Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part four, : Charlotte Nip, Jesse Eckerlin + Ayaz Pirani,

[left: Ken Norris + Jay MillAr in conversation ; see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here; see part three of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. I am frustrated I missed last weekend’s fair through The Ampersand Festival! But there will certainly be other fairs, I’m sure (and Christine did a fine job running proxy at the above/ground press table). And don’t forget the thirtieth anniversary of the ottawa small press book fair is November 16, yes?

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: The chapbook debut by Vancouver poet Charlotte Nip is Acne Scars (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), an assemblage, the author notes at the end of the collection, was a “decade in the making [.]” Nip’s poems offer themselves as a sequence of collage-sketches, observations, first-person commentaries and scattered lines, held together as a kind of scrap-book lyric accumulation. “Eliot said it was the cruelest month,” she writes, to open the poem “April,” “but he lied. It’s where I find / myself again, and again, and again. I never get lost because April / births like a malignant tumour. I turn 24.” There’s something intriguing about watching this particular emerging writer feel her way through lyric form, from first-person descriptive commentary and observation and staccato phrases, composing pieces leaning closer into prose poems, more traditional open lyric and even hand-drawn lines connecting thought to thought. Or, as the poem “Persimmons” begins:

we are
a soft bird
a man
with no taste

Montreal QC/Toronto ON: From Montreal poet Jesse Eckerlin, following We Are Not the Bereaved (2012) and Thrush (2016), comes ALMOST NOTHING (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), a sequence of a dozen short, dense lyric bursts. The chapbook-length sequence opens with a couplet on the first page—“Fire in the province— // A car without brakes”—and continues along that same slow unfolding, offering precise and specific language. Each self-contained koan offers a sheen of haiku, composed of lines that might connect but on the surface seem, potentially, disconnected, allowing the reader to fill in certain spaces. “Chisels in my mouth,” the third page/section reads, “Extracting the wisdom teeth // Your lost disciple [.]” There is a certain clarity provided by these poems that is quite intriguing, offering small twists and turns, some more effective than others, but enough that I am intrigued to see what and where Eckerlin lands next.

Conversations like rooms

filled with empty music stands

Toronto ON: The latest from Tanzania-born and California-based Canadian poet Ayaz Pirani (an expat poet comparable to Ken Norris, who also spent years publishing predominantly or even exclusively in Canada while living and working in the United States), following the full-length poetry collections Happy You Are Here (Washington DC: The Word Works, 2016), Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Toronto ON: Mawenzi House, 2019) and How Beautiful People Are: a pothi (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as at least one chapbook, Bachelor of Art (Anstruther Press, 2020) [see my review of such here], is the chapbook NECROPOLISBOROUGH (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). NECROPOLISBOROUGH is made up of eight short first-person lyric narratives, offering a plain speech of uncomplicated language woven through narrative wisdoms. “Even the ones I didn’t reach.” he writes, speaking of teaching and being taught, attempting to mentor and being mentored, across the poem “Beloved Infidel,” “Perhaps not reaching them / reached them and / was what they needed.” There’s a quiet power to and through Pirani’s lines, and one can’t help but be charmed by the opening line of “Smart Car,” that reads: “My car drove away honklessly / to live with another family.”

Camus’ Door

My door is plainspoken
without if or but
or doubt. No squeak or yawn.
Puritan by nature
my door is best wide open
or fast shut.
Ajar is too fanciful
for my door.
Door-pain is real
and there’s loneliness
finding yourself
two-sided. Grief too
in the phallic bolt.
My door hangs on
ancient purpose.
A look then a lock
between yes and no.
Swing then swing
between right and wrong
is my door’s fate.

And, according to the author biography at the back of this small collection, Pirani has a collection of short stories forthcoming with Gordon Hill Press, which is pretty exciting.

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part three, : Annick MacAskill + Jay MillAr,

[see part one of my notes here; see part two of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Hooray small press! And I’m hoping you caught that above/ground press was being represented yesterday in Mississauga, with Christine as table-proxy at the Ampersand Festival? She was also on a panel, discussing her brand-new book! Dang, I wish I could have been there.

Halifax NS/Toronto ON: I was curious to engage with the carved lyrics of Halifax poet Annick MacAskill, her small chapbook five from hem (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), set as five short, sharp lyrics that each take as their jumping-off points opening quotes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 AD), as translated into English by MacAskill herself. “blazing in my marrow / laid down the quiver to / greed the god in long fa- / miliar grasses wet / before his carbon-grey,” she writes, to open the poem “Upon losing my gold star & being confronted / by Diana, I, Callisto, tell my story.” This isn’t the first time MacAskill has slipped into Metamorphosis, having done same through her Governor General’s Award-winning third collection, Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The poems here are extended, nearly breathless, composed as short-lined single stretches of thought and utterance running down the length of a page. As the poem “Together together together together together / together” begins: “once just another girl / -friend the goddess cursed me / worse than mute stripped me of / my girl power gossip / my place in the gaggle / resented my prattle / garrulous once but trick / her so now only soak / up the words of others [.]” Whereas that collection moved through Metamorphosis as a way to articulate a particular loss, these poems are no less intimate through their own explorations, an unfolding of fathers, female relationships and love that teases at something far larger I look forward to seeing, once the larger shape of the narrative is published as a full-length collection. As the first third or so of the poem “The snake bites they sting, yes, but are not, / strictly speaking, the worst part of this” reads:

not my silken farewell
or the blush pinpricks so
faint the world could hear or
see through shade & fog me
like a token blotted
the end of it & I
slipping asked so faint too
his frame now & that lyre
almost but don’t fade those
songs mere aftershocks tin

Toronto ON: Given how many years I’ve composed birthday poems (including my own recent Gap Riot and № Press titles), I’m intrigued by Toronto poet Jay MillAr composing his own meditations on making the half-century mark through Offline: Fifty Thoughts for Fifty Years (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024), produced as #11 of Anstruther’s Manifesto Series. Composed with introductory paragraph and post-script, MillAr offers his thoughts on fifty numbered single-paragraph prose-commentaries, set as one thought immediately following another. There is a curious way that MillAr attempts to find ground through a suggestion of disconnect, even flailing, putting one foot down and seeing where the next might lead. Part five, for example, reads: “When I read older novels, the past has been filed into touchstones that are recognizable, almost orderly. Unlike the present, which is multifarious and unwieldy, overflowing. How will this mess be distilled and commodified by our collective memory fifty or a hundred years from now?” His is a pause, a checking-in, to see where he is at and how one might interact with cultural and temporal shifts, an introspection of and through time and space. “Can one live autonomously and independently off-grif in a major urban centre?” he asks, as part of the tenth section. MillAr muses on moments and movements, writing on agency, the long shadow of American culture and politics, community, seasons, literature, disposability, institutions, etcetera. There’s an anxiety here as MillAr works through where we’re at, and where we might be headed, slowly boiling to death (as a frog in a pot on the stove) in and through a sequence of situations that might not be okay. He offers no answers, but pushes the very question, and questions. As the essay, the prose-manifesto, opens:

A sensation brought on by the anxiety of our age rubbing up against the inescapable reality that I am quickly approaching my fiftieth birthday: I have lost the plot. The world, or at least the human world, since this has only ever been a human world to the extent that even the non-human things around us are still human, feels out of control. And so I find myself undertaking a retreat: I will turn away from the world into a series of texts meant to represent my thoughts summed up as a series of moments. Every time I have the urge to share something on social media, I will add it to this list instead. My hope is that these texts will become a pathway, pebbles, or crumbs by which I can engage with, and perhaps even to return to, the world. Thinking is a practice that requires patience while mastering fear.

 

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part two, : Conyer Clayton + brandy ryan,

[left: Gary Barwin, signing his new selected fiction collection with Assembly Press : see part one of my notes here] Here are some further notes from my recent participation at the Small Press Market that Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press organized and hosted through the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Hooray small press!

Toronto/Ottawa ON: The latest from Kentucky-born Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton (following two trade poetry collections and six prior solo chapbooks) is the chapbook KNEELING IN OUR NAME (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024), a chapbook-length sequence the acknowledgements offers as “the first of a three-part series of interconnected poems.” The poem, the poems, here are evocative and visceral, writing grief and loss and enormous love. “My mother’s name is mine and buried in my throat.” she writes, to open “iv.,” “Her name is buried in my throat. / You scratch at her when you call to me. / When I kneel on the carpet. / When I stretch my neck to reach her. / When I reach into my throat to touch her.” Set as an expansive sequence, Conyer moves from short lines to lyrics set closer to prose poems and scatters of lyric clusters set across the page, offering a narrative that writes parental loss as physical, interconnected and devastating. “But I couldn’t do a damn thing to help. It hurt / right here, pointing, right here, kneeling. / right here, still.”

Browned edges.
Water droplets

on the corners
of the windows

I wipe
like a sermon.

Every day
like a sermon

The temperature
drops.

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Every day
like a sermon

I kneel
to stretch my neck.

Like a prayer to
something

Toronto ON: It was very cool to watch brandy ryan work on further erasures throughout the fair, sitting at the Gap Riot Press table next to mine. The author of three previous chapbooks—full slip (Baseline Press, 2013), once/was (Empty Sink Publishing, 2014) and After Pulse (w Kerry Manders, knife|fork|book, 2019)—ryan’s latest is the visual erasure in the third person reluctant (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2024). There is a curious blend of erasure and visual collage in ryan’s pieces, offering full-page reproductions of prose pages (a paperback of some sort; google doesn’t provide easy answers as to what this book might be) with the bulk of the text excised via coloured marker, overlayed with what appear to be full-colour glossy magazine images. ryan works an overlay across pages (and what might be ‘chapter headings’—“LITERARY DIVERSIONS,” “LITERARY CONSUMPTION” and “LITERARY POSSESSION”) with a text that suggests a commentary on gender, body autonomy and agency, and rage. “uncomfortable in ///// anger / the object of / her / housewifely / high profile,” ryan writes, mid-way through the collection, “display / a performance / a sharp observation, /// put on / like a ‘mask’ / they are ‘putting on their face’) […]”

 

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part one, : Devon Rae + Norma Cole,

Once more, Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press helped curate and organize the annual Small Press Market as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors! And I was totally there for that, with a swath of recent above/ground press titles and my new short story collection with University of Alberta Press and Christine’s new hybrid memoir with Book*hug Press. Naturally, there were plenty of amazing publishers and items there as well [see my two notes from last year here and the four posts I made around the first year here], including Anstruther Press, Gap Riot Press, knife|fork|book, Gordon Hill Press/The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc., room 302 books, Proper Tales Press, Book*hug Press, Nietzsche’s Brolly, serif of nottingham, etcetera (with Simulacrum Press and Puddles of Sky Press unable to attend this time around). Don’t you wish you could have made it? At least there’s another small press fair coming up in Toronto (Mississauga, actually)that I’m participating in soon, for those folk who wanted to catch some further small press excitement (where Christine is on a panel with her new book as part of the same event/festival that day). And you know about the 30^th anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair happening on Saturday, November 16, yes? OH, AND IF YOU ARE IN OTTAWA COME OUT TO THE LAUNCH OF MY SHORT STORIES TONIGHT!

Here are a couple of items I picked up at this year’s event:

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: I’ve been an admirer of the work of Vancouver poet Devon Rae for a while now [see my interview with her via Touch the Donkey], so was very pleased to see a copy of her chapbook debut, THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS WITH MY BODY (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). Rae’s work, at least what I’ve seen, is leaning into what I presume will be an eventual full-length collection of very sharp prose poems around the body, with titles such as “My Lips,” “My Left Leg,” “My Left Shoulder” and “My Breasts,” offering narrative threads and conversation almost as a kind of update on what the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was playing with across his Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1987) and eventual, posthumous, organ music: parts of an autobiography (Black Moss Press, 2012). Rae’s poems offer a conversation with and around bodies very different than Nichol’s serious play, one instead that works through and with the differences and culturally-loaded complications of women’s bodies; she writes bodies as both physical and emotional space, one impacted far too often from the outside. “That elsewhere so close we can almost / touch it.” she writes, as part of “Conversation with My Night Body.” These prose poems are damned sharp, and you should be paying attention to them. Rae packs enormous amounts in very small spaces, yet her poems are composed with a deceptive ease of lyric and propulsive flow. As the poem “Conversations with My Uterus” reads:

You are shaped like the child I may not have. I think of myself curled up inside my mother years ago – the fullness of her uterus and the emptiness of mine. Sometimes, I want to return to that dream place. I know she loved being pregnant, I’ve seen the photographs, belly swelling in an Armani dress. And I wonder if I too will become a kiln or remain a vacant room.

Dani Spinosa, Gap Riot Press

San Francisco CA/Toronto ON: Oh, the delight of a new title by Toronto-born American poet, translator and visual artist Norma Cole [see my review of her 2010 To Be At Music: Essays & Talks here], her chapbook RAINY DAY (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). Another of Toronto poet and publisher Kirby’s gracefully-produced items, RAINY DAY is a collection of twenty-one short, sharp lyrics offering a myriad of narrative directions across few words and very short spaces. As the poem “Critical Miss” begins: “permanently / beyond chagrin // intrinsic—what is / trinsic?” Alternating between prose poems and slightly longer sequences against short bursts, Cole composes the long line of each poem across a kind of condensed point-form, offering a rhythmic sequence of bursts held in breath, almost as hesitations, or a lyric caught in the lungs. “the darker / room // he talks / blocks,” the unpunctuated four-page poem “NO ACCOUNT SYLLABLES” writes, “of space / and // books of / time // I think / your // hand on / paper // least exercise / leaves [.]” Her lyric compactness clusters, stretches, holds breath. All of which, of course, makes me eager to think that we might be closer to a further full-length by Cole at some point soon, hopefully.

Mum’s the Word

saturation not able inside the magnitudes
scorpion suppression oppression falling failing
oblivious silent objects

Ongoing notes: TIFA’s Small Press Market (part one: Dale Martin Smith + Chris Johnson,

[see my four posts from the debut fair back in 2019 here and here and here and here] What a delightful fair this was! I was unable to make last year’s event due to my host falling sick with covid last minute, but managed to drive down for the sake of this small curated small press fair at Toronto’s Harbourfront, as hosted by Kate Siklosi/Gap Riot Press. Here are a couple of the items I collected as part of this year’s event:

Toronto ON: Some of the most intriguing small publishing work right now is being produced by Kirby’s Knife|Fork|Book; I’ve really been admiring the way that Kirby manages to find remarkable work by an array of writers that might not have been able to find homes for their work, at least easily. One of the titles I picked up at the fair was by Dale Martin Smith [see my review of his 2021 Talonbook title, Flying Red Horse, here], the chapbook Blur (2022). Dedicated to his partner, the poet Hoa Nguyen, the poems in Blur are an assemblage of short lyrics composed with such a light and even delicate touch. “What you know of me / is duration,” he writes, to open “Circles,” “movement / along the path between / our home and the neighbors’.” Smith’s work has long held an element of the personal in his work, but there is an intimacy here that focuses very deeply on the small that is stunningly, staggeringly moving and beautiful. Here is Dale Martin Smith composing poems with the density and brevity of poets such as Mark Truscott or Cameron Anstee, but set with the entirety of his whole heart.

Mundane

You step out of the house
with trash and rain
comes down cold, intimately
known across the time you imagine
is your life.

Jim Johnstone, Anstruther Press

oronto ON: It was interesting to catch Ottawa poet Chris Johnson’s latest title, 320 lines of poetry (counting blank lines) (2023) from Jim Johnstone’s Anstruther Press, apparently in my hands before even the author got to see copies (this has happened the rare time before over the years with other publishers). There is something about Johnson’s poetry that is intriguing for the way he is so overtly exploring the lyric through experimentations with form and influence, seeking out a form through which to finally land. His poems are so clearly exploratory, seeking and reaching out to see what might strike, from his prior explorations through the haibun to these explorations through elegy, prose poems and extended lines, with individual poems composed “after” specific works by Jessie Jones, Kim Mannix, John Newlove, Artie Gold (his entire prior chapbook was a riff of a specific title by Artie Gold) and Christian Wiman.

Other pieces in the collection reference specific friends, many of whom also happen to be contemporary writers. “the rain has stopped,” Johnson writes, to open “some days are harder than others,” “but Monty says / there is always something / with bigger holes in it.” There are moments that the poems do fall too deeply into the self-referential, such as the opening poem, “elegy for chris johnson,” offering “today I ate a turkey sandwich and / thought about stephanie roberts’ turkey sandwich.” Throughout this piece he cites and he references, but doesn’t seem to offer really anything more than that, so the poem is intriguing, but doesn’t really seem to go anywhere. There are times that his line breaks do offer some nicely sharp turns, moments and corners, such as the opening of “when does the hunger begin?”: “the last days of February were honeyed, / snowy, and enlightened by whisky and weed.” That’s some fine precision, there. As well, there are moments within his prose poems where the music in his lyric shows itself quite nicely, whether the poem “asleep” (after “Awake” by Kim Mannix) or “a regular person” (after “Better Manifesto” by Jessie Jones). All in all, it feels (in an interesting and positive way) as though Johnson is still searching, still experimenting; I look forward to seeing what occurs when he finally lands.