MA│DE, ZZOO

 

VENTRAL

As above, this eternity below the ocean waves
is a bitter and frigid blue. Heavenly heads are
full of cold light, though blood swells their hearts
with auroras pink and gold. 

Peaceful poison twinkles teal along the seascape,
winking at the passing sea angels whose wing fins
flutter like twin flames, flare pinpoints of holy
fluorescence. 

lucid as water, naked as an androgynous body,
their interior intimacy is brightly exposed, tweaked
into the devilish curl of buccal cones. Free-floating,
slow-moving alongside the drift ice, 

violence graces the angels. They crush butterflies
in the dusk of the midnight zone, gorging their young,
who will swell like a red wave until they overwhelm
the bodies that bore them.

In case you weren’t aware, collaborative duo MA│DE, “established 2018,” as the biography in their full-length poetry debut, ZZOO (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) reads, “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.” The publication of ZZOO, which appears through Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Books imprint, follows a quartet of chapbooks, the work from some of which falls into this new collection: Test Centre (ZED Press, 2019), A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books, 2020), A Barely Concealed Design (Puddles of Sky Press, 2020) and Expression Follows Grim Harmony (JackPine Press, 2023). The poems and illustrations that make up ZZOO actively play with and between the binary, composed as a blended work of smart and engaged language bounce and clatter and precision, resonating with sound and lyric play across the human-animal divide. “Questions fuzz like dust,” writes the poem “FURVERTS,” “bunnies along the edges / of ever changing rooms. // We’re pooling our fantasies, / low poly sprites in a garden / of prismatic light. // When skin crawls and minds / purr, we bump against // the immovable / body // of a tree inside a forest / of illusion.”

There is a bounce and clatter, but one of a density of lyric, one that works to interrogate relations and interrelations, offering a collaborative language between and across language, sparking a binary through a binary, and where they might possibly connect. The poems are layered, and sharp, writing in the midst of, or even between, or beyond, the work of these two, such as the single sentence of the poem “PITCHDOWN BAY,” that reads: “The small sound of a falling snowflake, / slow it down, low frequency rumble / of a whale, both melting into the ocean / in time, the water glowing as bright / as lanterns, and sailors drowning as if / they’d seen lighthouses, more lost men / entering from the shore’s mouth, that / emptiness between the stars, pupils / compensating for this hard blanket of / deadlight night, still surrounded by / silent shorebirds, nested, watching, / stringing the surface of the water / like quickening nix when they alight.”

Through ZZOO, the poet/s of MA│DE write of boundaries made, met and blurred, and the impossibilities of crossing those boundaries. As the final poem in the collection, “THE ETERNAL ZOO,” ends: “On exhibition are humanity’s / ersatz transmutations. Mammals / and mundane birds reinterpret / the phoenix, rising out of the ash / of death into which they disappeared: / Life still vivid in the distance.”

 

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three,

[Marilyn Irwin's shreeking violet press]

See the first of my notes from our most recent fair here and the second of my notes from our most recent fair here.

Windsor/Toronto ON: I’m very taken—charmed, even—by the seventeen-poem sequence TEST CENTRE (Windsor ON: Zed Press, 2019), a chapbook by the collaborative MA│DE. As the author biography attests:

MA│DE is a collaborative gesture, a unity of two voices fused into a poetic third. It is the name given to the joint authorship of Toronto-based creators Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace, artists whose active solo practices differ quite radically from one another. MA│DE’s collaborative writing formalizes a process that began as an extended conversation between two people newly discovering one another. over a number of months, the pair messaged, texted, emailed, telephoned, conversed in person, left links on social media for the other to find, and mailed letters; their long, exploratory conversations opened up a language-space all their own.

With each poem, in the table of contents, named after a particular test—running from the Apgar Test and Bechdel Test to the Turning Test, Emergency Broadcast System and Rorschach Test—the poems in the body of the collection appear with number only, allowing for a smooth flow of sequence, even as an accumulation of self-contained pockets. As the third poem reads:

If coal is white / are some books black / words

cut with a knife / flow up a hill / as avalanches

do indeed descend mountains / and illiterate men

read romances for the Devens Literacy test

[Matthew Walsh]

Kingston ON: Anyone paying attention to Michael e. Casteels’ Puddles of Sky Press will be well aware of his occasional illiterature, a journal of small poems. The latest issue is “eight and a half” (June 2019), edited and beautifully hand-printed (hand-stamped) by Casteels in an edition of one hundred and twenty-two copies, it includes wee poems by Kemeny Babineau, David Alexander, Cameron Anstee, Justin Patrick, Angeline Schellenberg, Conor Barnes and Charlotte Jung. His publications are very graceful, understated and carefully put together. You should be paying attention.

A narrow bridge

in the middle of the nigt

fanged (Conor Barnes)

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one,

[Stephen Brockwell, right, speaking to a seated Jim Johnstone] Okay: given our wee girls, it has taken more than a couple of weeks to start getting into the small mound of publications I ended up with, after our most recent small press fair in mid-June.

Ottawa ON: Only a few blocks away from where we live in Ottawa’s Alta Vista neighbourhood, poet and critic D.S. Stymeist (who has a first poetry collection forthcoming, by the by) runs Textualis Press, a small chapbook press only a couple of titles in. His newest title is by Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, the chapbook Where Did You See It Last? (June, 2016), a lovely title “Printed on Classic Laid (Avon Brilliant White),” with cover stock “Glama Natural (Pearl) and Royal Sundance Fiber (Ice Blue).” Even if you don’t know much about paper, you might just get a slight sense of how damned classy this small item looks. I’ve always been fascinated by the way, through some half-a-dozen trade poetry collections going back to the late 1980s, that Brockwell has composed poems as small ‘moments,’ composing small capsules utilizing voice and/or character studies. The poem “Biography of the Letterpress Father,” while I know I can’t automatically read as biographical, becomes curious knowing that his own father was actually the printer of Brockwell’s debut, The Wire in Fences (Toronto ON: Balmuir Press, 1988), a poetry collection that included a number of short, lyric ‘studies’ surrounding his mother’s home territory of Glengarry County, Ontario.

Biography of the Letterpress Father

The day after my father died, I swept

a thousand pounds of scrap—plates, rods, wires,

gears—with an industrial broom three feet wide.

I hurled reams of 90lb cover stock, rolls

of blank newsprint, corrugated cardboard,

pallets of die-cut printed boxboard packed

but never delivered to a customer who never paid.

I dumped his confession from drawers of lead type

on the concrete floor of the loading dock

and shoveled it into the bin below.

I poured endless canisters of wasted ink,

blending indigo, emerald, pink, gold and black

into this grey biography of his adulterous heart.

There is something about the production of this small item that really clicks with the meditative weight of Brockwell’s pieces in this short collection, eight poems moving through a variety of “biographies,” from “Biography of the Discovered Owl” to “Biography of the Barbed Wire Scar” and “Biography of the Praying Mantis,” as well as the enticingly-titled “Bacon Production on an Industrial Scale.” And for those who don’t already know, Brockwell also has a new poetry title out this fall—All of Us Reticent, Here, Together—with Mansfield Press.

[Mark Laliberte of Carousel beside Catriona Wright of Desert Pets Press] 

Toronto ON: From Toronto’s Desert Pets Press comes FOREIGN EXPERTS BUILDING (2016) by Michelle Brown, a poet who is, incidentally, also the author of a forthcoming debut poetry collection: in 2018, with Palimpsest Press. There are some intriguing moments in Brown’s short lyrics, such as the cadence of the poems “SUN RISES IN A CHINESE HOSPITAL” and “LEDGE.” There are moments in some of these pieces that require a bit more tightening, and other moments that do feel a bit too ‘clever’ for their own good, such as the opening to the poem “APARTMENT,” that reads: “The couple next door had a baby, and each night / we woke to his baby ennui.” As a whole unit, this small chapbook might not be perfect, but there is enough positive and intriguing in this debut that Michelle Brown now has my attention.

SOMETHING FUNNY

Here’s something funny. A clamshell that you couldn’t

open. In a market, and it was definitely funny.

The others thought so. They were all wiping their

Eyes with dirty napkins as they watched you dig your nails in.

In the market, as the night was closing up. The people were laughing

and you were angry because you wanted it so bad, wanted

it all, the hearts and brain of it all together, and I was laughing

because it was funny, so funny, and that’s what humour is,

it’s funny because you’re afraid it’s true, and here I was laughing

at your stubby fingers, laughing at the woman scrubbing the shells

in a bucket of seawater, laughing at the sea, that impossibility,

and knew that nothing would ever be funny again

as we stood up from the table and returned to the rain,

all of us laughing at you and the timing that death

seems to have, lapping at everything.

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 17, 2016: Besserer, Rogal, Fitzgerald, Harness, Black, Carlucci, Johnstone + Laliberte,

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

The Factory Reading Series
pre-small press book fair reading
featuring readings by:

Amanda Besserer (Ottawa ON)

Stan Rogal (Toronto ON)
Fitz Fitzgerald (Baltimore MD)
Kyp Harness (Toronto ON)

and, as the first stop on the CAROUSEL Paper Roadshow:

Meagan Black (Ottawa ON)
Paul Carlucci (Ottawa ON)
Jim Johnstone (Toronto ON)
Mark Laliberte (Toronto ON)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, June 17, 2016;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

[And don’t forget the ottawa small press book fair, held the following day at the Jack Purcell Community Centre]

author bios:

Amanda Besserer is from North Bay, Ontario, and now lives in Ottawa. She received her BA and MA in English Language and Literature from Carleton University. While there, she was a contributing editor for In/Words Magazine, and creator and editor-in-chief of Vagina Dentata, a feminist arts journal. Aside from poems, broadsides and a chapbook with In/Words & VD, Amanda's poetry has also appeared in the Loamshire Review (UK), the Steel Chisel (Canada), and The Machinery (India). Her work will be included an upcoming "best of" volume from The Machinery this summer. In the meantime, visit adbesserer.wordpress.com for poetry and prose. She is also the author of a new title from Jeff Blackman's Horsebroke Press.

Stan Rogal has been described by Stuart Ross as a bon vivant and man about town. Judith Fitzgerald referred to him as an intellectual redneck. Hedonist, harsh humourist, philatelist, fatalist, devoted oenophile, punster... whatever... his work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe. He is the author of 20 books, the latest being a novel titled Dog The Moon, from Insomniac Press, spring 2016. He is also produced playwright. He resides in Toronto.

Though his name appeared on Josef Kaplan’s kill list, Fitz Fitzgerald still lives, often uncomfortable in his own skin. His poetry has appeared in Apartment, Octopus, Open Letters Monthly, Hidden City Quarterly, Dusie, Boog City and elsewhere. Furniture Press published Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. 17 Reasons is forthcoming from AngelHouse Press. He has read as part of the Worms series in Baltimore, the Ruthless Grip in Washington D.C., the La Tazza series in Philadelphia and Welcome to Boog City Festival in Brooklyn. He attended New College of California in the late 1990s where he studying with Lyn Hejinian and David Meltzer and participated in “A Night in the Life of San Francisco Writing” at New Langton Arts and read at Canessa Park. He has edited theoretical works by Benjamin Friedlander, Brian Reed, Peter Quartermain, Steve McCaffery, Harryette Mullen among others as part of the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series curated by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. He has published poetry reviews in Rain Taxi, First Intensity, Real Pants, Fanzine and elsewhere. He lives on Quaker Hill in Baltimore.

Kyp Harness is a singer-songwriter known for the poetry of his lyrics. He has released twelve independent recordings.  He is also the author of two books: The Art of Laurel and Hardy (2006) and The Art of Charlie Chaplin (2007), both published by McFarland in the US. In March 2016, he released his thirteenth album, Stoplight Moon. In May, his novel, Wigford Rememberies was published by Nightwood Editions.

Meagan Black starts her MFA in Creative Writing this fall and is freaking out. Outside of school, her interests include working for Arc Poetry Magazine and never finishing the edits on her first YA novel. She’s won a couple of awards and been published in a couple of place, including Carousel Magazine and the internet. Visit her on her website at www.actuallyreadbooks.com.

Paul Carlucci's sophomore collection, A Plea for Constant Motion, will be published by House of Anansi in January 2017. The Secret Life of Fission, his debut, won the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Individually, his stories are forthcoming or have been published in Carousel, filling Station, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, Little Fiction, subTerrain, The Malahat and others. He lives in Ottawa.

Jim Johnstone [pictured] is a Canadian poet, editor, and critic. He’s the author of four books of poetry: Dog Ear (Véhicule Press, 2014), Sunday, the locusts (Tightrope Books, 2011), Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010) and The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008), and the subject of the critical monograph Proofs & Equational Love: The Poetry of Jim Johnstone by Shane Neilson and Jason Guriel. He’s the winner of several awards including a CBC Literary Award, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, Matrix Magazine’s LitPop Award and This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Johnstone is the poetry editor at Palimpsest Press, and an associate editor at Representative Poetry Online. He lives in Toronto.

Mark Laliberte is a Toronto-based artist-writer-designer-curator with an MFA from the University of Guelph. He has exhibited extensively in galleries across Canada and the USA, curates the online experimental comics site 4panel.ca, and edits the hybrid art/lit mag CAROUSEL. Laliberte was recently awarded a 2016 'Comic Arts — Works-in-Progress' grant from the Ontario Arts Council; he is currently working on two full-sized comic-poetry manuscripts, BalloonCloudBubble and BLKBK. In 2016, he is releasing 3 books: 4PANEL 1 in May (through his own Popnoir Editions imprint); Free For the Taking in August, a collaborative book project with artist Micah Lexier (this is one part of a 3 book series being published by Warby Parker); and, asemanticasymmetry in October (a riso-printed remixing of selected derek beaulieu's letraset works, published by Anstruther Press).