filling Station #81 : Some Kind of Dopamine Hit

Ithas been a while since I’ve done a write-up on Calgary’s filling Stationmagazine, not having writ anything since filling Station issue #57 :showcase of experimental writing by women (2014) [see my review of such here]—anissue worth picking up, if they have any left—so perhaps we’re due (althoughwhy does the issue itself offer no more than a number and year? is this aspring issue, winter issue, autumn issue, what?). As usual, there’s some strikingwork in this issue, following a fine history and trajectory of experimentalwriting centred in those Canadian prairies. filling Station has, since Ifirst took notice of it somewhere back in the mid-1990s, one of the fewjournals I regularly attend, alongside The Capilano Review , FENCE magazine , headlight anthology , p-queue and a handful of others, for alwaysmanaging to publish fresh work, and often by writers I hadn’t previously beenaware of. For example, there’s the poem “Milk River” by self-described emergingCalgary poet Lee Thomas, a piece unselfconsciously lyric, and offering both a languidquality and a sharpness that is quite lovely, rolling down the length of the pageakin to a prairie breeze across landscape: “and I think I might love // the waythe badlands kiss the sky / how the sandstone yields / a trembling sigh, andthe prairie grass / yields to the wind,/ and we to the sagebrush night-hush, /and I think I might love // the way you transmute water into laughter / analchemical recollection of the seas / that surged across these plains.” And whois this Bertrand Bickersteth, providing some stunning poems shaped as visualsthrough the paired poem “A Black Hand Revisits”?

Thereare some fascinating visual rhythms in the poem “Words Whispered 4, 5” by Nova Scotia Acadian poet and playwright Thibault Jacquot-Paratte, staggering astaccato down the page through halting hesitations and visual strokes. As well,Calgary writer Kevin Stebner offers a short sequence of really interesting visualpieces, each of which were produced via the manual typewriter. The poems are includedin this issue with accompanying write-up, that includes: “Throughout theprocess, I’ve become quite preoccupied with the idea of stereopsis, the ways inwhich our brains perceive 3 dimensions on a 2D page. Much of what I’veattempted with these pieces is to make your brain juggle and flip an image, tryingto find that moment where a cube will fold through itself. There is a joy inbeing able to do so especially within the confines of the handful ofkeystrokes.” And one can never go wrong with a poem by Stan Rogal, offering anarrative saunter across line breaks and playful sounds and rhythm. “now Ou LiPo / is firm,” he writes, as part of his sly poem-critique “Ou Li Po Re-writesCatallus N+7,” “hearse doesn’t search for yo-yo : / won’t ask unwillingly / butyo-yo will grieve when noggin asks / womb to yo-yo, wicked glacier, whatligature’s left for yo-yo?” Did you know the issue also has a poem by StanRogal?