Ongoing notes: mid-July, 2024 : Sandra Simonds + Biswamit Dwibedy,

Ihaven’t done one of these in a while, despite the chapbooks piling up [my last non-ottawa small press fair one was back in February, after all]. So here are some furtherchapbook reviews! I mean, everybody loves the chapbooks.

Toronto ON/Tallahassee FL/Bennington VT: I was amusedto see an exchange a few months back on social media that directly led to American poet Sandra Simonds’ debut Canadian chapbook, Combustible Mood (TorontoON: Anstruther Press, 2024), an assemblage of eighteen short, sharp lyrics. Theauthor of eight full-length poetry collections and a handful of chapbooks—includingsteal it back (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Atopia (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019)[see my review of such here]—the poems gathered in Combustible Mood givea sense of a far-wider canvas, which speak to not only her experience, but thepossibility of these pieces being part of a larger, full-length manuscript. Hernarratives provide the curious ability to extend and return, extend further andreturn, utilizing a core through which the language and purpose of each poemmoves out from, and beyond. As the poem “I Took My Place” ends: “I want tocollapse in you or find some shared / furrow that translates roughly into atrain // of thought and take it so far past the cedars / that we couldrecognize our own ghosts.”

Book of Hours

November, my God,November: a paranoia
of kernels and tombs, apanorama watered-

down, the rouge returningto a slapped
cheek then draining awayonce again as if

nothing happened. That’sthe body, isn’t it?
Ready to refill, ready toharvest, ready to paint
the walls of its owncatacombs vertigo-blue.

Boston MA/Paris: I’m finally getting into the recent trioof chapbooks by Sputnik & Fizzle, including Biswamit Dwibedy’s latest, FILM OF DUST (2023). The author of five full-length collections published in theUnited States and India, I’ve only seen a small handful of Dwibedy’s work priorto this, such as the chapbook EIRIK’S OCEAN (Portable Press @ Yo-YoLabs, 2016) [see my review of such here] and full-length Hubble Gardener(New York NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) [see my review of such here]. There is suchan intriguing way that Dwibedy extends his lyric from one poem to the next, asthough each cluster of poems as a kind of extended line of thinking acrossdistances. Dwibedy utilizes film as his subject for this two-sectioned clusterof poems, but in a way that allows for other threads, other conversations, tofloat in and around as well. “We were one / with everything that worked inrhythm / hence the stones that dance,” he writes, as part of the poem “14thApril, 1911,” their faces half-gone, centuries later / still striking a pose.”The poems weave through histories domestic and familial, and the patternings ofthe intimate against the universal. As the small collection opens:

The Hindi film industryis a family business. I write
about the movies because
my mother loved theadaptation of a book into a film.
She studied it, for anexam, an education she gave herself
years into her marriage.
            Or her other favorite films she let us watch. Or so
many films in which anactress plays a double role,
            Without the face changing, so it was the same
woman who gave birth toher. Repeatedly.
                  One plus oneequals a million. They say a
child can hear what themother sings or listens to even
from inside the womb.
This love for songsstarts when within.
                  In fact,babies react to music with an
invisible smile.
            How else do you teach something? You hum a
tune into his ears and itbecomes a new time.
                  Anything sungis always in the present tense.