Toronto ON: Oh, how lovely to see this new title by Toronto poet R. Kolewe [see my review of his latest here], the chapbook HOLONOMY (Toronto ON: knife fork book, 2026), a cluster of fourteen delightfully-packed and short prose poems. “Porch sketch, penciled showers slant with the scent of rosemary. Postscript rather than prelude,” begins the opening poem, “Rosemary,” “moist hours mix eternity into fallen ordinary order and escape. Can you name the clouds all grey and dusky?” Kolewe’s work has long been known for expansive projects across the long poems, composing large works underneath the umbrella of a big idea or turn of phrase, and the internet provides that holonomy (a word I hadn’t known prior) refers to the change in a line or object’s orientation when returning to itself, such as running a line across the earth’s equator. The holonomy is the curve itself, as the line or object returns back to that point of origin. “Rare earth remainders scuttle,” begins the poem “Lively,” “worn scow flocks skew wings named widening full scarlet Geneva. Pause fluid lustral stochastic review.” Are there more of these pieces, somewhere? Might a larger, full-length manuscript be in the works? Kolewe works quietly, it would seem, but rarely in such small containers, so I would hope there are more of these on the horizon.
Narrative Approach
Sheer diffract predestination cover, stratocumulus portcullis memory alembic door ajar. Pale glow effect. Beginning future chiptone plastic, unbegun catenary cross canvas melancholic two-step (three four time.) Proof suspended: every edge derivative: bereft infinity knifeblade uniform field fiction patch, no torsion etc. Ambient classical approximation. Laurel ardour triage. No probability amplitude, no perpetual help, no polyhedron forever oyster idol factory isn’t about anything is. Communities stir and name themselves. The human heart alas, the neighbourhood, the pitcher broken at the fountain. Too fast.
Johannesburg, South Africa/Toronto ON: From poet Erin Conway-Smith, born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario but living in Johannesburg, comes the chapbook-debut, the extended poem VELD SENSE (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2026), a curious two-sided structure on each page, with single, chapbook-length line running mid-way between, comparable to how Darren Wershler’s The Tapeworm Foundry (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2000) held a single, book-length line along the bottom of each page, alongside the main element of the book’s text. The main thread of this particular work is assembled via a curious assemblage, almost a collage, of short lines and phrases, allowing sound to playfully bounce around through language, geography. “Cape Town with cousins,” she writes, mid-way through, “not mine.” Or a bit further down the same page: “You get / a new pair of shoes, // you experience a minor lift.” As the chapbook-length sequence opens:
Heavy hung the spiral
in early but not that
early
air. This is me, after
all.
Yesterday was so loud.
To my right, tray go-away
birds
mobbed a sleepy owl. To the
left,
a 15-foot-high water
feature
after some oke crowbar’d
the meter open for the metal.
A generating unit each at Tutuka and Majuba have tripped. Reminder to
The air cut with spirals
this season,
repeating at medium
distances
at regular through not
predictable
blips. Perception: least
of my problems.
Sprung graffiti insistently
tug.
The sound is sideways-turned,
shaggy to even.
The quality is tin.
A spiral doesn’t settle,
it just stops.
But it is March, and still they haven’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment