Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three : Claudia Souto Cuello (trans. by the author + Stuart Ross,

[Mia Morgan of Coven Editions and Dr. Dessa Bayrock of post ghost press]

[see the first part of these notes here; see the second part of these notes here]

Cobourg ON/Switzerland: Every few months, there emerges further conversation how there isn’t enough literary translation occurring through Canadian publishing (Jérôme Melançon conducted a really compelling interview recently with Yilin Wang, for example, posted over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics), so it was good to see Swiss poet Claudia Souto Cuello’s chapbook, A braced triptych, translated from the French by Stuart Ross & the author (Proper Tales Press, 2025). As the author biography mentions, Cuello “inherited the Spanish and French languages from her Spanish parents living in Switzerland. After working for years as a vegetable grower, she published her first collection of poetry, Marina (éditions du goudron et des plumes, 2023).” The pieces in the collection exist as three poem-clusters that could be three poems, or three cluster-sections—“Cathedral of Leaves,” “A little patch of yellow wall” and “The Ornaments”—each of which exist through a blend of prose-stanzas and individual lines. The structure offers a curious counterpoint of structures within poems, within pieces, that play multiple rhythms, narrative purposes, and declarative sentences. Whereas Cuello’s poems lean into prose poem structures, there’s elements of the extended first-person meditative and declarative line of such as the late Etel Adnan (1925-2021), working a kind of lyric diary of the moment, running through the light and the dark of the current moment, or at least the moments across the time of composition. Might Ross be working to get a full collection of these happening? I would certainly hope so.

When the fog arrived, the timeworn lavoir and the weathered fountain tucked their necks into the hunched shoulders. Alone, circling the trees, tree by tree, I hung my words on the little coat racks of their leaves, like a little dictionary made of dry branches. And so it came to me that I had nothing left to say. Trapped in this bottle-green, to be drunk before winter arrives, my suspended words looked down on me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

{Before the light followed me, I stepped in}

 

the ottawa small press book fair (part two,

[jwcurry's Room 302 Books table]

‘Tis the season of small press fairs, it would seem [see my first post on our 25th anniversary fair here; my fourth post on the Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market here; my posts on the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market here]. And you saw my recent post on who came to our first fairway back in October, 1994, yes?

Ottawa ON: I’m charmed by the array of small mini-chapbooks that Dessa Bayrock produces through her post ghost press, with some of her most recent offerings including the wishing well: a suite of found poems (2019) by Rose Hunter, brilliant blooming voices (2019) by mj santiago, Monster (Girl) Theory (2019) by Kanika Lawton, and Blessing (2019) by Victoria Nugent (and did you see they now also have poetry socks?). Producing more chapbooks over the course of a year than most, post ghost press focuses, it would seem, pretty heavily (but not exclusively) upon emerging authors (which is often the case with such enterprises; working to support and produce writing and writers not necessarily being supported otherwise). There is an energy to these small publications that is quite charming, from the DIY cut-up design to the confidence that only comes through from emerging authors. As Kanika Lawton writes in her small chapbook/sequence:

I am good enough to bring to your mother’s house.

I will eat from her china plates and wipe off the crumbs.

I will be the perfect false-daughter.

I am bad enough to show to your friends.

Don’t act so shocked. You know I only look innocent.

I promise I’ll only break your neck with my teeth.

Some of the strongest poems of this assemblage comes from mj santiago; for example, “Anything that emerges from my body / becomes my responsibility / the moment it is visible,” is just stellar. One can see the emergence of something working its way up to some very fine sharpness:

my mom says, this is how we die

For the fourth night in a row

I vomit overcooked meat onto the floor.

It does not slip out easily while I sleep

but is hacked out onto the tile

surrounded by my history made tangible

Through the lining of my esophagus.

Anything that emerges from my body

becomes my responsibility

the moment it is visible.

I dream all of the ways

I will clean up after fate.

Ottawa ON: I’ve been very impressed with the quality and attention of the literary and community work that Canthius journal has been doing over the past few years, whether in print, online (such as Manahil Bandukwala’s recent interview with Baseline Press editor/publisher Karen Schindler) or as part of one of their expansive multi-city launch parties. Managing editor/founder Claire Farley, with a recently-shifted assemblage of writers and editors in the editorial collective, have been working on their semi-annual “feminism and literary arts” journal long enough, now, to have released their seventh issue, featuring the work of Pearl Pirie, Sanna Wani, Jade Wallace, Terese Pierre, Kirby, M. Brett Gaffney, Annick MacAskill, Melanie Power, Kari Teicher, Sanchari Sur, Margaret Christakos, Émilie Kneifel, Karen Schindler, Jane Shi, Barâa Arar, Allie Duff, Natalia Orasani and Jesse Holth, as well as artwork by (and accompanying interview with) Rowan Red Sky. While I am familiar with more than half the names here, I am intrigued to be introduced to the luscious and powerful prose of Émilie Kneifel, such as the second half of the poem “Sharing Again,” that reads:

hanging silence, not even bye. you sit on his bed which holds in a breath. it collapses toward you; it tumbles him down. he of the drowsy hands, dulled-out reaching, pulls you to the peak of him. he clasps your head with the whole of his hand, your hair his veil, rumbling like a rock bed because you unleashed your old braids. he says i’m sorry like he always does like he always sleeps closest to the ground. which is its own kind of pattern. you nod, nod, nod. the dog tucks into the statue that still isn’t yours and you saddle your hand on him because he is just good. pungent as colour. your dad thumbs your steep face. arcs the crag of your nose. like a worry stone. says. “my pounpoun” (your oldest nickname. butchered french) “always so joyful on the outside, always so— thoughtful. on the inside.” he rustles your hair as your head accrues all the room’s static. “so many thoughts.” so he can see the roiling. “i wish i knew what they were” is what he mouths as you think it.

Part of the appeal of Canthius, apart from simply being a journal of some strong writing, is akin to what I mentioned in my notes on post ghost press: their continuing engagement with the work of emerging writers, and there are an enormous amount of writers from across Canada (and, occasionally, beyond) coming up that Canthius has been publishing and championing. The strength of Canthius comes from their ability to provide space for an array of literary voices, moving from the performance lyric to short bursts of prose to the boundaries of language poetry, holding their interest across a range of narratives and narrative lines, as Kari Teicher writes to open her poem “i told raw. –”:

he asks me for a story.

I can tell him anything, new or old

with Easter candy, we lie naked

feet-up, feet-down

and I tell him about the first grade

when Miss Moss sent me

to the principal,

made me show how I twisted

my shirt around, made my

tank top

into a

bra.

how to explain

Shania Twain is your idol.

Keep in mind, also, that this is one of the journals affected by Doug Ford’s government deciding to cut a section of funding to the Ontario Arts Council, which left Canthius without necessary funds to continue publishing, so I will suggest that, yes, you should totally subscribe.

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

[post ghost press]

See the first of my notes from our most recent fair here and the second of my notes from our most recent fair here and the third of my notes from our most recent fair here and the fourth of my notes from our most recent fair here. You don’t even know how much fair we have here. Can you believe the fair will be twenty-five years old this fall? And did you see I’ve already announced the date?

Ottawa ON: I’ve been enjoying the progression of Ottawa poet and editor (In/Words magazine and press, Canthius) Manahil Bandukwala’s poems over the past year or two, especially in what I’m seeing in her latest chapbook, Paper Doll (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2019). This is a collection of ten increasingly-precise poems on culture, language and identity—speaking to belonging, connection, conflict and disconnect)—through the small moments and meditations around family, travel and school. As she writes in the poem “I can’t shelve my race to study for a midterm”: “Always remember / animals are not for humans and your language / is not for you. Your tongue can’t bear the music.”

What better place

to shed my skin

than here? What better place

to reclaim skeleton

steam off white particles. This is where

we’re golden. Surviving bridges

while we bleed out

broken trails

for others to follow. These are my siblings

my aunties and uncles

sisters

looking for reclamation. They drip

on the patches I have left,

build upon the trail of others. (“II,” “Heat”)

[Canthius]

Toronto ON: I’ve also been quite taken with the long, lyric streams of Toronto poet and editor Khashayar Mohammadi’s latest, Dear Kestrel (Toronto ON: knife │fork│book, 2019), a collection of fourteen self-contained lyrics held together through a sequence of eight numbered “Dear Kestrel” poems, writing out a series of epistolary gestures: “lately / each affinity becomes love / moistens to lucidity / prosthetic / to the body / the comradery of stale breath” (“Dear Kestrel III”). Mohammadi’s poems are fluid, expansive and curious, embracing both gesture and meditation, and seeking out answers to a myriad of unanswerable questions. Or as a section of “Dear Kestrel IV” reads:

Dear Kestrel,

last night I saw a little girl

dragging a toy truck

tethered to her wrist

Was that a poem Kes?

Is this?

post ghost press: Deglane, Jordan + small poems for the masses

what’s left of the wild animals,

the rainforests, the savannahs,

will eat human corpse after corpse

until their descendants no longer

hear tales of the soft-skinned

two-legged monsters. (Wanda Deglane)

I’m pleased to see the emergence of another micro poetry press, especially in Ottawa, over the past few months, with publications appearing regularly by post ghost press, “a tiny publisher of microchapbooks and other strange projects, committed to publishing something new, weird, and lovable every month.” Three recent publications I’ve managed to get my hands on include the anthology zine small poems for the masses volume one (September 2018), things that will happen after the end of the world no one will be around to witness, a poem by Wanda Deglane (2018) and CALCIFICATION by Susannah Jordan (2018). I really like the updated 1990s cut and paste feel of these tiny zines, full-colour sheets of images with text literally cut and pasted in as strips. small poems for the masses volume one is the first volume (obviously) of a series of small anthologies focused on the small poem, and this current volume, at least, includes a single poem per poet, one to a page, with pieces by Alex Everette, Frances Boyle, Juliana Rupchan, Kristin LaFollette, Katy DeCoste and Erin Emily Ann Vance—but for Boyle and Vance, the contributors to all three of these publications are entirely unknown to me, and the lack of author biographies, a peeve I seem to forever hold, is less of an issue here (although it makes it far more difficult to provide links for authors, if I have no idea where they are situated, or anything about them). This is a press that appears to favour and focus on the emerging, and there is a good energy to these small publications, one that easily comes through every publication.

athena

when we drive the ravine rushes by

you sound lost feel lost are lost in

your red flannel your levis your doc martens

everything orange and blue blurry

and neat– something about fall feels

lost– and dirty– like a t-shirt shed in the

backseat of the volkswagen and never

taken inside to be washed like the coffee

cup you keep reusing without rinsing

because it’s just coffee without any milk (Katy DeCoste)

For anyone interested in their publications, they do have an extensive website, as well as an Etsy store, and will be tabling this June, for the first time, at the ottawa small press book fair.