Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one, : Tamsyn Farr, emily shafer + Yoko’s Dogs,

[Michael e. Casteels, Puddles of Sky Press]

Another small press fair, come and gone; and have you been catching my posts from the recent participation in both the TIFA Small Press Market and Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market? [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here; see my fourth post here].

Wakefield/La Pêche QC: The latest from Pearl Pirie’s phafours is Crime & Ornament: poems (2025) by Tamsyn Farr [see her “six questions” interview from last year this time], a chapbook debut by the self-described “degenerate, straggler, marauder, buffoon, confidence trickster, latent criminal, pathological phenomenon, and poet who goes around Wakefield, Quebec, in velvet hose with gold braid like a fairground monkey.” I had a landlord back in the late 1990s who was the “Village poet” of Wakefield, I wonder if she knows Phil Cohen? “America was Kmart the Beautiful / when I was seven and in love / with Teddy Ruxpin.” she writes, to open the first poem “Cross Border Shopping,” a poem around memory, composed beneath the shadow of the current political climate. Her poems in this short collection offer depiction, response and memory, writing first-person poem-thoughts across narrative stretches, playful patter and sharp turns. Or, as the first quarter of the poem “Lovin It” reads: “Piercing gun cocked: pop goes / the sheen of a flat world // conspicuous, daubed / in all-angled light. // A footnote in the fiscal year / liquidates the wax museum // in some sun’s hollow centre. / Now two-thumbed hands // shake at rates reflecting / the cadences of the real world. // The death rattles’ goo goo / ga ga: the last dead giveaway.” I am intrigued by her use of political and cultural touchstones, riffing references and exploring multiple shapes and forms across this assemblage. I am curious to see what might come next, certainly.

Ornaments Wanted: Dead or Alive

On the mantle, a BBQ lighter. It came in a pack
of two: red and blue. Its long, flame-tipped finger
lights the fireplace. Left too close, it later catches
fire and explodes and leaves specks of soot over 

the whole goddamn house because that’s how hot
fire gets, hot enough to blow up the fire-maker
and ash-festoon every surface. And at the blue
fire’s centre is six months or years of sad and
unfiligreed time: to hose you down and feed you
peanuts, to talk to your druid therapist, to recall
that hangover nap on the toilet in a bathroom for
employees of the research unit of the psych
hospital, to be gainfully employed, to step into
the cold shower like a chest-beating Swede and
fantasize pleasantly about being fed into a wood
chipper. Mulch-me becomes the beadwork on
another disenchanted century. 

He wasn’t wrong to look for the ornament
embedded in the object. He wasn’t wrong that
fads lead to landfills adorned with dated kitchen
cabinetry. Every Hummel figurine is haunted.
Snipped from their forests, my indoor trees
yellow around me. 

(For the love of Christ, go water your plants).

Cobourg ON/New York NY: From Stuart Ross’ infamous Proper Tales Press comes New York City-based Rochester, New York poet emily shafer’s chapbook debut, it’s too early for poetry (2025). There’s a clarity to her lyric I find charming, a straightforwardness that still bends in the light, offering a slight pull on the line from gravity. Her poems really do feel akin to full-length sentence-thoughts, stretched across a canvas to shape across pause, interruptions, turns and twists. “Midnight ivy holds this house / together but I squeeze / out through the cracks,” she writes, as part of “the Munchmuseet,” “If you didn’t want to blossom, you should have told me so [.]”

August 

Jessica works at the Met
every day editing
exhibition photographs, so we go
out on weekends to some bar
in the Bronx for wings and syrup
-y soda. I can’t yet tell
if the waiter has had such
picky customers before, tearing
apart and rearranging the menu, but he seems
to mind
            only us.
At midnight I see the moon
over Van Courtland Park out the empty
train car window and she says
it looks like me and I rest
my head on her shoulder
            as the I train takes us home.

Montreal QC: I’ve long found collaborative quartet Yoko’s Dogs [Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis and Jane Munro] a curious aberration, offering an ongoing conversation between a larger grouping of collaborators than the usual two or three, paired with the fact that they’re all individually well-established and published writers, and the fact of their sheer ongoingness, perhaps comparable only with their contemporary, Pain Not Bread [made up of the collaborative trio Roo Borson, Kim Maltman and Andy Patton]. Yoko’s Dogs formed in Montreal in 2006, and has since published titles including the full-length Whisk (Pedlar Press, 2013), and chapbooks Rhinoceros (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and Caution Tape (Collusion Books, 2021). Their latest is the chapbook Lunchbox Poems (Turret House Press, 2025), a title composed as an extended sequence of short, fragmented and accumulative lyric bursts. “can you put your feet up and relax,” they write, mid-way through the collection, “if the footstool is an anteater [.]” Their declared intention sits within the structure of the English-language haiku, but their lyric feels a bit more expansive than that, pulling at the boundaries of where the lyric meets a clipped, meditative density. Not straight haiku at all (again, in the adapted and otherwise imperfectly-translated English-language parlance of an original Japanese form), but something expansive, and ongoing. Not simply one small moment held, but held in a loose kind of sequence.

on the phone with my mother
I pull skin from
a slice of salami 

full snow moon, your other name is
hunger

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part two, : Jacob Alvarado + Drew Lavigne,

[a corner of my table at the TIFA fair, including the shortbread cookies I made] 

Again, this blended sequence, as the weekend of back-to-back small press fairs was a bit of a blur. [see my first post on such here] 

Toronto/Mississauga ON: The debut poetry chapbook by Mississauga poet Jacob Alvarado is I Can Make It All Up To You (Toronto ON: Knife│Fork│Book, 2024), a collection of poems that write around their subjects, their initial prompts; less a sense of being evasive than simply working a different kind of clarity. “Bowie made his deathbed with Kendrick in his headphones,” begins the poem “How Many Times Does An Angel Fall?,” “a shipwreck saluting its reflection. // 3:16 AM: my head hits a wall. / Confetti bursts from my ears like ripped toilet paper.” There’s almost an element of the English-language ghazal (John Thompson, et al) in some of Albarado’s lines, allowing a leap between lines, between couplets, allowing the space between as much narrative space as the space itself. There are times that I do want the author to push further, just to see what else is out there, but there remains a clarity through Alvarado’s lyrics, one that finds itself the occasional wisdom, sharp lines that poke through, such as the final line of “Me and You and Awkward Silence,” that reads: “Depression is a room full of cereal bowls.” I am intrigued by this debut; intrigued by where this particular author might venture next.

Branches

His hands: dew leaves, iced tea, a waterfall.
Dares and truths are both dreams. Two choices; one flesh. 

My shoes were faded by the soaked suede
of summer strolls through sweet grass. 

A clearing. Of throat and brush. 

My legs were oaks. My knees; a forest-fire.

The sun was my heartbeat. Its rays my veins;
its heat my pulse. 

His eyes: acorns, aloe, alcoves.
Needles rained from pine-trees: self-clouding. 

The breeze flew around me but not through me:
    grease in a dewdrop.
Palm sweat: a waterfall, an avalanche, inevitable. 

His back: smooth, steady, slicked. A rockface. 

His mouth: The Devil dawned into God,
The stab of Eden’s gatekeeper, the sun. 

A hickey is a mark of belief.

TIFA fair: Jay MillAr of Book*hug Press, Leigh Nash of Assembly Press + Michael e. Casteels of Puddles of Sky Press

Moncton NB/Toronto ON: From the current poet laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick, Drew Lavigne, comes the chapbook EveningDress (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), a title that appears to be his debut, chapbook or otherwise. Lavigne offers poems of narrative richness and gestures that suggest performance, offering descriptive thickness across long lines and evocative meaning. “There is a dress by Paul Poiret,” he writes, to open the title poem, “which I first saw / in James Laver’s Costume and Fashion: A Concise History. / It was called ‘Evening dress: Il a-été primé.’ A fashion plate / from the Gazette du Bon Ton, 1914. / I was ten, and had never seen anything like this / turquoise pleated tunic, over a wrapped hobble skirt, / fastened with a gilded oval gem, bands of the same / fabric twisting down the arms, clasped at each crossing / by round jade jewels.” There is such careful narrative unfolding, unfurling, through his lyrics, one that might provide as much comfort on the stage as on the page.  

Round Mirror

It was easy then to walk into the sky
with my mother’s gilded mirror,
stolen from her dark room, held in my hands outside.
Startling then to find in the disc
that everything was upside down.
With little effort I could fly,
or walk among the branches of trees;
then jump from cloud to cloud: going higher,
seeing everything in a way that was strange and new.
Not understanding the danger of falling.
I tripped on the root tangled ground.
I saw the rolling sky, the black trees, the hard earth,
my face like a desperate man, seeing blood.
I fell into the mirror, shattered on the ground.

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two : Pearl Pirie, Sacha Archer + STUMPT 7 + issue eight,

[nina jane drystek, jwcurry + Chris Johnson doing the first of their two sound performances mid-fair]

[see the first part of these notes here]

Toronto ON/rural QC: From Quebec poet Pearl Pirie comes the chapbook we astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), a title the acknowledgements suggest “could be considered a sequel to Sex in Sevens (above/ground, Sept. 2016).” With a poetics that includes collage-movement and haiku, this small collection again works Pirie’s own familiar forms while expanding her nuance, her repertoire, of poetic assemblage, collision, sketch-notes and density. “inside the exquisite loss of everything / except where skin knows sweat,” begins the poem “vacation day,” “time and all else will be someone else’s problem, / here is birdsong and wave crash, // eyelash and breath, lips as if warmed silk / and a hiking up onto one elbow.” Her phrases almost read accumulatively, with the slight disconnect between each one, allowing the poem to exist in the collision between descriptive phrases. What amuses, as well, is Pirie’s further inclusion into the ongoing “Sex at 31” series [see my own notes on the origins of the project here, and my participation in same], her “sex at fifty,” a two-page poem that opens with “perhaps I have seen my last / set of menstrual cramps. // I never needed to collect / the whole bleeding set.” and ends with the couplet: “eight minutes until a / teleconferencing call.”

light on your feet

how did it take decades
for the full moon to catch
you, the sun? your sunspots,
your corona flare of backlit hair
the dinner plate of light
on your chest, and your
shoulder blades as you
rise to turn down the heat
at 9pm, the moonlight is
music scoring your ribs,
and hip notch,
slips with my eyes
down to the horizon
of your fine, sculpted
delectable ankles, arches.

Hamilton ON/Achill, Co. Mayo, Ireland: There is a beautiful compactness to Hamilton (formerly Burlington) poet, publisher, editor Sacha Archer’s latest, the delicately-lovely Second Sight (Ireland: Redfoxpress, April 2025), a title subtitled “(36 Masks)” and produced as a hardcover edition, number 214 in the “C’est mon dada” series, a “collection for visual poetry, experimental texts and works influenced by Dada and Fluxus.” I’m fascinated by these blends of handwritten text and physical object, image, stitch and erasure, and would want to hear far more on his process around such a project, and how far he might take such structures in subsequent work. And while the production for such an object is wonderfully graceful, I do hope there is an opportunity to see these works in larger renderings at some point. As the introduction to the collection offers:

The work of Second Sight repurposes facsimiles of so-called famous/canonical MSS to create masks in what is both a gesture of looking backward and forward. While reconsidering the manuscripts themselves, their relevance and legibility (handwriting and content) to the contemporary reader, the act of creating masks transforms the MSS into surface matter or, raw material, which is to say, the concrete. The mask, being a loaded tool both for its intended use as a transformative piece of costume and for its trans-cultural historical presence, not to mention the colonial exoticization of African masks met in Modernism, primarily in the work of Picasso, makes of the mask a powerful vessel for a leap of faith which is the blind gesture forward, concretizing the MSS via cutting and the addition of banal (read totemic) objects into masks which cannot be worn, but which may reveal.

Stuart Ross, Proper Tales Press

Kingston ON: If you’ve never encountered any publications from Kingston writer, editor and publisher Michael e. Casteels, through his Puddles of Sky Press, I would highly recommend: at any small press fair you might encounter Casteels at his table, quietly staping, cutting, folding and assembling small publications throughout the day, throughout the afternoon. Two of his latest include the envelope STUMPT 7 (64 copies; June 2025) and the Japanese-sewn STUMPT issue eight (60 copies; June 2025), all hand-stamped (echoing jwcurry’s own infamous production, through his 1cent series and other productions via Room 302 Books) by the publisher himself. There is a kind of care, an attention, to publications and processes such as these that photocopied items are simply unable to replicate: consider that this is not sixty-some copies of a single poem, but sixty-some times the publisher hand-printed each poem, each line, in the same way on each slice of carved paper. One has to admire the patience, and the attention, as well as the craft. STUMPT 7 is made up of three poems on cards, one per card: an untitled poem by Hamilton writer Gary Barwin, BC poet Dale Tracy’s “Soft Growth,” and Kingston poet Allison Chisholm’s “Attachment Unavailable,” which I photographed, below:

Most small press publications are very good at offering different elements of pieces by emerging, and established writers, and Casteels works a very nice balance as well, but working from a far different pool of writers than might ever appear across mainstream publishing. STUMPT issue eight, produced with hand-sewn binding, offers a poem each by Keaton Studebaker, John Grey, John Repp, daniel f. bradley, and, on the back cover, which I photographed, below, this piece by David Romanda: