Once more, I offer my annual list of the
seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive,
imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian full-length poetry titles
I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. This is my fourteenth annual list [see also: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020,
2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] since dusie-maven
Susana Gardner originally suggested various dusie-esque poets write up their
own versions of same, and I thank her both for the ongoing opportunity, and her
original prompt.
Is my reviewing slowing down? It does feel this year,
and the prior also, have held fewer book-length reviews, perhaps as I focused
deeper into fiction and non-fiction (another collection of short stories, and
nearing the ends of two hefty non-fiction manuscripts—“the green notebook” and “the
genealogy book”—both of which I’ve been posting excerpts of for months now through my enormously clever substack). There has also been at least one
Canadian publisher that, frustratingly, seems to have dropped me from their
reviewers list (and another handful that don’t seem to respond to my queries)? I
think I’m a good enough reviewer, and the blog is receiving some 3,000-4,500
daily hits these days, so I’m not sure what the resistance is all about). Admittedly,
doing these annual round-ups I find helpful to realize just how much I’ve done,
as most of the year all I can see are the books I haven’t yet had opportunity
to even open, let alone review (so many I haven’t yet managed to get to; I do
try to at least consider reviewing every single book that passes my
direction). Either way, presuming my count is correct, I’ve posted at least one
hundred and thirty poetry book reviews across 2024, which is quite a lot (although
slightly less than in prior years; most at my blog, but further at periodicities:
a journal of poetry and poetics as well as through Chris Banks’ The
Woodlot), as well as a further fifteen reviews of other books, including
anthologies, essay collections and further prose works. I’m pleased I managed
to get a mound of chapbook reviews posted (nearly forty, by my count), as well
as some journal reviews. Is that all there is?
I wonder, occasionally, if I should be working similar
‘best of’ lists for chapbooks, or American full-length collections, or fiction,
or a geographically-unspecified list of full-length collections, but then I
remember that this list takes a full day or two to compile and post, so there
you go. And you know this list always includes a few stragglers from the year
prior, yes? I mean, I can only do so much during a calendar year. Beyond that,
I always mean for these lists to be shorter, but I couldn’t think of a list
without including every book on this list. Is there simply too much exciting
work being produced right now? Oh, and my On Beauty: stories (University
of Alberta Press) came out this year! You should pick up a copy!
1. Fawn Parker, Soft Inheritance: The author of
the fiction titles Set-Point (Winnipeg MB: ARP Books, 2019), Dumb-Show
(Arp Books, 2021), the Giller Prize-nominated What We Both Know: a novel
(Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2022), and the forthcoming auto-memoir Hi,
it’s me (McClelland & Stewart), the first full-length poetry title by
Fredericton writer Fawn Parker is Soft Inheritance (Windsor ON:
Palimpsest Press, 2023), published under Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Books
imprint. I’m intrigued by the back cover quote by Toronto writer Lynn Crosbie,
and there are echoes and influence in Parker’s approach to narrative content,
whether swagger or swipe, to Crosbie’s own fierce lyric: you can see it in
Parker’s first-person storytelling slant that refuses to be held, or held back;
occasionally reactive. “My husband says there is one place I can’t / do it and
I do it there,” Parker writes, to open “POEM AGAINST MY HUSBAND,” “I don’t
come, and I don’t want to / so instead I write couplets.” The poems lead with
swagger, but hold through precise measure, as Parker crafts sharp lines of
meditative, observational grace, composing short monologues across a lyric
surrounding grief, maternal loss, marriage, caretaking and how one even begins
to feel safe. As the same poem ends: “But for the love of things / I do
nothing. // My work needs me like an infant— / this is why we understand each
other.” See my full review here.
2. M.W. Jaeggle, Wrack Line: I’ve known his name for
a while now (through seeing copies of his three published chapbooks), so was
curious to see a copy of Wrack Line (Regina SK: University of Regina
Press, 2023), the full-length debut by Vancouver-born Buffalo, New York poet
M.W. Jaeggle. Wrack Line is a collection of carved lyrics exploring and
examining form, from prose blocks to sonnets to more open forms of the lyric.
Jaeggle works through first-person lyric narratives to articulate grief, loss
and distraction, writing out the distances and the distances between, as the
piece “POEM BY FRIDGE LIGHT” offers: “Here I am in the culvert where we found a
car’s die mirror. / Here I am in the fields of horsetails, / in the blackberry
with stained fingers. // Here, there’s no wristwatch on a nightstand, / just a
mind kidding around / someplace unaware it’s unawake. // If I look up at the
canopy now, the day’s / a shredded rag. If I close my eyes, / the light is
honeycombed.” There is an intriguing way that Jaeggle works through form through
an extensive reading list—examining and echoing form through the masters, as
one does—and the poems offer an array of literary models, from cited poets
Denise Levertov and Phyllis Webb to Paul Blackburn and Wang Wei, as well as
hints of poets such as John Newlove, perhaps. His lines are solid, offering
precise rhythms on memory and land, although it is the two-part opening prose
poem, “AUTUMN, ACCORDING TO CHILDHOOD,” where the lyric of his line really
shines, a sparkle and rush that rise above and beyond the precise specifics of
his line-breaks, as the first poem opens: “Your mother whispers your name,
draws your eyes away from the / loon threading water, tight stitch. Look, she
says. Look: there’s a deer / chewing dandelion, right here in the yard. Knees bending,
she slowly / breaks distance.” Either way, there are some stunning moments and
movements across Jaeggle’s Wrack Line; I am very curious to see where he
might go next. See my full review here.
3. Robert Coleman, Ghost Work: Poems: I’m intrigued
by Newmarket, Ontario poet Robert Coleman’s fourth full-length collection, Ghost
Work: Poems (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), “a suite of poems that
explores a son’s gradual loss of his father from dementia.” The loss of a
parent is one of those universal experiences, one poets have been articulating
and exploring for as long as poems have existed, and the first-person
narratives of Coleman’s latest collection around the slow erosion of his father
offers lines and phrases set with subtle force, a striking ease and the most delicate
care. “This walk is not ruined by absence— / loss comes easy to the cedars,” he
writes, to close the short poem “To Test an Absence,” “birch peel and its
sticky skin / that tests memory’s rule, what we hope / we can trust as we walk
above / on what seems like solid ground.” This is a book of ghosts, made more
difficult for the slow erosion of his father’s self throughout dementia
(comparable, in certain ways, to my own father’s slow physical erosion due to amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis). In the poem “Name,” Coleman writes on regularly calling his
father “father,” so as to remind him their relationship, a poem striking and
heart-wrenching for that simple and ongoing detail. “I run on as if words could
shape an anchor,” he writes, “shape a father unoccluded, riven of doubt.” And
yet, I find Coleman’s more compelling poems are the ones where he approaches
his subject at a bit of an angle, allowing the language to propel, over the
poems set to articulate a particular bit of information. “Tonight we char wild
boar,” he writes, as part of the six poem sequence “Lost on the Way to
Tortosa,” “aflame in tree boles. Yet here in the ash, / mockingly, new growth.
// This is the flicker he misses, the nonsense spark. / I hear him, an ocean
away, testing a tune.” See my full review here.
4. Chimwemwe Undi, Scientific Marvel: Poems: From 2023-24
Winnipeg poet laureate Chimwemwe Undi comes the impressive full-length poetry debut,
Scientific Marvel: Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2024), a sharp and
self-aware assemblage of prairie gestures, lyrics and examinations. “Good
practice is dissolving my beloved / into traits,” she writes, as part of the
opening poem, “PROPERTY 101,” “either useful / or distinct.” This is an
impressive collection, one comfortably powerful, without the awkward stretches
of so many other debuts; she knows full well what she is doing, without any
sense of showiness or hesitation, but a calm understanding of her own lyric,
her own strength. “Taking its title,” as the press release offers, “from a
beauty school in downtown Winnipeg that closed in 2017 after nearly 100 years
of operation,” the lyrics of Undi’s Scientific Marvel investigate and
interrogate the landscape of Winnipeg as city and cultural space, articulating
alternate perspectives on what had so long been assumed, presumed or simply
ignored. She writes a field guide of gestures, expectations, absolute delights
and utter losses. “every horizontal edge the city hesitates,” she writes, as
part of “FIELD GUIDE TO THE BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA,” “and they die in such
numbers / with such specifity that scientists / name it and watch unmoved [.]”
Undi tethers her lyrics to these local histories, that sense of Winnipeg space,
fully acknowledging the self-described lineages through lovely, performative
gestures, guttural markers and lines composed as direct offerings turned
sideways. “It is bigger than its targets,” the short poem “IN DEFENCE OF THE
WINNIPEG POEM” reads, in full, mid-way through the collection, “& still
small, & there is nothing to do // & so much to be done, & here //
at the centre of a bad invention, // it is, in fact, pretty cold.” See my full review here.
5. Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, Daffod*ls: I’ve been
increasingly interested in what American publisher Pamenar Press has been
producing lately (see my review of the Laynie Browne trio from last year, which
included a title they produced), and the latest I’ve seen is by Toronto-based
poet, writer and translator Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, the book-length suite Daffod*ls
(Pamenar Press, 2023). This is Mohammadi’s third full-length collection,
following Me, You, Then Snow (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021) and the dos-a-dos WJD conjoined with The
OceanDweller, by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi, trans. from the Farsi by Mohammadi
(Gordon Hill Press, 2022). Mohammadi is also the author of the recent and collaborative
G with Klara du Plessis (Palimpsest Press, 2023), and already has a
fifth full-length poetry collection, Book of Interruptions, scheduled
for fall 2025 with Wolsak and Wynn. Structured very different than his first
two collections, both of which suggest chapbook-length works conjoined into a
larger unit, Daffod*ls is composed as a book-length suite, moving and
flowing as a single unit of individual, accumulated lyric sections. The shift
is interesting to witness, and one many poets have done over the years (I think
back to Toronto poet Kevin Connolly’s infamous debut Asphalt Cigar, for
example), watching in real time as a poet’s attention expands beyond the chapbook
and into the collection. Set as an assemblage of slightly surreal first-person
observations, musings and commentaries, Daffod*ls is a book-length lyric
suite across more than a hundred pages of sweep and nuance, offering an
expansive gesture into history, time and language. There’s a heft here, one
that requires careful, repeated readings, even through what at times might
appear a kind of rush. Through the space of Daffod*ls, Mohammadi
utilizes the lyric form and space as a means of study, through which to explore
the collisions, contusions and conflicts that emerge through the eyes of a
narrator situated within and between two weighty world cultures. “I miss behind
firmly sat in the middle of a patch of dirt you / can claw into. Its finished.
skyscrapers no longer scrape the / sky. clouds have all moved out of our town.
I used to write / differently so speak to me NOW, through the noise my hand /
is piercing. you’ve got the right idea, sitting with coffee table / magazines
and tuned into classical music.” There’s something of the inconsistent
puncutations and capitalizations, and the asterisks, also, that provide a
particular kind of immediacy, propelling the lines across the page, offering an
urgency to these explorations, these declarations. See my full review here.
6. Rob Manery, As They Say: Vancouver poet and SOME
magazine editor and publisher Rob Manery is one of a handful of west coast
poets that seem to publish intermittently enough (comparable to Dorothy
Trujillo Lusk, Lissa Wolsak, Kathryn MacLeod and Aaron Vidaver; former
Vancouver poet Colin Smith, now in Winnipeg, is also worth mentioning), that
one might understandably lose track, one of many reasons why it is good to see
his second full-length collection As They Say (Chicago IL: Moira Books,
2023). There are those that might recall Manery as an Ottawa poet during the
late 1980s and into the early 1990s, collaborating with Louis Cabri as the
Experimental Writers Group and curating readings at Gallery 1010, later
publishing hole magazine and eventual chapbooks under hole books while
curating the N400 Reading Series at The Manx Pub until he left town for
Vancouver in 1996. There is such a wonderful heft to this collection, as though
everything Manery had worked on prior has been a kind of lead-up into this (the
Elegies poems appear near the end of the collection, as well). With
poems that stretch and sequence, Manery’s is a language-fueled lyric of small
movement across great distances, constructed as a kind of compressed
expansiveness. “I at least / yield,” he writes, as the penultimate poem in the
seven-fragment sequence “These Constant Moments,” “to inarticulate / distances
// if you depend / on these // unwelcome convictions / these constant //
moments / some borrow [.]” Manery’s poems hold such exact language and
thinking, crafted and crisp stretches, providing such a delightful array of
sound collision and jumble of meaning, providing the poems far greater than the
mere sums of their parts. “Please tell me a story,” he writes, as part of the
poem “If All My Woulds,” “just a little story, // hemmed-in between the Would /
and the Should, or the Must. It wasn’t / always like this? I count my / self
the same man whether / I want or have.” There’s a staccato to his short lines,
enough that he writes less across the page than straight down, providing a
language of craft and baffle, drawing vocabulary from multiple sources
(depending on the piece), from Sophocles, John Donne, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Louis Cabri, Catriona Strang, Bob Hogg, Ted Byrne and Dr. Robin Barrow, among
others. He utilizes collision and collage in such way to provide an effect of
the pointed sketch, quick lines that simultaneously offer meditative pause and
propulsive force. As he writes as part of the book’s acknowledgements: “The
Elegy poems draw almost all of their vocabulary from John Donne’s Elegies
(Signet Classic, edited by Marius Bewley). Each elegy in the series corresponds
to the same numbered elegy penned by Donne.” Built as a highly deliberate work
of meditative collage, As They Say is an assemblage of Kootenay School
of Writing-infused language poetry as thoughtful and purposeful as anything
I’ve seen. Rob Manery’s work has clearly been flying underneath the radar for
far too long. See my full review here.
7. Allie Duff, I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought: As the back
cover for St. John’s, Newfoundland poet, stand-up comedian and musician Allie
Duff’s full-length poetry debut, I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought
(Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) offers: “In I Dreamed I Was an
Afterthought, the poet leaves her childhood home of St. John’s,
Newfoundland to live in the country’s capital. Familial relationships,
complicated by chronic illnesses, are juxtaposed with looming disasters, both
actual and imagined, as the writer navigates her stubborn yearning to be ‘some
other kind of woman,’ and to ‘live fiercely’ against the odds.” Duff composes a
sequence of short narratives across the lyric, offering a portrait of home
caught in part through her time away, and Duff offers a distinct view. “High in
the red oaks / blackbirds dive and land,” she writes, to open the poem
“Constance Bay,” “scattering clouds of white moths. // Sentenced to hunt / each
moment and pin it down; / the past is mine, the past is mine, / and it’s
nobody’s, too.” She writes of spring flowers in the capital, but more often
than not, her gaze is east, glimpsing home in short threads on grandmothers and
kitchens, the hostility of weather and dreams of reaching out, and reaching
back. Duff holds to small spaces, small geographies, writing out short
narrative bursts less as scenes than moments that string together through the
collection across a far wider, and expansive, tapestry of landscape and being.
She speaks of the weather, of family; she speaks of boatloads, and sheep. She
writes of what intimately can’t be but anywhere else than in her corner of
Newfoundland. “Something alive under the snow / makes it shiver,” she writes,
to open “#DarkNL2014,” “like it’s asking not to be / shovelled, scraped, or
salted. // For a few days / we get a taste / of living in the dark.” See my full review here.
8. Nicholas Bradley, Before Combustion: I found myself
charmed by the heartfelt intimacies of Victoria, British Columbia poet Nicholas
Bradley’s second full-length collection, after Rain Shadow (Edmonton AB:
University of Alberta Press, 2018), his Before Combustion (Kentville NS:
Gaspereau Press, 2023). Before Combustion opens with a suite of poems
that focus on the new moments of parenting, of fatherhood, offering such clear
and quiet moments I haven’t seen prior around the subject, one I’ve also had
the experience of enjoying three different times, three different ways: “I am
the oldest / living thing // you know,” he writes, as part of “In the
Beginning,” “an unshaven // bristlecone / bent over // your bed.” While
there is an enormous amount of territory worth covering and recovering on
parenting generally, the subject matter of fatherhood is still one that emerges
with hesitation; a poem or two at most by any new fathers, perhaps, although
there are exceptions. Before Combustion is a collection sectioned into
quarters, with the opening cluster of poems focusing on that newness of life,
that newness of expansion, becoming and being. As the two-page poem “Waiting
Room” begins: “Your third night alive / I drove home // from the hospital /
to find sleep // and left you sleeping / those few hours. // In darkness,
having / forgotten // everything but food, / water, and how // to keep you fed,
clean, / and quiet, // I entered the house / a stranger // and failed to notice
/ the oak leaves // letting go.” In certain ways, the entire collection is
centred around that opening moment of new life, new fatherhood, echoing the way
one’s entire world compresses into a single, singular moment at the birth of
one’s first child, slowly rippling out a return to the world but with an
entirely new perspective, an entirely new lens. The poems of Bradley’s Before
Combusion begin with new life, but slowly do edge out into that return,
offering graeftul turns of phrase and line-breaks and short phrases, each of
which do provide a slowness, requiring deep attention, even through poems such
as “There Must Be 50 Ways of Looking / at Mountain Goats on the Internet,”
that begins: “Stoned, blindfolded, one /goat dangles above / a second, horns /
sheathed, four / ankles bound / and then four more, / rhyming quatrains.” In
certain ways, each section provides its own impulse, less leading up to
combustion than reacting to a change or changes so life-altering they seem akin
to an explosion. Or, as he writes to open the poem “Parable of the Drought”:
“Not the end of the world but the onset / of another.” See my full review here.
9. Chuqiao Yang, The Last to the Party: There are
long-awaited debuts, and then there are long-awaited debuts, such as
Chuqiao Yang’s The Last to the Party (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane
Editions/icehouse poetry, 2024). Yang writes of a prairie childhood, various
travel, family and family roots and youthful adventures, rebellions and
reconciliations, her lyrics offering a richness that is confident and subtle.
“Sometimes I float backwards,” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “The
Party,” “ten times / over the South Saskatchewan / until I’m only kite bones /
and promise: watch me, / a mawkish pre-teen pedalling / uphill, licked by rime,
/ peering into a neighbour’s window.” There’s a thread of wistfulness, and even
melancholy, that runs through these poems, as Yang articulates intimate
distances, drifts and attempts to connect or re-connect. She writes of a
closeness that never quite feels close enough, or is never meant to last, but
occasionally, unexpectedly, might or even does. Listen to the lines of the
wedding-poem “Epithalamium,” a poem that ends: “And while there may be // years
so full of sadness // you will be reluctant to trek // the dogged trail ahead,
// you will reach for each other’s // hand, feel the other’s pull, // and you
will be at ease.” She writes of a lifelong search for connection and belonging,
and of finally landing at a moment that allows itself that comfort. Her poem
“Friday,” a piece that immediately follows “Epithalamium,” includes: “Now, we
share the same space, and life is a wide, / paved driveway.” See my full review here.
10. Johanna Skibsrud, MEDIUM: The latest from Johanna
Skibsrud, a writer who “divides her time between Tucson, Arizona, and Cape
Breton, Nova Scotia” is the poetry collection MEDIUM (Toronto ON:
Book*hug Press, 2024), a collection that “shares the lives and perspectives of
women who – in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums – have
helped to shape the course of history.” The author of three previous
collections of poetry, three novels and three non-fiction titles, as she writes
to open her “PREFACE”: “This project began a decade ago, while I was pregnant
with my first child. I kept thinking during that time, and afterward—through
those first all-consuming years of parenthood, two miscarriages, and the birth
of my second child—about the ways in which women have served as mediums
throughout history, and of the ways they continue to serve. I thought of and
looked again for guidance from the powerful women whose bodies, minds, and
spirits have acted as conduits of knowledge and intuition; as points of
convergence for the past, present, and the future; as concrete points of
channeling and accessing a way forward—or sideways, or otherwise.” The poems
that make up MEDIUM are carved and constructed in a kind of layering,
providing different elements across a book-length project almost as a
polyphonic call-and-response. Skibsrub’s lyrics and asides offer a multitude of
voices, structures and perspectives, from Helen of Troy to Anne Boleyn, Marie
Curie to Roe vs. Wade, and Shakuntala Devi to Hypatia of Alexandria. The effect
is almost choral, offering threads on and around multiple figures vilified across
history, reclaiming the stories, purpose and legacies of an array of historical
women. “We don’t know either Julian of Norwich’s real name or / what her life
was like before she recorded her Revelations / of Divine Love—the
first known book to be written by a / woman in the English language,” Skibsrud
writes, “in the 14th century. Some / suspect she was a mother before
taking her vows, and that / during the plague years she may have lost one or
more chil- / dren.” Skibsrud writes akin to an anthology that leans into
theatrical script, as different characters, including the narrator, take their
turns in the spotlight. See my full review here.
11. Matt Rader, FINE: Poems: The latest from Kelowna,
British Columbia writer Matt Rader is FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions,
2024), a book of fire, climate and crisis, including deforestation, mining and
other increasingly-devastating resource-extractions. As his author biography
inside the collection reads, Rader is the “award-winning author of six volumes
of poetry, a collection of stories and a book of nonfiction,” the last title on
that list being Visual Inspection (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2019). Composed across twenty moments organized in four
cluster-sections (as well as a further poem, hidden as post-script, just after
the acknowledgments and author biography), the poems in FINE articulate
“a vision of the present from a deep future, charting the porous borderlands of
the self and the social through a year of cataclysm.” Across the poems of FINE,
Rader offers long, meditative stretches, almost as a single, meditative length,
through this year of catastrophe, offering a thoughtful, quiet and slow-moving
sketchwork of point-form, writing of visiting his brother’s farm, watching the
landscape hollowed out and the aftermath of a season of orange skies. As the
poem “Working on My Brother’s Farm in Errington, BC” writes: “When we read / a
silence / we change it. I can’t tell you / what it’s like / to be outside /
language / inside language. The tall grass / at the edge / of the field makes
shapes / in the breeze [.]” These are poems that exist from within a changing
landscape, and one that sits nervously on a precipice of complete
environmental, entirely man-made, collapse. Throughout, Rader offers lovely
sequences of sharp moments, turns and observations across a poem-suite of sharp
attention, deep concern and an abiding engagement with his landscape. Really,
it is just as much the pacing of his short lines and line-breaks that make
these poems as any other element, moving at exactly the correct speed as it
makes its way down the page. As well, the ‘hidden track’ poem-as-postscript,
“Lite Reading,” offers its own kind of conclusion to the collection, opening:
“What does a good future look like? / I asked the plum tree / as I steadied
myself / on the aluminum stepladder. In its bare branches / the tree held open
a few choice pages / of daylight to read. That’s what it asks here, I said /
but the plum knew that passage / from memory / being a natural, as it were, in
the literature / of water and heat.” See my full review here.
12. Sarah Burgoyne & Vi Khi Nao, Mechanophilia, Book 1: From
Montreal-based experimental poet Sarah Burgoyne & Iowa City-based
Vietnamese-born poet and multi-genre writer Vi Khi Nao comes the collaborative Mechanophilia,
Book 1 (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2023), produced through Stuart Ross’
imprint, A Feed Dog Book. I’ve been an admirer of Burgoyne’s work for some time, but hadn’t previously been aware of the
work of Vi Khi Nao (although I’ve caught more than a couple of interviews she’s
conducted, including this one with Sarah Burgoyne), the author of not only six
poetry collections, a short story collection and a novel, but a prior
collaborative work, the novella Funeral, with Daisuke Shen (Kernpunkt
Press, 2023). Mechanophilia, Book 1 is composed as the first of an
ongoing, potentially open-ended collaboration between the two, comparable to
the two volumes of the “Continuations” series, composed as well via email, by Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy.
It is interesting to get a sense of the crossing of vast, geographic distances
between these two writers, something articulated as well in a review of Nao’s
prior collaboration, almost as though she is working to either chase or bridge
a number of solitudes. Mechanophilia, Book 1 is composed as a
continuous, book-length piece across more than a hundred pages, following a
numbering system of lines that accumulate, following the numerical structure of
pi. A “collaborative epic,” as the press release offers, “by American poet Vi
Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne (who have never met) that follows the
omniscient conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they
attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet.” The
numerical system is reminiscent, slightly, of those grid-poems that Canadian
Modernist poet Wilfred Watson (1911-1998), a poet better known for being
married to legendary prose writer Sheila Watson (1909-1998) than for his own
work, spent his career focused upon. Through Burgoyne and Nao, there is the
suggestion of the call and response, threads that myriad and move beyond the
two distinct voices that mingle, weave and interweave, blending into each other
as a separate sequence of a combined single voice. Through these two,
references weave into and around each other, changing shape and texture as the
poem furthers. Part of what becomes interesting through such a project is not
only how such a project might progress across the further three volumes, but
how the individual works of these two might adapt as well. See my full review here.
13. Kim Trainor, A blueprint for survival: poems: Writing from
and through Delta, British Columbia and wildfire season while “charting a
long-distance relationship,” Kim Trainor’s fourth full-length collection is A
blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024), a
book-length poem around climate crisis, fires and long-distance love.
Furthering her examination of the book-length lyric suite, A blueprint for
survival seems comparable Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions,
2024) for their shared book-length British
Columbia perspectives around climate crisis and wildfires, but with added
layers of emotional urgency. As Trainor’s poem “Iridium,” set in the first
section, includes: “I can’t read anymore. / There is no clear way. I will
venture out along white tracks. Mark ink / on green-ruled numbered pages. Lay
down strips of black carbon. Scatter / signals of plutonium and nitrogen,
Tupperware, chicken bones, lead. / Absorb radionuclides. Take shelter. Mourn.
Make fire. Write poems. / Conserve. Despair. Decay.” There is a thickness to
her lyric, writing undergrowth and foliage, of trees and scientific names. A
few pages further into the first section, as the poem “Paper Birch” begins:
“These are notes for a poem I meant to write in August, but poetry / seemed
very far away then. The BC wildfires smudged the shoreline / of the
Saskatchewan—everything ash on the tongue, like cigarettes / or coffee dregs,
and the sun a smoked pink disc. / I had not seen you for weeks except by Skype
(I’ll strip for you, / you said, and you did) but now in flesh
meandering, / now talk, now silence, now climate change and / your research on
the Boreal.” There is something of the long poem combined with both the poetic
diary and book-length essay that Trainor offers in this collection,
articulating crisis and climate but expanding into an agency of archival
research and illustrations; she writes asides and footnotes and prose stretches
through a lyric framework in an impressive book-length package. This is a
highly ambitious and heartfelt collection, one that even provides echoes of the
detailed lyric researches of one such as Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris,
attending to the big idea through an accumulation of minute details. The scale
of this volume is incredible. I don’t know how to begin. See my full review here.
14. Ellen Chang-Richardson, Blood Belies: Oh, I am
absolutely delighting in the structures and shapes of Ottawa-based poet, editor
and collaborator Ellen Chang-Richardson’s full-length poetry debut, Blood
Belies (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2024), published through Paul
Vermeersch’s Buckrider Books imprint. Even the back cover copy provides a
liveliness, working to prepare any reader for the wealth of possibilities that
lay within: “In this arresting debut collection Ellen Chang-Richardson writes
of race, of injury and of belonging in stunning poems that fade in and out of
the page. History swirls through this collection like a summer storm, as they
bring their father’s, and their own, stories to light, writing against the
background of the institutional racism in Canada, the Chinese Exclusion Act,
the head tax and more. From Taiwan in the early 1990s to Oakville in the late
1990s, Toronto in the 2010s, Cambodia in the mid-1970s and Ottawa in the 2020s,
Blood Belies takes the reader through time, asking them what it means to
look the way we do? To carry scars? To persevere? To hope?” There is such a
wonderful polyvocality to this collection, a layering of time and tales told,
including asides, overlapping and faded, fading text; a multiplicity within a
singular frame, representing multiple ways, furrows and threads across this
collection. The poems offer quick turns, clipped lyrics and inventive speech,
writing heredity, silence and open space. Set through three sections, and a
poem on either end of the collection to bookend, Chang-Richardson plays with
space on the page through word placement, composed absence, swirls of text and
image, erasure and hesitation, providing a forceful book-length provocation of
slowness, storytelling, pulse and punctuation. “My brother and I sometimes
posit” they write, part-through the collection, “that maybe they named him Sing
in the hopes he would go through life / embodying a song – // past present and
future interactions make us question that line of thinking.” Chang-Richardson
writes of race, of family, of identity; of anti-Asian racism, and a history
that provides an intimacy around such facts as Canada’s Royal Commission on
Chinese and Japanese Immigration in 1902, and The Chinese Immigration Act of
1923, which prevented Chinese immigration into Canada until the Act was
repealed in 1947. Chang-Richardson offers a delicate and powerful lyric of such
strict, incredible precision, speaking only a single word or phrase or absence,
where others might have offered pages. Through memory, archive, gymnastic
language, erasure and an expansive, inventive sequence of forms,
Chang-Richardson offers insight into and through family history, trauma,
possibility and story, one that honours both past and the present, constructed
as a larger portrait of family, history and self, but as much a loving and
attentive outline of the author’s father. “I lost my wanderlust in tandem / to losing you --,”
Chang-Richardson writes, near the opening of the collection, “ – but we no
longer speak / of such things.” See my full review here.
15. Faith Arkorful, The Seventh Town of Ghosts: As part of
this year’s spring quartet of poetry titles from McClelland and Stewart is
Toronto poet Faith Arkorful’s eagerly-awaited full-length debut, The Seventh
Town of Ghosts (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2024), a book that
begins with her mother, and of origins. “i am going to tell you about yourself,
she says,” the poem “ORIGIN STORY,” which opens the collection, begins, “which
means she is going to tell me what she knows of / a beginning for herself.” The
poems in The Seventh Town of Ghosts are thick, tangible and evocative,
populated with family and familial connections; of familial spaces and cultural
apparatus. “I can only guarantee my breathing in the present.” she writes, as
part of the poem “WHAT ERA WOULD YOU TRAVEL TO IF YOU HAD A TIME / MACHINE?,”
“This life is my only / chance. What comes before glows in the dark.” These are
poems that seek, seek out and call out, responding and reacting in ways
thoughtful, and with considerable weight. “I have no answers,” she writes, as
part of the poem “LONG ISLAND MEDIUM,” “only small honesties. / The moon moves
around us and us around / the sun. Every breath a plant makes is an / act of
forgiveness. Winter is a chore and a / punishment. I know these truths.” A
clear and confident debut, The Seventh Town of Ghosts is a book of truth
and connection; a book of witness moving across the culture, amid the long
shadow of ongoing and perpetual police violence. “I tried to explain the story
and you said that if / the police don’t provide a reason for the stop then they
/ have done something illegal.” the poem “NO DIFFERENT” begins, “You are
telling me this means / I am allowed to walk away. I am trying to explain that
/ I have never seen a police officer struggle to find a reason. / You and I do
not share the same rules.” With a strong and optimistic heart at its core, this
is a book that works to speak openly, while attempting to reconcile such
differences, disturbances and brutal and blatant truths. Or, as the poem
“JUSTIN TRUDEAU DREAMS IN BLACKFACE” ends: “This / country belongs to me. This
body, all bodies. I am a kingdom of bodies. / Indeed, many will have to stand
throughout my performance.” See my full review here.
16. Bren Simmers, The Work: The latest poetry title
by Prince Edward Island-based poet Bren Simmers is The Work (Kentville
NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), following Night Gears (Hamilton ON: Wolsak
& Wynn, 2010), Hastings-Sunrise (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions,
2015), Pivot Point (Gaspereau Press, 2019) and If, When
(Gaspereau Press, 2021). The Work, as the back cover offers, engages
“with the work of love and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to
carry our portion of grief. Simmers writes of churning in an accumulation of
losses—the sudden death of her father, the descent of her mother into dementia,
her sister-in-law’s terminal illness—and of the work of slowly making wholeness
out of brokenness.” There is an enormous amount of churning, as the book
offers, through this collection, swirling and surrounding grief and illness and
the roiling turmoil of familial health, all of which carry their own
considerable and accumulative weight. “There comes a point / when the losses
stack / up and all you want is / a few good years and / cash in your wallet.”
Simmers writes, to open the poem “LOAD UPON LOAD,” the piece that opens the
first of the book’s five sections. Simmers’ usual clear narrative lyric
provides a tension through its very restraint and straightforwardness, writing
the implications of grief, and the regrets around what can no longer be said,
no longer be repeated, no longer be taken back. “The last night I was in an
airport I ran / from one empty terminal to the next / looking for a time zone
with my father / still in it.” she writes, to open the poem “ICE FISHING.”
Further, to close the short poem, offering: “I could feed a village with / my
grief. These days, / I don’t need a shelter or // an opening to talk to him. /
Simply stand on the ice, / let the wind scale / my cheeks.” See my full review here.
17. Hamish Ballantyne, Tomorrow is a Holiday: I’m intrigued
by the quartet of sequences that make up Vancouver poet Hamish Ballantyne’s
full-length poetry debut, Tomorrow is a Holiday (Vancouver BC: New Star
Books, 2024), a title that follows his chapbooks Imitation Crab (Toronto
ON: knife|fork|book, 2020) and Blue Knight (Durham NC: Auric Press,
2022). Composed across the sequences “Hansom,” “Luthier,” “A&Ws” and “ROCK
ROCK CORN ROCK,” Tomorrow is a Holiday is, as the back cover offers, “a
witness at the margins,” all of which provides a curious and amorphous shape to
that absent, outlined centre. “a letter from jimmy buffett to / benjamin
treating the form,” he writes, as part of the third sequence, “of appearance of
movement arrested / in the billboards advertising / billboard space: a whale
encounters / an enormous incarcerated krill in a submarine [.]” There’s a
lustre of the Kootenay School of Writing language-infused work poetry across
Ballantyne’s lyrics, one that acknowledges labour, even across the patina of
holiday, comparable to recent works by Vancouver poet Ivan Drury, Vancouver poet Rob Manery, Winnipeg poet Colin Smith,
Windsor-based poet Louis Cabri or Vancouver
poet Dorothy Trujillo Lusk. He speaks to the
things around those things that are also around those things, writing rings
around rings around that absent presence of centre. See my full review here.
18. Sylvia Legris, The Principle of Rapid Peering: Smart readers
know that a new poetry title by Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris is worth
noting, thus her latest, The Principle of Rapid Peering (New York NY:
New Directions, 2024), following prior collections Circuitry of Veins
(Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1996), Iridium Seeds (Turnstone Press,
1998), the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Nerve Squall (Toronto ON: Coach
House Books, 2005), Pneumatic Antiphonal (New Directions, 2013), The
Hideous Hidden (New Directions, 2016) and Garden Physic (New
Directions, 2021). There are few poets working this kind of tone and scale,
writing a particular intimate depth across both the expanse and distance,
although one might see Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley, a poet originally from
Saskatchewan, holding echoes (tendrils?) of Legris’ lyrics throughout her own. As
the online blurb for the collection offers: “The title of Sylvia Legris’
melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase
the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used
to describe the feeding behavior of certain birds. Rather than waiting
passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of ‘rapid
peering.’ Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray
of poems that together form a kind of almanac or naturalist’s notebook in
verse.” Presented, as well, as her Covid-era collection, Legris examines
specifics that pinpoint deep enough to bleed into an abstract, writing an
anxiety that works to ground itself, quite literally, into a comfort of foliage
and gardens; what emerges out of both the wild and cultivated earth. “Ring a
ring o’ roses.” she writes, as the second section of the twelve-part sequence
“Viscum Album,” “Broom root and mistletoe. / Ligneous chatterers. / Lungs halo
March.” Given such, the poems across The Principle of Rapid Peering situate
themselves across a Covid-specific timeline, neither forefront nor backdrop but
as a constant presence, with pieces such as “Forecast Issued 5:00 am CST /
Sunday 27 December 2020” and “Forecast Issued 6:00 am CST / Friday I January
2021.” The collection also hosts two Covid-quartets, equally titled “An Anatomy
in Four Seasons,” the first of which holds titles “The First Spring of Covid,”
“The First Summer,” “The First Fall” and “The First Winter” (one presumes you
can discern the titles from the second sequence easily enough, hopefully). The
garden, within its seasonal timelessness remains, but within the shadow of this
particular period. See my full review here.
19. Shō Yamagushiku, Shima: Another
full-length debut from this spring’s McClelland and Stewart poetry quartet is
Victoria, British Columbia-based Shō Yamagushiku’s book-length poem, Shima
(Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2024), a collection built as a
collage-text of memory, witness, family history and scrapbook, detailing, as
the press release offers, “the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that
exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community.” Opening
with the prose-set “Shima,” the book collages a quartet of
sections—“amerika-yuu,” “yamatu-yuu,” “uchinaa-yuu” and “yanbaru-yuu”—which
combine into a long poem comparable to a book such as the late Barry McKinnon’s
infamous I Wanted To Say Something (Prince George BC: New Caledonia
Writing Series, 1975; Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1990), which was
itself an essential long poem of leaving, collage, family history and
recollection. “Uncle,” Yamagushiku writes, “Forgive me for shining this light /
into your graveyard of an eye // Where are you?” And a few lines further: “You
are being vaulted into currency / carved of timber bones, this relic // that
you will become, you thought // you had a choice [.]” One might say that
Yamagushiku’s narratives stretch out into an abstract as well, offering
narrative concreteness across a far wider canvas. Even prior to the first
piece, Shima offers a definition of the title: “shima, n. 1. A village;
a community. / 2. One’s home village. 3. One’s fief. / 4. An island.” The
definition informs, but says little, with the history of this Japanese city
buried under the weight of what remains unsaid, but for through Yamagushiku’s
lyric. Paired with the opening quote by the late Etel Adnan, from her
collection Paris, When It’s Naked (The Post-Apollo Press, 1993)—“An
ancestral forest within me stirs my / memory and makes life
untenable.”—Yamagushiku frames a collection named for this ancestral city,
writing around exile, utilizing family/archival photographs and the endless
strands of history. “a vastness // disappears // abandons me,” he writes, early
on in the collection, “to a cloudless night // all the stars // turn sleep’s
path // away from me [.]” See my full review here.
20. Concetta Principe, DISORDER: The latest from
Peterborough-based “award-winning poet, and writer of creative-non fiction,
short fiction, as well as scholarship that focuses on trauma literature”
Concetta Principe is the poetry collection, DISORDER (Guelph ON: Gordon
Hill Press, 2024), following her collections Interference (Toronto ON:
Guernica Editions, 1999) and This Real (St Johns NL: Pedlar Press,
2017). DISORDER is composed with a focus on neurodiversity, the focus of
which is quite unique, and an important one; working meditative stretches while
attending an open conversation aimed toward dismantling stigma. Composing her DISORDER,
Principe offers poems not as the opposite of “order,” but through a structure
requiring its own attention, composing crafted lyrics on what isn’t a problem
to be solved but a difference of perspective. “Just so you know knots / are the
pyrotechnics of appetite // repressant;,” she writes, to open the poem “ICING
ON THE CAKE,” “a kink in the intestine / of this birthday cake // wrapped in
frosted lake; [.]” Principe utilizes the lyric as a sequence of narrative
threads that work to examine, unpack and document the way she thinks and moves
through the world, and there are echoes in her meditations that remind of works
by Pearl Pirie, or Phil Hall, attempting to discern how the world works (or
doesn’t work) through language (including a stellar cluster of prose poems). See my full review here.
21. Margaret Christakos, That Audible Slippage: I’m always
amazed at the wealth of contemporary Canadian writing and poetic thought
available in print, providing an array of Canadian poets working on a whole
other level. To illustrate the point, my deeply-incomplete list of those
better-than-best would include poets such as Sylvia Legris, Stephen Collis, Sandra Ridley, Jordan Abel,
Erín Moure, Gil McElroy, Phil Hall, Anne Carson,
Dionne Brand, Canisia Lubrin, Lisa
Roberston and a multitude of so many
others, all of whom are doing work that are difficult to compare, although
echoes, patters and patterns of influence and conversations can’t help but reveal
themselves, naturally. Another of those Canadian poets long working at a far
higher level than the rest of us is Toronto poet Margaret Christakos, author of
the recently-released collection That Audible Slippage (Edmonton AB:
University of Alberta Press, 2024). I’ve mentioned before my admiration for Christakos’
ability to simultaneously establish something self-contained through work that speaks
and relates to her other published works. Within that particular trajectory,
the original composition of That Audible Slippage roughly holds to a loose
temporal boundary from her time as writer-in-residence at the University of
Alberta in Edmonton in 2017-18, and there’s something about self-contained
“residency” poetry titles I’ve always found intriguing, providing a space and
time for a different kind of self-contained work. Through this, That Audible
Slippage can be said to follow a string of other poetry titles
compositionally specific to poet-in-residence positions, whether Moure hetronym
“Eirin Moure” composing Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Toronto ON: Anansi,
2001) out of a University of Toronto residency, George Bowering’s The
Concrete Island: Montreal Poems 1967-71 (Montreal QC: Vehicule Press, 1977)
out of a Sir George Williams residency, or even my own University of Alberta
writer-in-residence collection, wild horses (University of Alberta
Press, 2010). Spaces such as these are very different than the focused time of,
say, two or even six weeks at The Banff Centre or three months at Al Purdy’s
A-Frame or The Burton House Writer’s Residency, offering the ability to move
beyond one’s day-to-day context across an extended period, all of which can’t
help but provide a different kind of attention, focus and perspective. If we,
as writers, are so changed, even if through context, wouldn’t the writing be so
as well? See my full review here.
22. Dawn Macdonald, Northerny: From Whitehorse, Yukon
poet Dawn Macdonald comes the full-length debut Northerny (University of
Alberta Press, 2024), a collection set in and responding to her particular
landscape, place and experience of what the rest of us in the lower parts of
Canada refer to as the north. “Fireweed is edible and best before / the bloom.”
she writes, as part of the poem “ROADSIDE WILDFLOWERS OF THE NORTHWEST,”
“Pigweed, a sort of spinach. / Kinnikinnick, we called it / honeysuckle.
There’s something else called / honeysuckle. We’d call it what / we want.” As
she highlit during her launch a few weeks prior, the poems here refuse the easy
depictions and descriptions, and even work to correct outside narratives on and
around a place she knows intimately, but I would suggest she offers these
elements not as foreground but as an underlay, beneath her depictions and
observations, writing her own line across such intimate backdrop. “growth is
its own / value proposition.” she writes, as part of the poem “INCREASE,”
“love’s supposed / to be automatic / like transmission.” Macdonald’s poems
flash light, offering intrigues of clarity, depth of lyric intrigue across
narratives that depict and document a particular kind of angled roughness and
wilderness. “One day the wind will have my heart, I guess,” she writes, as part
of the poem “WALKING THE LONG LOOP,” “flash fried and let fly from the jar of
ash, / assuming such litter is permitted, and you’re there / to flip that lid.
/ I could do worse than to lodge, / even the barest bonescrap, atop / a nodule
of pine. Anything / with sap in it, a line / to the nearest star.”Playing off
Emily Dickinson, her opening poem, “FIRST THINGS,” hold to the small moments of
chickens and broken eggs, writing: “Riddle wrapped up inside, / cased, laid,
brooded, clucked upon, clean // as a whistle. An egg’s / a thing / with
features, but, order / of operations applies – a flashlight shone clean /
through the inside / illuminates outline, diagram, edges blown: [.]” See my full review here.
23. Simina Banu, I Will Get Up Off Of: The second
full-length collection by Montreal poet Simina Banu, following POP
(Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020), is I
Will Get Up Off Of (Coach House Books, 2024), a book-length suite akin to a
deck of cards, working through layers of depression, regression and response.
As the back cover writes: “How does anyone leave a chair? There are so many
muscles involved – so many tarot cards, coats, meds, McNuggets, and memes. In
this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates
her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from
social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually,
the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts
at expression become more and more desperate.” From the cluster of lyric
explorations of her full-length debut, Banu shifts into a structure of prose
lyrics that cohere into a book-length structure, the first page of which opens
with a single fragment—“I will get up off of”—before the following page
furthers that thought, leaving the space where the prior page, that prior
phrase, had left off. Composed in a sequence of prose blocks, there is
something less of the prose poem to this stretch of pieces than a poetry
book’s-worth of prose extensions across the lyric sentence, each broken up into
blocks, each returning to that same Groundhog Day moment. “this monobloc
but Goya’s dog drowned in mud.” she writes, a few pages in. “It’s true the dog
gazed upward, but she was looking at mud, and guess what, the mud wasn’t
looking at her. If we want to be accurate, she was looking at oil, she was oil,
and everyone was plastered. Me too, over and over and over: the oil fills my
stomach, and the mud fills me.” There is something compelling in how Banu rhythmically
returns each lyric opening to “this monobloc,” offering book title as the
presumed opening phrase of each poem, perpetually returning to the beginning,
to begin again, offering a tethered and unsettlingly stressed variation on
Robert Kroetsch’s structure of composing the long poem; by continually
returning to the beginning, one can keep going indefinitely, after all. And
yet, Banu’s seemingly-unbreakable narrative tether is entirely the crux of the
problem her narrator wishes to address, reducing the complexities of depression
and anxiety down to the simplest, and deceptively so, of questions, asking: How
does one get up from a chair? See my full review here.
24. Domenica Martinello, Good Want: The second
full-length poetry title by Montreal poet Domenica Martinello, following All
Day I Dream About Sirens (Coach House Books, 2019), is Good Want
(Coach House Books, 2024), a collection that immediately opens with quotations
by American poet Mary Ruefle and New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird, with a
further reference within to American poet Dorothea Lasky, all of whom are well
known for working variations on Martinello’s similar engagements with a
first-person lyric tautness of swagger and pop culture confidence. “Inside my
body was a strawberry / stain. Sturdy and sweet,” Martinello writes, to open
“SOLSTICE,” “then suddenly / squelched. I choked out everything // that one
populated my life. / Summer had no curfew. Flowers died, / public pools dried
up and were used // differently.” There’s an echo of Toronto poet Lynn
Crosbie’s work here as well, although Martinello’s poems appear to aim for more
compact and even straightforward lyric sentences across such potential
emotional or narrative messiness. The structures of these poems are bone-tight,
even within the bounds of such expressive narrative gestures. “Snapshot: gold
ring in the mud underneath the old deck. // The house sold,” she writes, to
open the poem “BAD EYE,” “their tall blond children fled. I once coveted // a
ring from one of them, muscular and goofy, all smile, no bite. // He swallowed
my contact lenses in a glass on the nightstand, // fell in love as I pegged him
on his childhood bed.” Martinello’s poems in Good Want offer an oratory,
a lyric less of performance than as preached from only slightly above, writing
her sharp strikes, crafted lines and disorienting wisdoms clear-eyed and
gestural; hers is a craft that is obvious, of carved and burnished steel. See my full review here.
25. Ben Robinson, The Book of Benjamin: From
Hamilton poet Ben Robinson comes the full-length The Book of Benjamin
(Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2023), a project that alternates between an
ongoing block text on the left side and short, observational moments that
accumulate across the length and breadth of the book on the right. “MARRIED ON
JUNE 29, 2015,” the block text writes, early on in the collection, “EARL AND
MICHAEL BENJAMIN-ROBINSON WERE THE FIRST SAME SEX COUPLE TO LEGALLY MARRY IN
THE STATE, STARTED THE FIRST BLACK GAY PRIDE CELEBRATION IN MISSISSIPPI IN 2004
AND OPENED ITS FIRST LGBT RESOURCE CENTER. THEIR WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER, BENJAMIN
ROBINSON, A PHOTOGRAPHER OF 15 YEARS, PLAYED A MAJOR PART IN GETTING THEM IN TO
THE COMPETITION, PAUL SAID.” The simultenaety of these paired texts is
reminiscent of the structure of the second trade collection by poet Darren
Wershler (formerly Wershler-Henry), the tapeworm foundry, or the dangerous
prevalence of imagination (Anansi, 2000), a book that ran a simultaneous
and ongoing text across the length and breadth of the book along the bottom of
each page, akin to a news ticker, providing an alternate to the book’s main
action. Through The Book of Benjamin, Robinson’s two texts exist in
tandem, akin to DNA strands wrapping into and around each other, with a further
level of alternating subject, as the text on the right side moves from presumed
biographical details and observations by the author around his own life and
alternate Benjamins he has encountered along the way, to the Biblical Benjamin,
out of Genesis; youngest of Jacob’s twelve sons, and brother of Joseph. “At
work, I overhear an adult ask a child what her new sibling’s name is. The child
freezes, just stands there until her mother jumps in to clarify that the
newborn doesn’t have a name yet, but they are considering a few. One is Nora.
// Later that afternoon, another customer comes in and one of my coworkers asks
what their last name is. The customer stares at my coworker for a moment before
replying, ‘Don’t have one’ and walking away. // Later still, a customer comes
in whose last name is nobody.” The narrative of The Book of Benjamin
unfolds (as overused as that word is, the descriptor is apt), slowly and
surely, across an enormous distance through the most intimate of details. He
writes of naming, as the back cover offers: “Like an obsessive baby name book
with only one entry, The Book of Benjamin establishes links between
identity, birth, and grief. Braiding the story of his stillborn sister with the
Biblical account of Benjamin to explore how names and their etymologies might
shape our self-understanding, Ben Robinson resists the individual focus of the
memoir, while investigating new forms of masculinity.” The weaving of his late
sister, braided through the narrative of the collection, acknowledges both a
grief and his sister herself, little more left than than that memory, the grief
and the fact of her name. Through The Book of Benjamin, the weaving of
name and self ripples out into elements of family, from his parents and
siblings, to him becoming a father himself, which can’t help but evolve into a
conversation, and a book, for, about and through his lost sister. In many ways,
The Book of Benjamin is less a book about the author and his name than a
book that allows her, the late Emily Robinson, to be acknowledged, and
discussed openly, and the rippling effects of both her and that unfathomable
loss. See my full review here.
26. Tia McLennan, Familiar Monsters of the Flood: I was curious
to see the full-length poetry debut by Pender Harbour, British Columbia-based
poet Tia McLennan, Familiar Monsters of the Flood (St. John’s NL: Riddle
Fence Publishing, 2024), part of a trio of poetry debuts produced through St.
John’s, Newfoundland literary journal Riddle Fence, as it slowly moves
to branch out into book publishing. Familiar Monsters of the Flood is a
collection composed of small lyric scenes across a tapestry of family moments,
writing a dream-scape around the loss of her father (my immediate namesake,
incidentally). “To think of leaving / as if it were a train station / to move
through and we are / always late.” she writes, as part of the poem “Late Letter
to Dad.” The narratives of her poems are shaped, often shaved down to a single
thought, a single thought-line, such as the short poem “Hungry,” as the first
half of such reads: “Driving around the gravel bend / in Dream Valley and
catching / a slim coyote gliding down / the middle of the road toward / me. I
slowed, hoping to get a closer / look at something wild.” The poems are
contained as small moments or scenes, held together across a soft cadence of
sentences and line-breaks. There is an unease through these poems, one
intertwined with memory, loss and grief, all of which are rendered in relation
to that dream-scape, whether aside or from deep within. “I have updated your
address / and added your darkest thoughts to the file.” she writes, to open the
poem “Now You Have Full Access,” “You must fill out the forms / using only spit
and moonlight. // If you forget your password, / press your face to the earth
in springtime.” See my full review here.
28. Michael Goodfellow, Folklore of Lunenburg County: The second
full-length poetry title by Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia poet Michael
Goodfellow, following Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems
(Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022), is Folklore of Lunenburg County
(Gaspereau Press, 2024). Goodfellow’s latest collection riffs off the volume Folklore
of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia (Ottawa ON: E. Cloutier, King’s Printer,
1950) by Dartmouth, Nova Scotia folklorist Helen Creighton (1899–1989), the
spirit of that particular collection utilized as a prompt for Goodfellow’s
explorations on landscape, folklore and storytelling through the form of the
narrative, first-person lyric. According to one online biography for Creighton:
“She collected 4,000 traditional songs, stories, and myths in a career that
spanned several decades and published many books and articles on Nova Scotia
folk songs and folklore.” “A haunting was a dream you had with your eyes open,”
Goodfellow writes, as part of “OTHERS SAID DISAPPEARANCE / WAS RINGED LIKE A
TRUNK,” “just as the sky was paved with the light of stones. / The forest was a
wall that painted itself. / The forest was a door that didn’t close.” As the
back cover of Goodfellow’s collection offers, his poems “are rooted in the
ethnogeography of Helen Creighton and the otherworldly stories of supernatural
encounters that she collected on the south shore of Nova Scotia in the
mid-twentieth century. For Goodfellow, these accounts evoke much more than
quaint records of a primitive time and place.” Part of the strength of
Goodfellow’s lyrics is his ability to offer such precise physicality, composing
poems hewn, and hand-crafted with a hint of wistful, folkloric fancy in
otherwise pragmatic offerings. “The light how stars are brighter / when you
don’t stare at them,” he writes, to open “WINTER LEGEND,” “how a fall day could
feel like spring, / how a dog won’t look at you when it’s frightened, // how
ash is the last to leaf, / how on certain nights / it was said that animals
could speak, // how we named the stars other things. / How often their names
were animals.” There is something intriguing about how Goodfellow utilizes the
suggestion of outside sources for his framing, from the “bibliography” of his
full-length debut to now taking Helen Creighton’s work as a prompt through
which to respond in his own way to what he sees, as though seeking an outside
lens from which to jump off of, to begin to explore, in his own way, the landscape,
stories and people of his home county and province. Through Creighton,
Goodfellow responds to both the stories themselves and the collection of those
stories. “The stories collected were fragmentary,” he writes, to open the prose
poem “MOTIFS,” “not even stories / in some cases, just a line or two about what
they had seen.” See my full review here.
29. Britta Badour, Wires That Sputter: Poems: I’m only just
now going through Wires That Sputter: Poems (Toronto ON: McClelland and
Stewart, 2023), the full-length debut by the award-winning Toronto-based
artist, public speaker and poet Britta Badour (a performer otherwise known as
Britta B.). I get books in the mail nearly every day, and it took nearly a year
to realize that McClelland and Stewart hadn’t actually sent along the spring
2023 list (which is why I’m so late), so this title only landed quite recently.
There is such a wonderful sense of performative expansiveness to these pieces,
poems composed through a blend of pattern, rhythm, confident gesture and deep
sense of the personal. She writes with a sense of loss and of heart; an
open-hearted intimacy, whether writing on family, politics or culture. “In May,
if asked,” she writes, as part of “: If His Mama :,” “I
would’ve said you’ll either have hurricanes / or become one.” These poems are
performative, declarative and substantive, offering a deep sense of
storytelling and rhythm, as well as a deep moral foundation, one that holds
through and despite all as an anchor against any storm. “here we are
bewildering,” she writes, as part of “: Letters to Miranda :,”
“our single mothers’ make-believe, we sisters / here we are dancing to Boys II
Men / here were are maybe four and six and Miranda is leaving / I repeat the
alphabet for twenty years [.]” See my full review here.
30. R Kolewe, A Net of Momentary Sapphire: The latest
from Toronto poet R Kolewe is A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC:
Talonbooks, 2023), a collection that “offers three closely related poetic
sequences, random rearrangements of a poignant but obsessively recurrent source
text – streams of consciousness in which no stable self can be elucidated.”
There aren’t that many Canadian poets these days overtly working in the
tradition of the long poem – Vancouver poets Stephen Collis and Renée Sarojini Saklikar, certainly – and Kolewe has been
feeling out the boundaries of formal innovation across the long poem form for
some time now, from his Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014), Inspecting
Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017) and The Absence of Zero (Bookhug Press,
2021), as well as through a handful of chapbooks. There are even fewer Canadian
poets working so deeply and through such lengthy works via the
recombinant—although works by Grant Wilkins, Gregory Betts, Margaret Christakos
and Sonnet L’Abbé certainly come to mind. Across three numbered parts, three
separate sequences—“PART ONE: The foretaste of a vision, but never the vision
itself,” “PART TWO: Like the noises alive people wear” (part of which landed
previously as an above/ground press chapbook) and “PART THREE: Beginning again
& again is a natural thing even when there is a series”—Kolewe extends a
sequence of collage-thoughts, writing a moment, another moment and a further
moment in a lengthy, continuous string of gestures. “I can’t write what I
really cant. / Remember leave things out I am like bees,” he writes, in the
fifth part of the one hundred and twenty numbered sections of the second
sequence, “That’s the real thing is what I said I said. // Ah, but then we
would be come more than / modern, & death / always so contemporary.” See
my full review here.
31. Tonya Lailey, Farm: Lot 23: “I’m prone to
forgetting,” Calgary-based poet Tonya Lailey writes to close the opening poem,
“Farms and Poems,” of her full-length debut, Farm: Lot 23
(Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), “the purpose / of a farm / of a poem /
has always been / the living in it.” According to her author biography on the
back of the collection, Lailey “spent her childhood on a farm in
Niagara-on-the-Lake. She started a winery there in 2000 with her family and
winemaker Derek Barnet. Certified as a sommelier, she worked in the wine trade
until 2020.” The length and breadth of the poems within Farm: Lot 23
explore and examine her relationship with that plot of family land, from the
days of her grandfather and a history of that particular corner of Ontario to
her own experiences growing up and eventually working within those particular
boundaries. “I think about the new reaches of peaches,” she writes, to close
the poem “Peaches,” “the cultivars we’ve bred and breed for travel. /
And that year, after the war supports ended, // when my grandfather still
farmed peaches / and Wentworth Canners closed, unable to compete / with
plantation agriculture to the south, // all around the township peaches ripened
/ then rotted in piles.” She writes poems from the Niagara Peninsula—wine
country, for those unaware—managing the music and rhythms of daily activity on
a working farm, offering these as both documentary and as a way to speak to the
human elements of familial life, such as the poem “The Give in Inches,” as she
offers: “My parents sum / up the farm in twenty acres; the survey says /
eighteen-point-five. They never do agree // on boundaries.” These are sharp
poems, composed with enormous thought and care, composed as both portrait and a
love letter to an eroding space. “On the other side / of the property line,”
she writes, to open “Acre,” “the riverbank / the river, / chestnut, basswood, black walnut / American elm, black willow / bitternut hickory, blue beech, butternut / blue ash, sassafras—with its
leaf asymmetry. // Nothing / in a /
row.” Across opening poem and four sections—“CONCESSIONS,” “LINES,” “END POSTS”
and “FARM PHOTO”—Lailey offers such a soft and subtle music articulating a
working farm from the inside, not merely as reminiscence but contemporary,
working and lived-in space. There’s a thickness, a density, to her detail, one
that embraces the lyric but carves the lines so precisely to hold all that is
required, but without sacrificing her music. She writes a precision to her
lushness, on seasonal crops of cherries, peaches, pears and plums. “Away,” she
writes, as part of “Out to the Farm in July,” “from the stewed lap / of
the shore / and the scents in banks / of raspberries / spicebushes / fringed
bromes / hop sedges / bonesets / running strawberries [.]” See my full review here.
32. jaz papadopoulos, I feel that way too: The
full-length poetry debut by Lambda Literary Fellow, “interdisciplinary writer,
educator and video artist” jaz papadopoulos is I feel that way too
(Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024), a collection of poems that, as Amber
Dawn offers as a back cover blurb, “flay[s] rape culture open in ways that
discourse cannot.” Across four sequence-sections—“The Rules,” “History of
Media,” “I Feel That Way Too” and “Epilogue”— papadopoulos articulates a study
of and around sexual violence via lyric narrative, composing a contemporary
conversation of depictions, dismissals, agency and ongoing trauma through
erasure, repetition, specific examples and cultural markers. “A beautiful man /
asks if I would read him a poem.” papadopoulos writes, as part of the extended
title sequence, “I open / whatever I’d last written: hyssop help me, hyssop
health me // hyssop help me now. Flowers pressed / over the Ghomeshi
trial, its inescapability.” I feel that way too offers an explosion of lyric
exposition that bursts out of a conversation long repressed, until it has no
choice but explode, and hopefully part of a larger, longer trajectory of
cultural shift. The language papadopoulos utilizes is thick and rich with
gymnastic, rhythmic density, including further in the title poem-sequence, as
they write: “Bloated raspberry. Overfilled / red balloon fishnets bulging plump
/ diamond rubies. The cochineal / is a parasitic scale insect that lives on
cacti in North and South America / looking like Jessica Rabbit’s lips /
procreated with a cob of corn and the offspring / came out kernelled, in
scarlet / rows, swelling at the seams.” This is a book about harm and
solutions, and about how both are portrayed, mangled, represetend and
misrepresented, writing out a string of savage truths and circumstances, and
the possibility and impossibly, the very limitations, of language, thought and
action. Or, as they write as part of the title sequence: “It is so very /
frustrating / when none / of the words work.” See my full review here.
33. Clare Goulet, Graphis scripta / writing lichen: I’m
fascinated by Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia poet Clare Goulet’s full-length
poetry debut, Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Kentville NS: Gaspereau
Press, 2024), a collection of poems approaching language as the means through
which to articulate a detailed study. “So pretty it shocks: pink smarties /
shaken out of the box,” she writes, to open the poem “Icmadophilia
ericetorum / candy,” “picked on a whim / for the green-room rider, pleasure
spreading / its plush blue blanket every which way / over moss.” There is a
curious way that Goulet’s language propels, composed as field guide, scripting
a detail through language that suggests hers is a somewhat slippery subject
matter: is this a collection around the collection and study of lichen, or a
means through which to discuss something else entirely? Possibly both,
honestly. Goulet’s poems provide a kind of layering, of waves and sweeps,
writing around and through the subject of lichen, multifaceted enough to ply
meaning upon meaning. “Lichen as armour is truth inverted: / a bullet-hole
flowers,” she writes, as part of “Parmelia sulcata / hammered shield,”
“cancer / takes root, a wound is blessé.” There is something comparable,
obviously, to Goulet’s explorations through the minutae of plants, language and
Latin to the work of Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris, although Goulet seems to offer her explorations not as an end but
as a means through it, such as the poem “Zaubreyus supralittoralis /
dreaming,” that offers: “I have not been honest, not told you / years
collecting lichen made a river of forgetting / which meant not thinking / about
him.” Akin to Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” or Monty Reid’s The
Alternate Guide (Red Deer AB: Red Deer Press, 1985), the poems emerge out
of the prompt of the original study of lichen, but instead wrap that research
around other considerations, other functions, across the length and breadth of
her lyric. She writes of the Greeks, intelligence reports, Shirley Jackson, Mae
West, Plato, Mad Men, cartoon gestures and other touchstones, utilizing
her research as both core and writing prompt, offering a solid line of meaning
thick with context. See my full review here.
34. Chris Turnbull, cipher: The latest by
Kemptville, Ontario poet and curator Chris Turnbull is cipher (Toronto
ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), a book of listening and attention; of being
present, and outdoors. Set as a triptych of suites—“candid,” “contrite” and
“ciper”—Turnbull extends her note-taking across a slowness, writing moments and
local through a book of ecological space. “in now, when, then –,” she writes,
as part of the first section, “compression – generated – / for this /
instant-on-instant, [.]” Compression is a perfect word to describe Turnbull’s poem-structures,
a kind of book-length accumulation of note-taking that exists amid the tensions
of compression and expansion. Across the length and breadth of the book as
compositional space, Turnbull composes short bursts of lyric that stretch out
across a wide canvas, compelling and attending an ecopoetic of minutae and
magnitude. “littoral zone – hundreds / list,” she writes, as part of the first
section, “founder – dark reshaping clusters – /// easy / does it /// these
domains / are fluid [.]” She writes of unsafe roads, ice on the river and bees
messaging, a poem composed from and within a landscape, elements of which echo
her ongoing rout/e, her project of placing poems along rural walking trails,
and watching across time as the words fade and pages decompose’; a project, by
itself, which echoes Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s collaborative Decomp
(Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013). Across cipher, Turnbull’s words hold,
erode, corrode, and slip into soil. There is an element, also, that echoes
Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” although, unlike Niedecker’s infamous poem
that emerged as an extension of work-related research, Turnbull’s lyric exists
as both research and reportage: these poems are simultaneous study and result,
and of something ongoing, deeply intuitive and regularly attended. See my full review here.
35. Stuart Ross, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky: The
latest from award-winning Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, critic,
editor, publisher and mentor Stuart Ross is The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky
(Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2024), a collection assembled, as the back
cover offers, as “a laboratory of poetic approaches and experiments. It mines
the personal and imaginary lives of Stuart Ross and portraits of his grief and
internal torment, while paying homage to many of the poet’s literary heroes.” With
so many contemporary collections seeking to cohere through shared tone or
structure, this seems a highly deliberate miscellany, allowing for what each
poem or situation might require, whether poems that reflect on quieter moments,
homages and responses to friends, including Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell or
the late Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, his late brother Barry, or offering his annual
New Year’s poem, a tradition he’s kept up for a number of years. “In Michael’s
office,” the poem “MICHAEL’S OFFICE” begins, “we are surrounded / by poetry.
each passing month, / the space for books expands while / the space for people
contracts. You feel / the poems on your clothes, your skin, / and your tongue.
It is paradise.” He writes of shadows, mortality and depression; not as an edge
but a kind of underlay, ever-present, and impossible to avoid. “That / tingling
sensation in my pocket / is not chewed gum but a cluster / of stupid nouns
that,” he writes, as part of the title poem, “joined at the hips, / creates a
quivering language / uttered only by clouds.” He includes poems that riff on
and respond to particular works by Nelson Ball, Charles North, Ron Padgett and Chika
Sagawa, among others, as well as a further poem in his “Razovsky” poems,
turning his family’s former name (before it was shorted to “Ross”) into an
ongoing character, one that
emerged in his writing during the 1990s, and first fleshed out as part of his
collection Razovsky at Peace (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2001). There’s
always been something intriguing about the way Ross has played this particular
character, occasionally riffing as a variation on himself (who he might have
been, perhaps, had his grandfather not anglicized their name), or even as a
kind of red herring akin to the late New York novelist Paul Auster, introducing
“Paul Auster” as a side-character in certain of his books, whether to distract
or distinguish from who the main narrator might truly represent. See my full review here.
36. Paul Celan, Thricelandium, trans. Mark Goldstein: Further to Toronto poet,
editor, publisher, translator and critic Mark Goldstein’s explorations through
the work of Romanian-French poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) is Thricelandium
(Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), translated by and with a hefty
introduction and even heftier afterword, “ON TRANSLATING PAUL CELAN,” by
Goldstein. Thricelandium is but one step in a much larger trajectory
through Goldstein’s thinking around Celan’s work, with other elements
including: his poetry collection, Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (Toronto
ON: BookThug, 2010); his collection Part Thief,
Part Carpenter (Beautiful Outlaw, 2021), a book subtitled “SELECTED POETRY,
ESSAYS, AND INTERVIEWS ON APPROPRIATION AND TRANSLATION”; as publisher of American
poet Robert Kelly’s Earish (Beautiful Outlaw, 2022), a German-English
“translation” of “Thirty Poems of Paul Celan”; and as curator of the folio “Paul
Celan/100” for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, posted
November 23, 2020 to mark the centenary of Celan’s birth. It has been through
the process of moving across such a sequence that I’ve begun to appreciate the
strength of Goldstein as a critic, offering a thoroughness and detail-oriented
precision to his thinking, working to articulate his approach to the material
and his translations of such, that seems unique, especially one focused so
heavily on the work of a single, particular author. Honestly, I’m having an
enormously difficult time not reprinting whole swaths of his
stunningly-thorough introduction, which deals with, among other considerations,
Goldstein’s approach to the translation and how Celan’s work helped him develop
his own writing. Across three poem-sequences—“ATEMKRISTALL · BREATHCRYSTAL,”
“EINGEDUNKELT · ENDARKENED” and “SCHWARZMAUT · BLACKTOLL”—there is a lovely
contrary and delicate quality to these poems, offered both in the original
German alongside Goldstein’s translation. The language swirls, moving in and
out, and through, blended and perpetual meanings that become clear as one moves
through, holding a firm foundation of clarity by the very means of those
swirlings, those gestural sweeps. See my full review here.
37. Melanie Siebert, Signal Infinities: From the very
first line of the opening poem of Victoria, British Columbia poet and therapist
Melanie Siebert’s latest poetry collection, Signal Infinities (Toronto
ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2024), comes an electrical charge: “As if breath
has sourced a new element, / a charged conductivity, / proteins holding open
each cell’s gates, // water or something like water presses in. // As if a fine
mist wicks / between this thought and the next.” (“Water takes up the office”).
Following her Governor General’s Award-shortlisted debut, Deepwater Vee
(McClelland and Stewart, 2010), there is some big canvas stuff happening in Signal
Infinities, a simultaneous structure of big ideas, small details and
precise, sweeping gestures. “biting his hoodie strings / fountaining Basquiat
dreads / saintly for math’s sake,” she writes, as part of the third
section-sequence, “TRYING TO READ LAKE’S CASE NOTES,” “Gen Z levels of sleep
deprivation / his voice is musical code / his concentration finessed / to a
nanospear / tuned to every test like enemy footsteps [.]” Set with opening poem
followed by five sections, Siebert structures her lyric accumulations across a
framing of, as the back cover offers, “a therapist [who] takes up an
apprenticeship to a lake, to bare attention.” She writes an ongoingness, from
the quartet of the opening poem “Water takes up the office,” the suite of
individual, interconnected lyrics of the section “THE SESSIONS ON REPLAY,” to
the extended sequence of fragment-notes of the poem “Somatic Psalms” and the
nearly twenty pages of similar structure across the poem-section “TRYING TO
READ LAKE’S CASE NOTES.” “the first-time knife held / to his own throat,” she
writes in that particular section-sequence, “does not emit / absorb or reflect
light / in the spring-loaded slapdown / of five psych reports / ten years later
more is unknown / than known [.]” Her lyrics offer themselves as strings of
innumerable, interconnected moments, one step following another; an examination
towards and into the possibility of clear-thinking, insight and clarity. See my full review here.
38. Keagan Hawthorne, After the Harvest: I’m just now
getting into Sackville, New Brunswick poet and letterpress printer (founder of
Hardscrabble Press, who is also in the process of taking over Gaspereau Press)
Keagan Hawthorne’s full-length debut, After the Harvest (Kentville NS:
Gaspereau Press, 2023), a carved sequence of family stories cut and shaped into
stone. Hawthorne sets up a landscape of east coast barrens, every word in its
proper place, akin to the kind of Newfoundland patter and long descriptive
phrases and sentences of Michael Crummey’s Passengers: Poems (Toronto
ON: Anansi, 2022). “Well, you know, we had a few
good years,” Hawthorne writes, to open the poem “THE BOOK OF RUTH,” “no kids
but a nice house, jobs, / and when the end came it was mercifully quick. // His
mother moved in for the last few weeks / to help with care, and stayed on /
after the funeral to help me clean things up.” There is a physicality to these
poems that are quite interesting; a rhythm of storytelling, and a story
properly told, through the rhythm and patterns of first-person ease across such
descriptive motion. “It was a spring of record heat,” the poem “SPRING FEVER”
begins, “when you walked down to the river, / found the pool above the beaver
weir / and took off all your clothes.” See my full review here.
39. AJ Dolman, Crazy/Mad: The full-length poetry
debut by Ottawa poet, editor and fiction writer AJ Dolman is Crazy/Mad
(Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2024), a book of anxieties, flailing,
resistance, vulnerability and mental health struggles. “Ruptured spokes and
axel / whine as moulded steel settles / into new shapes,” Dolman writes, as
part of the poem “Trauma response,” “plastic, / deflated lung, a broken
tradition; / cougar and hare motif homaging / histories of crosshairs /
triangulated on hills of fog, / the many outcomes / that came before, / that
will [.]” Set with opening poem “Overthinking” and three sections of
poems—“HYSTERIA,” “NEUROSIS” and “MELANCHOLIA”—Dolman’s first-person lyrics move
through an array of subjects, examining and highlighting rage, trauma,
self-harm, vertigo, supernatural beliefs, atheism, personality disorders and
memory loss. “There’s a story,” the poem “Memory loss” ends, “the night that
happened, / but a man can’t tell a story like that. / He has to wait until
everyone named within / is dead; can only hope to outlive them, / so that
someday he can explain his certainty / to no one [.]” How does one write, or
even find balance, through such struggle? There’s something interesting, also,
how Dolman refuses closure, whether easy or otherwise, ending poems abruptly
(although perhaps not as abruptly as they could be), often sans punctuation. It
suggests both a sudden stop and a kind of ongoingness, how one poem, one crisis
or concern, actually bleeds into the next. “All our forths and backs could be
broken / into letters,” the poem “Difficulty concentrating” ends, “twenty-seven
shapes, / a few scratches, but we whisper / our meanings in the kerning [.]” See
my full review here.
40. Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise: I’m intrigued
by the latest full-length poetry title by Toronto-based poet, editor and critic
Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book,
2024). The Size of Paradise follows prior full-length collections Black
Stone (effing press, 2007), Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform Press,
2014) and Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks 2021), as well as numerous chapbooks, including from Riot
/ September 2016, an Inside Out Journal (above/ground press, 2019), and at
least two with Kirby’s knife|fork|book: Sons (2017) and Blur (2022). The Size of
Paradise is composed as a kind of book-length sonnet-scape or sonnet suite,
one hundred pages of one hundred untitled poems. These are pieces composed
through constraint, albeit one focused more on a gymnastic language than I’ve
seen of his work prior, offering an array of poems that each sit
self-contained, as a kind of repeated response to a particular prompt. “Promised
bomb falls at each step and the dead / persist in long slumber,” he writes,
half-way through the collection, “cohabitants / of earthly paradise. Circle the
many / objects composing you, insistent / collection folding me in.” There’s a
collage-echo to the sentences and phrases assembled here, and I’d be interested
to hear how these poems began, almost expecting a response involving the daily
motion of composing a poem with the only constraint being the sonnet, a
consideration of duration and of writing itself. I’m curious about the way Smith
pushes at the boundaries of the sonnet form, stretching and extending outward
in waves, the edges of these poems moving nearly as would lungs. As well, to
move through these poems is to move across duration in an interesting way,
through the very act of writing, and of reading. “To write is a / residue like
beauty,” he writes, early on in the collection, “a deformity / one adapts.” A
few pages further: “I can barely sense duration.” See my full review here.
41. Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Bad Weather Mammals: Kingston,
Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s latest full-length poetry collection is Bad
Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024), a follow-up to her
full-length debut, Slow States of Collapse (ECW Press, 2016). Bad
Weather Mammals explores illness, depression, trauma, disability poetics,
and a history of violence; working through and across an array of ongoing and
lingering, old and new, challenges across a first-person lyric. To open the
poem “Good Sick/Bad Sick,” she writes: “The sick should be good. / It is a kind
of undoing.” As the back cover offers, the collection “navigates the
devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a
backward glance, Best traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy
of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led
her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social
assistance.” Opening the collection, the prose-poem “Chapter of Accidents” sets
the tone, introducing all that might follow: “I am thirty years old and this is
the first year of my life I have lived in an apartment that did not have a
mould problem, that did not have a man problem, that did not have a man with
fists in your face problem.” This is what one needs to know before she begins,
before she moves further back to where she had been, compared to where she is
now. The poems in and across Bad Weather Mammals represents an
unfolding, an unfurling, of reclaimed and repurposed self, despite and through
whatever else had been, has come and still is. “Bronwen suggested the body / is
the limit we must learn to love.” she writes, to open the poem “I Am Becoming a
House,” a poem which suggests a reference to the late Kingston poet Bronwen
Wallace (1945-1989). “I’m not one to love my limits: / I’m practicing being an
empty house.” She writes of disability and poverty, both through her childhood
and into adulthood, and the reduced options available to her through either,
both. “My words,” she writes, to open the nine-part sequence “Pathography,”
“always pale reflections for the language / of my organs. They say I am so
lucky, to not have / a nephrostomy tube intubating my kidneys, delivering / my
body of its own fluids, like E. I was lucky a nurse / didn’t have to come every
other day to clean bandages / and disinfect the open wound like E. I got to
stay in school, / collect a scholarship and student loans, pay rent,
groceries.” She writes of agency, even when and through a seeming lack of such,
forcing her way through, and hopefully past, the worst of it. As she writes,
further along in the collection: “Consider: it is a privilege to have a story,
to know your own / narrative as surely as you know your name.” See my full review here.
42. Zoe Whittall, no credit river: From Prince
Edward County novelist, poet and television writer Zoe Whittall comes the prose
poem memoir no credit river (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2024), a book
self-described as “a contribution to contemporary autofiction as formally
inventive as it is full of heart.” As the first line of the introductory
poem-essay, “Ars Poetica / Poem in the Form of a Note Before Reading” begins:
“IT IS A CONFUSING THING to be born between generations where the one above
thinks nothing is trauma and the one below thinks everything is trauma.”
Approached as a hybrid/memoir through the structures of lyrc/narrative prose
poems, this is Whittall’s fourth poetry title, following Pre-cordial Thump
(Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 2008), The Emily Valentine Poems (Montreal
QC: Snare Books, 2006; reprinted by Invisible Publishing, 2016) and The Best
Ten Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan Books, 2001). Set with introduction and
three numbered sections of shorter pieces, no credit river is
constructed through a sequence of self-contained prose poems as a first-person
essay/memoir with lyric tilt, offered episodically, each piece unfolding as a
kind of lyric moment or scene. Rich with fierce intelligence and a deep
intimacy, Whittall’s sequence of diary-poems unfold and meander, and there’s an
ability that I admire about her (or her narrator, alternately) ability to be
present, whether discussing the wish to possibly have a baby, the devastation
of a break-up, or seeing an elk outside her window at Banff Writing Studio, all
while allowing the blend of daily life and writing life to shape and inform.
“Form is content, I tell the elk. My girlfriend and I have an arrangement,” she
writes, as part of “Neurotic, / Bisexual, Alberta,” “a type of freedom whenever
we travel. This makes me cconsider all strangers from a different angle. When
I’m the one left at home it makes me sleepless and on edge. I go see Dave read
from a new play. I watch Jonathan give a talk. When I’m with a woman, I look
only at men, and vice versa. You should know you’re bisexual if you answer the
question Are you ever just happy with what you’ve got? I know gender
isn’t that simple.” See my full review here.
43. Ben Robinson, As Is: The latest from Hamilton
poet Ben Robinson, following The Book of Benjamin (Windsor ON:
Palimpsest Press, 2024), is As Is (Winnipeg MB: ARP Books, 2024), a
collection that opens, appropriately enough, with a quote by the late London,
Ontario artist Greg Curnoe: “It is a long distance call from London to
Putnam (25km). / It is not a long distance call from London to Glencoe (50km).”
The quote emerges from Curnoe’s infamous Deeds/Abstracts (London ON:
Brick Books, 1995), and Robinson utilizes As Is with similar intent,
even if far different approach: attempting to explore and articulate his own
relationship to geographic space and its wealth of history, from his own
immediate back through well before European occupation. Whereas Curnoe explored
the specific Lot upon which sat his house, Robinson explores specific elements
of his Hamilton, Ontario, where, as his author biography has offered in the
past, he has only ever lived. “I push my son through our neighbourhood.” he
writes, to open “By-law to Provide for and Regulate a Waste / Management System
for the City of Hamilton,” “It’s just us / and the dog people. A three-legged
chair on a lawn, / a box spring at the curb with NO BUGS spray painted / on it
in black.” Through long sweeps of short lines and historical space interspersed
with shorter, first-person lyrics, Robinson provides As Is the feel of a
kind of field notes, moving across and through layers of personal history, the history
of Hamilton, and the occupation of centuries. “He didn’t realize that in this
country,” he writes, as part of “Remediation,” “when a white man / runs his
boat into something, it gets name after him. / Fifty years later, randlereef.ca
is adorned / with a logo of a tern flying low over water.” Composed as a poetic
suite on and around overlooked and neglected histories, Robinson folds in and
incorporates research and first-person observation, moving in and across time,
references and intimacies deep and distant, from kept lawns and parenting to
city founders, landscapes and boundaries, and what passes for history, passing
notes like waterways. See my full review here.
44. Michael Turner, Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems: The latest from Vancouver writer, poet and
musician Michael Turner is Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected
Poems (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2024), a collection that follows multiple
poetry and prose titles across thirty-plus years that play with genre, music
and narrative layerings, from the infamous Hard Core Logo (Vancouver BC:
Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993)—the only Canadian poetry title adapted into a
feature-length film—Kingsway (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995), American
Whiskey Bar (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), The Pornographer’s Poem
(Toronto ON: Doubleday, 1999) and the most recent 9x11 (Vancouver BC:
New Star Books, 2018). As the back cover of this new collection offers: “Playlist
fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’
contextual introduction and ends with the songs – or in this instance, poems –
to which they refer. Though these poems aren’t expressly critical, their formal
method of construction qualifies them as that subgenre of poetry known as the
protest poem.” Turner has long been engaged with the the hows of narrative,
offering book-length twists, blending working-class first-person commentaries
into the lyric, or a book-length poem as long as a particular city street.
There are threads here that run through the length and breadth of Turner’s
work, from an interest in genre, working class flexibilities, autofiction, tour
notes, rock ‘n’ roll songbooks, the lyric sentence and the straighter lyric,
and the dual-aspect of commentary and poem in Playlist provides an
inverse kind of call-and-response to the pieces. It is almost a reversal of the
poem-and-response of Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (McClelland
and Stewart, 1978), or even Ken Norris’ COMMENTARIES (above/ground
press, 1999), his chapbook-length prose poem response to his own full-length
collection, The Music (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1995). Turner offers a
story, and a song; another story, and another song. Sometimes the story is
directly tied to the song that follows, but often it is not, allowing for a
series of suggested links. There something of the folk-crooner, the work poet,
through these pages. If Peter Culley (1958-2015) wrote songs, or if Gordon
Lightfoot (1938-2023) composed poetry titles, Michael Turner’s Playlist
lands somewhere between, perhaps. See my full review here.
45. Mercedes Eng, Cop City Swagger: The latest
from Vancouver poet and curator Mercedes Eng is Cop City Swagger
(Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), following my yt mama (Talonbooks,
2020), Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Talonbooks, 2017) and Mercenary
English (Vancouver BC: CUE Books, 2013), furthering her ongoing trajectory
of poetic investigations of racism and colonialism in Canada. Eng spotlights a
blend of archival and first-person commentaries on police action, police
violence, in and across Vancouver, and the foundations of violence that extend
out from the office of the mayor. Set in nine poem-sections—“Core Values,”
“Corporate Values,” “Coporate Values,” “Tent City Citizens’ Safety,” “Public
School Safety,” “Public Safety Budget,” “Workplace Safety,” “Indigenous Women,
Girls, Nonbinary, and / Two Spirit Peoples’ Safety” and “Chinatown Public
Safety”—Eng composes a book-length suite of critiques on perpetual state
violence on and across vulnerable communities, and the very question of who and
what, exactly, is being served. “I take the alley,” she writes, as part of the
second sequence, “which I shouldn’t. It’s one of the last public spaces people
who use drugs have left and I am taking up room. Several people are using, a
woman’s hand is swollen from an abscess, and little hunks of meat are littered
on the ground. In Chinatown there are several butcher shops as well as dumpster
foragers so refuse spilled in the always is common but I see red meat cleaving
from bone and cartilage for days. When I get to the church the police tape is
gone and I can see blood on the sidewalk cracks.” In sharp bursts of prose
lyric, Eng employs elements of the long poem into precise action, perhaps not
far from what Dorothy Livesay originally intended for the “documentary long
poem,” a form she employed across her own blend of politics and poetics. Eng writes
an extended lyric through the official records and official responses of the
mayor and the police chief, articulating a lyric from the ground level of
police violence, not in a way of glorifying, but to document what she sees.
Hers is a direct and urgent lyric, composed through archive, gesture and appeal
through class and poverty, and the ongoing assaults upon both. See my full review here.
46. Andy Weaver, The Loom: The fourth full-length
poetry title by Toronto poet Andy Weaver, following Were the Bees
(Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005), Gangson (NeWest Press, 2011) and This
(Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2015), is The Loom (Calgary AB: University
of Calgary Press, 2024), one hundred and forty pages of an extended sequence-thread
on the surrealities surrounding marriage, children, parenting and homestead through
first-person lyric. As the back cover offers: “Andy Weaver led a life of quiet
contemplation before becoming a father at the age of 42. Within three years he
had two sons; two small, relentless disruptions to an existence which had, for
a very long time, been self-sustaining and tranquil.” For some time, Weaver has
been engaged in pushing his own variations upon a blend of the long poem/serial
poem, and The Loom exists as an extended, book-length line. Composing
sequences within sequences, he writes an excess that stretches itself through
sequences and layerings, suites upon suites, clusters and accumulations, one held
together and by this new foundation of domestic patter, and discovering how big
a human heart might become. “Perhaps if a new content is / a new devotion,” he
writes, as part of the extended sequence “THE CLEAVE,” “the result / of novel
imagination, then / there is love even in reason—if / emotion is the first
evolution / making ways for new forms of life, / then love is what gives us
reason / for reason and saves us from the crushing / reality of reality.”
Through the evolution of his lyric, passion and reason are no longer separate,
distant poles, but a blended opportunity for enlightenment, calm and
perspective, offering fresh layers of personal and lyric insight. Throughout The
Loom, Weaver offers structural echoes of Robert Duncan’s lyric blocks and
staggers, writing not an abstract articulating the spaces around and through
the occult, but one of an open-hearted familial love, a grounding provided
through his two young sons. “When I had journeyed half my life’s way,” he
writes, near the opening of the collection, “I found I’d lost sight of
love—just the sort / of line that mediocre, middle-aged men / have been using
since the evolution / of male pattern baldness.” Through his explorations
around family and children through a particular lens of the long poem, his work
exists nearly as counterpoint to that of Ottawa poet Jason Christie, two modest
and quiet poets (both with two young sons of similar age) simultaneously
working their long lyric stretch of an abstract, accumulating domestic line. See my full review here.
47. Alice Burdick, Ox Lost, Snow Deep: poems: The latest
full-length poetry title from Lunenberg, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick. Following
the compactness of the poems of Book of Short Sentences, it is
interesting to see how Burdick moves across longer forms. “To whom it may
concern,” she writes, towards the end of the nine-page poem “Suspenseful
demographics,” “you must surrender / the love song of sentient life. The truth
is, / we will all be fuel cells. You brought me here / to speak with our fierce
opponents, so / I might as well speak.” Ox
Lost, Snow Deep held as an assemblage of thirteen longer poems, rife with
surreal humour and first-person domestic, turns of phrase and observational
twists. “It’s no problem to find the real story.” she writes, as part of
“Suspenseful demographics,” “Live a wet dream, of which / an attack started the
trajectory.” In each of these extended poems, it seems there’s always a
direction she’s heading in but in no hurry to land, weaving and bobbing across
her short sentences to see what might be possible along the way, which most
likely alters her destination. Follow along with her sequence “Big Trouble in
Little China Trouble,” for example, composed in response to the 1986 film Big
Trouble in Little China, that begins: “Name, occupation: tourist bus. /
Meat of this table a green flame. / Oh, sure. Sorcery because it’s real. I talk
/ and eat a very small sandwich in the Pork Chop / Express. The cheque is in
the mail. / Rainy vegetables are funny. / Geese sing from boxes, / dumplings
steam, / daytime dog.” While even an experienced reader of her work might
wonder where she might be going, there’s never a sense of Burdick’s narratives
at loose ends or lost, purposefully stretching out across a landscape of
unexpected delights; we journey with her, seeing what she catches across the
lyric. “They were not statistics / to themselves,” she writes, as part of “Life
irritates art,” “Potentially infected salads // The printing press and mystic
joy // The lyric, a scream // Too many write dull and straight / regardless of
identity.” Her accumulations offer wisdoms and seek out questions, playful and
incisive moments of sharp clarity carved through a musical flow of colliding
words, sounds and ideas. “I thought the creatures around me were both here /
and not. Not an absence of presence,” she writes, as part of the poem
“Practice,” “but human at some point, even as echoes. Echoes of air made into
form; my demands / were simple: you may enter only / if you tell me something
interesting. / Practice memory to release into air.” See my full review
here.
48. Stephen Collis, The Middle: Vancouver poet, editor
and critic Stephen Collis’ latest full-length poetry title is The Middle
(Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), furthering his array of poetry collections that
speak to elements of climate crisis, social politics, community and human
responsibility that include Anarchive (Vancouver BC: New Star Books,
2005), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008/2014), To the Barricades
(Talonbooks, 2013), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks, 2016) and A
History of the Theories of Rain (Talonbooks, 2021). Each collection of his
to date is crafted as a book-length poem, but one that has evolved into an
extended, ongoing trajectory of thought, writing from the deepest part of the
centre. “To be in the middle is to be in relation,” he writes as part of his
“PREFACE,” “moving between.” Across a sequence of “MOVEMENTS” and numbered
“CANTOS,” it is curious to see the evolution of his ongoing work, and how he
sets himself firmly in the tradition and foundation of the work of the late
Robin Blaser (1925-2009): if the forest is indeed holy, one might suggest, then
it requires protecting. As his “PREFACE” continues, a bit further along: “This
long poem grown from the middle of life comes in three parts. The first finds
its seeds in the assembling of a small library of Robin Blaser’s books – a
decade after the poet’s death, his books arrived at the university where I
work, like a long-whispered echo through the trees. so I ran through the Holy
Forest like a madman – there was some urgency, the librarians said – so I ran,
pulling quotations from volumes like branches broken from the trees, apples
caught as they fell.” The Middle presents itself as a book-length poem
of perpetual love, despite all ecological trauma we’ve inflicted upon the both
the planet and ourselves, but articulating the conflict held between that
devastation, that love. Self-described as an extension of Collis’ ongoing
“investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and
wandering,” The Middle is the second volume of a projected trilogy; as a
layering of one poem atop another, an expansive and introspective questioning
of climate action and inaction, of state response; of music, movements and
cantos, employing Blaser’s element of song across his examinations of the
earth. “Without stopping / one after the other / lit out / for all haste / you
move / your image moves,” begins “CANTO 25,” “words remain human / like blood
coagulates / and quickens / like a plant / or sea fungus forming / from the
begetter’s heart [.]” There’s a thickness to the collection, an intellectual
and lyric heft, blended in such a way to not allow either to get in the way of
the other, but intermingle comfortably; akin to the work of Blaser, one might
say, able to absorb and engage with elements from his surroundings, his
community, into something unique, lyric and purely his own. See my full review here.
49. Sophie Anne Edwards, Conversations with the Kagawong River:
The full-length debut by Manitoulin Island poet Sophie Anne Edwards is Conversations
with the Kagawong River (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), a book-length
study structured and presented through a blend of lyric, visual poems,
photographs and archival material. Edwards offers, as Dr. Alan Ojiig Corbiere
writes in his statement that opens the collection, “a creative and meaningful
book” that “grapples with a decolonial approach to writing about, and with,
place – a place significant to both the Anishinaabeg of Mnidoo Mnising and
settlers.” Self-described as a “site-specific engagement with an ecosystem of
Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island),” Conversations with the Kagawong River
emerges from “several years [she spent] learning to listen to the Gaagigewang
Ziibi (Kagawong River) and to follow the rhythms and patterns of its flora and
fauna, the weather and the water. She invited the participation of various
collaborators – woodpeckers, otters, currents, ice, grasses. The resulting
poems, supported by local Edlers, language speakers, and historians, make
visible the colonial, environmental, and social processes that construct an
ecosystem and (settler) relationships to it.” There’s an expansiveness to this
collection, one that brings in an array of research and conversation and
collaborate to form Edwards’ study of the river and its inhabitants,
environment, ecologies and colonial interferences, comparable to how Fred Wah
and Rita Wong’s collaborative art-text, beholden: a poem as long as the
river (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018), to
Lorine Niedecker’s 1966 poem “Lake Superior” (produced in a critical edition a
decade back, which I reviewed here), or even the late London, Ontario artist
Greg Curnoe’s historical excavation of his London lot, Deeds/Abstracts
(London ON: Brick Books, 1995). One could also cite further recent comparables
such as Jennifer Spector’s Hithe (Connemara, Ireland: Xylem Books, 2021) or Chris Turnbull’s Cipher (Toronto ON:
Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024) for an attention to minute, ecological detail
across a constellation of lyric and visual expansiveness. Edwards attends to a
listening, a conversation, one that includes the sound of the water, petitions
to Colonial governments and traditional space, and the blend of visual forms,
lyric and photographic montage is fascinating, opening up a layering of what
might be possible through and across a poetry collection, structured akin to a
gallery exhibition of more than two hundred rooms, two hundred pages. See my full review here.
50. Stephen Cain, Walking & Stealing: There is
something curious about the accumulating distances between full-length
collections by Toronto poet and critic Stephen Cain, from the relatively quick
appearance of his first three full-length collections every couple of years—dyslexicon
(Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1998), Torontology (Toronto ON: ECW,
2001) and American Standard/Canada Dry (Coach House Books, 2005)—to the
longer wait-times that emerged with False Friends (Toronto ON: BookThug,
2017), and now, Walking & Stealing (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press,
2024). Some of us have been waiting, sir. There aren’t too many poets these
days in Canada working through poems to see where the language might land or
extend, offering the next steps in a conversation around poetics that seems to
have quieted down over the past decade. Through Walking & Stealing,
Cain offers himself as example of the standard-bearer for an exploration of
thought and form, continuing a trajectory of sound and meaning collision,
playfully battering around a lyric too often staid or safe. Where have all the
language poets disappeared to? With so many poets of the aughts either shifted
in poetic or publishing far less (if at all), Cain almost exists as a central
Canadian counterpoint, one might say, to the west coast poetics of further
still-standing poets Clint Burnham or Louis Cabri, all pushing further
variations on a language-play through social commentary, countless quick
references, and deliberate collision. “Canada Post- / Ashkenazi Anishinaabe,”
he writes, as the eighth section of the nine-part “CANTO THREE,” “Two nations
under clods / Anti-Semitism & assimilation // Fuck breathing fire / Spit
sparks instead // Almost cut my fear / Flying my antifa flag // Smoke ‘em when
you see them [.]” Are there any poets on this side of the country, still,
referencing the work of Dorothy Trujillo Lusk (I would suggest there should be
more, certainly)? For years, Cain was engaged in book-length sequences and
stretches composed across ten sections, a kind of decalogue of extended
language structures, whereas Walking & Stealing exists as a triptych
that breaks down into further sections—the seventeen sections, some of which
are broken into further sections, of “Walking & Stealing,” the ninety-nine
short sections of “Intentional Walks,” and the nine “CANTOS” sequences of “Tag
& Run.” The geographic composition points, setting the moment to the music
of language, is an interesting mapping across Cain’s Toronto, almost an echo of
bpNichol’s The Martyrology: Book 5 (Toronto ON: Coach House Press,
1982), a book I know that Cain himself has written extensively on, or Lynn
Crosbie’s legendary “Alphabet City” abecedarian from Queen Rat: New and
Selected Poems (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1998), a book that should have won all
the awards after it first appeared. The mapping of Cain’s Toronto becomes, if
not direct subject, a kind of backdrop and prompt, allowing the landscape of
his city to breathe into the animation of his language. See my full review here.
51. Kevin Stebner, Inherent: “Typefaces have
personality built into their forms.” So writes Calgary poet, artist, bookseller
and musician Kevin Stebner to open the end-note, or “Explication,” of his
full-length assemblage of visual poems, Inherent (Picton ON: Assembly
Press, 2024). Stebner’s letterform work, as it would appear, builds on some of
the prior and ongoing work done by contemporary Canadian poets such as Derek
Beaulieu, Kate Siklosi, Amanda Earl and Gary Barwin, among others. Across the
nine word-sections of Inherent, Stebner works through how letters are
freed from language or even meaning, one might say, into elements of pure
shape, simultaneously regressing and progresing through origin, back when shape
implied shape and only itself. The book moves through and across thirteen
letterform sequence-clusters—“Ultramatum,” “AdieuAdo,” “Totemic,” “Agalma,”
“Significant,” “Süperiör,” “Peaceful,” “Brethren,” “Assemblage,” “Present,”
“Kindled,” “Unbroke” and “WellWorn,” followed by the aforementioned
“Explication”—providing an elasticity of letterform shapes and possibilities
that move almost immediately beyond the realm of language purpose and meaning.
There’s something ancient in these forms, something complex and yet basic in an
understand of how letters begin, evolve and continue. This is a fascinating
exploration of shape, and, if, through Kroetsch, a Phoenician might have had
cause for grief, these forms could only delight. See my full review here.
52. Paul Celan, The Dark Oar, translated by Jaclyn Piudik: Presented as
a poem in three languages is The Dark Oar (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw
Press, 2024), offering an original poem by Romanian-French poet Paul Celan
(1920-1970) composed in German, alongside his own translation of the poem into
French, and subsequently, the translation from French into English by Toronto
poet and translator Jaclyn Piudik. As Piudik offers in her preface to the
collection, she purposefully chose to translate the poems from the French, as
opposed to translating directly from the German: “The Dark Oar brings
Celan’s French translations of his own German poems – 26 in total – into
English for the first time. Celan’s translations span some 17 years, from 1952
to 1969, through many phases of his life and his writing career.” She
continues, writing: “And while there are many fine translations of the original
German poems into English, the translation of Celan’s French versions of those
poems open a window into the poet’s relationship both to his mother tongue and
to his adopted language.” There is something I find fascinating about anyone
moving to write in a language beyond their mother tongue. Samuel Beckett
(1906-1979) and Milan Kundera (1929-2023), for example, who also moved into
France and composed works in French, each of them situated in their own unique
and very different forms of exile. Through Piudik’s offering, it allows for the
possibility of seeing further into the process of Celan the translator
alongside Celan the poet, catching the differences he might have himself seen
in the shifts between language, and a further project might be seeing just how
different these English translations might be to others taken directly from
Celan’s German. A book of companions and comparisons, especially for those able
to read German and French. See my full review here.
