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.
 

Manahil Bandukwala, Heliotropia

My review of Ottawa poet Manahil Bandukwala's Heliotropia (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025) [which won the 2025 Archibald Lampman Award, by the by], following her full-length debut MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

2025 Ottawa Book Awards shortlist : On Beauty: stories,

Thanks much to the City of Ottawa! Yesterday it was announced that my short story collection, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press, 2024), was shortlisted for the 2025 Ottawa Book Awards! This is my first ever appearance on a shortlist for this particular award, so that's pretty exciting. Congratulations, also, to the other four on the shortlist: Manahil Bandukwala, for Heliotropia (Brick Books); Nina Berkhout, for This Bright Dust (Goose Lane Editions); Paul Carlucci, for The Voyageur (Swift Press); and Chuqiao Yang, for The Last to the Party (Goose Lane Editions). Hooray all! I've only actually seen Chuqiao's book of the quartet [see my review of such here], and it is remarkable, which makes me curious to see the other three. Naturally, I think you should pick up a copy of my short story collection [check out here for some links to reviews of the book, although it's Salma Hussain who really gets it], as well as the other nominated titles. There's plenty of time to read all five books, I'd think, before the winner gets announced on November 15th, yes?

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part four : Grant Wilkins + Salma Hussain,

[see the first part of these notes here; see the second part of these notes here; see the third part of these notes here] And you already know about the dates of our next three fairs, yes? Saturday, November 22, 2025 (thirty-first anniversary event!), Saturday, June 20, 2026 and Saturday, November 14, 2026 (thirty-second anniversary event!), all at our usual (new) location of Tom Brown Arena. Strange to be booked that far ahead, but there you go. As ever, check for updates here when there are any (although if you already know the dates, I’m not sure what further updates you’d need, beyond the pre-fair reading announcements, which would only happen a couple of weeks before each fair).

ottawa small press book fair co-founder James Spyker + Ottawa poet Grant Wilkins

Montreal QC/Ottawa ON: It is always good to see new work from Ottawa poet and performer Grant Wilkins [catch a recent essay he wrote on his work here], and his latest chapbook (and to my immediate knowledge, his first non-above/ground press chapbook, beyond the privately printed hardcover The Kamouraska Codex: A Preliminary Translation with Commentary that he self-produced in 2019 in an edition of fifteen copies) is the chapbook-length sequence LEGENDARY THINGS (in which Phyllis Webb sings Motörhead to Basho) (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2025), a sequence “variously gathered, sifted, nicked or otherwise drawn” from Webb’s The Vision Tree (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1982), Basho’s On Love and Barley – Haiku of Basho (Penguin Books, 1985) “and the lyrics of various songs by Motörhead (Lemmy Kilnister et al.).” “That weather-beaten skeleton / at the secret heart of your poem / has nowhere to hide,” he writes, to open the second page of the sequence. Half a page down, offering: “Laying there drunk on the cobblestones / I studied your graceful script / Sans serif and righteously stoned [.]”

There is something quite fascinating in the way Wilkins approaches his recombinations, finding new threads through not only the source material he selects, but the collision of what might otherwise seem contradictory sources, from “The echoes of music and poetry / are shredded by summer’s end / and the bombs going off at night” to “I’ve lost my passion / for burning skies / and riders wearing black [.]” There are other poets working creative work through similar processes of recombination, providing both original works and threads of critical response to their source materials, including a couple of recent titles such as Edmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Toronto poet R. Kolewe A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023) [see my review of such here], not to mention Philadelphia poet and critic Laynie Browne’s ongoing work [see an interview I did with her on such here; see my review of her latest here]. Wilkins is doing some interesting things, and I very much hope he keeps going. I want to see what he does next.

Ottawa poet (and Brick Books tabler) Manahil Bandukwala and Ottawa poet Mahaila Smith

London/Toronto ON: Okay, so Baseline Press wasn’t actually at the small press fair this time around, but this chapbook landed in the mail around about the same time (and they’ve been at fairs before, so it still totally counts). The latest from the press is What if Maybe and other poems (July 2025) by Toronto-based writer Salma Hussain, a poet and fiction writer, author of the debut young adult novel The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan (Tundra/Random House, 2022). A sleek collection of nine poems, the pieces in What if Maybe and other poems follow a trajectory of the narrative, first-person lyric, but one that holds to smallness, to precision; one that speaks in points of light across distances, step upon step upon step. “Math was not math     until / the Greeks saw the value in how the Arabs used zero,” she writes, to open the poem “THE VALUE OF ZERO,” “They needed zero / for calculating prayer times / for weighing za’ka:t dues / for shirking interest // but also / they were counting stars / mapping patterns in the light beyond their grasp [.]”

I’m curious, intrigued, even, about Hussain’s lyric precisions, and would be interested to see what she might do in the space of a full-length collection. Her lines pull the stretch between small and expansive, often simultaneously, in interesting ways. There’s a fine line between her poem’s ungencies and propulsion, and the ability to hold to the moment, to stand peacefully and utterly still. Or, the first two stanzas of the poem “SCREAMSONG,” that begin:

Belligerent with the nurses I pulled
the feeding tube out of my nose
like a birthday party magician    pulling out yards of silky red ribbon
from an upturned top hat 

The white coats recommend a two-week residential stay
at a physio rehab clinic    but I insisted I be sent back home
I felt then and I know today that I have two little daughters who unknowingly
unwittingly are the only gurus I need(ed) for my healing
We signed a mountain of release forms
liability waivers    other papers
and my trembling husband bit his lip    his tongue the entire drive home

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 20: Pirie, MA|DE, Bandukwala, Moran + Smith,

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series
the pre-small press book fair reading

featuring readings by:

Pearl Pirie (QC)
MA|DE (Windsor ON)
Manahil Bandukwala (Ottawa ON)
James K. Moran (Ottawa ON)
+
Mahaila Smith (Ottawa ON)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, June 20, 2025
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
Anina’s Café, 280 Joffre-Bélanger Way

[And don’t forget the ottawa small press book fair, held the following day at the Tom Brown Arena]

author biographies:

Pearl Pirie [pictured] lives slowly in rural Quebec. A queer, p/t abled settler on unceded land of the Anishnaabe, she is the author of footlights (Radiant Press, 2020)  You can find her on socials— Instagram, Patreon, Substack and at www.pearlpirie.com.

MA|DE (est. 2018) is a collaborative writing entity, a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third. It is the name given to the joint authorship of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace — artists whose active solo practices, while differing radically, serve to complement one another. Their work has appeared in literary journals internationally, including Augur, CV2, Grain, PRISM, Salamander, The Woodward Review and Vallum. MA|DE has written 4 chapbooks, including the bpNichol award-shortlisted A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books 2020). MA|DE's debut full-length poetry collection, ZZOO, is out now from Palimpsest Press, and another collection, Detourism, is forthcoming with Palimpsest in 2028. More: ma-de.ca

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books 2024; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and the Raymond Souster Award) and MONUMENT (Brick Books 2022; shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award). She has been twice longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

James K. Moran’s poetry and speculative fiction have appeared in Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, Burly Tales, Bywords, Glitterwolf, and On Spec. Lethe Press published his fiction collection Fear Itself and horror novel Town & Train. Moran writes across genres about cosmic carports, drag-queen warlocks and nomadic superheroes. He reviews for Arc Poetry Magazine, Plenitude and Strange Horizons. Findable at jameskmoran.blogspot.ca, @jamestheballadeer.bsky.social (Bluesky) and jamestheballadeer (Instagram). Moran lives in Ottawa, on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.

Mahaila Smith is a researcher, poet, editor and MA student based on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They won the 2024 John Newlove Poetry Award and were nominated for the Rhysling and Best of the Net awards. They adore fibre crafts and collecting sea-glass. You can find more of their work on their website: mahailasmith.ca. Their debut narrative poetry collection, Seed Beetle is available from Stelliform Press.

three VERSeFest interviews: Alice Burdick, Manahil Bandukwala + Armand Garnet Ruffo,

I've been working a trio of interviews with poets as part of this weekend's VERSeFest "Fall into VERSeFest" mini-festival (that starts TONIGHT), all of which I've been posting recently over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (there was also a sequence of interviews for our spring festival, if you recall: Chris Turnbull, Klara du Plessis, Laila Malik, Jason Christie, Sandra Ridley, Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi + AJ Dolman). The three new interviews posted include: Alice Burdick (she has a new title with Anvil Press, and reads tonight at RedBird: have you tickets yet? she's also doing an in-person poetry workshop on Saturday!), Manahil Bandukwala (who also reads tonight, and has a new title with Brick Books) and Armand Garnet Ruffo (who has a new award-winning title with Wolsak and Wynn, and reads on Saturday). I actually interviewed Ruffo prior, ten years ago for Jacket2: do you recall? Why not read and compare? Did I ask him the same questions? Did he provide the same answers?

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two: Stuart Ross, Claire Sherwood + Jeff Blackman,

Here are some further items I recently picked up as part of our thirtieth anniversary ottawa small press book fair [see part one of my notes here]. So many things! And might we see you this weekend at our mini-VERSeFest festival, running Thursday through Saturday? Tickets for the Thursday night reading available now through RedBird Live!

Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: I hadn’t been aware of this wee title by award-winning Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross [see my review of his latest poetry collection here; my piece on his recent short story collection here], his a very little street (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2023). This is a curious structure, two numbered sequences that suggest a far larger, more expansive work-in-progress, with the eleven-part opening, “1. The Highway,” and seven-part “2. The Doughnut.” There is something in this sequence, this pair of sequences set as part of (possibly) something longer, reminiscent of bpNichol’s novel Still (Vancouver BC: Pulp Press, 1983), the manuscript of which won the 5^th International 3-Day Novel Writing Contest. Across that small book, Nichol described the room he was in with enormous detail; in a very little street, Ross describes a moment across a particular unnamed street, moving out across recollection and points across an expansive lyric map, as the chapbook opens: “One hundred and seven kilometres / of highway. Clouds roar through the sky. // Running shoes dangle from telephone wires. / Clouds of gnats. The smouldering ruins. // And my history: a red-brick barbecue / my father built in nineteen seventy-four. // The backyard patio’s pink and green / ceramic tiles.” Utilizing the highway, the sequence, as a kind of prompt, Ross weaves and meanders across a meditative assemblage of accumulated couplets, driving for as long as he can, just to see where he goes. He writes a highway into a street, and a street into a recollection, allowing the structure as a kind of catch-all for memory, a variation on the book-length poem Vancouver poet Michael Turner wrote on another rather lengthy street, Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995). As Ross writes across his sequence-thread, as part of the second section:

through our streets every day. We saw him
beaming every day. He clutched the handle

and bellowed a song in Hebrew, manoeuvred
the rattling cart. The giant ant mass undulated,

animated. The wheels of Arnie’s shopping
cart screeched against the sidewalk. He wore

baggy jeans and a faded blue T-shirt
that said Hey Hey We’re the Monkees. His shoulders

quaked with the vibrations. The crooked wheels
faced every direction. A hand of lightning

snatched the bag my hand grasped,
tore it from my grip. A doughnut. A doughnut

rose from the paper bag, dangled from
the claws of three white doves. It ascended

Manahil Bandukwala (Brick Books), wishing to recreate the 'grumpy poet' sequence of photos from the prior post,

Montreal QC: The opening reader of our pre-fair event at Anina’s Café (a wonderful new café in Ottawa’s Vanier neighbourhood, I should add) was “Montreal writer, visual poet, and oral storyteller” Claire Sherwood, reading from her chapbook sequence, Eat your words (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2024). As she writes at the offset:

This poem is an interrogation of memory, a fluid autobiography. Swirling with intergenerational flavours and aromas. Stirring, blending, beating, scraping the sides of the bowl to find the right words. Struggling with separation, painful endings. Searching for home.

This is a poem struggling to be a poem. Words are impossible to control. Nothing is static. Memory continually reorders and reframes archived slices of the past. Loops and lines write the story. Is it leftovers? Am I home?

Across Sherwood’s twenty-eight page/part sequence, she writes through an accumulation of memory centred around her mother’s cookbook, threading what seem like childhood recollections and precise questions, open secrets and gestures. There’s a lot of information packed in here, and her poems read like lists, offering layers of nuance between lines, one set atop of the other. “Is it dragging your feet,” she writes, early on in the collection. “Is it a leg up / Is it the hand of friendship / Is it losing old friends [.]”

Is it too many cooks
Is it the wrong pan
Is it returned to the oven
Is it a complete shambles
Is it terminal
Is it treatable
Is it roaring back to life
Is it mightier than the sword
Is it easier said than done
Is it one horse and one cow sharing a meadow
Is it ever easy to find the right words

Pearl Pirie, phafours

Kingston/Ottawa ON: I was intrigued to see that Kingston editor/publisher Michael e. Casteels had produced, through his Puddles of Sky Press, a small chapbook item (sixty copies hand printed, hand sewn, within an envelope) by Ottawa poet and publisher Jeff Blackman, his IN THE BRINY (November 2024). Anyone who has seen a Puddles of Sky item knows there is a detailed and graceful ease to these publications, and there is a spare element to these poems I appreciate, one that allows moments of density, hesitation, spark and flourish in contained and compact spaces, such as the poem “In It,” that begins: “Honestly / I want less to do / with my body // but the body / has a poem / I want [.]” There is such an intriguing slow and careful attention here, a perfect blend of text and production. Or the second half of the poem “HR,” that reads:

       how this
     poem ends

     but not yet, friend.

 

 

                        Look,
your ride’s here.

 

VERSeFest (mini) festival, Fall Into VERSeFest: Nov 28-30, 2024 : schedule now online!

VERSeFest (mini) festival, Fall Into VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival : Nov 28-30, 2024 : schedule now online!

readings and performances by Manahil Bandukwala, Alice Burdick, Stuart Ross, Véronique Sylvain, Sergio Guerra aka Cheko7even, Apollo the Child, Playto aka Panos, Stephen Collis, Chuqiao Yang, Faith Paré [pictured], Armand Garnet Ruffo, Erik Lindner and Chimwemwe Undi, and an in-person afternoon workshop with Alice Burdick! Urban Legends! Plan99!

Tickets now available for Thurs via RedBird! https://www.verseottawa.ca/en/versefest

Manahil Bandukwala, Monument

 

Wed

You slipped away from the ring of golden torches
encircling you and Khurram. The flames burned on
without you. You slipped away to the silent rooftop,

shed the peacock feather headdress and pressed
your blazing cheek against a hallway mirror. Flames
have a habit of spreading; your old life

consumed. Watching your wedding from a vantage
point, your body intertwined with his, ready to make

a promise. Your spirit hovered
silver
                                                            your voice faded

to night. He whispered the namesake
that would entwine you with mausoleum—

Mumtaz Mahal, exalted one of the palace

—a promise
to one day take for himself
                                    and you
            a throne.

There is a curious framing around Manahil Bandukwala’s full-length debut, Monument (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2022), a title deliberately designed on the cover with crumbling letters “n” and “u,” offering a sly dual title of “Monuments” and “Moments,” an idea reinforced through the book’s opening quote by British Columbia poet Phyllis Webb, from the opening of her poem “MOMENTS ARE MONUMENTS,” a poem first included in the second section of her Even Your Right Eye (1956) that reads: “Moments are monuments / if caught / carved into stone [.]” Of course, Saskatchewan poet John Newlove famously tweaked that particular phrasing nearly a decade later, through his poem “Then, If I Cease Desiring” from Moving in Alone (1965): “You may allow me moments, / not monuments, I being / content. It is little, / but it is little enough.” Through her use of paired titling, Bandukwala writes of and around the life (and the moments) of Mumtaz Mahal (b. c. 1593—d. June 17, 1631, Burhanpur, India), wife of Shah Jahān, Mughal emperor of India (1628–58). It was this historical figure who died but a few years into her husband’s reign, a loss that prompted him to construct the infamous Taj Mahal in her memory, where she is also entombed. “In this moment,” Bandukwala writes, as part of the poem “Ask,” early on in the collection, “I saw his love start // and end with your beauty.” There is little known of Mumtaz Mahal beyond the facts of this particular memorialization, and before this book has even begun, Bandukwala offers not only the tension of the collection, but her goal to explore the human figure out of a fixed point in stone: a moment or two, perhaps, pulled out of the monument. As the back cover of the collection informs, “Manahil Bandukwala’s debut upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal’s life, moving her story beyond the Taj Mahal.”

There is something compelling about the way Bandukwala approaches her subject, writing the tension between memorialization and a life lived, wishing to provide this historical figure some agency, beyond the exclusive associations and depictions around her husband. The approach is reminiscent, in certain ways, of how Montreal poet SueElmslie equally worked to reclaim André Breton’s surrealist muse Nadja through her I, Nadja, and Other Poems (London ON: Brick Books, 2006) [see my review of such here], or even Stephen Scobie’s The Ballad of Isabel Gunn (Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1987). As she writes as part of the poem/section “Unravel”:

Your children were witness
to the grandest expressions of love,
the immortalization of memory.

                        twenty-thousand put labour
                        into love.

Fourteen children, and half of them
lost                  too young
                        to form lasting souls.

Structured with an opening poem (“Before, it was love”) and into seven suite-sections—“Braid,” “Love Letters,” “Threads,” “Offspring,” “Unravel,” “Last Words” and “Plait”—Bandukwala folds language and structure into her lyric, utilizing and weaving excerpts and prompts from Mohsin Hamid, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Phyllis Webb, Danez Smith and Sylvia Plath into a larger tapestry of biographical reclamation. “War elephants sway their tails in summer.” she writes, as part of the poem “1622,” “I fed them peanuts, rough skin of trunks / puffed out silk threads from my crown. Tended an empire // overgrown with hibiscus and sunflower. / Hoisted skirts and climbed up a stalk // to reach the yellow petals. I, a sun, a smile, // a swaying empire in the breeze. // You, a pollen grain, floating towards me.” There are layers and shimmerings of history and geography that ripple across this collection, offering her subject a long shadow across a country and a culture she held herself up to, and into the most human of simple moments. “Caught between the floor tiles of your quarter / in Khwabgah,” she writes, to open the poem “Flow,” “strands of hair. Yours and your daughters, // other wives and other daughters. So black, still carrying / whiffs of jasmine perfurme and pearls that looped / your curls across your cheekbones. The act // of braiding, woman to woman, of brushing the day / out of her hair, of her combing sleep and calm / dreams into yours. A moment / to be yours, where all the hair that fell // twisted into its own braid. This room // more than a monument.” This is, one might say, the moments of a life lived, however brief it may have been, with as few details as might have been recorded. Or, as Mumtaz Mahal speaks, further, through Bandukwala’s lyric, to close the poem “1631”:

Command was not
an inherited trait. Were it so,

I might have cast myself
in iron, sat atop a throne,

left radifs to rot in empty gardens.

            Untethered carbon over diamond.

I, unremembered in history books,
unalive in my own life.