Book Your Own Reading, ed. Scott Inniss

 

Light lengthens in the evening.

Light lengthens in the evening as the day is swallowed by the horizon.

Light lengthens, casts shadows, reflects on surfaces.

Light lengthens, casts shadows, reflects on surfaces, is captured by an apparatus. 

An apparatus is designed for the capturing of light to reflect an image of the world as it is.

An apparatus is designed for the capturing of light to reflect the world as one imagines it. (“A and Not A,” A Jamali Rad)

I’m intrigued by Book Your Own Reading (Vancouver BC: Publication Studio Vancouver/Bookmachine Editions, 2025), a small anthology edited by Vancouver poet and critic Scott Inniss, and offering work by Cam Scott, Fintan Calpin, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Scott Inniss, A Jamali Rad, Jeff Derksen, Fan Wu, Weldon Gardner Hunter, Andrew Mbaruk and Ryan Fitzpatrick. As Inniss’ “Editor’s Note” at the end of the collection offers: “Book Your Own Reading is a companion to the Bring Your Own Reading Series. It presents material from poets for whom I helped to organize readings in 2023 and 2024. The title is a riff on the DIY punk tour supplement that Maximum Rocknroll used to publish annually until the Internet did away with analog print endeavours of this sort.” He continues:

BYO(f)R finds its initial impulse in the years immediately following the COVID-19 lockdowns, a long moment of social isolation and crisis from which poetry as a (counter)public still struggles to recover. In its most utopian aspect, what confronts poetry in Vancouver today is an economy of scarcity around the reading as a social event and relational form. Without making too big of a deal about it, BYO(f)R aims to put a dent in this scarcity. It exists to provide space for alternate social and performance forms, for experimental work or work in progress, for the testing of material, for poems that risk uncertainty and failure, or whose viability is at once fervent and tenuous.

BYO(f)R strives to maintain a productive informality as regards relations between writers and audiences (as equal and active participants). It wants to help maintain a supportive, non-judgmental, anti-hierarchial space in which to discuss poetry and its critical relation to the social.

Anthologies, whether large or small, for reading series are few and far between, but become important documents for a particular kind of on-the-ground activity within particular cities, particular communities, that aren’t always known or obvious from the outside (and even from within, at times). Toronto poet Paul Vermeersch edited The I.V. Lounge Reader (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2001) to document some of the activity through the series he curated and co-created, just by the Art Gallery of Ontario; Wayde Compton and Renée Sarojini Saklikar co-edited The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press/Simon Fraser University, 2015) [see my review of such here] to document some of the activity through their series Lunch Poems at SFU; outgoing directors James Moran and Jennifer Mulligan edited a celebratory anthology, Twenty-Five Years of Tree (Ottawa ON: BuschekBooks, 2005), highlighting some past readers to Ottawa’s infamous long-running standard, The TREE Reading Series (a series which, sadly, fell apart during the Covid-era) [see my mention of the collection here]. There are probably lots of other examples I’m not even remembering at the moment. What is happening on the ground in Vancouver right now? Here’s the answer, and the range and quality of the experimentation is absolutely wild. And kudos to anyone who is able to publish work by the woefully-underpublished marvel that is Vancouver poet Dorothy Trujillo Lusk:

Under begin, that’s left twice, hunker, laugh the notion, shiver. I’m on my knees, sicken, walks fridge and stoves as fiction, as autographical shortwaves distance. As evacuation as product and banishment tunes, thus avoiding seller’s defeat among lions’ feet.

Lexicaloric ever long nuts around dogs the area. Any monster is bags full, bags full. Here’s monkey out of molehills littering the peat. Tiddly fear posterior bug romance till rectitude. Subordinate substance finest finite eschewer.

Heard all palatable as “jeez still.” Nominal mumble moderates. Vigorous soft bonnets, our nieces’ proportion, heading down the predicate, as circumstances most palpable, grizzlies allow about it. Tadpoles worrying about a drag like us at home. Little most against hardly ugly dun. (Dorothy Trujillo Lusk)

While the work of most of the names within this collection I’m aware of, I had to look up information on Fintan Calpin (a poet who “recently competed his doctorate in English Literature at King’s College London researching contemporary poetry from the UK and North America,” and author of the 2025 publication Terminal City, a work that emerged from his year in Vancouver), Weldon Gardner Hunter (author of Four Poems, published by Small Ghosts in 2012) and Andrew Mbaruk (“a Black post-Canadian poet dwelling on Xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh territories . . . author of Oiseau=textual: the flying rap album and Hydro=textual: the underwater rap album”), as there aren’t author biographies included in this sleek collection, although it isn’t hard to look up at least basic information. All three of these new-to-me are doing intriguing work (as is everyone in the collection, really), but, of the trio, it was Calpin’s work that really struck:

POEM FOR GRANTA 

That’s the problem at night
    all cows are black
    perhaps comfort
means vigilance or some joke
desire plays on habit. Like
    having a cow
    & milking it too
there’s no use guessing what
    the farmer wants.
My landlord died now I have
    a landlord.
    How come
the sparrow’s at its seed though
   the squirrel’s baffled?
The board of trustees has
    been alerted.
What follows are big sad words
    like “sore ear”
though you seemed more
    like a sparrow
    in the hand.
Is it a problem with cows
   or the night?