Ongoing notes: late May, 2023: Emily Tristan Jones, Carolina Ebeid + Jordan Davis,

There’sso much going on! There’s even a reading on Thursday in Ottawa with three above/ground press poets—Stuart Ross, William Vallières and Jessi MacEachern—hosted by Bardia Sinaee. And you saw the big above/ground press 30thanniversary fundraiser, happening right now? Or the fact that the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair is coming up in a couple of weeks? And don't forget my enormously clever substack, where I'm working on one or two or three ongoing non-fiction projects. Somany things!

Montreal QC: I was first directed to Montreal poet andeditor/publisher (Columba) Emily Tristan Jones’ chapbook debut, HAND(Cactus Press, 2023) thanks to Hugh Thomas, who offered her as a poet worthpaying attention to. I’m intrigued by the curious patterns of her lyric, andintrigued at the fact that she has a full-length debut, Buttercup, outnext year with an unnamed press (at least according to her biography in thisparticular title) in Chicago. “A crow, inserting its hands into the air,” shewrites, to open the poem “CROWNLAND,” “descends / by my human head / to low redshrubs [.]” The narratives of her scenes unfold across narratives of straightlines and deflections (the Blomidon and Bay of Fundy references I quite enjoyed, having experienced such myself), even through the fact of a chapbooktitled HAND that bears the cover illustration of a foot: one thing isnot necessarily another, aiming instead for the ways in which these thoughtsconnect. The poems are playful, specific and simultaneously tethered anduntethered to the ground, akin to a kite. “My whole body, like a skeleton,music in the air,” she writes, early on in the collection. I am interested tosee what her work is able to accomplish through this forthcoming debut, acrossa wider, broader canvas.

~

A large number of mythoughts were broadcast in the woods

I ran in every direction,leaving little to the imagination
I was like a racehorse. Thewind whistled behind me
Animals whistled behindme

I was a free man
My soul fanned like thehair on the body of a wild thing

Philadelphia PA: Further to Brian Teare’s remarkablechapbook series through his Albion Books is Carolina Ebeid’s latest, DAUERWUNDER(2023), subtitled “a brief record of facts,” published as the fourth title inAlbion’s series eight [see my reviews of 8.1 here, 8.2 here and 8.3 here]. Thepoems collected here are set, or tethered, between two words—“WINTERNET” and “TRANSGRACE”—andemploy a sequence of an exploration around the accidents of language thattechnology spark. She writes of the glitch, of audio, text and meaning(something east coast poet Lance La Rocque explored as well from a differentangle, across his chapbook glitch a few years back), from the literalglitch of audio to the recombinative. She explores the elements of what remainsand what is rebuilt, reconstituted; she writes of telepathy, telephone calls andthe “Hollow of a torso”; she writes of what is left behind, lost or added, fromdigital recordings to “something about our / neighborhood dust [.]” As shewrites, mid-way through the collection: “how do you know you are remembering /an event or remembering the pictures of / an event, do your dream in the firstor / third person?”

“Attention” as animperative but without exclamations, the way one lowers her voice in thesensitive part of conversation making you lean in. “Attention, taken to itshighest degree, is the same thing as prayer” (Simone Weil).

Brooklyn NY: I’m only slowly engaging with the work ofNew York poet Jordan Davis, having produced a chapbook of his throughabove/ground press (full disclosure, naturally), and now through thepublication of his Hidden Poems (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2022), a small chapbookof sixteen short poems produced in an edition of one hundred copies. I’vealways been a bit envious of those poets working in miniature, from Nelson Ballto Mark Truscott to Cameron Anstee, for the possibilities that can exist in smallspaces. Through Davis, the short form is less a compact form of held meaning,as in the works of those three examples, but as poems composed as pieces thatexist beyond the boundaries of a single moment. Some poems here are akin to a waveof the hand, suggesting but part of an unseen and far larger space, or as accumulationsof phrases that mangle and mix in the imagination, offering something far else.These are poems of possibility, including what might fall into contradiction, across what mightotherwise be impossible. His directions are as evident as through the openingpoem, that reads, in full:

BAD POEM

Put that rock down