ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two : Jason Heroux + Moez Surani,

[see part one of these notes here] Might we see you at the ottawa small press fair this fall? The event will be turning thirtyyears old, don’t you know.

Kingston ON: The latest by Kingston writer (and formerKingston Poet Laureate) Jason Heroux is the small Blizzard of None(2024), published through Michael e. Casteels’ Puddles of Sky Press. Heroux’slyrics emerge as short, narrative sketches, short lines carved as gestures intostone. “The old broken fence,” the two-line “Damage Report” reads, “loves itsbrokenness.” Unlike the brevity of a poet such as the pointillist mode of, say,Ottawa poet Cameron Anstee, Heroux works a short form across these eight small poems,but one that still retains a structure of narrative, working with clear delineationsof beginning, middle and end. “One definition of darkness is that it doesn’t exist/ by itself as a unique physical entity but is simply / the total or near totalabsence of light.” the poem “Black Lamp” begins. According to the authorbiography at the back of this small collection, also, he has a collection ofprose poems, Like a Trophy from the Sun, due out this fall with GuernicaEditions, which I am very much curious about, and looking forward to.

Blizzard of None

Blizzard of none

you remind me
of something I’ve neverseen.

Snowflake drifting fromone
nowhere to another,
where is your home?

 

Michael e. Casteels, Puddles of Sky Press

Ottawa ON: I was fascinated by Moez Surani’s latest [see my review of his fourth full-length collection here], the chapbook The FirstThousand Questions (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2024), a title that opens withthis introductory note:

For about a year, I trackedthe questions that my daughter, Zara, asked. I tried to record them exactly as shesaid them—with her grammar, omissions, nicknames, and diction. In the editing, Iculled some of the redundant question, and I added referents or context insquare brackets.

I had the idea for thiswork when my daughter was born, and waited as her brain, senses and identitydeveloped. It was then that these inquiries began.

Setas an ongoing list of questions, there is something quite delightful in thenarrative of these pieces, offering a trajectory of development that beginswith Zara and circles out into the larger world. At the offset, Zara’s world isintimate, small (self, toys, parents) and moves with a wide-eyed andopen-hearted curiosity through the simplest of inquiries that become, throughthe process, increasingly aware and increasingly complex. As the parent ofthree (and a former child as well, if you can imagine), it is very familiar to watchas Zara, through her father’s hand, works from “Mama say goodnight? // Did youplay soccer ball? Did you win? // I peed in my bed and in my shirt. Why? //Where’s me? [Stuck in a sweater.] // Oh no, where’s my bath fruit?” into “Can Ido it [plunge the Bodum]? // Who left it [newspaper] on the ground [driveway]?// Do you have any grapes Why [not]? // Will there be penalty shots? Where’sJack Grealish? // How many fingers do you have? How many does Laiq have? // Arewe going to Montreal next week? Gosh. I love Montreal-y.”