Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part two : Pearl Pirie, Sacha Archer + STUMPT 7 + issue eight,

[nina jane drystek, jwcurry + Chris Johnson doing the first of their two sound performances mid-fair]

[see the first part of these notes here]

Toronto ON/rural QC: From Quebec poet Pearl Pirie comes the chapbook we astronauts (Pinhole Poetry, 2025), a titlethe acknowledgements suggest “could be considered a sequel to Sex in Sevens(above/ground, Sept. 2016).” With a poetics that includes collage-movement andhaiku, this small collection again works Pirie’s own familiar forms whileexpanding her nuance, her repertoire, of poetic assemblage, collision, sketch-notesand density. “inside the exquisite loss of everything / except where skin knowssweat,” begins the poem “vacation day,” “time and all else will be someone else’sproblem, / here is birdsong and wave crash, // eyelash and breath, lips as ifwarmed silk / and a hiking up onto one elbow.” Her phrases almost readaccumulatively, with the slight disconnect between each one, allowing the poemto exist in the collision between descriptive phrases. What amuses, as well, isPirie’s further inclusion into the ongoing “Sex at 31” series [see my own noteson the origins of the project here, and my participation in same], her “sex atfifty,” a two-page poem that opens with “perhaps I have seen my last / set ofmenstrual cramps. // I never needed to collect / the whole bleeding set.” and endswith the couplet: “eight minutes until a / teleconferencing call.”

light on your feet

how did it take decades
for the full moon tocatch
you, the sun? yoursunspots,
your corona flare ofbacklit hair
the dinner plate of light
on your chest, and your
shoulder blades as you
rise to turn down the heat
at 9pm, the moonlight is
music scoring your ribs,
and hip notch,
slips with my eyes
down to the horizon
of your fine, sculpted
delectable ankles,arches.

Hamilton ON/Achill, Co. Mayo, Ireland: There is abeautiful compactness to Hamilton (formerly Burlington) poet, publisher, editor Sacha Archer’s latest, the delicately-lovely Second Sight (Ireland: Redfoxpress,April 2025), a title subtitled “(36 Masks)” and produced as a hardcoveredition, number 214 in the “C’est mon dada” series, a “collection for visualpoetry, experimental texts and works influenced by Dada and Fluxus.” I’mfascinated by these blends of handwritten text and physical object, image,stitch and erasure, and would want to hear far more on his process around sucha project, and how far he might take such structures in subsequent work. Andwhile the production for such an object is wonderfully graceful, I do hopethere is an opportunity to see these works in larger renderings at some point. Asthe introduction to the collection offers:

The work of Second Sightrepurposes facsimiles of so-called famous/canonical MSS to create masks in whatis both a gesture of looking backward and forward. While reconsidering themanuscripts themselves, their relevance and legibility (handwriting andcontent) to the contemporary reader, the act of creating masks transforms theMSS into surface matter or, raw material, which is to say, the concrete. The mask,being a loaded tool both for its intended use as a transformative piece of costumeand for its trans-cultural historical presence, not to mention the colonialexoticization of African masks met in Modernism, primarily in the work ofPicasso, makes of the mask a powerful vessel for a leap of faith which is theblind gesture forward, concretizing the MSS via cutting and the addition ofbanal (read totemic) objects into masks which cannot be worn, but which mayreveal.

Stuart Ross, Proper Tales Press

Kingston ON: If you’ve never encountered anypublications from Kingston writer, editor and publisher Michael e. Casteels, throughhis Puddles of Sky Press, I would highly recommend: at any small press fair youmight encounter Casteels at his table, quietly staping, cutting, folding andassembling small publications throughout the day, throughout the afternoon. Twoof his latest include the envelope STUMPT 7 (64 copies; June 2025) and theJapanese-sewn STUMPT issue eight (60 copies; June 2025), all hand-stamped(echoing jwcurry’s own infamous production, through his 1cent series and other productions via Room 302 Books) by the publisher himself. There is a kind ofcare, an attention, to publications and processes such as these thatphotocopied items are simply unable to replicate: consider that this is notsixty-some copies of a single poem, but sixty-some times the publisherhand-printed each poem, each line, in the same way on each slice of carvedpaper. One has to admire the patience, and the attention, as well as the craft.STUMPT 7 is made up of three poems on cards, one per card: an untitledpoem by Hamilton writer Gary Barwin, BC poet Dale Tracy’s “Soft Growth,” and Kingston poet Allison Chisholm’s “Attachment Unavailable,” which I photographed, below:

Mostsmall press publications are very good at offering different elements of piecesby emerging, and established writers, and Casteels works a very nice balance aswell, but working from a far different pool of writers than might ever appear acrossmainstream publishing. STUMPT issue eight, produced with hand-sewn binding,offers a poem each by Keaton Studebaker, John Grey, John Repp, daniel f. bradley,and, on the back cover, which I photographed, below, this piece by DavidRomanda: