Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part four, : Neil Surkan + Beverley Daurio,

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here]. Might we see you later today at the ottawa small press book fair? We’ve been doing this for more than thirty years now, if you can imagine.

Toronto ON/Nanaimo BC: From Nanaimo-based poet Neil Surkan, following the full-length poetry collections On High (2018) and Unbecoming (2021) [see my review of such here], both from McGill-Queen’s University Press, as well as the chapbooks Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017), Their Queer Tenderness (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Die Workbook (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2024) [see my review of such here] is Ruin (knife|fork|book, 2023), a title I clearly missed when it first appeared. One might think, with at least two chapbooks I’m aware of over the past couple of years, might a new full-length collection be on the horizon? These are short, rather tight, first-person lyrics that run through meditation, reflection and family, whether working a long, extended, poem-long sentence-thought or compact lyric. I’m curious to see how the poems here might fit with his work from, for example, Die Workbook, what the shape of that potential full-length might be.

Reflection

I’ve come to the mirror and seen
myself for the first time 

in years, not as I fear
others judge me mid-chore 

or with love, but as
a creature who peers 

frankly, knowing neither shame
nor the threat of heaven.

Toronto ON: I’m very pleased that Toronto writer Cary Fagan has been producing a series of reprints and reissues as part of his chapbook press, Found Object, with one of the more recent titles by Toronto writer, editor and publisher (of the late and legendary press The Mercury Press) Beverley Daurio, A Broken Cup (2025). A Broken Cup is excerpted from her full-length poetry collection If Summer Had a Knife (Toronto ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 1987), a book, obviously, long out of print. I’m curious if this particular selection exists as a kind of “selected poems,” akin to a “best” of what that particular full-length had to offer, nearly four decades on, or if an assemblage of poems salvaged into a form that felt self-contained (or a bit of both, really). Without knowing the source, it all becomes speculation. “I am a slow writer; the poems in A Broken Cup were composed over several years,” Daurio writes in her short introduction, “Thoughts from a 505 Dundas Streetcar,” “within this newly electric and alive city. These poems may not seem political, but their very existence felt to me incredibly daring. I love Basho and Hopkins and Thomas and Plath, but I was hungry for writing that breathed the air of this place and time.” Further on, she offers:

Re-reading these poems, I am reminded of these times with fondness, of the living and charmed world created by so many caring, brilliant, open-minded people, and the unwavering light that shines from the lanterns they carried.

Before this re-issue, I actually hadn’t been aware that Daurio wrote poems, far more aware of her as the author of fiction (and one of the finest editors of same, through her time as a publisher). The poems have a timeless quality to them, both of their time and immediately fresh, offering clipped narratives across distances, pointed phrases and descriptive patter. I keep hoping from further prose from her, aware that it has been years since she’s released any new work, and this appearance of a reissue does make me hope that there might be further work possible What other gems might be hiding in Beverley Daurio’s files?

driving into winter 

dear mom: just a note to tell you i missed you
by a few hours, went through stop signs,
cranked up the radio, but when i got in
there were three cars in the driveway
and dad was in the hall closet with his face
in your coats, he was hugging your coats.
the whole way up i was driving into winter,
not a slow or subtle winter, there’s just
snow
suddenly. 

not the heart of winter either though
the highway’s rather like a spike
and you can fancy somehow driving it
that there is such a thing as control. 

steven and gregg had eaten and nana poured me a brandy
which i didn’t spill, thanks to the shape of the glass.
the green walls were hung with your
natures mortes, also the painting of the empty
café. nothing really dead in any of them,
no acknowledgement of withered apples lying
useful on the grass, no presumption
of comparison.

dad said the nurses sat you up in bed and
combed your hair. i wish i had a picture
of that. otherwise, it’s so easy to pretend
otherwise.

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part three, : Sadiqa de Meijer + Ben Berman Ghan,

[MLA Chernoff at the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market, receiving copies of their brand-new above/ground press title]

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here]. Will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 22? Will we see you at the pre-fair reading on Nov 21 at Anina’s Café?

Kington/Toronto ON: Presented as Kingston poet and non-fiction writer Sadiqa de Meijer’s Joanne Page lecture at Queen’s University, October 29, 2024, is the chapbook-length Fieldwork (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2025), which becomes a curiosity, given how recently her collection of essays, In The Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] appeared. “I remember only one conversation with Joanne Page,” the piece begins, “although we saw each other before and after. This encounter happened at the edge of City Park in Kingston. She looked at me, squinting against the sun, and said, We read your essay, we all read it and thought it was really good, we were surprised at how good it was. She was on the organizing committee of Common Magic, a conference celebrating the life and work of Bronwen Wallace. I had submitted a piece about reading Wallace’s work during my early years of living in Kingston and had called it ‘Arguments With The White World.’”

This lecture feels, in many ways, an extension of that collection, offering her thoughts on writing, Page’s work and Kingston thoughts, and thoughts through and around writing and thinking, all prompted by the Page Lectures, and the work of the late Kingston poet Joanne Page (d. 2015). In case you were unaware, the Lecture series was originally founded by Phil Hall during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 2012, with lecture chapbooks, the “Fieldnotes,” originally produced by Maureen Scott Harris (with lectures in the series by Don McKay, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Elizabeth Hay, Stan Dragland, etc.), a series since moved onto Kirby’s knife│fork│book. It is rather striking how far de Meijer has come as a writer of non-fiction prose over the past few years, able to weave such musical thinking across such a stunning prose lyric, one heartfelt and grounded in curiosity. As she writes:

This lecture was written. I wrote it in a series of rooms that have left their quiet tracks. The kitchen was sunlit and my mind accelerated. The chair was uncomfortable and I disputed myself. I answered the door and a phrase was lost to me. I used the fast pen, my fingers pushed buttons. Knowing the text would be read out loud, I wrote differently than I would for an essay, because you as the listening cannot insert your own pauses, or read the same line two or thee times over. I didn’t make them, describing occurrences from another millennium and country—writing is miraculous in its dissembling of space and time. I couldn’t tell you what I intended without it, because my mind is unpracticed in what an oral culture would require. We live where settlers attempted for hundreds of years to eliminate orally transmitted languages like Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka, and this was also a violence against the profound linguistic capacities of their speakers. Writing is rigid.

 

Guy Elston (with Jeremy Luke Hill to the left) announcing Hill's 'Microchimaera' (Baseline Press), as the winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: The latest from Calgary writer Ben Berman Ghan, author of a novel, two collections of stories and a novella, is the chapbook of poems Behold the Dead (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), providing an interesting stretch of literary genre. Might a full-length poetry collection be far behind? Ghan’s poems stretch across narratives, allowing line breaks and silence between lines, attempting few words but across distances. With meditative elements of breath, staccato pulse and hesitation, composing open space as carefully as he places words. There aren’t many examples off the top of my head of prose writers that move into poetry—the late Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, certainly, and Kemptville, Ontario writer Michael Blouin come to mind—and there are elements of Ghan’s lyric still firmly held in a foundation of prose narrative, although one he works to punctuate with open space, as the two-part poem “Annihilation” begins:

My body is a river

annihilated

in the hungry eyes of men.

 

Black waves hide a word, a body:

            Dissolve. 

                      Drown.

 

Becoming is the cruellest sensation. 

 

Bloody mouths

drinking in.

 

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: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part one, : Liam Burke + Gary Barwin,

Okay, so this has to be a blended sequence of fair-posts, as multiple vendors (such as myself and the delightfully-productive above/ground press) attended both fairs across two days in Toronto [see my post on the most recent prior TIFA Small Press Market I attended; see my post on the most recent prior Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market I attended]. I mean, two fairs in two days? It was a bit ridiculous, but somehow, it worked. Most of the vendors I spoke to, myself included, were naturally exhausted after two days of fairs and carrying and standing. There was a nice tribute that Gary Barwin spoke at the Indie Lit Market to honour the late Toronto poet (and Meet the Presses Collective member) Paul Dutton, who died earlier this year. And congratulations to Jeremy Luke Hill, who won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award! Announced the very day he saw his new above/ground press title for the first time. And you know our Ottawa fair is coming up soon, yes?

Toronto/Ottawa ON: From Ottawa poet Liam Burke, co-author of the collaborative Orbital Cultivation (with Manahil Bandukwala; Collusion, 2021) and machine dreams (with natalie hanna; Collusion, 2021), comes the solo chapbook status ailment (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), an assemblage of ten short, curious lyrics. Burke’s poems offer lyric narratives, lyric inquiries, set in ether, presenting or suggesting a kind of action, such as the reference to the Marvel flick, Doctor Strange (2016), by titling a poem “dormammu ive come 2 bargain,” a poem that writes a held kind of abstract, purposefully, it would seem, inert. As the opening stanza reads: “i could just stay here / gather green trichomes / let inertia have its way / collate colonies of moss / mash every button / to escape the command- / grab of coming of age [.]” There are narrative threads that exist in Burke’s poems, but less straightforward than from all sides, slant; offering swirls instead of straight lines, and a sequence of entreaties without clear closure. These poems are intriguing, thoughtful and exploratory, offering unexpected paths and trails and truths. Or, as the first section of the sequence “five litanies” ends: “how am i       to show / to love my body       when it fails me so [.]”

status ailment

panic overwhelming

No you may not heal heat uplifted.
No you may not jitterbug your body.
No you may not catapult your
heart your throat your diaphragm.
No you may not finish that joint.
You might be dying. Panic
’s roar in the dark, low, hot. No you
May not. No you may not.

Gary Barwin + serif of nottingham at TIFA's Indie Lit Market

Hamilton ON: “I weep for the world and so UNESCO declares my tears a site of significant cultural heritage. They don’t include my snot and jagged sobs though I would argue that they are integral to the process.” And so begins the title and opening piece of Hamilton writer, musician, collaborator and performer Gary Barwin’s latest chapbook, MY SEXY MOTHER TERESA COSTUME (serif of nottingham editions, 2025). Barwin’s short prose bursts exist as postcard stories, twenty-two in total, all existing as blends of dense, narrative expansiveness, offering short sketches across a wide canvas of history, literature and experience. “During World War II,” the first half of the piece “In my Pants” reads, “Dervis Korkut, the librarian at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at great risk to his life, hid the beautiful medieval Sarajevo Haggadah from the Nazis by concealing it in his pants, I remembered, so I went to the bookstore.” His short missives have progressed, it would seem, blending a thread of surrealism with a far larger worldview, offering pieces that read somehow both surreal and straightforward, able to only see the story properly from coming to it from unusual sides. Or, as the piece “The Ventriloquist and 1942” begins: “The European explorer stood on the bow of the ship, holding a ventriloquist dummy dressed as a sea captain. Together, explorer and dummy looked across the vast ocean at the distant horizon.” Truly, these pieces are quite amazing, and hard to shake, once you’ve read. They keep one returning.

Cake

I’m phoning your cake because of course you don’t have a birthday anymore, at least, not really. Your cake is really far away—somewhere “out there” or “here.” Same as you, in this day where I woke up and made coffee and got in my car and drove to where I’m writing this and where I picked up this old-fashioned phone. Ring. Ring. Are you thinking of cake in your own cloudtown, thinking of us, candles and blowing them out, the breath from inside us, hhh hhh hhh. Happy birthday. Happy birthday, we say. And you’re thinking, happy birthday, happy birthday to me too.

 

this weekend! rob in toronto at the tifa small press fair + meet the presses' indie lit market,

In case you are around, I'll be (along with a mound of above/ground press titles + my new poetry title, the book of sentences) participating in two different small press fairs this weekend in Toronto:

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1ST: Toronto International Festival of Authors SMALL PRESS FAIR, 10am-5pm, Victoria College https://festivalofauthors.ca/event/small-press-fair-2025/

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2ND: Meet the Presses INDIE LIT MARKET, noon to 4pm, Cecil Centre, 58 Cecil Street, https://www.instagram.com/p/DN6d0WDDvUo/?hl=en

can you believe above/ground press is more than three decades old? new and forthcoming by russell carisse, Kevin Spenst, Lillian Nećakov, Jill Stengel, Cary Fagan and Rebecca Comay, Guy Birchard, Benjamin Niespodziany, Buck Downs, Jeremy Luke Hill, Mrityunjay Mohan, Kate Siklosi, Charlotte Jung and Johannes S.H. Bjerg, Eudore Évanturel (trans. by Jamie Sharpe, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jason Heroux, Ken Norris, Jon Cone, Ben Ladouceur, Yaxkin Melchy (trans. by Ryan Greene, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Michael Sikkema, Laynie Browne, Nada Gordon, Stuart Ross, Ellen Chang-Richardson etc etc etc https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/

and i hear my new poetry title is amazing: https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781773856483/

drop by if you are able!

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part four, : Charlotte Nip, Jesse Eckerlin + Ayaz Pirani,

[left: Ken Norris + Jay MillAr in conversation ; see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here; see part three of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. I am frustrated I missed last weekend’s fair through The Ampersand Festival! But there will certainly be other fairs, I’m sure (and Christine did a fine job running proxy at the above/ground press table). And don’t forget the thirtieth anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair is November 16, yes?

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: The chapbook debut by Vancouver poet Charlotte Nip is Acne Scars (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), an assemblage, the author notes at the end of the collection, was a “decade in the making [.]” Nip’s poems offer themselves as a sequence of collage-sketches, observations, first-person commentaries and scattered lines, held together as a kind of scrap-book lyric accumulation. “Eliot said it was the cruelest month,” she writes, to open the poem “April,” “but he lied. It’s where I find / myself again, and again, and again. I never get lost because April / births like a malignant tumour. I turn 24.” There’s something intriguing about watching this particular emerging writer feel her way through lyric form, from first-person descriptive commentary and observation and staccato phrases, composing pieces leaning closer into prose poems, more traditional open lyric and even hand-drawn lines connecting thought to thought. Or, as the poem “Persimmons” begins:

we are
a soft bird
a man
with no taste

Montreal QC/Toronto ON: From Montreal poet Jesse Eckerlin, following We Are Not the Bereaved (2012) and Thrush (2016), comes ALMOST NOTHING (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), a sequence of a dozen short, dense lyric bursts. The chapbook-length sequence opens with a couplet on the first page—“Fire in the province— // A car without brakes”—and continues along that same slow unfolding, offering precise and specific language. Each self-contained koan offers a sheen of haiku, composed of lines that might connect but on the surface seem, potentially, disconnected, allowing the reader to fill in certain spaces. “Chisels in my mouth,” the third page/section reads, “Extracting the wisdom teeth // Your lost disciple [.]” There is a certain clarity provided by these poems that is quite intriguing, offering small twists and turns, some more effective than others, but enough that I am intrigued to see what and where Eckerlin lands next.

Conversations like rooms

filled with empty music stands

Toronto ON: The latest from Tanzania-born and California-based Canadian poet Ayaz Pirani (an expat poet comparable to Ken Norris, who also spent years publishing predominantly or even exclusively in Canada while living and working in the United States), following the full-length poetry collections Happy You Are Here (Washington DC: The Word Works, 2016), Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Toronto ON: Mawenzi House, 2019) and How Beautiful People Are: a pothi (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as at least one chapbook, Bachelor of Art (Anstruther Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is the chapbook NECROPOLISBOROUGH (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). NECROPOLISBOROUGH is made up of eight short first-person lyric narratives, offering a plain speech of uncomplicated language woven through narrative wisdoms. “Even the ones I didn’t reach.” he writes, speaking of teaching and being taught, attempting to mentor and being mentored, across the poem “Beloved Infidel,” “Perhaps not reaching them / reached them and / was what they needed.” There’s a quiet power to and through Pirani’s lines, and one can’t help but be charmed by the opening line of “Smart Car,” that reads: “My car drove away honklessly / to live with another family.”

Camus’ Door

My door is plainspoken
without if or but
or doubt. No squeak or yawn.
Puritan by nature
my door is best wide open
or fast shut.
Ajar is too fanciful
for my door.
Door-pain is real
and there’s loneliness
finding yourself
two-sided. Grief too
in the phallic bolt.
My door hangs on
ancient purpose.
A look then a lock
between yes and no.
Swing then swing
between right and wrong
is my door’s fate.

And, according to the author biography at the back of this small collection, Pirani has a collection of short stories forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press, which is pretty exciting.

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part three, : Annick MacAskill + Jay MillAr,

[see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Hooray small press! And I’m hoping you caught that above/ground press was being represented yesterday in Mississauga, with Christine as table-proxy at the Ampersand Festival? She was also on a panel, discussing her brand-new book! Dang, I wish I could have been there.

Halifax NS/Toronto ON: I was curious to engage with the carved lyrics of Halifax poet Annick MacAskill, her small chapbook five from hem (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), set as five short, sharp lyrics that each take as their jumping-off points opening quotes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 AD), as translated into English by MacAskill herself. “blazing in my marrow / laid down the quiver to / greed the god in long fa- / miliar grasses wet / before his carbon-grey,” she writes, to open the poem “Upon losing my gold star & being confronted / by Diana, I, Callisto, tell my story.” This isn’t the first time MacAskill has slipped into Metamorphosis, having done same through her Governor General’s Award-winning third collection, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The poems here are extended, nearly breathless, composed as short-lined single stretches of thought and utterance running down the length of a page. As the poem “Together together together together together / together” begins: “once just another girl / -friend the goddess cursed me / worse than mute stripped me of / my girl power gossip / my place in the gaggle / resented my prattle / garrulous once but trick / her so now only soak / up the words of others [.]” Whereas that collection moved through Metamorphosis as a way to articulate a particular loss, these poems are no less intimate through their own explorations, an unfolding of fathers, female relationships and love that teases at something far larger I look forward to seeing, once the larger shape of the narrative is published as a full-length collection. As the first third or so of the poem “The snake bites they sting, yes, but are not, / strictly speaking, the worst part of this” reads:

not my silken farewell
or the blush pinpricks so
faint the world could hear or
see through shade & fog me
like a token blotted
the end of it & I
slipping asked so faint too
his frame now & that lyre
almost but don’t fade those
songs mere aftershocks tin

Toronto ON: Given how many years I’ve composed birthday poems (including my own recent Gap Riot and № Press titles), I’m intrigued by Toronto poet Jay MillAr composing his own meditations on making the half-century mark through Offline: Fifty Thoughts for Fifty Years (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), produced as #11 of Anstruther’s Manifesto Series. Composed with introductory paragraph and post-script, MillAr offers his thoughts on fifty numbered single-paragraph prose-commentaries, set as one thought immediately following another. There is a curious way that MillAr attempts to find ground through a suggestion of disconnect, even flailing, putting one foot down and seeing where the next might lead. Part five, for example, reads: “When I read older novels, the past has been filed into touchstones that are recognizable, almost orderly. Unlike the present, which is multifarious and unwieldy, overflowing. How will this mess be distilled and commodified by our collective memory fifty or a hundred years from now?” His is a pause, a checking-in, to see where he is at and how one might interact with cultural and temporal shifts, an introspection of and through time and space. “Can one live autonomously and independently off-grif in a major urban centre?” he asks, as part of the tenth section. MillAr muses on moments and movements, writing on agency, the long shadow of American culture and politics, community, seasons, literature, disposability, institutions, etcetera. There’s an anxiety here as MillAr works through where we’re at, and where we might be headed, slowly boiling to death (as a frog in a pot on the stove) in and through a sequence of situations that might not be okay. He offers no answers, but pushes the very question, and questions. As the essay, the prose-manifesto, opens:

A sensation brought on by the anxiety of our age rubbing up against the inescapable reality that I am quickly approaching my fiftieth birthday: I have lost the plot. The world, or at least the human world, since this has only ever been a human world to the extent that even the non-human things around us are still human, feels out of control. And so I find myself undertaking a retreat: I will turn away from the world into a series of texts meant to represent my thoughts summed up as a series of moments. Every time I have the urge to share something on social media, I will add it to this list instead. My hope is that these texts will become a pathway, pebbles, or crumbs by which I can engage with, and perhaps even to return to, the world. Thinking is a practice that requires patience while mastering fear.

 

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part two, : Conyer Clayton + brandy ryan,

[left: Gary Barwin, signing his new selected fiction collection with Assembly Press : see part one of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Hooray small press!

Toronto/Ottawa ON: The latest from Kentucky-born Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton (following two trade poetry collections and six prior solo chapbooks) is the chapbook KNEELING IN OUR NAME (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), a chapbook-length sequence the acknowledgements offers as “the first of a three-part series of interconnected poems.” The poem, the poems, here are evocative and visceral, writing grief and loss and enormous love. “My mother’s name is mine and buried in my throat.” she writes, to open “iv.,” “Her name is buried in my throat. / You scratch at her when you call to me. / When I kneel on the carpet. / When I stretch my neck to reach her. / When I reach into my throat to touch her.” Set as an expansive sequence, Conyer moves from short lines to lyrics set closer to prose poems and scatters of lyric clusters set across the page, offering a narrative that writes parental loss as physical, interconnected and devastating. “But I couldn’t do a damn thing to help. It hurt / right here, pointing, right here, kneeling. / right here, still.”

Browned edges.
Water droplets

on the corners
of the windows

I wipe
like a sermon.

Every day
like a sermon

The temperature
drops.

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Every day
like a sermon

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Like a prayer to
something

Toronto ON: It was very cool to watch brandy ryan work on further erasures throughout the fair, sitting at the Gap Riot Press table next to mine. The author of three previous chapbooks—full slip (Baseline Press, 2013), once/was (Empty Sink Publishing, 2014) and After Pulse (w Kerry Manders, knife|fork|book, 2019)—ryan’s latest is the visual erasure in the third person reluctant (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024). There is a curious blend of erasure and visual collage in ryan’s pieces, offering full-page reproductions of prose pages (a paperback of some sort; google doesn’t provide easy answers as to what this book might be) with the bulk of the text excised via coloured marker, overlayed with what appear to be full-colour glossy magazine images. ryan works an overlay across pages (and what might be ‘chapter headings’—“LITERARY DIVERSIONS,” “LITERARY CONSUMPTION” and “LITERARY POSSESSION”) with a text that suggests a commentary on gender, body autonomy and agency, and rage. “uncomfortable in ///// anger / the object of / her / housewifely / high profile,” ryan writes, mid-way through the collection, “display / a performance / a sharp observation, /// put on / like a ‘mask’ / they are ‘putting on their face’) […]”

 

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part one, : Devon Rae + Norma Cole,

Once more, Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press helped curate and organize the annual Small Press Market as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors! And I was totally there for that, with a swath of recent above/ground press titles and my new short story collection with University of Alberta Press and Christine’s new hybrid memoir with Book*hug Press. Naturally, there were plenty of amazing publishers and items there as well [see my two notes from last year here and the four posts I made around the first year here], including Anstruther Press, Gap Riot Press, knife|fork|book, Gordon Hill Press/The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc., room 302 books, Proper Tales Press, Book*hug Press, Nietzsche’s Brolly, serif of nottingham, etcetera (with Simulacrum Press and Puddles of Sky Press unable to attend this time around). Don’t you wish you could have made it? At least there’s another small press fair coming up in Toronto (Mississauga, actually)that I’m participating in soon, for those folk who wanted to catch some further small press excitement (where Christine is on a panel with her new book as part of the same event/festival that day). And you know about the 30^th anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair happening on Saturday, November 16, yes? OH, AND IF YOU ARE IN OTTAWA COME OUT TO THE LAUNCH OF MY SHORT STORIES TONIGHT!

Here are a couple of items I picked up at this year’s event:

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: I’ve been an admirer of the work of Vancouver poet Devon Rae for a while now [see my interview with her via Touch the Donkey], so was very pleased to see a copy of her chapbook debut, THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS WITH MY BODY (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). Rae’s work, at least what I’ve seen, is leaning into what I presume will be an eventual full-length collection of very sharp prose poems around the body, with titles such as “My Lips,” “My Left Leg,” “My Left Shoulder” and “My Breasts,” offering narrative threads and conversation almost as a kind of update on what the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was playing with across his Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1987) and eventual, posthumous, organ music: parts of an autobiography (Black Moss Press, 2012). Rae’s poems offer a conversation with and around bodies very different than Nichol’s serious play, one instead that works through and with the differences and culturally-loaded complications of women’s bodies; she writes bodies as both physical and emotional space, one impacted far too often from the outside. “That elsewhere so close we can almost / touch it.” she writes, as part of “Conversation with My Night Body.” These prose poems are damned sharp, and you should be paying attention to them. Rae packs enormous amounts in very small spaces, yet her poems are composed with a deceptive ease of lyric and propulsive flow. As the poem “Conversations with My Uterus” reads:

You are shaped like the child I may not have. I think of myself curled up inside my mother years ago – the fullness of her uterus and the emptiness of mine. Sometimes, I want to return to that dream place. I know she loved being pregnant, I’ve seen the photographs, belly swelling in an Armani dress. And I wonder if I too will become a kiln or remain a vacant room.

Dani Spinosa, Gap Riot Press

San Francisco CA/Toronto ON: Oh, the delight of a new title by Toronto-born American poet, translator and visual artist Norma Cole [see my review of her 2010 To Be At Music: Essays & Talks here], her chapbook RAINY DAY (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). Another of Toronto poet and publisher Kirby’s gracefully-produced items, RAINY DAY is a collection of twenty-one short, sharp lyrics offering a myriad of narrative directions across few words and very short spaces. As the poem “Critical Miss” begins: “permanently / beyond chagrin // intrinsic—what is / trinsic?” Alternating between prose poems and slightly longer sequences against short bursts, Cole composes the long line of each poem across a kind of condensed point-form, offering a rhythmic sequence of bursts held in breath, almost as hesitations, or a lyric caught in the lungs. “the darker / room // he talks / blocks,” the unpunctuated four-page poem “NO ACCOUNT SYLLABLES” writes, “of space / and // books of / time // I think / your // hand on / paper // least exercise / leaves [.]” Her lyric compactness clusters, stretches, holds breath. All of which, of course, makes me eager to think that we might be closer to a further full-length by Cole at some point soon, hopefully.

Mum’s the Word

saturation not able inside the magnitudes
scorpion suppression oppression falling failing
oblivious silent objects

Ongoing notes: TIFA’s Small Press Market (part one: Dale Martin Smith + Chris Johnson,

[see my four posts from the debut fair back in 2019 here and here and here and here] What a delightful fair this was! I was unable to make last year’s event due to my host falling sick with covid last minute, but managed to drive down for the sake of this small curated small press fair at Toronto’s Harbourfront, as hosted by Kate Siklosi/Gap Riot Press. Here are a couple of the items I collected as part of this year’s event:

Toronto ON: Some of the most intriguing small publishing work right now is being produced by Kirby’s Knife|Fork|Book; I’ve really been admiring the way that Kirby manages to find remarkable work by an array of writers that might not have been able to find homes for their work, at least easily. One of the titles I picked up at the fair was by Dale Martin Smith [see my review of his 2021 Talonbook title, Flying Red Horse, here], the chapbook Blur (2022). Dedicated to his partner, the poet Hoa Nguyen, the poems in Blur are an assemblage of short lyrics composed with such a light and even delicate touch. “What you know of me / is duration,” he writes, to open “Circles,” “movement / along the path between / our home and the neighbors’.” Smith’s work has long held an element of the personal in his work, but there is an intimacy here that focuses very deeply on the small that is stunningly, staggeringly moving and beautiful. Here is Dale Martin Smith composing poems with the density and brevity of poets such as Mark Truscott or Cameron Anstee, but set with the entirety of his whole heart.

Mundane

You step out of the house
with trash and rain
comes down cold, intimately
known across the time you imagine
is your life.

Jim Johnstone, Anstruther Press

oronto ON: It was interesting to catch Ottawa poet Chris Johnson’s latest title, 320 lines of poetry (counting blank lines) (2023) from Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Press, apparently in my hands before even the author got to see copies (this has happened the rare time before over the years with other publishers). There is something about Johnson’s poetry that is intriguing for the way he is so overtly exploring the lyric through experimentations with form and influence, seeking out a form through which to finally land. His poems are so clearly exploratory, seeking and reaching out to see what might strike, from his prior explorations through the haibun to these explorations through elegy, prose poems and extended lines, with individual poems composed “after” specific works by Jessie Jones, Kim Mannix, John Newlove, Artie Gold (his entire prior chapbook was a riff of a specific title by Artie Gold) and Christian Wiman.

Other pieces in the collection reference specific friends, many of whom also happen to be contemporary writers. “the rain has stopped,” Johnson writes, to open “some days are harder than others,” “but Monty says / there is always something / with bigger holes in it.” There are moments that the poems do fall too deeply into the self-referential, such as the opening poem, “elegy for chris johnson,” offering “today I ate a turkey sandwich and / thought about stephanie roberts’ turkey sandwich.” Throughout this piece he cites and he references, but doesn’t seem to offer really anything more than that, so the poem is intriguing, but doesn’t really seem to go anywhere. There are times that his line breaks do offer some nicely sharp turns, moments and corners, such as the opening of “when does the hunger begin?”: “the last days of February were honeyed, / snowy, and enlightened by whisky and weed.” That’s some fine precision, there. As well, there are moments within his prose poems where the music in his lyric shows itself quite nicely, whether the poem “asleep” (after “Awake” by Kim Mannix) or “a regular person” (after “Better Manifesto” by Jessie Jones). All in all, it feels (in an interesting and positive way) as though Johnson is still searching, still experimenting; I look forward to seeing what occurs when he finally lands.