Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two: Stuart Ross, Claire Sherwood + Jeff Blackman,

Hereare some further items I recently picked up as part of our thirtieth anniversary ottawa small press book fair [see part one of my notes here]. Somany things! And might we see you this weekend at our mini-VERSeFest festival, running Thursday through Saturday? Tickets for the Thursday night reading available now through RedBird Live!

Cobourg ON/Montreal QC: I hadn’t been aware ofthis wee title by award-winning Cobourg, Ontario poet, fiction writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross [see my review of his latest poetry collection here;my piece on his recent short story collection here], his a very little street (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2023). This is a curious structure,two numbered sequences that suggest a far larger, more expansivework-in-progress, with the eleven-part opening, “1. The Highway,” and seven-part“2. The Doughnut.” There is something in this sequence, this pair of sequencesset as part of (possibly) something longer, reminiscent of bpNichol’s novel Still(Vancouver BC: Pulp Press, 1983), the manuscript of which won the 5thInternational 3-Day Novel Writing Contest. Across that small book, Nichol describedthe room he was in with enormous detail; in a very little street, Rossdescribes a moment across a particular unnamed street, moving out across recollectionand points across an expansive lyric map, as the chapbook opens: “One hundredand seven kilometres / of highway. Clouds roar through the sky. // Runningshoes dangle from telephone wires. / Clouds of gnats. The smouldering ruins. //And my history: a red-brick barbecue / my father built in nineteenseventy-four. // The backyard patio’s pink and green / ceramic tiles.” Utilizingthe highway, the sequence, as a kind of prompt, Ross weaves and meanders acrossa meditative assemblage of accumulated couplets, driving for as long as he can,just to see where he goes. He writes a highway into a street, and a street intoa recollection, allowing the structure as a kind of catch-all for memory, avariation on the book-length poem Vancouver poet Michael Turner wrote onanother rather lengthy street, Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal PulpPress, 1995). As Ross writes across his sequence-thread, as part of the secondsection:

through our streets everyday. We saw him
beaming every day. He clutchedthe handle

and bellowed a song inHebrew, manoeuvred
the rattling cart. The giantant mass undulated,

animated. The wheels ofArnie’s shopping
cart screeched against thesidewalk. He wore

baggy jeans and a faded blueT-shirt
that said Hey Hey We’rethe Monkees. His shoulders

quaked with the vibrations.The crooked wheels
faced every direction. Ahand of lightning

snatched the bag my handgrasped,
tore it from my grip. Adoughnut. A doughnut

rose from the paper bag,dangled from
the claws of three whitedoves. It ascended

Manahil Bandukwala (Brick Books), wishing to recreate the 'grumpy poet' sequence of photos from the prior post,

Montreal QC: The opening reader of our pre-fair event at Anina’s Café (a wonderful new café in Ottawa’s Vanier neighbourhood, I shouldadd) was “Montreal writer, visual poet, and oral storyteller” Claire Sherwood,reading from her chapbook sequence, Eat your words (Montreal QC: TurretHouse Press, 2024). As she writes at the offset:

This poem is aninterrogation of memory, a fluid autobiography. Swirling with intergenerationalflavours and aromas. Stirring, blending, beating, scraping the sides of thebowl to find the right words. Struggling with separation, painful endings. Searchingfor home.

This is a poem strugglingto be a poem. Words are impossible to control. Nothing is static. Memory continuallyreorders and reframes archived slices of the past. Loops and lines write thestory. Is it leftovers? Am I home?

AcrossSherwood’s twenty-eight page/part sequence, she writes through an accumulation ofmemory centred around her mother’s cookbook, threading what seem like childhoodrecollections and precise questions, open secrets and gestures. There’s a lotof information packed in here, and her poems read like lists, offering layersof nuance between lines, one set atop of the other. “Is it dragging your feet,”she writes, early on in the collection. “Is it a leg up / Is it the hand offriendship / Is it losing old friends [.]”

Is it too many cooks
Is it the wrong pan
Is it returned to theoven
Is it a complete shambles
Is it terminal
Is it treatable
Is it roaring back to life
Is it mightier than thesword
Is it easier said thandone
Is it one horse and onecow sharing a meadow
Is it ever easy to findthe right words

Pearl Pirie, phafours

Kingston/Ottawa ON: I was intrigued to see thatKingston editor/publisher Michael e. Casteels had produced, through his Puddlesof Sky Press, a small chapbook item (sixty copies hand printed, hand sewn,within an envelope) by Ottawa poet and publisher Jeff Blackman, his IN THEBRINY (November 2024). Anyone who has seen a Puddles of Sky item knowsthere is a detailed and graceful ease to these publications, and there is aspare element to these poems I appreciate, one that allows moments of density, hesitation,spark and flourish in contained and compact spaces, such as the poem “In It,”that begins: “Honestly / I want less to do / with my body // but the body / hasa poem / I want [.]” There is such an intriguing slow and careful attentionhere, a perfect blend of text and production. Or the second half of the poem “HR,”that reads:

       howthis
     poem ends

     but not yet, friend.

 

 

                        Look,
your ride’s here.