Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Stuart, Niespodziany, Melançon, LaPierre, Pinder, Kaplan + Win,

Anticipating the release later next week of the thirty-fourth of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the thirty-third issue: Cecilia Stuart, Benjamin Niespodziany, Jérôme Melançon, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder, Genevieve Kaplan and Maw Shein Win.

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-three issues (more than two hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: Carrie Hunter, Lillian Nećakov, Nate Logan, Hugh Thomas, Emily Brandt, David Buuck, Jessi MacEachern, Sue Bracken, Melissa Eleftherion, Valerie Witte, Brandon Brown, Yoyo Comay, Stephen Brockwell, Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax, Cat Tyc, Michael Turner, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Tom Prime, Bill Carty, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Robert Hogg, Simina Banu, MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty, Lisa Fishman, Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming thirty-fourth issue features new writing by: Jade Wallace, Katie Naughton, Nathan Austin, Barry McKinnon, Monica Mody, T. Best and Leah Sandals.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-three issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press 2022 subscriptions! We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Sarah Pinder, Common Place

Tumbling behind pleasure

on our best behavior,

holding its hands.

The sweeter version:

hollow, ropey, and roaring,

in redux with the truest reds.

Step by step, man in a blue suit,

man with a baby, man kneading the grass,

carrying some matte black apparatus.

Digging the trough for a headstone,

a fleshy neutrality of debt, lymph-tinted.

You can’t pay back flicker –

we’re in a marked space, using

our bottle caps to place

three-minute video calls home.

For her second trade poetry collection, Common Place (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2017), Toronto writer Sarah Pinder shifts her short, dense lyric meditations into the structure of a single, book-length poem. She writes: “We are trying to keep the moment / when the worst seems to have / not happened.”

In Common Place, Pinder writes a suite of seemingly self-contained fragments into a slow, meditative monologue blending self and landscape, the private and the public, as disparate threads that sometimes connect, separate, overlap and even blend. It is intriguing to see a poet long known for her explorations in brevity and the small moment attempt to extend the canvas upon which she writes, allowing every word and line to be part of a single unit, and the resulting book provides a slippery single-portrait, one that shimmers and distorts even as it begins to come into view. What is this book working towards, or doing? I admire the ambition of such a project, and the fragments exist less as a linear suite than an accumulation, and one that doesn’t require every connection to connect to achieve, writing layer upon layer upon layer. Shifting voice, tone and location, perhaps the closest to a description that might encapsulate the entire project comes from the mid-section of the collection, as she writes: “I wore so many layers when we met / and drank doubles, which destines me to say CAPITALISM / again and again like a more diligent newspaper Marxist, / but I did it anyway, pulled the glow on us.”

Before it had been absent, it was a task,

water ready to empty.

I was absent in the tension

throughout my body.

I didn’t discuss it.

When I got to Chicago,

I kept splitting into quarters,

then eighths.

Fingering waistbands,

bag checked and a playing card

slipped in my back pocket.

Five of diamonds

laminated with packing tape.

Cutting Room, Sarah Pinder

My review of Sarah Pinder's Cutting Room (Coach House, 2012) is now online at Prairie Fire Review of Books.

Ongoing notes: early January, 2012

So, on January 6, we finally broke down, and picked up a kitten from the Humane Society. Apologies to our allergic friends who can now no longer visit. We swear, it wasn’t about excluding you.

Will four-month-old Lemonade (yes, that’s his name) survive longer than Christine’s plants? I sure hope so. He spends half his time sitting or sleeping with us, and the other half, tearing around the apartment, getting into absolutely everything. And now we aren’t the only cat-less apartment in our little building. Apparently we’ve already scheduled a play-date with the cat on the first floor (sigh).

Another New Year, yes. Hopefully I can get the first packet of above/ground press items out sometime this month, including a new chapbook by Rae Armantrout. Why haven’t you subscribed yet? And did you see this reading I’m doing for Pearl Pirie with various others on January 19 at Collected Works Bookstore, to launch her anthology Air In/Out Air?

Here’s an interview I read recently on writing and mothering, etcetera, between American poet Rachel Zucker and American writer Sarah Manguso. I highly recommend.

Toronto ON: Another self-publication from Marcus McCann is Labradoodle (The Onion Union, 2011), “Published privately for Mark Schaan, with love, / on the event of Christmas 2011.” Can you think of anything so lovely? A chapbook of six poems, “after David McGimpsey,” McCann plays off Montreal poet and musician David McGimpsey’s sonnet-wise variation pop culture poems, reading nearly as a short essay on McGimpsey’s work.

Three years ago, I was not quite ready to use

the word labradoodle in a poem

It’s like that time I found, in the memo folder

of my Blackberry, the one word memo

Cocktapus. I thought about it for a long time,

how it got there, what I was trying to say

to my future self. Dear self. Cocktapus.

Much later, I added two more words:

Cocktipmus Prime. You can be physically

ready for sex but not emotionally ready,

I learned in grade eight. It was confirmed

the day I crossed out April on the office

calendar and wrote Cocktober. I just hadn’t

figured out what part of misery

“labradoodle” stood in for. Now I think I know.

Every day is a David McGimpsey poem,

and it’s half golden lab, and half whatever

“doodle” stands for. It is not good news.

Over the past couple of years, Marcus McCann has been branching out in all sorts of interesting directions, and reads as one of the smartest and most interesting of all the young poets currently writing in Canada. Certainly, most readings of McGimpsey’s poems have been misunderstandings, or readings distracted by the humour, and missing the rest of what his work is doing, and dealing with. McCann’s final poem in the collection, “A primer on David McGimpsey for those / who have never heard of David McGimpsey” reads:

That and the Olsen twins. People say,

David McGimpsey is the guy who writes

funny poems. Which is a little like saying,

Hey, he’s the guy with the really funny cancer.

Toronto ON: After seeing numerous self-published chapbooks by Toronto writer Sarah Pinder, it’s exciting to hear she has a trade poetry collection forthcoming with Coach House Books. Her most recent small publication (in anticipation, I suppose) is Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination (bits of string, 2011, with the title of the publication and the poem titles taken “from chapter titles (or modified chapter titles) from a book called Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination by Francesco Orlando (Yale University Press, 2006).”

Genealogy

think first to fire wounding the wall,

sending it up in a thick sheet, so quiet from the road

where we scrape our thighs.

evidence of all sinners here: vowels,

formaldehyde, pancake in a limited range of shade melting,

melting in its pans, simply contained, simmering

little complaints, nothing like life-like, we can surely agree

on this building, lit, graduating to a ghost of ash, lilies

claimed, culled, refused.

all the trees retreat, gasping; we lean in,

the afternoon unlaces.

I’m intrigued by this, and the repeated reference to silence, references to ghosts, as well as the poem dedicated to Alice Oswald, “Making Decisions in Order to Proceed,” that begins: “Time-lapsed smoke curled back / toward your pursed oh / channels silence.”

Houston TX: The newest in Dawn Pendergasts’ little red leaves textile editions, “lovingly sewn using textile remnants,” is Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 96: Velocity (2011), part of an ongoing sequence that has appeared in volumes such as Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (Salt Publishing, 2010) and The Collage Poems of Drafts (Salt Publishing, 2011). Constructed with two extended sections, the second working more prose-poem forms, Draft 96: Velocity is a steady pulse of swallowtails, one that increases exponentially its speed.

That gust of pulsing, wide and fast. plunging crosswise push and change that made this mark, this / this \. like any brightness blown, any wing or leaf, I wanted to say it was Parnassius mnemosyne (clouded Apollo) for its fancier name – which wasn’t true. It was just a swallowtail in which the word “memory” did not appear nor the touch of “poetry.” It was just ordinary, not endangered, no more than any thing.

It’s interesting to read such pieces, her “Drafts” individually, knowing that there will be a point when they will only been seen as a larger unit. Does this mean we miss what they might catch, and possibly, vice versa? Just how connected are her drafts, and how do they read sequentially? A small note at the back of this exquisitely designed volume gives some context to the poem, and reads:

It was the Old World or Common Yellow Swallowtail—Papilio machaon. Parnassius mnemosyne, also a swallowtail, is both rarer and endangered. The citation in German is from Rilke, from the first Duino Elegy. “We’re coming here with pieces of people we’ve lost,” stated by Norma Gabriel Taylor and cited by Matt Saldaña in an article about the inauguration of Barack Obama, The Independent: The Triangle’s Weekly, Jan. 22, 20009, 5. The poem is the first work of beginning again on the “line of one.”

Ongoing notes: Toronto + Ottawa small press fairs,

I recently attended the Toronto Small Press Fair, as well as our own ottawa small press book fair [a snapshot of part of the Ottawa room]. Here are a couple of items I picked up, between the two. Each fair holds two events per year, and there are various other fairs around Canada (Toronto's Canzine in the fall, Montreal's Expozine, and Toronto's upcoming Meet the Presses, etc), many of which post to the (canadian) small press fair blog, so be sure to check back regularly for updates for future events!

The next event I'm aware of is the first-ever chapbook-only Meet the Presses in Toronto on July 9, which includes many Toronto-based publishers, as well as Ottawa's own AngelHousePress and Apt. 9 Press.

Ottawa ON: It was good for Toronto author Jim Smith to be able to come through the pre-fair reading in Ottawa to launch his newest chapbook of poems, Exit Interviews (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2011), a collection of pieces composed in tribute to a series of dead, male poets, including bpNichol, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn, David Aylward, Frank O'Hara. Vladimir Mayakovsky and Federico Garcia Lorca. There was something compelling about the way he read, also, ending the pieces before the end, giving the closure of each piece its own soft edge, tied up in subtle ways.

Ted Berrigan

POOF!

I'm dead.

& you can't keep me here

As is mine

Great mud intelligence

That icebox I hadn't read

You cant keep me

Davy Crockett is right on

What thoughts I have

Smoking a pipe

You cant keep

Sober dog

White powder

Ron Padgett said

Me here

Go back to speed

Chicago,

It's made of everything!

[Jim Smith, seeing his Apt. 9 Press chapbook for the first time] Interesting to think he might have twigged on the idea, possibly, after a similar series by Toronto poet Victor Coleman, who wrote poems for a series of his late poet friends, each piece dedicated to another, his “Eulogistics” series (originally published as STANZAS #20), which appeared in his trade collection ICON TACT : Poems 1984-2001 (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2006). 

In both authors' series, the writers weave in echoes, slight traces, of the poets they write on, write for, small tributes to each, and the legacy they might have left behind. 

Of Jim Smith's work I'm aware of (which is, admittedly, quite little), these pieces strike as some of the more interesting of a mid-length (so far) career, from his One Hundred Most Frightening Things (blewointmentpress, 1985) to his most recent trade collection, Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2009).

Federico Garcia Lorca

At five in the afternoon.

I will not see it.

Spain is the only country.

Yet the Milky Way

Has filled the valleys of Spain.

The rest was death.

Now, archer, now

There are newly crated things,

There are jellyfish,

There are angels who never attack.

I love the song

I love the cartwheel

I love the rooster.

Que pasa, rooster?

The best bullfighters fall,

Torn apart by the horns

Of their mothers.

Spain stretches out

At five in the afternoon

All is finished

The bull

Loses itself, the fighter

Scares himself.

Ottawa ON: I've only been requesting review copies from In/Words Magazine and Press editor David Currie [that's him in the middle, there] for six months, so it's good to finally see a small stack of publications, including two poetry chapbooks from jesslyn delia smith, her so it's the first really warm day (In/Words, Chapbook Series 8.10, February 2009), edited by Cameron Anstee, and rescue poems (In/Words, Chapbook Series 10, January 2011), listed as, since she was about to end her fourth year as an English student at Carleton University, “her last in/words chapbook.”

behind mike's place in january,

thinking about the future

from where i stand

the flag is lit

on brilliant fire

behind

cold stone pillars,

rising with smoke,

supporting

our flourishing minds

Whereas the poems in the first of this pair of chapbooks seem unformed, unfocused and with so very little happening, the poems in her second, some two years later, read like koans in comparison, short, thoughtful poems that reveal by what they manage to hold, so briefly, back.

love lines.

decisions have been

made, unlike before, white

tea seeps from sponges,

creases of your skin,

love lines

and yellow bruises

on the backs of both

my knees, my ankles, from

kicking them in slip-on

princess shoes

There's a gaze here that focuses inward here, and considers, and is considered. The first chapbook might not have been much to grab the attention of too many, but smith's rescue poems intrigue. She might have moved away from publishing with In/Words, but one can only hope that this doesn't mean the end of her publishing. That would be a shame; she should keep going. I'd like to see where she goes.

Toronto ON: I've long been a fan of the small chapbooks produced by Sarah Pinder [see a previous entry on her here] through her bits of string, and the Toronto Small Press Fair provided copies of COLLAPSE (May, 2011) and THE RYE HOUSE, a suite (October, 2010).

one street named after a saint or a mountain, another after blood, pealing bells, loose live gerunds strung across, pitched in hum, every eye a question, a pan, an establishing shot

the alternate ending: wreck this, move with speed, a leash, obedient, the click and what follows, wagging, eager, all breath

after the foot lifts, the cloud of upper sound in the flat wet warmth of the afternoon, you want the drag in chorus, field spent, the clench of taking aim at exhausted scrap, blowing it all – the name of a pocket, a hand carved tattoo (COLLAPSE)

What I like about her writing is the cool clarity of the lines, whether the prose or short line-lengths, and the smooth way that these chapbooks so wonderfully seem to exist outside the boundaries of trade publications. I don't know what her goals are, but I think I almost prefer that I haven't seen any of her work outside these small items; it gives her work a kind of credibility, stepping outside the mess of publications, journals, funded book-length works.

Lake Ontario

New York State on the other side,

but you had turned away,

flicking a match into

the velvet frozen sand (THE RYE HOUSE, a suite)

[Here is Sarah at the most recent Toronto fair] Hers are small, lovely poems that require extra thinking, that require attention of all sorts, for the reader to enter slowly, and live inside for a while, listening.

There's a part of me that would love to see her writings collected into a larger form, and another part of me that just wants to leave the whole of it alone. 

Go find her work, please. Give her your money, and ask, politely, for some of her works. 

If you can't find her, you should be able to at the next Toronto fair.

Son-in-Law Tony at Home, Sept 1973

before he embarrasses himself

with the axe. (THE RYE HOUSE, a suite)

Ongoing notes: the Toronto Small Press Fair, spring 2010;

[Nathaniel G. Moore at the TSPF; and then he went to the movies.] I don’t understand why the literary community in Toronto still keeps such a wide berth from the semi-annual Toronto Small Press Fair; I mean, I understand why, but the current organizers didn’t even know about the “troubles” the fair had a few years back (one wasn’t even on the continent at the time, and the other wasn’t much closer to the fair). Those involved on both sides don’t even come near, so what I don’t understand, why does everyone else also stay away? The new Meet the Presses fair is a positive thing, but why this insistence on factions? Why can’t we all just get along? I am not interested in factions; here are a couple of the items I picked up at or around the fair this time around. 

Toronto ON: Since discovering Sarah Pinder’s work at the previous Toronto fair, I’ve been quite taken with these small, graceful poetry and fiction chapbooks produced by her Bits of String, including Garden, Gardener: poems by Sarah Pinder (2008). Her poems are odd, quirky things, and her chapbooks are only two or three dollars; how can one not be charmed?

Half-Price Bed and Breakfast

On pilgrimage, I post,
aim and erect.
Missing cotton, velveteen,
a purple bite, a powder-puff,
I make a mini regatta in
crisp paper and set them a-sail
in the trout stream.

There’s something charming, naïve and then not-so in her pieces (I like this one, shades of Richard Brautigan’s surrealism), and even the back page, writing “I made this in Hamilton, ON, listening to my neighbours set off Victoria Day fireworks.” Check out her website for more information.

Toronto ON: Another little chapbook I picked up was Catherine Paquette’s A Theory of Darkness (the unkindness of ravens press, 2010), what appears to be a little sampler from a “larger cross-genre mystery novel” work-in-progress. Why do you, Pacquette, require an introduction at the beginning instead of little essay at the end? As a reader, I’m less interested in the explanation than the work itself, and wish she would have let her readers experience such without preconception. There are some good lines here, in a series of small straight-prose sections, albeit in need of editing: “Time is a formula to hate. Clocks are laughable containers. Like hearts.”

The Funeral Home of Time

A mug shatters. It is like that – the fragmenting. Something breaks into something else. The sun is rising. Breaking out from the darkness and the moon is fading out with the stars. Her breath regains and loses itself unevenly as she steps over the shards. Yes, she has lost. There are deaths all around her. she is grasping for something, but the temporal grope leaves her empty handed. She sits and watches the dark becoming light. The ruins of the night. Invisibly present and invisibly past, weaving in and out of the shifting moment. Now, she is hungry and takes in, chewing. Changes matter into mush and uses it to fuel her now. An empty plate; a broken cup. No, we do not have time to attend all the little funerals.

Ottawa ON: Produced by Ottawa writer Matthew Firth’s Black Bile Press is Toronto writer Nathaniel G. Moore’s “Sensational” Sherri (2009). Just what is it about professional wrestling, between this and his first novel, Bowlbrawl (Montreal QC: Conundrum Press, 2005) that keeps Moore (who once appeared on City TV’s Ed the Sock in a Mexican wrestling mask and subsequent match), and even Michael Holmes, going? “Never mind Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler…” the back cover tells us.

Ricky’s face filling red, voice evaporating. “Hey,” he said. Not sure if his words could be heard, not that if they mattered, just if he was actually speaking or lying down somewhere thinking this was going on and, “So, hey,” shifting the stool closer to the strangers, “But have you, or Carla, do you know?” He was slipping on and off the stool. “Hi … there.” He was using a bad Elvis voice. “Do you, hold on,” [wobbling his ass on the stool]. “So have you, you …” [focusing on one of them, one girl’s bony bare wrist. “S-s-s-sorry; I’m Rick by the way, must be wondering,” [slurrrr slurrrrr]. “Can you sit sit sit, okay, can you sit on on … a white frost cake. I mean, doesn’t goddabe white frost per say, can you sit on a cake for my birthday; it’s in July?”

Heels don’t turn but stay the same way. Heels are bad guys who work with heroes or baby-faces. When a heel becomes good, it’s called a face turn, or turning face.

Toronto ON: I didn’t get this at the fair, but Brian Fawcett handed me a small stack of his THE NORTHERN B.C. RULES with The Regulations for Snipe Hunting (David Mason Books, 2010), a small booklet of lists including “The General Rules,” “Survival in the Bush,” “Surviving in Town” and “The Snipe Hunting Regulations.” You can take the boy out of Prince George… What I enjoy best of all in this unassuming chap is the space at the end, the “several blank pages for additions to these rules. If you would like them to be considered for subsequent editions, please forward them to the publisher or author,” the inside says. Do you think they really would? As the colophon claims:

These rules are designed for physical survival in the Canadian north, which is an area that starts anywhere 100 kilometers north of a major Canadian city and extends to the geographical point at which all-terrain vehicles and skidoos outnumber normal transport, and government officials outnumber human beings (at which point “north” becomes “North” and only idiots are willing to put up with the cold and bugs).”

Fawcett, currently in Toronto but originally from Prince George, British Columbia, has a long history with the north, and about writing creative non-fiction works that could best be described, I suppose, as suggestions on negotiating various aspects of the world, including his work through the ongoing Dooney’s Café. From the first page, here are the first four, for example, general rules:

1.) In the north, rules only work in optimum conditions. Most of the time the rules are frozen solid or fouled with mud like everything else.

2.) Only things designed in the north work in the north. Everything is now designed south of the north.

3.) The most common natural hazard in the north is other people with beer or hard liquor on their breath. Unless you’re actively looking for trouble, bears are down around 17th in the list of things likely to harm you.

4.) All government and corporate megaprojects not only fail to produce promised benefits, they also produce unexpected side effects that eventually make life worse while exponentially increasing the volume of broken down or abandoned vehicles and other non-rustproofed machinery littering the landscape.

Who can argue with the logic of that?

Sarah Pinder: some detritus;

A Shout!

Obviously, I’m open-minded,

but who handles the handover?

What is important is that you’re serious,

and who can handle that? (Do You Like What You See?)

Coming out of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair recently, one of the very few tables with publications that really stood out was by former Montrealer Sarah Pinder, through her series of lovely little chapbooks, covering her table as she sat quietly, knitting. Deceptively small, her publications include the single-poem chapbook thanksgiving (2006), the poetry collection Do You Like What You See? (2009), the short story collection The Beautiful Province (2009), the essay/talk ‘My things, my grand-mother’s things’ (2009) and a two-author chapbook of two short stories, Pearls Before Swine Flu / This Is Plague City (with Dave Proctor, 2009).

I used to fuck men in plaid lumberjack shirts all the time when I first moved to this city – saw the canoe paddle over the door of the first boy I dated here and knew I’d have his dick in my mouth in five minutes’ time, though we’d just met. I wanted someone to take me home. All the wilderness tips came back, a thousand kilometres away, regardless of whether you’ve ever actually had to stare down a bear in the middle of a trail. Us kids spent most of the time popping strips of caps on the sidewalk with jagged rocks, or killing small creatures in snares off where the street ended.

But still, that mountain man cliché got under my skin in the middle of Toronto; made me ache for smoke and sweat until I went around sealing my mouth second-handedly over every smoker I could find. Walked around with little dead fires in my mouth all the time, wanting more and more ash. (“Neighbor Study,” The Beautiful Province)

In little publications that run the gamut from essay to poems to short story, hand drawn roughness to carefully-crafted design (the photo series in Do You Like What You See?, for example, is quite lovely), part of what appeals is the lack of self-consciousness in these small chapbooks, from someone who appears to write and publish quietly, out of a sense of necessity, and out of the occasional (making each publication, thusly, a true occasion), as opposed to habit. Her chapbook ‘My things, my grand-mother’s things’ comes out of, as she writes at the back, “a lecture at OCAD at a symposium called Collectorama that focused on people’s obsessions with the act of collecting.” Her essay begins:

I want to say something about houses, and the way they end up becoming repositories. When I was fifteen, my mother sold the house I grew up in. I remember walking through the halls of the little bungalow with my camera, taking flash photos of the empty rooms and naked walls, while telling my confused mother it was because I wanted to remember the house we’d lived in. when I got the roll of film developed, I leafed through the photos I’d meant to describe our life before the atomizing effects of divorce and just saw the flash bouncing off those naked white falls, flattening each room into a box devoid of sentiment. That roll of film made clear to me then that memory is sealed to things that fill the spaces we spend our time in – objects and possessions from paint by numbers to egg slicers that say ‘we are here’.

Still rough in parts, this is a lovely personal essay written as story with all the weight of the personal, adding another bit of thread from her larger weave of concerns, and makes itself, almost, just as much a treatise on art and memory. Does it take going through a writer like Pinder to realize just how little heart comes through in so much other writing? There is much heart, certainly, in Pinder, but rarely a moment of over-sentiment, even while wandering through a series of familiar tales of failed dating, losing one’s own past, and working to negotiate oneself through a new and unfamiliar city.

I was at a yardsale over the weekend, and a woman had a large box of photographs from the 1950s-70s that she was giving away for free. Upon inquiry, she revealed she’d found them at the intersection a few years before – decades of documented family dinners and trips to the beach, which she’d assumed had been tossed to the curb when someone had died. Every photo was carefully annotated with dates, names and little in-jokes or asides about the images themselves. Another woman going through the box with me announced that it was too depressing to look at these images stripped of meaning by the absence of their owner, and her statement neatly named my desire to hold on, archive, become the narrative link.

Where exactly is Sarah Pinder heading with these small, glorious (and sometimes, uneven) moments? I could see something collecting all of the above as a warm and loving arm in a collection produced by, say, Pedlar Press, as very few other publishers seem to want odd little bits of prose and poetry mixed into a single package, but perhaps Pinder remains happy making as many of these as she sees fit, whenever the moment strikes. In many ways, I certainly hope so. I know I would like to see more of these odd, and extremely personal, little productions.

Snap that string and let me reel

out, driving bald highways

towards a holiday I don’t celebrate

with anything but food,

simple movement and talk

of money, grief.

I fill the gas tank in stripped

small towns – payphones and

and lists are my roadside relief

now. I must rake leaves (thanksgiving)

For more information on her or her little publications, check out Sarah Pinder at bitsofstring.wordpress.com