Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one: Rose Maloukis, Ksenija Spasić + Kristjana Gunnars,

Bynow you know we’ve come and gone through the 30th anniversaryedition of the ottawa small press book fair [see my notes from the spring 2024 fair here and here, by the way], which was the largest (by a third or so) todate of our semi-annual event, which is quite remarkable. And all the vendors Iheard from said it was the best in sales they’d ever had! So that is deeply exciting.And did you see this report Amanda Earl made after the event?

Be aware that our next two dates are already booked andconfirmed! Saturday June 21, 2025 and Saturday November 22, 2025, again at TomBrown Arena, just west of Ottawa’s downtown core. If you lose track of those dates, you can always check here, of course. And make sure to keep track of theoccasional posts at the (ottawa) small press almanac, our small collective of Ottawa-based small publishers, yes?

myself, Stuart Ross (Proper Tales Press) + Cameron Anstee (Apt. 9 Press)

Montreal QC: I’m a bit behind, clearly, in my readingof Montreal poet and visual artist Rose Maloukis’ work, only now catching herchapbook Offcuts (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2023), a follow-upto, among other titles, Cloud Game with Plums (above/ground press,2020). Her chapbook-length sequence “Offcuts” suggests an element of collage,of stitching lines and sentences together, each page a self-contained burst ofphrases held together with precise intent. “one / thousand / would that be /enough to send / into the world / to say,” she writes, early on in thesequence, “here / look at these / and just for / a moment / yield [.]” There isa curious way that Maloukis works her own ekphrasis, engaging through text herown ongoing visual practice, allowing the one side of her creative work toreveal itself through another form, akin to a kind of commentary or poetics ofher visual art.

to save my life foreleven days
I made drawings
                            mybody
                           smoked
the novelty

lay on the floor
under a table

burnt ultra-thin candles
not to flame the paper
                           only to mark
                           with soot

this dirty foul smoke
and dangerous wax
                           affirms

all the charred days
bring back
                            mythirst

Ottawa ON: I was intrigued to see that Jeff Blackman’s Horsebroke Press has expanded to include single-author chapbooks, with the newtitle, the beautiful the bearable by poet Ksenija Spasić (November 2024)appearing, according to the colophon, as “These Days #29.” There isn’t anauthor biography included for Spasić, although a quick online search reveals theMoscow-born author currently lives in Montreal, after studying at both theUniversity of Toronto and Concordia University. Has she published anywhereelse? Either way, the beautiful the bearable is a chapbook about familyand war, offering ten first-person poems documenting response, aftermath andhow one can never fully escape. Referencing The Complete Works of Primo Levi(2015) by the Jewish-Italian chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi(1919-1987), Spasić offers: “Levi writes madness, / but describes method / orderliness,the gears that make it go. / Like transposing the patterns of life/ to give intelligibleform / to death.”

Thereare small gems within these poems, some of which really strike, and make mecurious about what else she might be writing or working on. “Into these words,”she writes, to close the poem “Ritual,” “I take a part to flee the whole, /perform the ritual / that shrinks a shoreline or a man / into the beautiful, /the bearable.”

jwcurry, Room 3O2 Books

Toronto ON/Vancouver BC: I’m frustrated to onlynow discover (via our small press fair “free stuff” table) Canadian poet and artist Kristjana Gunnars’ chapbook sequence At Home in the Mountains: A Report on Knowledge in Twenty Parts (Toronto ON: Junction Books, 2019) [catch the essay I did on her fiction a while back here]. As she writes at the offset:“I want to acknowledge the University of Alberta Department of English and FilmStudies for hosting the writer-in-residence anniversary event in 2016, whichbecame a precursor to these poems.” This is wonderful to hear, but frustrating,as I had also been part of that event, and had even produced a new chapbook of poems by Gunnars as part of it (and a further one since). I had no idea this existed!As Gunnars writes as part of her “PRELUDE AND INTRODUCTION” to the collection:

            Because I have fused the traditional poetry manuscriptwith the more academic or literary essay, with the attendant paraphernalia, I amthinking of this work as “essay-poetry.” Mixing genres can be illustrative of away of thinking that is not strictly “according to rule” and doing so oftenopens up avenues otherwise left untouched. We are not living in the age of Rumi,or in the age of the chanting of lyrics, unless they come to us as musicalpresentations. We live in a textual age, brought on by the uses of the computerwith all its tentacles. We are now used to seeing “hypertexts” and feelingcomfortable with many layers of text and information coming to us at once. I havesimply followed an inclination brought on by contemporary technology increating the present manuscript, and I feel I am able to imply a great dealmore this way, and allow some of the voices I have left out of the poems toenter the field.

Asequence of twenty poems, Gunnars moves through and across prose poems to themore traditional lyric mode, offering a sequence of meditations on writing,thinking, living and solitude. “and yet the life of everyday is nice; food anddrink,” she writes, to open the poem “LOVE’S INEBRIATION,” “walking, sleeping,talking, regular life, as we know it; / how nice also for Milarepa when hereturned home from the mystical heights / and the villagers spread for him a feastof food and happiness— [.]” I complain of a lack, and yet, if I could figureout where I put my copy of her more recent collection, Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems (Brooklyn NY: Angelico Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], this particular poem-sequence is most likely and completely included inthere as well. Is my attention really that fractured?

without a word, withouteven a thought. I am trying to decipher
the botanical prints leaningagainst the wall, the faded cardboard
and singed edges of ourhearts—the ones we have tried to read
like maps or graphs ormathematical formulas, our long-lost

perspective that hangs bya thread, and how we cannot say
the words. how speechlesswe are, how mute, how afraid we seem
of the possibility itwill all be destroyed again: as it will, as it will