begins to read as reasoning, as mantra; as a listing of ongoing complaints and as, perhaps, a way to centre the mind, the spirit, amid all the chaos. “This is just a feeling,” she writes, a repetitive quartet across a single page, “It does not control me.”

Grandma energy. Whoever invented sin. Whoever
invented sinkholes. The unsettling glow of the
Bachquellengraben River. Open casket burials.
Indoctrination camps. Resetting interest rates to avoid
financial meltdown. Whoever invented spurs. Whoever
invented your comfort animal’s soft, synthetic fur.
Whoever invented Dolly Parton. Hacking the central
Bank of Japan. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark’s
sexual orientation.

Chicago IL: From Hannah Brooks-Motl, another poet I hadn’t been aware of prior, comes Poem Staple Collage / for Jonathan Rajewski / & Other Poem (Chicago IL: The Year, 2024), the bulk of which, according to the colophon, originally “appeared as part of a text/image collaboration originally hosted by Nina Johnson gallery as part of ‘Recreational Collage,’ a 2023 exhibition of works by Jonathan Rajewski, some of which appear here,” produced in a lovely and graceful (with letterpress covers) edition of two hundred copies. I am curious about the nature of this particular collaboration, if it a proper back-and-forth between the poet and the artist, or if more of a response project, with the poet responding to particular artworks. These poems are extraordinarily expansive, slow and meditative, composing an ongoing line that suggests itself far longer than this particular collection might hold. “The artist works at a simple machine,” Brooks-Motl writes, offering bits of text interspersed with full-colour artworks by Rajewski, “It uses pressure from which flows an arrangement of heavens wrapping around and carrying on—a hand or arm, a foot, a knee— // Pistachios and marigolds on a background of cardboard // When you look at the staple it’s catholic and scattered. An array meaning the town you appeared in with obscure talents at life [.]”

From GS we know that repetition is not just repeating since differences of emphasis always exist

There is a granular non-repetitive emphatic and continuously present view of things that liberates you from story and regret

Time in its plastic wrap and denim, stapling dried blood and dried leaves

Failure which loves holey socks and rags, walnut or rocks

Affects that appear over and over are bother, nervousness, ease

There is a velvety repetitive ambiguous and intermittent prospect—I write in a rush and then I select

The form is choosing, in order to keep choice open