Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part four : Grant Wilkins + Salma Hussain,
[see the first part of these notes here; see the second part of these notes here; see the third part of these notes here] And youalready know about the dates of our next three fairs, yes? Saturday, November22, 2025 (thirty-first anniversary event!), Saturday, June 20, 2026and Saturday, November 14, 2026 (thirty-second anniversary event!), allat our usual (new) location of Tom Brown Arena. Strange to be booked that farahead, but there you go. As ever, check for updates here when there are any(although if you already know the dates, I’m not sure what further updates you’dneed, beyond the pre-fair reading announcements, which would only happen acouple of weeks before each fair).
ottawa small press book fair co-founder James Spyker + Ottawa poet Grant Wilkins
Montreal QC/Ottawa ON: It is always good to seenew work from Ottawa poet and performer Grant Wilkins [catch a recent essay he wrote on his work here], and his latest chapbook (and to my immediate knowledge, his first non-above/ground press chapbook, beyond the privately printed hardcover TheKamouraska Codex: A Preliminary Translation with Commentary that heself-produced in 2019 in an edition of fifteen copies) is the chapbook-lengthsequence LEGENDARY THINGS (in which Phyllis Webb sings Motörhead to Basho)(Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2025), a sequence “variously gathered,sifted, nicked or otherwise drawn” from Webb’s The Vision Tree(Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1982), Basho’s On Love and Barley – Haiku ofBasho (Penguin Books, 1985) “and the lyrics of various songs by Motörhead(Lemmy Kilnister et al.).” “That weather-beaten skeleton / at the secret heartof your poem / has nowhere to hide,” he writes, to open the second page of thesequence. Half a page down, offering: “Laying there drunk on the cobblestones /I studied your graceful script / Sans serif and righteously stoned [.]”
Thereis something quite fascinating in the way Wilkins approaches hisrecombinations, finding new threads through not only the source material he selects,but the collision of what might otherwise seem contradictory sources, from “Theechoes of music and poetry / are shredded by summer’s end / and the bombs goingoff at night” to “I’ve lost my passion / for burning skies / and riders wearingblack [.]” There are other poets working creative work through similarprocesses of recombination, providing both original works and threads of criticalresponse to their source materials, including a couple of recent titles such asEdmonton writer and critic Joel Katelnikoff’s Recombinant Theory(Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]and Toronto poet R. Kolewe A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC:Talonbooks, 2023) [see my review of such here], not to mention Philadelphia poet and critic Laynie Browne’s ongoing work [see an interview I did with her on such here; see my review of her latest here]. Wilkins is doing someinteresting things, and I very much hope he keeps going. I want to see what hedoes next.
Ottawa poet (and Brick Books tabler) Manahil Bandukwala and Ottawa poet Mahaila Smith
London/Toronto ON: Okay, so Baseline Press wasn’tactually at the small press fair this time around, but this chapbook landed inthe mail around about the same time (and they’ve been at fairs before, so itstill totally counts). The latest from the press is What if Maybe and other poems (July 2025) by Toronto-based writer Salma Hussain, a poet and fictionwriter, author of the debut young adult novel The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan(Tundra/Random House, 2022). A sleek collection of nine poems, the piecesin What if Maybe and other poems follow a trajectory of the narrative,first-person lyric, but one that holds to smallness, to precision; one thatspeaks in points of light across distances, step upon step upon step. “Math wasnot math until / the Greeks saw thevalue in how the Arabs used zero,” she writes, to open the poem “THE VALUE OFZERO,” “They needed zero / for calculating prayer times / for weighing za’ka:tdues / for shirking interest // but also / they were counting stars / mappingpatterns in the light beyond their grasp [.]”
I’mcurious, intrigued, even, about Hussain’s lyric precisions, and would beinterested to see what she might do in the space of a full-length collection.Her lines pull the stretch between small and expansive, often simultaneously, ininteresting ways. There’s a fine line between her poem’s ungencies andpropulsion, and the ability to hold to the moment, to stand peacefully andutterly still. Or, the first two stanzas of the poem “SCREAMSONG,” that begin:
Belligerent with thenurses I pulled
the feeding tube out ofmy nose
like a birthday partymagician pulling out yards of silkyred ribbon
from an upturned top hat
The white coats recommenda two-week residential stay
at a physio rehabclinic but I insisted I be sent backhome
I felt then and I knowtoday that I have two little daughters who unknowingly
unwittingly are the only gurusI need(ed) for my healing
We signed a mountain ofrelease forms
liability waivers other papers
and my trembling husband bithis lip his tongue the entire drivehome
