Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one, : Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross, + Monty Reid,

[Manahil Bandukwala at the Brick Books table; Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner at the Assembly Press table] Another small press book fair! Do you remember my notes from last fall on the ottawa small press book fair [see parts one, two] or my combined notes on Toronto's TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market [see parts one, two, three, four]? So much small press! And our next Ottawa fair will be Saturday, November 14th at the Tom Brown Arena, so be sure to mark your calendars. Did you know there’s a zine fair coming up in Sherbrooke, Quebec on July 4th? (a handful of issues of Touch the Donkey will be available there gratis, by the way) And apparently there’s another Fisher Library Small Press Fair in Toronto on September 19^th!

Ottawa/Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross have been working a curious sequence of chapbook-length response projects (all part of a larger manuscript-in-progress, “THE SHOOKY SESSIONS (A Litany),” a handful of such appearing recently in print [including titles through above/ground press, № Press and Vallum’s Chapbook Series], one of the latest being Shooky Session 4 (with allergies) (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, June 2026), subtitled “Paul Celan, Selections / 11 December 2023 / Sarah Burgoyne’s Place.” Each chapbook-length project, it would seem, is composed as a collaborative response to a poetry title pulled off a bookshelf at random, this one being Paul Celan’s Selections (University of California Press, 2005), edited by Pierre Joris. As the note at the back of the chapbook offers: “This chapbook presents poems written during the fourth of seven listening poetry sessions that Stuart Ross and Jason Camlot held between December 5, 2022, and December 18, 2024.” With the other prompt-titles in the sequence, Celan is an interesting selection, given the work can’t help but be a richly generative text. The notion of the “response text” is one that runs the length and breadth of literature, including what one might term straight translation to more abstract translations, from bpNichol’s Translating Translating Apollinaire to Erín Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Anansi, 2001) to more recent mis-translations by Montreal poet Hugh Thomas. Not that a response is the same thing as translation, or even mis-translation, but I would say the ideas are certainly related. Siblings, perhaps.

As well, Ross is one of but a handful of writers (I would include Gary Barwin in such as well) who seem to be constantly, even perpetually, pushing the boundaries of their own comfort and possibility through projects, including collaboration, all of which can’t help but feed into either author’s solo work. I am very curious to see this eventual published collection, and the way each chapbook-length project might play off each other, possibly. As the poem begins:

The divers are crowned by halos.
They are not brainless,
nor are they flames of vegetable.
Let’s dance around my eyes,
celebrate my glorious decapitation,
my glistening kisser.

Ottawa ON/Grand Lake NB: In case you were unaware, New Brunswick poet russell carisse [see my recent interview with carisse here] has started a chapbook press, sider0xylon press, which debuted at this most recent ottawa small press book fair. One of the first titles is the sequence OPERATIVES by Monty Reid, hand-sewn and produced “on a 1929 LCSmith & Corona Standard #8-12,” each copy individually typed and numbered in an edition of fifty copies. Throughout this ten-part sequence, Reid invokes a slow and considered lyric unfurling that works perfectly in this format, each short section on its own page, allowing each line to properly absorb. As the opening piece, titled “Brush Pass,” reads:

You never know what you’ll be given.

You might not feel the slightest touch
as the messenger passes. 

You never know where it came from
although you suspect a source. 

Your job is not to know. You are the form
the message takes, every time.
 

what we did on our summer staycation, (part two,

[see the first part of our travels here] Two days (again) at Great Wolf Lodge, Niagara Falls, where I hobbled around in my boot, protecting my still-healing broken foot. Where I was unable to go into the water, which allowed a bit more time with notebook, pen; with reading.

Mother-in-law met us there, with six year old nephew in tow, which allowed for some good cousin visits (Christine's brother moving from England to Halifax this summer, which should allow some more-often cousin visits, perhaps). Our young ladies don't get to see any of them that often [although we were in London not long ago, where our young ladies enjoyed a good handful of cousin days].

Day two included a visit to Christine's great-uncle Charlie in Thorold, to see how he's been keeping. On the way back, catching a freighter through the Welland Canal: That boat is so long! Aoife declared. It must be a million Aoifes! (Christine looked it up: apparently "one million Aoifes" is equivalent to 232 metres).

The children, Christine and Oma even played laser tag (Rose came in fourth place, naturally). We all played a round of mini-putt golf. I sat on the step with notebook and reading material during both evenings, and caught a visit (again) from the local skunk, who toddled by both nights (and even the next morning). He was uninterested in whatever it was I was doing. Before we left, both young ladies and nephew their faces painted.

Back in Picton another few days, we landed just in time to catch the latest PEP Rally at the bookstore, curated by Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner of Assembly Press (Christine reads at same in September, by the way), with readings by Sneha Madhavan-Reese, Spencer Gordon and Matthew Tierney! What are the odds? I don't even recall the last time I heard either Spencer or Matthew read.

Curious to start going through Spencer's latest, and I haven't even seen Matthew's yet. And did you know that novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer lives rather close? Was good to see her again (we thought the last time we'd seen each other was at the final Scream in High Park in Toronto, which would have been more than a decade ago).

And, once back at father-in-law's place (where we'd deposited the young ladies, just prior to heading to the reading), another three days of attending them, poolside. Another three days of reading, although we did manage a dinner, just the two of us. Up on a hill, way way up above the water. Did you know a small lake in those hills? And a brewery? A view along the water's edge to nearly-Kingston, nearly-Napanee. Point north, where Roblin Mills, or where my birth mother lives. Point east, where the wind farm sits on the horizon. Point east, where a tower sits, near the town of Bath.

In Picton, where the young ladies saw a handful of turtles along the water's edge, and Rose named one "Reginald," taking a forty-minute video (with my phone) of her new best friend and his adventures. Where they sat at the water's edge.

And then, Sunday afternoon, back to Ottawa. Aoife remains, spending some solo time with gran'pa and his wife for a few days, whereas Rose a day-camp began Monday morning.

Andrew Faulkner, Heady Bloom

  

Faust saw the devil

and Faust is made up.
Not to say the devil’s not real.
Abstraction accumulates 

in the body until made definite.
A fever dream, a bit of coke

in the night’s false bottom.
A faint droning unfolds

behind the eyes and an unpleasant
sensation wriggles free. (“ON VISIONS”)

Picton, Ontario poet Andrew Faulkner’s second trade poetry collection, after Need Machine (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013), is the remarkable Heady Bloom (Coach House Books, 2022), a book of meditations and conversations around headaches and pain relief, writing on Advil while offering classical references amid dense language and deft turns. “From spit and straw,” he writes, as part of the poem “WHAT ADVIL GETS UP TO,” “Advil assembles / amphetamine’s scarecrow cousin. // Advil sucks its teeth as it thinks. // Advil is thick, / as always Advil is thick, / with representation.” Heady Bloom writes a poetic response across headaches, as the opening poem, “ON VISIONS,” offers, further on: “The sensation / could be a headache only. // To obsess is a mistake. / What’s not to believe? Suffering // and ascendance require the same work. / The literature is clear: these things / happen all the time. // One is advised not to argue / with the extraordinary persistence of vision.” Through a remarkably fluidity, the narratives of Faulkner’s poems dismantle and reassemble with a remarkable ease, deftly turning corners and dodging traffic, working skillfully what should seem otherwise impossible. Heady Bloom is a book of big ideas and hard journeys, and even writes Advil against the late Canadian-born comedian Norm Macdonald, as the poem “Advil Clumsily Retells Norm Macdonald’s Moth Joke from The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” explores the failure to replicate Macdonald’s unique and gifted offering: “Advil’s wielded / explication like an ice axe // and the joke’s gone / the way of Trotsky, // theory murdered by praxis, / and what’s left is the most, // who’s staring down / a barrel-shaped dread, // and you, dear receiving end, / who must hold this shaggy // moment and hack through / the fact that Advil’s lost the plot, // can’t stick the punchline, / as the podiatrist has no clue // how to shoo the moth / from his office.”

I deeply admire the way through which Faulkner engages semi-familiar and familiar facts and references to write unexpected corners, akin to Tom Stoppard writing the spaces only he could see through Shakespeare’s Hamlet to compose his infamous play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). Through composing reflective passages on facts and truth, and the slippages of what both of those have become and might be, there are echoes of tone throughout reminiscent of works by Stephen Brockwell and David O’Meara; I could imagine either one of those Ottawa poets offering a lyric similar to the one that ends Faulkner’s poem “GUNS N’ ROSES PINBALL MACHINE”: “The game darkens the depot // like a sweetly blackened eye. / Skin discolours where blood convenes. // It's not quite pleasing. But whither the fun / in a jungle of leaving.”

Ongoing notes: the Ottawa small press book fair (part one: Ferno House),

Another Ottawa small press book fair has come and gone, an event now eighteen years old (something I still find completely amazing). Here are some of the items I picked up during this year’s event. Watch here for information on the spring 2013 event, most likely to happen later in June (and announce around February or so).

And congratulations to Adrienne Gruber, who won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award! Hopefully I can get my hands on a copy of her book at some point.

Toronto ON: Ferno House might not have won the bpNichol Chapbook Award this year (neither did above/ground press, obviously), but the fact that they had two publications on a shortlist of six titles is impressive. Spencer Gordon was up for his own chapbook [my review of such lives here], as was Toronto poet and AvantGarden Reading Series co-organizer/host Liz Howard’s first chapbook (skullambient) (2012):

(Steinian aphasia)

I that I am thy.

At thy happenstance of atoms.

Were the where of my happening into happened.

But only slightly.

So many, so manlike, multiplying thusly.

Into a permanence of flux, disconcerting.

Sister.

Sister none.

Other than the keeper.

Of another heart bleeding in December.

Boys.

Some of those boys who know no boredom.

Golden, even, in the significant design.

Sing glyph.

Sing slow creep of limbs and neural tube.

Gone too far too few in fathers.

A husbandry of worms between.

There.

Over there.

The sigh almost silenced.

Thereby a maple tree. (Liz Howard)

I’m startled by the pure electricity of the language, a poetry that perhaps needs to be heard to fully appreciate the cadences and wordplay. Howard’s poems embrace the abstract with concrete language, strafing the familiar with disconnects that alter perception, into a kind of hyper-familiarity. I’m taken with the way she uses information and twists it, playing with the sounds and meanings, such as in the poem “ (may-tea-non-state-is-abhor-original) ,” where she writes “bienvenue / the residential school / —or ancestor, ascended” (p 16). Already in a second printing, this chapbook strikes as an incredible debut. The last page of the final poem in the collection, the four-page “ Psychogeography),” reads:

I slept in voices of smoke

by the woodstove in the basement

of our house by the cemetery

to be small and dreaming parallel

to ceremony and decay

sometime ago I found

the body of a métis fur trader

in the hunting shack back there

in the woods where I guarded

him like a treasure

Chapleau         vexation and myth or

                        rabbit under the scrap car

                        or fox corporeal or

                        a mother and ravens

Toronto, now

this breathless forest.

I was also able to pick up copies of Shannon Maguire’s Fruit Machine (2012), Andrew Faulkner’s mean matt and other shitty people (2012), as well as the anthology For Crying Out Loud II: Another Anthology of Poetry & Fiction (2010). In her Fruit Machine, Shannon Maguire, about to launch a second poetry chapbook with above/ground press, writes of a dark and largely forgotten part of Canadian history that destroyed multiple lives. As she writes in her “Notes”:

The Fruit Machine was a battery of psychological and physiological tests developed during the 1950s and 60s by Carleton University psychologists Frank Robert Wake to “scientifically” detect whether someone was a homosexual. At the time, homosexuality was deemed a threat to national security and authorities sought reliable ways of identifying and expunging lesbians and gay men from the civil service as well as other professions. Fortunately, the tests never proved conclusive, but the harm that their development and underlying assumptions caused was felt in the LGBT community.

Needless to say, thousands of people in the public service, military and police lost their jobs during this period, and the stain of the fruit machine can still be felt in certain corners of Ottawa. Because of this potentially loaded title, I’m not sure it aligns with the work in the chapbook, and even works to distract away from the rich variety within. The title seems to have been pulled only from a single poem, salvaged from a slight reference towards the end:

VOLUME

of queen with circus & coo

with wolf-velvet, blackmail

to rim with prowl for fish for flute

with bell of fruit in swing to sew

her tearoom & top fish

her swing & trade with mother-punk

of cruise wolf, of queen wolf, of punk prowl,

fish-wolf queen for velvet bell

whole sew bull

sew bull sew …

with normal words

like breast & blond & stiff & newspaper

radiator farm asphalt politician hammer

erect child cigar fight & stroke

like tearoom fight & breast fruit

like swing stiff in blond fish

like camp politician with mother-punk radiator

like top men hammer blond on asphalt

fight blond for top

blind blond with trade cigar

all part of a lexicon

of aversive substances & shocks

change in size of pupil

of the fruit machine

by the fruit machine

for the fruit machine

subdivision did

The poems within explore systems of language, perception and sensation, with a sprinkling of her favoured “wolf” scattered throughout. Maguire is very much a fan of structure, and experimenting with structure throughout, such as in the poem “Pleasure,” where she playfully echoes a binary played from Robert Kroetsch’s The Sad Phoenician (1979), a structure more recently played with by Amanda Earl in The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (above/ground press, 2008). As the notes at the back of the collection claims, this chapbook is “part of a book-length ‘exploded sestina called Myrmurs.” Shortlisted previously for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing, she already she has a first full-length trade collection out in the spring, fur(l) (BookThug). I am very much looking forward to seeing what she ends up doing with larger structures, and the larger canvas.

existing independently of zip-stripe; openness of destination

if she loved a man on Tuesday; epiphytes rather on Saturday

if she only undergoes a not entirely determinable series of women

admiring them for their inkjet streams & analytical coups

if anarcho-sundicalist organizers appeal to her & mother

            is in a state nursing home

if by sunrise the next day the girl escaped drowning

then she takes moisture from the air; that kissed all she saw

            in the factory (“LETTERS”)

Author of Useful Knots and How to Tie Them (Toronto ON: The Emergency Response Unit, 2008), Andrew Faulkner is one of the Ferno House editors and co-editor/co-publisher of The Emergency Response Unit. To my knowledge, he hasn’t had a chapbook out in some time, and his poems on terrible people explore a range of characters and voices, some of which work and others that don’t.

IL MIGLIOR FABIO

If you are what you eat then I

am the ass of a high school cheerleader,

high on boredom, behind the bleachers

after school. I am listening to robot rock at dawn

in a Ferrari made of glass. My body is hairless,

strong as OxyContin. I sweat oxytocin.

I gather the wind in my pipe and puff, puff.

I will not pass. I transpose your love song

from C-major to apathetic. I’ve consumed the future.

My farts articulate the past. The secret fifth chamber

of my heart weeps for your scoliosis,

but style does as style is, so I’ll be cruising

the night with my gilded twelve-foot dick.

I hope you catch my drift, emphasis dick. (Andrew Faulkner)

Notes on Five Canadian Small (micro) Publishers: Apt. 9 Press, The Emergency Response Unit, AngelHousePress, Nomados Literary Publishers and Greenboathouse Press

A piece I wrote for Australian online journal Cordite on five Canadian small press publishers is now online! On Cameron Anstee's [photo by Lisa Greeves] Apt 9 Press, Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner's The Emergency Response Unit, Peter and Meredith Quartermain's Nomados, Amanda Earl's AngelHousePress + Jason Dewinetz' Greenboathouse Press! includes a list of a ton of other Canadian small publishers.

Profile of Leigh Nash + Andrew Faulkner's The Emergency Response Unit at Open Book; Ontario

My profile of Leigh Nash + Andrew Faulkner's Toronto-based chapbook press, The Emergency Response Unit, is now up at Open Book: Ontario.

Dinosaur Porn, eds. Gordon, Faulkner, Nash

Downloading Pornsaurus Rex Instead

Of Downloading You

Nathaniel G. Moore

Goodbye and goodnight cave girl extreme

Your club asleep at cave mouth, your mouth

Diligent, lean.

I clean the barrel of my mischief.

Can it be you that I hear snoozing

In the Dino Mart staff lounge in leopard print

Tart wear? Let me view you, then,

Sleeping with terror broom, terribly constructed

Standing as when I drew near to the pile of dry leaves

And twigs where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original nightmare blouse.

Or is it only the trees, and their dutiful chemistry in its twitchy night

Scratching at my cave door?

Dusty kisses travelling across the mulch and oh my manners.

You being ever so consigned to itemized profit sharing employee

Discount debate, heard no more of my poetry.

Thus I; cave slammed hard, leaves around me crying and pouting,

Wind a sore oozing cream across my chest, my nostrils delighted in thorns

And the pornography calling.

I finally received a copy of Dinosaur Porn (2010), edited by Spencer Gordon, Andrew Faulkner and Leigh Nash as a co-presentation between their two small Toronto publishing houses, Ferno House and The Emergency Response Unit. This is an anthology that asked potential contributors to submit poetry and/or fiction on the theme of “dinosaur porn,” and was published with the following warning at the beginning, seemingly in lieu of an introduction:

WARNING: This anthology contains sexually explicit material and/or fossils. In order to excavate this anthology you must certify to the following:

Under the governing law of my continent, I have reach the epoch of majority and the epoch required to excavate sexually explicit material and/or fossils (i.e., at least the Lias Epoch). I am excavating this anthology from a location where sexually explicit material and/or fossils are legal and permitted. Furthermore, I will not permit any person or hatchling to excavate this anthology if said person or hatchling is not legally permitted to do so.

I would presume so much of this anthology, even to them, is either self-explanatory, or like a joke one doesn’t get, making it impossible to explain. What does that mean, exactly? Responses vary, but highlights included work by Nathaniel G. Moore, Gary Barwin, Andrew Faulkner, Louise Bak, Leigh Nash, Carey Toane, and Shannon Rayne, such as this piece, the first of her three in the small collection:

Primitive

Shannon Rayne

Therizinosaurus: This odd dinosaur had immensely long muscular arms (2.5m) that ended in three-fingered hands with huge 60cm long scythe shaped claws. Some experts suggest that it behaved like a giant ground sloth, sitting on its haunches to feed.

Douglas Palmer,

Dinosaurs

There is no much thing as an unflattering position. Bellies slap, hips tilt back. Thighs part just wide enough to expose our sex, our most vulnerable parts. Butterfly and lotus poses are nothing more than glossy labels given to sell books. Think downward dog, think bucking bull, primitive and raw squatting over cock as bellies roll and breasts flop. Make plenty of noise. Squeal, grunt, scream. Burrow your nails into your lover’s chest, bite down, reveal your teeth.

Beautifully produced in a numbered edition of two hundred copies, there are few anthologies of Canadian writing this odd, and with a variety of interesting work as well. But where the hell did they get the idea? Why do I suspect that the lack of introduction simply confirms that this was an anthology originally conceived over too many drinks?

Drink up, I say, dear editors. I, for one, would like to see what else you might imagine.