The Unpublished City, curated by Dionne Brand

She moved back all her books and belongings. In our apartment she would look at me from underneath the bed sheets, her bottom half covered, her diary in her hand. She would ask me not to look at her diary. I never have—I remember once she left it on the bed and I stared at it for five minutes. It had a black cardstock cover. I opened it and read the inscription, her full name, the year, how much of a reward she would give if it was returned—20 bucks. I closed it and let it lie on the bed. Her diaries would be here in a closet. I wonder if they might be with the parents. Would they read through them? I wanted to ask her parents to let me move in to her room and let them take care of me.

A small Vans shoebox on the desk that I know is full of mementos from our relationship. It’s black, small, frayed. A note might be in there. (Adnan Khan, “All I Can Tell You”)

While at the most recent Indie Literary Market (hosted by Meet the Presses) in Toronto, I was intrigued to recently discover a small anthology of emerging Toronto writers, “Curated by Dionne Brand,” The Unpublished City (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2017). Constructed as an introduction to a multitude of Toronto-based writers prior to their first trade-length works (although two have since released first poetry titles), the anthology includes work by Ian Kamau, Nadia Ragbar, Chuqiao Yang, Rudrapriya Rathore, Sofia Mostaghimi, Kathryn Wabegijig, Doyali Islam, Adnan Khan, Phoebe Wang (see info on her first collection here), Canisia Lubrin (see info on her first collection here), David Bradford, Laboni Islam, Sanchari Sur, Shoilee Khan, Nicole Chin, Diana Biacora, Dalton Derkson and Simone Dalton. As Brand writes at the offset:

The Unpublished City was conceived to show the (Multipli)City of writers that call Toronto home; that the City of Toronto might hear the wonderful voices of the Citys own true imaginaries. The idea here is to read ‘unpublished’ not simply as not in print, but as the narratives, and imaginations of the City that are present, and not yet fully realized, nor acknowledged. In these stories and poems we apprehend what lies on the surface of the City’s glass walls, in the depths of its rapidly and perennially urbanized landscape, and in its bristling and multilingual streets.

How different such a collection is than some of the Toronto-specific (or really, Canadian) anthologies of the past, whether Plush (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1995), the book that introduced myself and many others to the work of Lynn Crosbie and R.M. Vaughan (for example), or Blues & True Concussions: Six New Toronto Poets (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1997). The focus on diversity becomes an important part of the conversation of literature to engage in, no longer automatically pushing certain writers further into the margins. While I’m familiar with a couple of the names in The Unpublished City (Chuqiao and Dalton from their Ottawa days, for example, Doyali Islam is well known for numerous activities, including her recent appointment as poetry editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and I recently reviewed Canisia’s latest small publication here), but most names are new to me, sitting just under the radar, it would seem, over there in Toronto. While my own sensibilities might have wished for more poetry than the collection holds (the bulk of the collection is made up of short fiction), one of the highlights had to be the work of Rudrapriya Rathore, such as her short story “Canaries,” that includes:

Grief is a heatstroke stumble through a coalmine. Find me with my parents, thirty years deep. History has gone slower here. The cheese comes in a tin. The bougainvilleas burn like fires. The glass of milk I am given grows a skin of fat.

Everyone calls my mother Baby. Later, I will watch Dirty Dancing and never not think of these things together. My mother’s mother sits on a straw mat in the middle of her home, which is crawling with relatives. A circle of women rock and pray and talk around her. Their heads are covered, eyes downturned, but the children have memorized the patterns on their saris, which is how they clamber into the correct lap. My grandmother, newly widowed, wears pure white. When she hugs me, I don’t recognize her earlobes. Stripped of jewelry, they’re fleshy and naked.

I would be curious to know the selection process for such a collection (Brand’s introduction is no longer than that paragraph quoted above), and where she discovered such a grouping of writers, or even the purpose/argument for the collection itself at this particular moment, but otherwise, the argument (as Brand writes it) is quite clear, quite strong, and quite remarkable: the wide variety of emerging voices that make up Toronto’s writing scene, one that can’t be reduced to a single sensibility, personality or perspective. And this is (beyond the introduction of a whole collection of emerging writers) a very good thing to be reminded of.

Wheezy stardust sucking on gold cellophane

Where they buried the garrison in a gravel pit.

And we are all friends till the snacks run out. (David Bradford, “Why We Can’t Live Together”)

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses (part two,

[view from my table]

I’m sure by now you’ve seen the first part already, but here are some further items I picked up at the recent Meet the Presses fair in Toronto last weekend; might we see you today at the ottawa small press book fair? I mean, there might even be cookies!

Toronto ON/Vancouver Island BC: Vancouver Island poet and critic Sonnet L’Abbé’s latest title, produced through Carleton Wilson’s Junction Books, is the beautifully designed and bound poetry chapbook Anima Canadensis (2016). Composed as part of a “larger project,” Anima Canadensis opens with the sequence, “PERMANENT RESIDENTS’ TEST,” a poem that speaks to Canadian cultural and historical contexts, referencing Indigenous displacements and European settlement through, among other means, discussing flowers (“Identify the native species in this passage.”) and other “agricultural products.”

Answer the following questions.

In order to stay in what form? In order. In order to keep the nuclear grazing, the gentle seep? In order to keep? To keep order. The way and flow and the way of things. The order of things. The will to keep, to keep on, to go on, to sustain. To keep out of trouble. To maintain. Love your ability to sustain. In order to sustain in what form? Please complete this human form. This formal question. How will you stay? Is the order complete? What form sustains? Where there is will some will remains. How will you sustain order? Prove your ability to sustain. Please fill out this shape. Take a new form. Prove your ability to love.

I’ve been utterly fascinated to see the shift in L’Abbé’s work since the publication of her first trade collection, expanding outwards from metaphor-driven lyric to more experimental works that attempt to navigate and explore issues around race, identity and colonization [see her recent Touch the Donkey interview that touches on some of the same]. Her work, in both form and content, has become more socially and politically engaged, more open to alternate forms and, to my mind, has become far more compelling, putting her on a Canadian poet shortlist of required reading. As she writes to open the poem “LOVE AMID THE ANGLOCULTURE” : “Is it not of the same gravity / as going to war, / the decision to love?”

BRAIN STEM

Strong neck the channel through which your roots become branches. Strong neck the trunk through which your impulses flow, tides of perception and reaction. You are a battery of cells, positive of material, anti-positive of nervous potential. You, a dyad of bunches of waving branches and bundled branches, of bunches of searching roots and rooting roots. The spine of your decision-making: a flexible tension between head and heart. The moving tree grows in more dimensions than knowledge: in its reach, yes, in its span, but also, if it is lucky, in its rootedness, in its density, in the neck’s rough skin thickened to injury, that lifts above its heart a head of power—ever spring-fond, ever fall-wise—a tender, leafy power to love light.

Toronto/Picton ON: New from Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner’s The Emergency Response Unit is Toronto poet Phoebe Ka-Ir Wang’s chapbook HANGING EXHIBITS (2016), a title constructed of poems that respond, predominantly, to visual art. Obviously, ekphrastic poems (poems that respond to other creative works, including poems, visual art, etcetera) have been around forever (works by Diana Brebner, Stephanie Bolster and Robert Creeley come to mind), and far too often simply describe or explain the artworks they claim to be “responding” to, but the narratives of Wang’s poems seem to respond sideways to the original works. She seems to compose intriguing little narratives that emerge from, or are even influenced by, the originals. As she writes at the end of the poem “STILL LIFE WITH ANCESTORS”: “She’ll tell us there’s more to the story.” Wang’s poems do seem to suggest far more than what they say, offering both alternate considerations and even addendums to their source materials.

STILL LIFE WITH SURFACES

after Matisse, Goldfish and Sculpture, 1912

She’s gone in ahead of us, testing

the bathwater. When she winces

we feel it too. The heat applies

its deep vermilion to her knees,

her thighs, the tract of her tummy,

forcing them to bloom.

We slough off cotton

socks and tank tops, climb in

as if into a second skin,

first my sister, then me.

we’re slippery as fins.

The light amniotic, rinsing us

in cerulean, and even when

we’re clean and we don’t emerge.

Outside, the air is frigid

and hostile. We’d rather live here,

inside the dance of chiaroscuro,

where the hour’s tropical.

Mom passes something to us—

a scrap of cloth, a white pill of soap

(her impulsiveness, her innate talents)

gives us no choice but to use them.

grain magazine 39.2: short grain contest issue,

PENELOPE BEFORE MARRIAGE

There are no mermaids in Lake Ontario,

but I’ve heard you singing. The girls

leaned in, legs wobbling onboard,

their footing unsure. Before the ferry

crossed our path we tacked, taking our time

with the racing done and the jib sheets slack.

The wind flirted with their feathery hair,

and they shivered as if feeling your eyes

comparing their bare arms, tempting

and harmless. One among us will be your

true wife. Across the inner harbour, hotels

lure and wink, waiting for your gamble.

Prince of this pleasure craft, you sighed

and looked away from the western gap

and the squalls beyond these sheltered waters.

Soon we’d be motoring back for supper.

Flaking the main, I hugged the mast.

I never stopped my ears against your suit

nor strained against what bound me. Our

greatest hardships are those closest to home. (Phoebe Wang, 2^ND PRIZE POETRY)

Arrived in my mailbox recently was Saskatoon’s grain: the journal of eclectic writing, Vol. 39.2 (winter 2012), their “short grain contest issue,” as poetry judge Jeramy Dodds awarded three prizes (in order) to Tim Bowling, Phoebe Wang and Vincent Colistro, and fiction judge Zsuzsi Gartner awarded three to (in order) Pete Duval, Zack Haslam and Zoey Peterson. It’s interesting to see, especially given that the issue that appears a year from now will be holding my own choices in the poetry category (apparently a mound of poems appear for me to judge in May), thanks to previous editor Sylvia Legris. As Dodds writes about the winning poem, Bowling’s “Gedding Wilder”:

What catches the eye, in this poem, soothes the ear, tweaks the mind. The movement and disposition of this piece shows a cool hand at imagery and complete control of tone. We are treated to language that both jokes and loosens our grip on narrative, while the leaping cinematics sequester any hopes we may have of coming out the same. We are stared at by “every crow / in a photographer’s cloak,” “and all the dark drops of rain / left fingerprints at the scene / of the crime” while there are “totemic salmon / swimming jerkily by.” But if we think this is just a list of acute imagery we are mistaken, for the entirety of the poem’s structure feeds its lyricism, “this cut jumps like that, like life, / life jumps like life.”

To judge, and then to judge. During a comedy awards show last year, Tina Fey said something along the lines that all award shows “are bullshit,” and I mostly agree, but understand also the benefits of highlighting certain works and artists, or even the simple matter of getting money into the hands of poets who are doing interesting works. 

The Bowling poem doesn’t do it for me, but then again, I wasn’t the judge for last year’s competition (I much preferred the second place piece).

But there are other pieces in the issue as well. Partly because the story is set in Ottawa, I’m intrigued by Robert Lake’s short story, “The Delphic Embroiderer,” an odd tale that can’t quickly be described, but can easily be the exception to the rule that all fiction set on Parliament Hill has to be political. 

Perhaps it might be best to simply give you the opening paragraph, and let you be your own judge:

The shooting of a bewildered moose on Parliament Hill provoked considerable media coverage and, of course, forced me to correlate this unexpected event with chaos theory, which asserts that nature is neither mindlessly orderly nor chaotic. Nature fluctuates predictably, yes predictably, between pattern and random movement. Is moose murder random or a human pattern? If both, in what proportions has Nature blended order and chaos, a statistical challenge worthy of John Nash, perhaps even of Euclid, the triangle guy? Why had the moose strayed from the herd? Most important: what does blood gushing from the moose’s jugular fifty metres from the Prime Minister’s Office portend, if anything?