Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part three: Jamie Sharpe + Monty Reid,

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 ; part two of my notes]. So many things! Maybe you should come out for the next one in June?

Comox BC/QC: Curious to see a new phafours chapbook byComox, British Columbia poet Jamie Sharpe, his Michael Hofmann: Poems (QC:phafours, 2024), following a small cluster of titles, including five full-length poetry titles through ECW Press. As the opening note of the smallcollection offers: “I was forty. I lived in an unassuming, but comfortable, vinyl-cladbox in a small Vancouver Island town. I’d completed an English degree, then anMFA. Somehow, I authored five books. Then I became Michael Hofmann. […] Six-monthsafter this puzzling transformation, as abruptly as it began, it ended. A modestsheaf of poems, written while I existed as Michael Hofmann, remained theresidue of altered days.” As he describes living an ordinary enough life withwife and two small children, there’s a curious element of this apologia that mightseem entirely familiar to anyone feeling the accumulation of life-shifts, nolonger who they once were; an evolution of being and becoming, entirely naturalthrough moments of wondering whatever became of one’s errant, fleeting youth. Orperhaps a writer with a handful of books, wondering if an evolution is required;if the writing requires a shift into or towards something other, else (this isall speculation, possibly; or overthinking on my part. Perhaps I take hisframing too seriously). Is this Sharpe attempting to adapt certain elements of style from the German-born translator, critic and poet Michael Hofmann, working to step into a voice beyond his own? As a writer, an artist, one needs to evolve, certainly.Is a change as good as a rest?

One in a Row

The Northern Lights aregone, leaving
Streets as the starsscar..

As insects increase,Southerners
Fall on boulevards. Even mykids try,

With disgusting, sincere voices,to make names
With their awkwardness.

I first turned to night,as coincidence.
Succumbed to the censusby accident.

Saw our constellation ina hospital,
Free. Mutilation, flash yourwhip

With its two goldenhooks: one in vain,
The other, across dumb distance,in lace.

Thepoems offer a curious shift on the work from his prior publications, one thatmight be less of a singular shift than part of a larger move into or towardsother structures, one step following another. It will be interesting to see wherethis particular direction might lead.

Ottawa ON/Montreal QC: Ottawa poet Monty Reid’slatest is Vertebrata (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2024), achapbook-length sequence on some of the makings and doings of some of his innerworkings of late, including issues he’s had with his back, one shoulder, arm:enough that he’s no longer able to play or perform music. “Articulates at theLuschka joints.” begins the small poem “CV3,” “Little Germanic teeth / subjectto degeneration. // And the foramen / little Latinate windows / graduallyclosing themselves. // And the nerves die / twitching with their languages. /Their little languages.” Composed as short, compartmentalized and numberedsections: seven poems in a sequence titled “Cervical Vertebra,” twelve poems inthe “Thoracic Vertebra” sequence, and five poems in the “Lumbar Vertebra”sequence, followed by the singular poems “Sacrum” and “Coccyx,” the penultimateof which reads, in full:

The federated bones havea single voice.
They do now.

Sacred bone, buttocksbone, broad bone
The bone that survives.

You sit there
and I am there for you

like a shovel in yourpelvic girdle
to shovel all the shit

out of your sedentarylife.

Reidhas long had an attention to the smallest detail, and the ability to extend aparticular thought or sequence of thoughts, offering sequences and evencollections that feel akin to a single, extended sentence-thought, holding a balancebetween the minutae of cause and effect, the physical and the metaphysical, boneagainst bone and the abstract idea. “Sit on the disc / of collagen,” writes thepoem “T6,” “where the metaphysical arteries / don’t penetrate // until youbecome / yourself. // Every bone / needs its cushion // which you are now.”