Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part one, : Liam Burke + Gary Barwin,

Okay, so this has to be a blended sequence of fair-posts, as multiple vendors (such as myself and the delightfully-productive above/ground press) attended both fairs across two days in Toronto [see my post on the most recent prior TIFA Small Press Market I attended; see my post on the most recent prior Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market I attended]. I mean, two fairs in two days? It was a bit ridiculous, but somehow, it worked. Most of the vendors I spoke to, myself included, were naturally exhausted after two days of fairs and carrying and standing. There was a nice tribute that Gary Barwin spoke at the Indie Lit Market to honour the late Toronto poet (and Meet the Presses Collective member) Paul Dutton, who died earlier this year. And congratulations to Jeremy Luke Hill, who won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award! Announced the very day he saw his new above/ground press title for the first time. And you know our Ottawa fair is coming up soon, yes?

Toronto/Ottawa ON: From Ottawa poet Liam Burke, co-author of the collaborative Orbital Cultivation (with Manahil Bandukwala; Collusion, 2021) and machine dreams (with natalie hanna; Collusion, 2021), comes the solo chapbook status ailment (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), an assemblage of ten short, curious lyrics. Burke’s poems offer lyric narratives, lyric inquiries, set in ether, presenting or suggesting a kind of action, such as the reference to the Marvel flick, Doctor Strange (2016), by titling a poem “dormammu ive come 2 bargain,” a poem that writes a held kind of abstract, purposefully, it would seem, inert. As the opening stanza reads: “i could just stay here / gather green trichomes / let inertia have its way / collate colonies of moss / mash every button / to escape the command- / grab of coming of age [.]” There are narrative threads that exist in Burke’s poems, but less straightforward than from all sides, slant; offering swirls instead of straight lines, and a sequence of entreaties without clear closure. These poems are intriguing, thoughtful and exploratory, offering unexpected paths and trails and truths. Or, as the first section of the sequence “five litanies” ends: “how am i       to show / to love my body       when it fails me so [.]”

status ailment

panic overwhelming

No you may not heal heat uplifted.
No you may not jitterbug your body.
No you may not catapult your
heart your throat your diaphragm.
No you may not finish that joint.
You might be dying. Panic
’s roar in the dark, low, hot. No you
May not. No you may not.

Gary Barwin + serif of nottingham at TIFA's Indie Lit Market

Hamilton ON: “I weep for the world and so UNESCO declares my tears a site of significant cultural heritage. They don’t include my snot and jagged sobs though I would argue that they are integral to the process.” And so begins the title and opening piece of Hamilton writer, musician, collaborator and performer Gary Barwin’s latest chapbook, MY SEXY MOTHER TERESA COSTUME (serif of nottingham editions, 2025). Barwin’s short prose bursts exist as postcard stories, twenty-two in total, all existing as blends of dense, narrative expansiveness, offering short sketches across a wide canvas of history, literature and experience. “During World War II,” the first half of the piece “In my Pants” reads, “Dervis Korkut, the librarian at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at great risk to his life, hid the beautiful medieval Sarajevo Haggadah from the Nazis by concealing it in his pants, I remembered, so I went to the bookstore.” His short missives have progressed, it would seem, blending a thread of surrealism with a far larger worldview, offering pieces that read somehow both surreal and straightforward, able to only see the story properly from coming to it from unusual sides. Or, as the piece “The Ventriloquist and 1942” begins: “The European explorer stood on the bow of the ship, holding a ventriloquist dummy dressed as a sea captain. Together, explorer and dummy looked across the vast ocean at the distant horizon.” Truly, these pieces are quite amazing, and hard to shake, once you’ve read. They keep one returning.

Cake

I’m phoning your cake because of course you don’t have a birthday anymore, at least, not really. Your cake is really far away—somewhere “out there” or “here.” Same as you, in this day where I woke up and made coffee and got in my car and drove to where I’m writing this and where I picked up this old-fashioned phone. Ring. Ring. Are you thinking of cake in your own cloudtown, thinking of us, candles and blowing them out, the breath from inside us, hhh hhh hhh. Happy birthday. Happy birthday, we say. And you’re thinking, happy birthday, happy birthday to me too.