MI/Kingston NY: From Milwaukee poet and editor Roberto Harrison (and the first publication of his I’ve seen) comes Posthuman Native: The Orchid (Kingston NY: Spiral Editions, 2025), an assemblage of poems each composed with lines that accumulate, stacked like cord wood. “a stretch of the body / ghosts matter in the light / of the shadows,” begins the poem “end mark for recursion,” “we / signal the afternoon / without a place to be outright / we make noise in the river / wood is out everywhere / in stacks of keys.” Through a heft of lyric, Harrison ebbs and flows through the query: what does it mean to be post-human? There’s a pacing, rhythm to these pieces that reads pulsed, almost unrelenting; a collage of layered lines that really shine across the lyric. And in the centre of the collection, eight full-colour collages that burst through. Each poem is thick, both in density and size, each of the eighteen poems assembled here far too large to large to include here (although there is a shorter one in Spanish, which does intrigue). There’s an urgency to Harrison’s poems, one fueled by a fierce intelligence and ongoing meditation on who we are and have become, and where, instead, we should be. We should, we could, be so much better. As the first half of the poem “patterns speaking,” reads:
what has made me move
to allow the streams to
feel like blood
flown for the birds, for
the hummingbird
night? my bodies stand to
allow
discussion of the number,
my bodies
remain outside in the afterimage
of darkness, when I speak,
there is
another to stand within,
there is another
to remain outside in the
water. of all
the above ground
monuments, I do not
have a single white flag
for surrender, I
do not know what the
symbol is to return
again, to the faltering display
of human
arrogance, my revolver
does not turn
and I do not become like
the river
that we know. I do not
become
like the fine gold that another
planet
makes us move around in,
in the exception
to winter I become again
what I am not.
America, somewhere: A further title produced by b l u s h produced “in an undisclosed number of copies) in their “illicit zines” series is FUGUE (summer 2025) by Abigail Garrison, an individual described online as “a poet and artist living in Mexico City.” FUGUE is composed as a sequence of fifteen numbered short bursts of first-person molologue/meditation, slowly moving and stretching across and within a particular held moment. “the barrel forms / a perfect circle” Garrison writes, to open poem “vii,” “pacing back / the quest / crossing the / fragrant / churchyard / I go / uphill / uphill / desert clouds / buffer in / fabulous / mirage rippling / distant / like the sea [.]” There is a distance the poem, the narrator and narration, reaches for, but one that can’t ever be reached, purposefully stretching to see what might lay behind the horizon of the next moment. The lyric holds pause, slow and deliberate, even purposeful, in its meandering. Or, as the first poem in the sequence reads:
uninspired except for
objects I keep
candlesticks
linen sheets
silver rings
in a dish
in a dish
memory cards
moonstone
a desert wind blows
across
my field of vision
tousled
night after night
I come to town
in red silk shorts
Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: From perennial favourite Hugh Thomas comes the new translation They Want to Steal My Name by Henri Michaux (Cobourg ON: Proper Tales Press, 2025). For some years now, Montreal-based Thomas has been working translations of poems from languages he doesn’t read or understand, utilizing the source material as a kind of jumping-off point into something entirely new and original, playing a surrealism of mistranslated poems across a small array of chapbooks (including some through above/ground). Although, given how long Thomas has lived in Montreal, this does read a straighter (relatively) series of translations, offering a new line of thinking across work already working a surrealism by the late Henri Michaux (1899-1984), a writer, poet, and visual artist of Belgian origin who lived much of his adult life in Paris. The poems here have the flavour of certain titles produced over the years by La Presse (a press I haven’t heard of in some time, are they even still around?). The poems are built with a prose structure but lyric line, one infused with a curious blend of elements, both straight and surreal simultaneously (with shades of Stuart Ross, also). I would hope that Thomas continues on this particular trajectory, I would love to see these pieces find a home in a full collection.
They want to steal my name
As I was shaving this morning, stretching out and lifting my lips a little to get a tauter surface, affording a good resistance to the razor, what do I see? Three gold teeth! I, who have never been to the dentist!
Ha! Ha!
And why?
Why? To make me doubt myself, and then to take my name of Barnabas from me. Oh, they’re pulling hard on the other side, they’re pulling and pulling.
But I am also ready, and I hang on to it. “Barnabas,” “Barnabas,” I say, softly but firmly, and on their side, all their efforts are reduced to nothing.
