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

[knife│fork│book’s infamous and brilliant Kirby]

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. There was so much fair this year!

Toronto ON: Published as part of knife│fork│book’s “What Queer Reading” imprint, edited by Fan Wu, is Prathna Lor’s remarkable 7, 2 (2019). A chapbook-length accumulation of lyric fragments, halts and hesitations, 7, 2 is composed with an incredible sense of sound, rhythm and pacing. Made up of two poems—an untitled opening sequence and “LOVE POEM”—Lor’s poems sequence and collage, written as ongoing meditation, mantra and yawp. As they write:

I drape your name over canvas and rock.

And tell the tides to go slow.

Locked in choreography a still burn.

Homunculus-lipped

Gnashed teeth

Tupperware,

            ozone.

                             Dizzying, it calls for warm tea

            and sculpted attitude.

According to their website (given the author biography at the back of the collection admits to nothing more than “Prathna Lor is a living poet.”), they are also the author of a previous chapbook, Ventriloquism (Future Tense Books, 2010), and Lor “is a poet and scholar who teaches and writes on race, sex, ethics, and poetics. Prathna is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and a 2019 graduate fellow at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies.” I really need to see more work from Prathna Lor. There is something incredible happening here.

I should have told you

                that which

when a woman

solids falling off the place

a would be better

in low light in low steel

I got dressed

and then the thought of being somewhat

“someone says”

dribble, cold butter

a misstep

and hierophany

divine me this

little shit

lateness is tragedy in miniature

try to think about removals

hurl the body against confidence

stepping out onto a street

the sound of lowering blinds

rest (n.) lying flat on the table

hard laundry

a coin purse

[natalie hanna, of battleaxe press]

Ottawa ON: Over the past few months, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis has been asking writers and publishers to challenge him, to see what he might come up with, and Marilyn Irwin, editor/publisher of shreeking violet press, challenged him to compose “cat poems” (unaware, or perhaps not, that he hates cats), a prompt that has resulted in his small chapbook Caterwaul: Nine Poems (shreeking violet press, 2019). A curious small chapbook, Dennis’ first-person narratives weave through stories of and around his disinterest in and hatred of cats, from the opening line of “Chinaski” (“I didn’t want another cat but I wanted the woman / who wanted the cat”), to the opening line of “Cat fight” (“I once broke up with a woman I loved  and blamed it on the cat”) to the opening poem, simply titled “Cats,” that reads:

I never met one I really liked

but over the years

circumstances and women

have forced them upon me

totally unreasonable assumptions

about mutual cohabitation

luckily I’m now married

to someone who loves cats

as much as I do

our catless home

just the way we like it

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

[Marilyn Irwin's shreeking violet 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.

Windsor/Toronto ON: I’m very taken—charmed, even—by the seventeen-poem sequence TEST CENTRE (Windsor ON: Zed Press, 2019), a chapbook by the collaborative MA│DE. As the author biography attests:

MA│DE is a collaborative gesture, a unity of two voices fused into a poetic third. It is the name given to the joint authorship of Toronto-based creators Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace, artists whose active solo practices differ quite radically from one another. MA│DE’s collaborative writing formalizes a process that began as an extended conversation between two people newly discovering one another. over a number of months, the pair messaged, texted, emailed, telephoned, conversed in person, left links on social media for the other to find, and mailed letters; their long, exploratory conversations opened up a language-space all their own.

With each poem, in the table of contents, named after a particular test—running from the Apgar Test and Bechdel Test to the Turning Test, Emergency Broadcast System and Rorschach Test—the poems in the body of the collection appear with number only, allowing for a smooth flow of sequence, even as an accumulation of self-contained pockets. As the third poem reads:

If coal is white / are some books black / words

cut with a knife / flow up a hill / as avalanches

do indeed descend mountains / and illiterate men

read romances for the Devens Literacy test

[Matthew Walsh]

Kingston ON: Anyone paying attention to Michael e. Casteels’ Puddles of Sky Press will be well aware of his occasional illiterature, a journal of small poems. The latest issue is “eight and a half” (June 2019), edited and beautifully hand-printed (hand-stamped) by Casteels in an edition of one hundred and twenty-two copies, it includes wee poems by Kemeny Babineau, David Alexander, Cameron Anstee, Justin Patrick, Angeline Schellenberg, Conor Barnes and Charlotte Jung. His publications are very graceful, understated and carefully put together. You should be paying attention.

A narrow bridge

in the middle of the nigt

fanged (Conor Barnes)

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

Hard to believe another fair has come and gone so quickly (and this fall will mark the fair’s twenty-fourth anniversary)! But it was a good one: here are a couple of the items I managed to pick up throughout the day.

[Chris Johnson at the Arc Poetry Magazine table, grimacing]

Ottawa ON: It’s good to see Marilyn Irwin continuing to produce items through her shreeking violet press, and her latest is the chapbook Eleven Elleve Alive : poems, “Original poems & translations by Stuart Ross & Dag T. Straumsvåg & Hugh Thomas,” and, at fifty-six pages, sits as her heftiest production yet. The publication stems from Thomas’ ongoing work translating poems from Swedish, a language he doesn’t understand, deliberately not looking up words, but taking what he sees and composing an English-language poem in response (for example, see his chapbook Six Swedish Poets from above/ground press, 2015). This chapbook, I suspect, came from an exchange between Thomas and Ross during a pre-fair reading, about Hugh wishing to translate some of Ross’ poems into English, and the results are quite striking. So the book itself contains twelve poems: an original poem by Stuart Ross, a translation of that poem into Nynorsk by poet and editor Dag T. Straumsvåg, and then Thomas’ “translation” of Straumsvåg’s translation back into English. For example:

Landscape

            after Larry Fagin

The bright green apple sails over the white fence.

The small running shoe lies in an overgrown field.

The man rappels down the side of a sidescraper.

The happy mice burrow through the rotting garbage.

The Latvian hairdresser leaps with joy.

Malarial flies float dead in the gutter.

A paperboy takes a bow.

Landscap

            etter Larry Fagin

Det Lysegrøne eplet seglar over det kvite gjerdet.

Den vesle joggeskoen ligg i ein overgrodd åker.

Mannen rappelerer ned sida a vein skyscraper.

Dei lykkelege musene grev seg gjennom den rotnande søpla.

Den latviske frisøren hopar av glede.

Malariafluger flyt døde i rennensteinen.

Ein avisgut bukkar.

Landscape

            Larry Fagin, otter

A green light shines over the planet.

A yoga studio starts to grow in the vacant lot.

A man remembers a disease and a skyscraper.

The happy muses bury themselves in the road map.

The freshly washed hairdresser flaps in the breeze.

Maria flies in the open window.

Both Ross and Thomas’ works have long been known for their engagements with surrealism and sense of play, so the interplay between the two is entertaining to see, especially with the added element of Dag T. Straumsvåg.

[Kate Siklosi at the Gap Riot Press table]

Ottawa ON: Cameron Anstee’s Apt.9 Press has been known for some time for producing lovely handmade books and, given he’s been producing less the past year or two, it was good to see a new item of his at the fair this year: Peterborough writer, publisher and artist Elisha May Rubacha’s chapbook, Too Much Nothing (2018). Rubacha, along with her partner, Justin Million, run readings in Peterborough, Ontario, as well as co-publish the small press, bird, buried press.

some smoked right up to the launch pad

there is no smoking in space

there is no smoking in the barn either

I’m impressed by the amount of activity Rubacha manages to contain within these small, deceptively straightforward poems, writing short observational musings on space, childhood and Roberta Bondar, and her poems close well before they end, leaving the rest of each piece to sit in the thoughts of the reader for some time after. These are poems that might be small in size, but contain multitudes, composed as quiet, thoughtful pieces I would like to see more of. I am hoping there might be more.

little girls

little girls bring their parents

to the opening of Dr. Bondar’s photography exhibit

she autographs their drawings

of rocket ships and planets

while their brothers wait impatiently to leave

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

Did you see my first set of notes here or even my second set of notes? I have been producing so many notes lately. What does it all even mean?

[Marilyn Irwin]

Hamilton/Ottawa ON: New from Marilyn Irwin’s shreeking violet press [see her recent “12 or 20 (small press) questions” interview here] comes Hamilton poet and critic Ryan Pratt’s chapbook, Rabbit months (June, 2016), produced in an edition of fifty copies. For his first chapbook-length publication, Rabbit months is a short collection of eight meditative, first-person lyrics that intrigue for their language, rhythm and density. Whether a first chapbook or otherwise, this is a worthy collection of poems, and am looking forward to seeing where his work ends up next.

Yarding

Two white-tailed deer climb

end days      escarpment confines.

New Year’s Eve

reddens your old house,

rehearses the snow mantra

I smoke in creek, repeat.

That summer to sprint on thank-yous:

classifieds classified, notching

carrots against natural reach

to lawyer parents, long distance,

when my first name

was Remember.

Migrate, darling

or risk starvation.

I sometimes visit, gather books

and music, wonder where you live.

But in the den      I hear no birds,

no false fascination.

Brews become revered

as spirits, emptying

the dew of another year

you’ve gone rabbiting.

[jwcurry]

Ottawa ON: From Amanda Earl’s AngelHousePress comes Ontario poet and publisher Kemeny Babineau’s latest, House of Many Words (2016), a poem set in ten acts. As the chapbook opens:

A narrator stands in the shadows. On a mounded earthen stage is a large arched doorway. Stretched across the doorway is a white sheet with altering shadow shapes upon it. Behind the sheet is the orange glow of a fire as well as other shifting shadowy figures. Music is played, at first loud, then soft, it could be Rachmaninoff.

Structured as a short play, Babineau’s poem-sequence explores the action of language, volume and inaction, composing a narrative in which quite a lot of nothing happens, and even more nothing is actually accomplished. Even for Babineau’s extensive list of publications, this is an odd work, and one that intrigues; after years of poems playing off surrealism, brevity, landscape and the narrative “I,” his foray into script is entirely curious. Might this be an entirely new direction, or a quirky one-off?

[Anstruther Press editor/publisher Jim Johnstone being awesome at the Carousel table]

Toronto ON: Further from Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Press comes Wax Lyrical (2015) by Klara Du Plessis, “a poet residing alternately in Montreal and Cape Town.” The narratives of Du Plessis’ pointed lyrics are akin to short essays, composed with a combination of looseness and striking density, some of which suggests far stronger work on the horizon. Part of the question becomes whether or not her poems require a stronger tension and tightness, or if she requires more comfort in the casual spaces, where she allows her lines a bit more air—in this, I would compare her work to early publications by Stephanie Bolster, who became a far stronger writer once her poems negotiated a stronger comfort between looseness and tight density. Already, Du Plessis’ boldness and fearlessness is apparent, as is the fact that her poems will soon be impossible to ignore. I would say that Klara Du Plessis is very much a poet to watch out for.

Feminists fuck like a real man

You’re always unfastening buttons you don’t need to.

It’s very manly.

You must admit that I’m good at bras.

So good at bras, it’s like I never wear them.