Further to what I picked up at the most recent edition of the ottawa small press book fair [see my first post on such here], an event now thirty-one years old. What the what? And you’ve been catching my posts from the recent Toronto fairs, yes? [see my fourth post on such here]; and did you see that Vancouver poet Jane Shi is starting a site for reviews as well?
Ottawa ON: Curious to see emerging poets Jean-Sébastien Grenier [see his six questions interview here] and Colin Quin [see his six questions interview here] self-publishing small chapbooks, presumably aimed for release at our small press fair. From Grenier, comes the chapbook BLOODORANGES, A DOZEN (2025), a title released in a “limited printing” of thirty copies; from Quin, it is the small chapbook Death Jester (2025), produced sans date, colophon or author biography. Both titles hold a table of contents at the offset, which I always consider unrequired for small publications such as these. I mean, if you’re dealing with twenty pages or less, roundabout, one should be able to find everything rather quickly.
Quin’s poems in Death Jester revel in the short sequence, in the gestural response, writing first-person meditations and expositions. “So, I tested the priest’s confessional creed / I’m rehearsing the book of subliminal verses / until it becomes second nature.” he writes, to open the poem “The Bent Knee.” “I imagined disobeying god / and caught my tongue playing with a razorblade / like it was a lollipop. // That’s the shadow-law of god.” Quin’s lyric offers a youthful vibrancy still seeking itself out, feeling out language and thinking, working out a series of gestures and response via the lyric. “Oh Death!” the fifth poem of his similarly-titled sequence, utilized as repeated prompt, begins, “You chain-smoke men like cigarettes.”
While working similar elements of exploratory, the pieces in Grenier’s BLOODORANGES, A DOZEN are a bit more meditative, darker; less shaped by line-breaks and visual space than in Quin’s chapbook, although offering curious elements of pause, of lyric stretch of phrase. With elements of occasional antiquated language, both titles provide important first steps towards the work that hopefully they both might get to, attempting to best determine how and what they write; further absorbing influence to find their own individual ways through and into themselves.
Before the Metamorphosis, Hearken
If lost, blinded through
a worm-lit foliage,
Licked by whispers
burrowing in your ears,
Do not be petrified by
what you may hear
In their saliva-shrewd
chaos language.
Keep steady through the
chattering mosaic.
And hold firm through the
fires of fear.
In this strange forest,
let your fear crystallize
As a kaleidoscopic music
box of knowledge.
Listen. When your
pirouette slows again,
and the forest’s a gorgon’s
hissing wig,
Behold, the maddened carnival
jester
Raising a jack-o’-lantern
of laughter!
A figure illuminating the
flicker of your smirk
As you struggle to recall
the crescendo of its worth.
Montreal QC: The latest from Montreal writer Cora Siré is the chapbook Moonlight Recipe for Disaster (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2025), following a handful of poetry, fiction and hybrid/memoir titles, including Fear the Mirror: Stories (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 2021). Moonlight Recipe for Disaster is composed as a first-person lyric sequence in seventeen numbered sections, reminiscent slightly of a prior recent Turret House Press title, Montreal writer Claire Sherwood’s chapbook-length sequence, Eat your words (2024) [see my review of such here]. So perhaps get your food-related lyric sequences off to James Hawes during their next open reading period, everyone.
1. Pick a knife with a red handle.
To avoid a massacre, make sure the knife’s not too sharp. Also, not too blunt.
Time can be lost with futile sawing, and there’s the risk of repetitive motion injury.
Sharp is to blunt as poetry is to memoir. It’s a matter of the knife’s edge, the blade where imagination cuts into memory.
I’m prone to self-harm either way.
Especially tonight when my creativity’s stalled and the moon is holding her breath.
Siré’s sequence curls and whirls through a meditation around elements of the work and life of Ottawa-born writer Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986) [catch the piece I wrote on Smart for Geist a while back here], specifically her infamous 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, swirling lyric threads across a tightly-woven lyric. Her poem offers the structure of a sequence of recipe steps and general cooking advice, weaving elements of Smart’s example and ethic, amid far broader, and more specific, meditation and life advice. I’m intrigued by the way she builds her sequence of prose lyrics, and would hope that this lands in a full-length collection at some point, although there’s a part of me that would want to see this piece expanded, furthered. I feel as though the potential of this piece might be far more, somehow, through Siré’s sharp eye. Perhaps I need to be paying more attention to the work of Cora Siré.
4. Onion, onion, Zwiebel and cebolla, viciously chopped.
Cry, cry, cry to the count
of three, a waltz that evokes a writer. I haven’t thought of Elizabeth Smart in
a long, long time. There’s no ratatouille in By Grand Central Station I Sat
Down and Wept. It’s all fierce passion. Not a single banal chopping action
to be found in the novel.
 |
| James Spyker's table of handmade items, |
No comments:
Post a Comment