sale : rob's Broken Jaw Press titles,

I recently garnered a few mounds of books from Broken Jaw Press (see my obit for editor/publisher Joe Blades here), including a handful of my own early titles that Joe published, as well as a couple of other titles I was involved with as editor. If anyone is interested, I am offering copies for sale.

Notes on drowning (1998; my full-length debut!), paper hotel (2002) and aubade (2006) I'm offering for $7 each; Manitoba highway map (1999; my third trade collection) and the five poet anthology Open 24 Hours (1998; poems by myself, Brenda Niskala, Joe Blades, D.C. Reid and Anne Burke) for $5 each.

this day full of promise: new & selected poems by michael dennis (2002) that I edited and put through the cauldron books series that Broken Jaw published I can offer for $7 each as well. I'm very pleased to have a new stack of copies of GROUNDSWELL: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (2003), the anthology celebrating the first decade of the press, especially since this year is not only the thirtieth anniversary of the press, but Invisible Publishing is scheduled to produce the third 'best of' decade anthology this fall. I can offer copies of GROUNDSWELL for $15 each (it even includes a bibliography of the first ten years of the press!), although if you order 2 or more books, I'm willing to throw in a copy of Manitoba highway map gratis.

if interested, send funds via email or paypal to rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com; if you are ordering a single book add $2 for Canadian orders, and $5 for orders to the United States : if you are ordering two or more books, add $5 for postage for Canadian orders, and $11 for the United States. for any orders beyond the boundaries of North America, send me an email and I can always attempt to figure out postage. I can even sign copies, if that is of interest. also, be sure to email if you have any questions.

Oh, and don't forget that I still have copies of the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) as well, yes? See the link here for information on those. And I've the final copies of my two novels with Mercury Press--white (2007) and missing persons (2009)--still available for $15 each. What a deal!

Joe Blades (1961-April 22, 2020)

I’m stunned and deeply sad to hear that Fredericton writer, artist, editor, publisher, community enthusiast, radio host and a ton of other things, Joseph Wendell (or simply, Joe) Blades died this past Wednesday. On Friday morning, the link to his obituary started floating around Facebook, which is how we first heard of it:

Age 58, Fredericton, NB, passed away April 22, 2020. Joe was the son of Wendell and Phyllis (Pieroway) Blades. He is survived by his mother and sisters Carol and Ruth (Mike Daye), and was predeceased by his father, just one month ago. He was born in Halifax, NS and was based in Fredericton, NB, since 1990. He grew up in Elmsdale and Dartmouth, NS, and also lived, studied, and/or worked in Delhaven, Halifax, and Port Hawksbury, NS; Toronto, ON; Montréal, QC; Banff, AB; New York, NY; Dumfries, Scotland; Senta, Serbia; and Pale, Republik Srpska. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Art (1988) from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, a Certificate in Film and Television (2008) from the New Brunswick Filmmakers’ Co-operative, and a Master of Education (2012) from the University of New Brunswick. Joe was a writer, artist, and publisher–president of independent literary publishing houses. He travelled extensively throughout Canada and Europe conducting poetry readings and creative writing workshops and took great joy from working with children and instilling in them a love of art and creativity through words. Joe will be sadly missed by family and friends across Canada and around the world. In honour of his memory, donations may be made to the Nova Scotia Writers Federation or the charity of your choice. Cremation has taken place; a celebration of Joe’s life will be held at a later date. Personal condolences may be offered through www.yorkfh.com

Joe Blades, myself, baby Rose: Fredericton, 2014: photo by Christine McNair

Given this seems to have come out of left field, I am stunned, confused. I am sad at the death of my friend. It is striking for me to realize that Joe was an early mentor to me and my activity—even acting at times as an older brother—in a hands-on way that so many others I would consider mentors and supporters during those early days of my writing life simply didn’t, from my twenties engaging with Judith Fitzgerald, Ken Norris, Michael Dennis and Diana Brebner to those mentors during my later teen years, Gary Geddes and Henry Beissel. He’d been already doing a decade or more what I’d only just begun. Joe and I both produced chapbooks, we both ran around the country doing readings, we both organized events in our home-cities and hosted each other multiple times. We included poems by each other in our journals and schemes, and produced chapbooks by each other; we hosted each other. It was through Joe Blades that I was first introduced to the work of R.M. Vaughan, then a writer still living in Halifax; it was through Joe I was introduced to UNB’s QWERTY magazine (which then introduced me to Andy Weaver, Sue Sinclair, Murray Sutcliffe and others), the flyer soliciting work for the debut issue in one of the envelopes he regularly sent my way of letters, poems, publications, notices, stickers and other papery scraps. He knew everything, everyone. Every small scrap. Did you know he was around for the founding of The Writer’s Guild of Alberta? Apparently he’d been working in Banff during those days, and was considered a founding member. He stayed at every residence I had, from 1996 onward, with notebook and towering backpack, having arrived first thing in the morning from an overnight Greyhound. He showed up for the first few years of ottawa small press book fair, tabling his east coast wares and spending more time at everyone else’s table than his own.

above/ground press, May 1994

I first encountered Joe Blades either late 1993 or early 1994, having responded to a notice he’d picked up somewhere about the new chapbook press and poetry journal I’d started in July of that year. He seemed to know everything that was happening in the small and micro press worlds, and everyone working the literary DIY aesthetic across Canada, and various other corners as well. Despite the geographical distances between us (Ottawa to Fredericton) we saw each other once or twice a year, whether him coming through town, or us meeting up at a reading or League of Canadian Poets conference in some other city.

We toured together in 1998, five poets running around Canada for a five-poet anthology Joe had produced of our work—D.C. Reid (Victoria), Brenda Niskala (Regina), Anne Burke (Calgary), myself (Ottawa) and Joe (Fredericton). A national tour, during which we would read in each of our home cities, was organized, with enough funding to get us across, and finally to Victoria, where the League of Canadian Poets agm was being held. It was a tour, in part, to allow us all the funding to get west for the conference. And we also thought it hilarious to tour across Canada without even stopping in Toronto. From Ottawa we flew to Regina, where a carload of poets landed in Brenda’s car and drove out to Winnipeg to read, driving the next day to Saskatoon to read, the following day back to Regina to read before driving to Calgary to read twice (where I first met derek beaulieu in person), and then back to Regina, from where we each flew out to Victoria. All of this was in a matter of days, with stops along the way at the Margaret Lawrence House, and Indian Head. We talked, we adventured, we grabbed photographs of each other and wrote poems, and gathered memorabilia, books and multiple postcards. Our first few days with then-Regina-based CBC Radio freelancer Robert McTavish, future editor of A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (2007) that I co-published through Chaudiere Books, who was recording and producing a radio documentary of our mad prairie poetry reading tour. At the time, we theorized that we’d driven the equivalent of Paris to Moscow. Another tour, a year later, found Joe and I in his parents’ house in Halifax, with fiction writer Anne Stone, where we enjoyed fresh lobster caught not twenty feet from his parents’ front doorstep.

STANZAS magazine #19, above/ground press, February 1999

There were things about Joe that were constant: his expansive notebook, where phone numbers, emails, appointments and first drafts of poems were collected. He would often stop as we walked to pick up some small item or scrap of paper that he would slip into his notebook or pocket for later. He collected “lost dog” posters he pulled from telephone poles. He pilled other fliers that were glued (with constant notebook companion, his glue-stick) into the pages. Elements of found materials often made it into issues of his New Muse of Contempt down the road, a journal as expansive in concern as his notebook: images, found materials, poems, prose, lost dog posters and visual poetry. He had an interest that expanded out into multiple directions, with no publication too large or too small to catch his attention.

In 1996, heading north via multiple buses and ferries from Vancouver to Sechelt for the sake of a conference on small and micro press that Victor Coleman and Michael Barnholden organized, Joe took a photograph of me in front of Molly’s Reach in Gibson’s Landing. Joe seemed to know everyone else at the conference: John Pass, Tim Lander, Barry McKinnon, Victor Coleman. It was good to have him there, for introductions. A few years back, I requested a copy of that photo, and he mailed me a print-out. I would have preferred a digital copy. Why couldn’t he have sent me a digital copy? Joe Blades and I at Molly’s Reach, where I purchased postcards to send to my parents, knowing they’d get the reference. Knowing they’d understand this one speck of my western trip at all.

We were around for at least one break-up each, and I think he might even have assisted one of my moves. He produced five of my poetry titles and two chapbooks, and I appeared in a handful of anthologies he produced. I even edited five collections he published, via my cauldron books series, under the wing of his Broken Jaw Press (Chaudiere, I might point out, is French for “cauldron” or “basin,” providing moniker to both the falls and the rapids along the Ottawa River). I produced a handful of his chapbooks, and included him in numerous journals and anthologies I was putting together as well. He was a one-man literary powerhouse, doing everything and anything from the east coast, from hosting his weekly radio show to writing reviews of books, chapbooks and gallery shows, producing poems, prose and visual art, and producing books, chapbooks, magazines, zines, anthologies, readings, performances, art shows, etcetera. What parts of literary activity and production he wasn’t part of out there I never quite trusted; if there was something or someone that didn’t want Joe Blades and his energy as a part of what they were doing, it felt suspect, at least from here. I know he was hurt to not even be included in an anthology of poetry from the east coast, as though his thirty-odd years of writing and publishing activity hadn’t counted for a damned thing. He was right to feel slighted, and it made me distrust some of those other engines that much more.

above/ground press, May 1997

I know he did feel frustrated out on the east coast for the lack of support he received, as though he had to do everything himself, unable to find anyone to assist with the reading series, or the publishing, or anything else. It made for some difficult visits. It meant that sometimes he would appear in Ottawa and spend the entire time vocalizing his frustration with the Canada Council, sales force/distribution issues, or with East Coast poetry politics or with whatever else that it left little time or energy for any other kinds of conversation, including actually engaging with the activities he was doing, or what any of us were doing. By the time he produced what would be my final Broken Jaw Press title in 2006, it felt as though he was the last one to realize that he didn’t want to be a publisher anymore. He’d been worn down too far. His shift out of book publishing and into a PhD at the University of New Brunswick in multi-media around that same time was a positive one, although it meant far less travel and touring. It meant we saw him less often. But it meant he could focus his attentions on his own studies, and his production, and a direction that might shift some of his financial opportunities as well. In 2011, the literary press I was co-running at the time, Chaudiere Books, prompted a poetry manuscript out of him, Casemate Poems (Collected) (still available through Invisible Publishing), resulting one of his few book-length poetry titles not out through his own Broken Jaw Press. It’s a title that emerged through a residency he’d undertaken a couple of years prior, and I think remains some of his strongest published work. I’m incredibly proud of that book, and I think Joe was too, although it didn’t provide his work the attentions I thought it deserved. Later on, in 2017, I even reprinted a chapbook I’d produced of his in 1997 as a “twentieth anniversary edition,” which I thought was pretty fun. His TRIBECA (above/ground press), is a mixture of text and visual-collage, most of which he’d composed a decade earlier while in New York City as, he writes in the new edition’s “Afterword,” “a curatorial intern at the New Museum of Contemporary Art [where his journal title New Muse of Contempt had emerged] as a chosen part of my Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s final year of BFA studies.”

Looking at these poems now, as well as related ones, I keep returning to Delaney quote at the front of this chapbook. I believe these poems contribute to a portrait of New York in 1987, and that they still share a story of that place and time. More people dream of going to New York than actually do. I have done some edits to some of the poems herein but essentially they remain the same. What has changed is not even mentioned herein: removal of self from most poems, fall of the towers, waterfront condo(m) developments in Halifax, etc. Twenty years is considered a generation. Wow! Time enough for so much to change. What will anyone think or feel about these poems today? Except for my ongoing use of manual typewriters, this piece excepted, what do I do now? I have so many more poems and situations addressed.

The last time I saw Joe in person was in 2014 (where Christine took this photo of us), although I did receive an email not two weeks before he’d died, mentioning, among other things, that his father had recently passed. Towards the end of Christine’s maternity leave year, we spent more than a week driving east in the fall of 2014 with baby Rose, and one of our stops was at the University of New Brunswick were Joe was working that week on the election, managing to get lunch with him there. It was familiar, sitting with Joe in the food court with Christine and baby Rose. As though nothing had changed between us, and nothing would. We would meet again. As he wrote as part of his Casemate Poems (Collected) (Chaudiere Books, 2011):

because i’m back in the casemate of public art

because there are always more stories to tell

A series of author photos: rob mclennan by Kerr, McInnes and whist,

For years, I preferred the idea of cartoon depictions on the back covers of chapbooks and books, as opposed to professionally-done author photos. I spent a long period unhappy with any photographic depictions of myself, and thought that by asking comic artists irregularly to draw me for such would be far more interesting, and make a cool archive down the road. Since the early 1990s, various artists that have drawn or painted me include Greg Kerr, Gavin McInnes, Dave Cooper, Heather Spears, David Cation, Diane Woodward, Tom Fowler [see the amazing "engagement photo" he did for us here] and the artist once known as emily whist (for years, I’ve dreamed of the possibility of an author sketch by Adrian Tomine or Kate Beaton, but so far, nothing yet). There was even a quick sketch once done by the poet George Murray that I used for a chapbook at one point. Here are a couple of examples I’ve discovered, while preparing my archives for the University of Calgary.

I originally met Ottawa artist and musician Greg Kerr through the small self-published comics he sold through Crosstown Traffic, Buncha Stories, immediately reaching out to write a short piece on him for The Charletan, during that period (circa 1993) I was writing regularly for Carleton University’s paper. Kerr drew a number of depictions of me over the years (most of which I’m still digging around my archive for), but he drew this one specifically for my first Broken Jaw Press publication, the chapbook Poems from the Blue Horizon (1994).

The “donut” reference on the coffee cup in the drawing refers to the fact that I wrote for a number of years in a Dunkin’ Donuts on Bank Street, where he used to occasionally visit me (after it closed, the location became a Tim Hortons, currently at the corner of Bank and Gloucester Streets). Without space in my shared house to write, I wrote six days a week, five hours a day in that donut shop (from 10am until 3pm) from roughly May, 1994 (after it opened) to June 2000 (when it closed), and most of my first few published books were composed in that donut shop window. During that period, I wrote poems and reviews in the donut shop, and fiction during occasional evenings at The Royal Oak.

Greg Kerr later on had a comic strip included in the visual art and literary journal I produced in the mid-1990s, Missing Jacket, and above/ground press produced a small comic of his, Drunkboy Stories (May, 1997). For a short time, his strips were included in the Ottawa X-Press, but, despite his loyal legion of Ottawa fans, nothing since.

Gavin McInnes sketched this mocking image of me for the seventh issue of STANZAS (above/ground press, November, 1995). The portrait gives the impression he didn’t have high opinions of either myself, poets or Toronto, but he claimed later that it was mockery, and he was shocked that I had actually published the thing. Why not? At that point, McInnes was self-producing a small comic zine he sold through Crosstown Traffic, but hadn’t yet started up at Vice Magazine. He later appeared on at least one panel on Politically Incorrect, and has recently produced a series of strange, short and amazing videos.

For a period after that, McInnes was co-producing a comic strip with Dave Cooper, who still keeps in touch with him.

emily whist was the pseudonym of the Ottawa artist Rob Nelms, said to be part of the family that owned and operated Nelms Opticians. I originally saw his artwork in the strangest corners of the University of Ottawa during the period I took a poetry workshop there, the 1992-1993 academic year. He had produced a series of very strange images, put them on stickers, and hid them throughout washrooms, on billboards, and various other locales.

I don’t recall specifically how I ended up meeting him, but this image was drawn on a paper placemat as I sat with Rob and his partner for a couple of minutes around midnight, at a Chinatown restaurant at the corner of Somerset Street West and Bronson Avenue. They were having dinner, and I was slowly making my way home from something, slightly or even somewhat intoxicated (I must have been wearing my "Go Fish" t-shirt that night, produced by another Ottawa artist from that period).

He was another who drew me more than once, and he even gifted a package of artwork I was free to use for various above/ground press chapbooks. I used fragments of his artwork on Natalee Caple’s poetry chapbook, The Appetites of Tiny Hands (Nov 26, 1997), the WHIPlash 2 reader (the anthology of the second annual WHIPlash poetry festival, June 1997) and various issues of the long poem journal STANZAS, including meghan lynch (now Meghan Jackson)’s “inside     first floor         at the randomization factory” (issue #13; June 1997) and ryan fitzpatrick’s “further revisions” (issue #25; July 2001).

He had large-scale paintings that once hung in galleries all over Ottawa, and he and his partner were the core of the most amazing noise-band, The Kittenling Foundation, who once performed as part of the second annual WHIPlash poetry festival in 1997. Their performance included a Theremin, singing, noise and a toaster. Stories of what happened to him after that vary, and are mostly unverified. Needless to say he was damned talented, incredibly strange, well-liked, and, bafflingly, simply disappeared.

rob recommends Jesse Patrick Ferguson's Dirty Semiotics at the Advent Book Blog;

Yesterday, I recommended Fredericton (formerly Ottawa, formerly Cornwall ON) poet and musician Jesse Patrick Ferguson's first trade collection of concrete/visual poetry, Dirty Semiotics (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2011) over at the Advent Book Blog. Check out my little write-up! You should get this book!

Joe Blades, from the book that doesn’t close

Anyone who knows Fredericton, New Brunswick writer, editor, visual poet, artist, radio host and publisher Joe Blades knows he’s been filling notebooks up for nearly three decades, traveling across country with notebooks, pens and gluesticks, to include whatever he happens to find around him that day, including text fragments, posters, stickers, and all sorts of other detritus. After years of collecting, he’s worked some of the text into a small trade book, from the book that doesn’t close (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2008). This is Joe Blades working through his daily routine.

game plan:
reject/return manuscripts
drop in mail drop box
get shirt @ cleaners
drop power bill check
post office for mail
beard trim @ currie’s
credit union deposit
get video @ library
get fish print@ casemates
eat something
interview dar (david
adams richards)
stop

Created directly from journal entries, these poems seem to be structured between a mix of Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2006) and George Bowering’s own His Life: A Poem (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2000), working its way between the accident of first thought and the deliberate reworking of a poem made from randomly-found material. Some of the material works, and some of it doesn’t, making it a strange mix of journal/diary entries, notes made to self, and thoughts while going through the work of his every day.

check-in

write widows &
orphans on mclennan
recommendation
send casemate poems

found a home for every season
is poet mating season

found a key for release
from the black hole

half moon and red mars two
hand spans apart during
alden nowlan literary festival night sky

Blades has done some interesting work over the years that, for some reason, he hasn’t received much credit for (his absence, for example, from an anthology of Atlantic poets a few years ago was quite baffling, and even offensive), and usually his conceptual writing, as well as his visual works, has far more going for it than his straight literary writing. Still, this is an interesting work, however uneven, and only goes to show how much is going on in these notebooks; haven’t there been those over the years that have suggested that the notebooks alone are worth putting on display somewhere?

Ongoing notes: early May, 2007

Why am I wasting so much of my time on my myspace page? Using it as a jukebox, predominantly (check out some of the Ottawa bands I've got on there; although I have been blogging there, too). And why did I let Jennifer build me a facebook page too? Did you see the article in City Journal misquoting myself and Nicholas Lea? Or this piece on Rachel Zolf that mentions my name? Or this fantastic article in The Ottawa Citizen? Or this interview that mentions my name (why do they keep upper casing me)? Amanda Earl on Ottawa's cultural capital? Did you see how Ron Silliman so kindly keeps mentioning my name on his magnificent blog? Did you see the piece I recently wrote on Sandra Ridley in the ottawa poetry newsletter? And I'm almost completely recovered from our little ottawa international writers festival (spring edition) that we keep insisting on doing over here, and gearing up now for the ottawa small press book fair on June 16th, with readings the night before by secret mystery out-of-towners; my new book and Nicholas Lea's new book seem to be doing pretty well, but could always be doing better; copies are now available in Ottawa at Collected Works, mother tongue books and Octopus Books (with more to follow…). Watch for a reading he and I might be doing with Ottawa poet Marcus McCann later in June at that Carleton Tavern…

Will I see any of you at the next Factory Reading on May 10th, featuring Ottawa poet Rhonda Douglas [see my note on her here] and American poet Kate Greenstreet [see my review of her first book here]? They're both launching chapbooks from above/ground press… Will I see any of you when I read in Toronto on May 16th for the DRAFT reading series? Will I see any of you back here in Ottawa when we launch Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Chaudiere Books) at The Mercury Lounge on May 18th? Did you see this communal blog I've started for my upcoming time in Edmonton? It'll be a few months before it gears up properly… I just found out that Marita Dachsel [see my review of her first book here] will even be there when I am, as her husband is going to be playwright-in-residence there; after publishing her eleven years ago, I'll finally get to meet her… Did you even notice our call for submissions for short short fiction? I need reviewers for the upcoming issue of ottawater; anyone interested?

Former Ottawa resident and current Vancouver writer Susannah M. Smith now has a blog.

Fredericton NB: Joe Blades recently sent me a copy of a small publication he edited and published, the collection UGLY: an instant spoken word chapbook anthology (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2007), produced out of a recent event in Banff. It's great that Blades is still making these small records of events he's participated in, and he's produced a number of them over the years; even to keep track of them is to be amazed in just what Blades has been involved in over the quarter-century he's been writing, producing, editing, publishing and just simply making. So much spoken word gets lost through a lack of permanent record, with readings becoming temporal events; if you weren’t there, you completely missed it, so any record of who did what and where becomes essential for the writing of any history (see also the book of Montreal spoken word produced by Conundrum Press a few years ago…). Collecting pieces by a number of participants to a spoken word conference/festival from across Canada (I'd heard rumours of it recently), including Fortner Anderson (Montreal), Joe Blades (Fredericton), Klyde Broox (Hamilton), T.L. Cowan (Edmonton), Ivan E. Coyote (Vancouver), Drek Daa (Winnipeg), Ian Ferrier (Montreal), cheryl l'hirondelle (Vancouver), D. Kimm (Montreal), Kevin Matthews (Ottawa), Sean McGarragle (Vancouver), Dwayne Morgan (Toronto), Billeh Nickerson (Vancouver), Hilary Peach (Gabriola Island), Andrea Thompson (Toronto), RC Weslowski (Vancouver) and Sheri-D Wilson (Calgary).

You who want nothing

recline your small head, you lovely
duckling. fuzzy fluff of darlingness.

kiting into a new reality, a healthy cigarette dangling,
a bottle of Glenmorangie, a cabin with a hot tub in the mountains.

strong enough to do fifty push-ups, but in that lithe,
limber way. no one wants to look like a Russian on steroids.

quack on over here, rub against my soft skin. glory
in the perfection of everything we have made together.

we are perfect. we are perfection. we are married under
the sunshine of our parents' unconditional love. we feel no cynicism,

not like we've betrayed anyone.

collect the downy comfort of this moment. snuggle into
a cup of cocoa made by our invisible Swiss nanny.

now that you are here, you will never shiver again.
your perfect temperature, body shape, sexual pleasure

is engraved on a tablet at that gate. there is no such thing as
a grouchy day, a bad party, sour grapes, a hangover, a rash.

television is always pleasing: handsome women doing
smart things, exchanging witty dialogue, a banter

you wrote yourself. your mind is a thesaurus, an encyclopedia.
nothing is mispronounced or misplaced. you have read everything.

you are Donna Karan. you are that jeweller from the south of France.
your feet are cushioned in custom-made boots of the softest leather.

rub against me, cluck-cluck-clucking contentedly. (T.L. Cowan)

Calgary AB: Some more No Press publications arrived in the mail recently, including Josh Smith's ALPHABETICA (No. 34), Jane Thompson's Special Occasions (No. 35), Sarah Cullen's Maps (No. 36) and ryan fitzpatrick's Lord, I'm Set to Cry (No. 37). It's hard to see any publication by ryan fitzpatrick without getting a little bit anxious, with his forthcoming trade collection with Montreal's Snare Books; chapbooks by him just aren’t doing it anymore (for me, anyway; I want more). When do we get the good stuff? When do we get to see what he can do with further pages? Still, the pieces in his No Press chapbook are a departure from the poems he's been publishing over the past few years, which recently were starting to move entirely in the same structural directions, so it's good to see him break out of that, and into something further. Where will he go next?

Where is there an escape route? Poison opens
the cheek and the mouth bleeds, linking two
tales. Forest roads open for glands wafting
pheromones. Cloak runs from hand to sleeve.
Cloaking, a game turns to anapest. Phone in to
work. White coat is too symbolic an image.
Compass pillages. (ryan fitzpatrick)

For further information, contact No Press via email at nopress2005@hotmail.com

Ottawa ON: I've always liked the fiction of Ottawa writer Ian Roy [he helps launch the anthology Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers on May 18th at the Mercury Lounge], author of the short story collection People Leaving (Ottawa ON: Buschek Books, 2007) and the collaborative book The Longest Winter (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 1999), featuring his fiction with photographs by musician Julie Doiron. Recently at the Manx Pub, he launched his first trade poetry collection Red Bird (Ottawa ON: Buschek Books, 2007), one of the more gracefully-produced publications John Buschek has made over the years. More a fiction writer than poet, his poems read like small stories, small fictions, writing their way through a narrative, and writing their way toward an inevitable series of ends. There is a certain kind of expectation that comes from the straightness of his lines, in particularly how straight they are, moving, sometimes, exactly where you expect them to move; his turns are slow, and deliberate, and move out across a slowly opening field.

Door

The first thing you see is a door, seemingly suspended
as if by some illusion—but delicately balanced
against a wall at an awkward angle, teetering.

The scene is lit from an open window
but the light stops at the door, slicing
the room in two, leaving shadows, dark corners.

To the right, a vacant doorway, leading to another room,
more doorways. A pipe runs up the wall beside the first door:
plumbing, an afterthought maybe forty years later

in this building in Providence. The long hardwood
planks of the floor are rough, wax-less,
strewn with plaster from the falling-down walls.

The room is an array of lines and angles, light and shadow.
And of course, beyond the camera's view,
somewhere behind—right where you are looking from, in fact—

stood the photographer. After arranging the door against the wall,
after waiting for the ideal light: the shutter snapped.
There is no way of knowing what happened next.