Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Eckes, Cain, Spinosa, Ace, Good, Morrison, Cardon and Boisvert

Anticipating the release next week of the nineteenth issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the eighteenth issue: Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon and Jon Boisvert.

Interviews with contributors to the first seventeen issues (over one hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming nineteenth issue features new writing by: Michael Robins, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Rae Armantrout, robert majzels, Stephanie Strickland, Kate Siklosi and Marie Larson.

And of course, copies of the first eighteen issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

new from above/ground press: Brockwell, Hall/Kinmond, Mavreas, Ross, hanna, Rodríguez, Caple, Polyck-O'Neill, Christie, Sharp, Ayer + Boisvert,

Immune to the Sacred
Stephen Brockwell
$5
See link here for more information

Alternative Girders
a collaboration / 2014 - 2017
Stuart Kinmond  /  Phil Hall
$5
See link here for more information

A MERCY OF SIGNS
Billy Mavreas
$4
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ESPESANTES
Stuart Ross
$5
See link here for more information

 

CONCEALED WEAPONS / ANIMAL SURVIVORS
natalie hanna
$5
See link here for more information

ANGELTONGUE / LENGUA DE ÁNGEL
Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez
$5
See link here for more information

Love / Wildness
Natalee Caple
$5
See link here for more information

Everything will be taken away.
Julia Polyck-O’Neill
$5
See link here for more information

glass language (excerpt)
Jason Christie
$5
See link here for more information

Sinister Queer Agenda
Travis Sharp
$5
See link here for more information

LIMPING TO THE BIG BAD
Beth Ayer
$5
See link here for more information

EGOCIDES
Jon Boisvert
$5
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July-August 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal/e-transfer via rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com. Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request. And, coming soon: 2019 subscriptions!

Forthcoming chapbooks by Sacha Archer, Sandra Ridley, Lisa Rawn, Ian Dreiblatt, Jamie Townsend, Cole Swensen, Melissa Eleftherion, Uxío Novoneyra (trans. Erín Moure), Dennis Cooley, Michael Martin Shea and Jennifer Stella, as well as the nineteenth issue of Touch the Donkey!

Jon Boisvert, BORN

DIVORCE

When mother divorces him, father moves out, onto the roof. He takes only the record player & his copy of the 1938 radio play, War of the Worlds. Every night at midnight, the Martians land & kill everybody. He comes down eventually, & mother lets him back inside. He still plays the record though, & sometimes says with fearful eyes: Whenever they take something, their world gets bigger & ours gets smaller.

I’ve been an admirer of the work of Oregon poet Jon Boisvert for some time now, so am immensely gratified to finally have a copy of his first full-length collection, BORN (Portland OR: Airlie Press, 2017). As Karen Holmberg writes on the back cover: “Like a Mobius band, BORN is a fluid continuum, an extended poem in which the speaker circles back to his childhood loss of his father, then toward, into, and through the loss of his own newborn son.” Writing through, of and around multiple and even incremental losses, Boisvert’s prose poems exist as small, semi-surreal snapshots, capturing a single, small moment and highlighting its component parts; sometimes the effect is one of tone, or texture, or even of relaying and absorbing a particular piece of information. As much as the poems are stand-alone, they accumulate in their own way into a sequence, suggesting a linearity that shimmers, shifts and occasionally floats across a span of years (and even lifetimes). While there is a sadness and grief that permeates every poem in this collection, the collection is both heartbreaking, and somehow not overwhelmed by that same sadness; the poems exhibit an odd matter-of-factness to them, a storytelling aura that exists in a lyric haze of stunning subtlety and force. Structurally, there are echoes here of the prose poems of American poet Jennifer Kronovet, if it were merged with the overall wisdom and darker tone of Bill Callahan’s songs. These are poems to be absorbed, not merely read.

MUSIC

I buried my true love one afternoon. I made a mandolin out of her hair & bones & gave it to her mother, who had lost two other daughters, a banjo & a double-bass. We don’t talk anymore, but sometimes I can hear her singing. I hear them playing simple music through the pines, through the pines, through the pines.

6x6 #30 : Words

BABY DUSKY

Right after the birth of our red baby we shared a room with another couple & their blue baby. What’s her name, they asked. Rosy, I said, what about yours? This is baby Dusky, they said, like the sun going down. The world was generous that day; we all took turns holding Dusky & Rosy & watched through the doorway as green or orange or more red babies went by, swaddled in white hospital towels. When do they lose their color, I asked a nurse. After forty-eight hours, normally, she said, except for the blue ones, of course. (Jon Boisvert)

The poetry journal 6x6, produced by Brooklyn, New York’s Ugly Duckling Presse, as usual, showcases the work of six poets (none of whom I’ve previously heard of), with this new issue (#30, Summer 2014) featuring the work of Ana Martins Marques, Jon Boisvert, Jeffrey Joe Nelson, Anzhelina Polonskaya, Denise Newman and Hirato Renkichi (translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita). Absent of author biographies (which I always consider frustrating), one works through the issue by virtue of the writing alone (which might entirely be their point), and I was immediately struck by the subversive, surreal and downright odd prose-pieces by Jon Boisvert, and his pieces in this issue are reminiscent of poems by Canadian poets Stuart Ross and Gary Barwin for their twists and turns in and out of surrealism and strange wisdom. His small handful of poems included here delight, confound, confuse and are even slightly troubling. Where, exactly, did Jon Boisvert come from?

THE COWS HAVE ALL DIED IN THEIR FIELD

The cows have all died in their field & now the dogs are herding the sunset. The corn is pondering graduate school. The farmer says through his tears, let’s hold a vigil, light candles & write poetry for the cows everyone, let’s hold hands around a burning bale of hay & praise the order of the world for once. (Jon Boisvert)

Another highlight of the issue was in the small poems of Denise Newman, each composed as a single, explored moment, akin to the breath held before a blow.

Take up thin sticks and sit pressed together

picking grains of sand from a crevice of a boulder

with a little girl whose head down total

absorption is an image of grass growing.

The satisfaction of watching her

is the seduction of film.