Ongoing notes: mid-April, 2026: Carlos A. Pittella + Corey Page Martin,

Poetry month! Have you been catching the daily poems posted over at the Chaudiere Books blog? Or the weekly interviews posted via the above/ground press substack? Or the weekly posts in the Canadian Poets Series via Peripety and/or Tronies? There’s a lot going on, as you most likely know. And will I see later this coming week in Victoria? I’m apparently doing two readings and hosting a podcast, live on stage! All through Planet Earth Poetry. That should be pretty cool.

Lethbridge AB/Toronto ON: The third chapbook and debut manifesto by Brazillian-born and Lethbridge-based poet Carlos A. Pittella is Dante’a Bureau: A Deformalist Manifesto (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), a curious lyric and layered essay that counterpoints a thread of Dante and Saramago against a commentary around the difficulties around attempting to garner a passport one can’t travel to, due to an outdated passport. “The last Holy Roman Emperor died and the First Florentine Republic legislated a new balance of power,” Pittella writes, as part of the first thread, “requiring new rules of representation for landed aristocrats, merchant magnates, lower nobles, bankers, artisans… Bureaucracy was just budding when Dante projected its ideal form. Hell is a rational dream.” Counterpoint that against the other thread on the same page, that begins:

It took me eight years to get my Northern passport
By jus soli I already had one from the South.
By jus sanguinis I could apply for other ones.
By marriage I could’ve got one more but then
would have had to swear I revoked all others.
I started the new passport application
but the agents at the consulate
didn’t really want more citizens
so it took years to reconstruct my genealogy
with birth & marriage & death certificates
all notarized & translated
from a believable ancestor to myself.

Toronto/Kingston ON: Another title from Anstruther is by Kingston poet Corey Page Martin, the sleek chapbook JIM (2026), which appears to be their debut. JIM is a suite of poems that respond to the death of the author’s father in 2010, as the first piece, “Suddenly,” offers his obituary: “MARTIN, James Edward – Passed away / suddenly on December 1, 2010 in his 43^rd / year.” Composed as a chapbook-length elegy, the poems assemble, cluster, accumulate, writing through and around this central point, sketching errant truths and pressure points, play and open space, and new spaces that have yet to be filled. “we buried him in the backyard,” begins the poem “On father’s day,” “construction-paper / coffin // garden-stone tomb // he was supposed to be a goldfish / but he was blue / then white / then dead [.]” In certain ways, this is entirely an assemblage of poems on form, as Martin works through grief and loss from a variety of angles, playing with shape and structure, from a variation on Wallace Steven’s infamous 1917 “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” to poems composed through erasure, grids or found material. As the fifth poem in Martin’s sequence, a clever riff off memory, loss, their father and a particular beloved song by The Beatles, “Thirteen ways of listening to ‘Blackbird,’” Martin writes:

with a different voice every time