Another small press fair, come and gone; and have you been catching my posts from the recent participation in both the TIFA Small Press Market and Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market? [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here; see my fourth post here].
Wakefield/La Pêche QC: The latest from Pearl Pirie’s phafours is Crime & Ornament: poems (2025) by Tamsyn Farr [see her “six questions” interview from last year this time], a chapbook debut by the self-described “degenerate, straggler, marauder, buffoon, confidence trickster, latent criminal, pathological phenomenon, and poet who goes around Wakefield, Quebec, in velvet hose with gold braid like a fairground monkey.” I had a landlord back in the late 1990s who was the “Village poet” of Wakefield, I wonder if she knows Phil Cohen? “America was Kmart the Beautiful / when I was seven and in love / with Teddy Ruxpin.” she writes, to open the first poem “Cross Border Shopping,” a poem around memory, composed beneath the shadow of the current political climate. Her poems in this short collection offer depiction, response and memory, writing first-person poem-thoughts across narrative stretches, playful patter and sharp turns. Or, as the first quarter of the poem “Lovin It” reads: “Piercing gun cocked: pop goes / the sheen of a flat world // conspicuous, daubed / in all-angled light. // A footnote in the fiscal year / liquidates the wax museum // in some sun’s hollow centre. / Now two-thumbed hands // shake at rates reflecting / the cadences of the real world. // The death rattles’ goo goo / ga ga: the last dead giveaway.” I am intrigued by her use of political and cultural touchstones, riffing references and exploring multiple shapes and forms across this assemblage. I am curious to see what might come next, certainly.
Ornaments Wanted: Dead or Alive
On the mantle, a BBQ
lighter. It came in a pack
of two: red and blue. Its
long, flame-tipped finger
lights the fireplace. Left
too close, it later catches
fire and explodes and
leaves specks of soot over
the whole goddamn house
because that’s how hot
fire gets, hot enough to
blow up the fire-maker
and ash-festoon every
surface. And at the blue
fire’s centre is six
months or years of sad and
unfiligreed time: to hose
you down and feed you
peanuts, to talk to your
druid therapist, to recall
that hangover nap on the
toilet in a bathroom for
employees of the research
unit of the psych
hospital, to be gainfully
employed, to step into
the cold shower like a chest-beating
Swede and
fantasize pleasantly about
being fed into a wood
chipper. Mulch-me becomes
the beadwork on
another disenchanted century.
He wasn’t wrong to look
for the ornament
embedded in the object. He
wasn’t wrong that
fads lead to landfills
adorned with dated kitchen
cabinetry. Every Hummel
figurine is haunted.
Snipped from their
forests, my indoor trees
yellow around me.
(For the love of Christ, go water your plants).
Cobourg ON/New York NY: From Stuart Ross’ infamous Proper Tales Press comes New York City-based Rochester, New York poet emily shafer’s chapbook debut, it’s too early for poetry (2025). There’s a clarity to her lyric I find charming, a straightforwardness that still bends in the light, offering a slight pull on the line from gravity. Her poems really do feel akin to full-length sentence-thoughts, stretched across a canvas to shape across pause, interruptions, turns and twists. “Midnight ivy holds this house / together but I squeeze / out through the cracks,” she writes, as part of “the Munchmuseet,” “If you didn’t want to blossom, you should have told me so [.]”
August
Jessica works at the Met
every day editing
exhibition photographs,
so we go
out on weekends to some
bar
in the Bronx for wings
and syrup
-y soda. I can’t yet tell
if the waiter has had
such
picky customers before,
tearing
apart and rearranging the
menu, but he seems
to mind
only us.
At midnight I see the
moon
over Van Courtland Park
out the empty
train car window and she says
it looks like me and I rest
my head on her shoulder
as the I train takes us home.
Montreal QC: I’ve long found collaborative quartet Yoko’s Dogs [Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis and Jane Munro] a curious aberration, offering an ongoing conversation between a larger grouping of collaborators than the usual two or three, paired with the fact that they’re all individually well-established and published writers, and the fact of their sheer ongoingness, perhaps comparable only with their contemporary, Pain Not Bread [made up of the collaborative trio Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton]. Yoko’s Dogs formed in Montreal in 2006, and has since published titles including the full-length Whisk (Pedlar Press, 2013), and chapbooks Rhinoceros (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and Caution Tape (Collusion Books, 2021). Their latest is the chapbook Lunchbox Poems (Turret House Press, 2025), a title composed as an extended sequence of short, fragmented and accumulative lyric bursts. “can you put your feet up and relax,” they write, mid-way through the collection, “if the footstool is an anteater [.]” Their declared intention sits within the structure of the English-language haiku, but their lyric feels a bit more expansive than that, pulling at the boundaries of where the lyric meets a clipped, meditative density. Not straight haiku at all (again, in the adapted and otherwise imperfectly-translated English-language parlance of an original Japanese form), but something expansive, and ongoing. Not simply one small moment held, but held in a loose kind of sequence.
on the phone with my
mother
I pull skin from
a slice of salami
full snow moon, your
other name is
hunger
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