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: Meet the Presses (part one,

[Invisible Publishing, on point (so to speak) (being invisible]

Given how excited I know you are about this weekend’s ottawa small press book fair (whether the reading on Friday night or the fair itself on Saturday), I thought it might be worth discussing some of the things I picked up this past weekend as part of the annual Meet the Presses event in Toronto! [If you wish to see my notes from last year’s Meet the Presses event, see the link here]. And congratulations to former Ottawa writer Chuqiao Yang for winning this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award for Reunions in the Year of the Sheep (baseline press)! [see my 2015 Open Book profile on her here; see my review of the chapbook here]

Cobourg ON: Stuart Ross (who will be at the ottawa small press book fair this weekend) furthers his way to forty years of continuous chapbook production through Proper Tales Press with Kingston poet Dale Tracy’s chapbook Celebration Machine (2018), a chapbook produced in an edition of 125 copies. The author of a scholarly title, With the Witness: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017), this small chapbook appears to be her poetry debut, a collection of short, first-person lyrics both composed directly and slant, writing in the most lovely indirect way. I like the quick movement of her lyric, and the casualness of her line, as she writes to end the short poem “Serious Living”: “If a violin sounds sad, is it?”

Don’t Look for Eunice de Souza’s Life

in These Poems

I won’t look for your life

in your poems,

but can I look for mine?

I’m asking because

I accidentally already

saw something familiar

about knowing, so not

only did I look and see

and know, but then I knew

about knowing too.

I hope you don’t mind I’ve put

your poem in my poem.

I’ve been careful

to leave out your life,

except in the exergue

of my address.

Calgary AB: From Kyle Flemmer’s The Blasted Tree comes the chapbook (another debut, I would think, given the author biography doesn’t specify any other titles) The Landscape We Left on Each Other (2018) by Lauren Elle DeGaine, produced in an edition of 40 copies. There is such a musicality to DeGaine’s work, moving from the lyric to prose poems, one with an energy that sparkles, and even crackles. Her poems manage to write uncomplicatedly on complicated things, something that could be mistaken for simplicity but is anything but. Much like Dale Tracy, this is another poet I would very much like to see further work from.

We Went to the Forest to Fire a Gun

I flick the lighter and picture your footsteps, treading snow and carpet pathways. The music I’m listening to brings memories of green and yellow days and I think about showing you this— I sing and blow smoke. We walked on a damn trail and smelled the earth: decomposition and the ache of things freshly growing. Back home, there were blood stains on your sheets, but you didn’t seem to mind. These are the gory moments of my life, paternal words flung like shards, my own voice a monstrous blade, now a ribbon of grass, but I turn monsters into you. I colour my new memories with you and they taste like fresh water and sweat and blue light and spliffs. Bright sky and bullet shells hitting ground and you holding my hand. These gorgeous spring days threaten us to be careful of summer.

Ongoing notes: the Ottawa small press book fair (part one: Ferno House),

Another Ottawa small press book fair has come and gone, an event now eighteen years old (something I still find completely amazing). Here are some of the items I picked up during this year’s event. Watch here for information on the spring 2013 event, most likely to happen later in June (and announce around February or so).

And congratulations to Adrienne Gruber, who won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award! Hopefully I can get my hands on a copy of her book at some point.

Toronto ON: Ferno House might not have won the bpNichol Chapbook Award this year (neither did above/ground press, obviously), but the fact that they had two publications on a shortlist of six titles is impressive. Spencer Gordon was up for his own chapbook [my review of such lives here], as was Toronto poet and AvantGarden Reading Series co-organizer/host Liz Howard’s first chapbook (skullambient) (2012):

(Steinian aphasia)

I that I am thy.

At thy happenstance of atoms.

Were the where of my happening into happened.

But only slightly.

So many, so manlike, multiplying thusly.

Into a permanence of flux, disconcerting.

Sister.

Sister none.

Other than the keeper.

Of another heart bleeding in December.

Boys.

Some of those boys who know no boredom.

Golden, even, in the significant design.

Sing glyph.

Sing slow creep of limbs and neural tube.

Gone too far too few in fathers.

A husbandry of worms between.

There.

Over there.

The sigh almost silenced.

Thereby a maple tree. (Liz Howard)

I’m startled by the pure electricity of the language, a poetry that perhaps needs to be heard to fully appreciate the cadences and wordplay. Howard’s poems embrace the abstract with concrete language, strafing the familiar with disconnects that alter perception, into a kind of hyper-familiarity. I’m taken with the way she uses information and twists it, playing with the sounds and meanings, such as in the poem “ (may-tea-non-state-is-abhor-original) ,” where she writes “bienvenue / the residential school / —or ancestor, ascended” (p 16). Already in a second printing, this chapbook strikes as an incredible debut. The last page of the final poem in the collection, the four-page “ Psychogeography),” reads:

I slept in voices of smoke

by the woodstove in the basement

of our house by the cemetery

to be small and dreaming parallel

to ceremony and decay

sometime ago I found

the body of a métis fur trader

in the hunting shack back there

in the woods where I guarded

him like a treasure

Chapleau         vexation and myth or

                        rabbit under the scrap car

                        or fox corporeal or

                        a mother and ravens

Toronto, now

this breathless forest.

I was also able to pick up copies of Shannon Maguire’s Fruit Machine (2012), Andrew Faulkner’s mean matt and other shitty people (2012), as well as the anthology For Crying Out Loud II: Another Anthology of Poetry & Fiction (2010). In her Fruit Machine, Shannon Maguire, about to launch a second poetry chapbook with above/ground press, writes of a dark and largely forgotten part of Canadian history that destroyed multiple lives. As she writes in her “Notes”:

The Fruit Machine was a battery of psychological and physiological tests developed during the 1950s and 60s by Carleton University psychologists Frank Robert Wake to “scientifically” detect whether someone was a homosexual. At the time, homosexuality was deemed a threat to national security and authorities sought reliable ways of identifying and expunging lesbians and gay men from the civil service as well as other professions. Fortunately, the tests never proved conclusive, but the harm that their development and underlying assumptions caused was felt in the LGBT community.

Needless to say, thousands of people in the public service, military and police lost their jobs during this period, and the stain of the fruit machine can still be felt in certain corners of Ottawa. Because of this potentially loaded title, I’m not sure it aligns with the work in the chapbook, and even works to distract away from the rich variety within. The title seems to have been pulled only from a single poem, salvaged from a slight reference towards the end:

VOLUME

of queen with circus & coo

with wolf-velvet, blackmail

to rim with prowl for fish for flute

with bell of fruit in swing to sew

her tearoom & top fish

her swing & trade with mother-punk

of cruise wolf, of queen wolf, of punk prowl,

fish-wolf queen for velvet bell

whole sew bull

sew bull sew …

with normal words

like breast & blond & stiff & newspaper

radiator farm asphalt politician hammer

erect child cigar fight & stroke

like tearoom fight & breast fruit

like swing stiff in blond fish

like camp politician with mother-punk radiator

like top men hammer blond on asphalt

fight blond for top

blind blond with trade cigar

all part of a lexicon

of aversive substances & shocks

change in size of pupil

of the fruit machine

by the fruit machine

for the fruit machine

subdivision did

The poems within explore systems of language, perception and sensation, with a sprinkling of her favoured “wolf” scattered throughout. Maguire is very much a fan of structure, and experimenting with structure throughout, such as in the poem “Pleasure,” where she playfully echoes a binary played from Robert Kroetsch’s The Sad Phoenician (1979), a structure more recently played with by Amanda Earl in The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (above/ground press, 2008). As the notes at the back of the collection claims, this chapbook is “part of a book-length ‘exploded sestina called Myrmurs.” Shortlisted previously for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Writing, she already she has a first full-length trade collection out in the spring, fur(l) (BookThug). I am very much looking forward to seeing what she ends up doing with larger structures, and the larger canvas.

existing independently of zip-stripe; openness of destination

if she loved a man on Tuesday; epiphytes rather on Saturday

if she only undergoes a not entirely determinable series of women

admiring them for their inkjet streams & analytical coups

if anarcho-sundicalist organizers appeal to her & mother

            is in a state nursing home

if by sunrise the next day the girl escaped drowning

then she takes moisture from the air; that kissed all she saw

            in the factory (“LETTERS”)

Author of Useful Knots and How to Tie Them (Toronto ON: The Emergency Response Unit, 2008), Andrew Faulkner is one of the Ferno House editors and co-editor/co-publisher of The Emergency Response Unit. To my knowledge, he hasn’t had a chapbook out in some time, and his poems on terrible people explore a range of characters and voices, some of which work and others that don’t.

IL MIGLIOR FABIO

If you are what you eat then I

am the ass of a high school cheerleader,

high on boredom, behind the bleachers

after school. I am listening to robot rock at dawn

in a Ferrari made of glass. My body is hairless,

strong as OxyContin. I sweat oxytocin.

I gather the wind in my pipe and puff, puff.

I will not pass. I transpose your love song

from C-major to apathetic. I’ve consumed the future.

My farts articulate the past. The secret fifth chamber

of my heart weeps for your scoliosis,

but style does as style is, so I’ll be cruising

the night with my gilded twelve-foot dick.

I hope you catch my drift, emphasis dick. (Andrew Faulkner)

Two Calls for Submissions: 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award + Leaf Press

Call for Submissions: Leaf Press
Leaf Press is gathering poems for an anthology about the newly born, the almost born, the journey in-between. We are interested in thresholds and liminal states; in moments that transcend global cultures. We welcome poems from all the continents, asking only that they be accompanied by a translation to English. We may be able to help, in some instances, with translations. Please send your poem to: poems@leafpress.ca, subject line: Newborns or to: Leaf Press, Box 416, Lantzville, B.C. V0R 2H0.

We will accept poems that have been previously published. Poets must provide this information (publication, publishing house and date) as well as permission for us to reprint. Leaf plans to publish the anthology in Spring 2014. Deadline: January 30, 2013. Anthology Editors: Ann Graham Walker and Ursula Vaira. Selected poets will be paid a fee of $50.00 CAD plus a copy of the book.

Call for submissions: 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award
A $2000 prize will be awarded for the poetry chapbook judged to be the best submitted. Interested authors or publishers should submit three copies of a chapbook of poetry in English published in Canada in 2011. Chapbooks should be no less than 10 pages and no more than 48 pages. Submissions should include a brief C.V. of the author, plus address, telephone number, and email address. Send to: Meet the Presses / bpNichol Chapbook Award, PO Box 26, Station P, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2S6. The closing date for submissions to the 2012 competition is May 31, 2012. Please email Meet The Presses for more information: meetthepresses@gmail.com.