[myself and Lady Aoife, who is unpromptedly perfecting her 'royal wave'] Here
we go again, my list of the seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’
is such an inconclusive designation), constructed from the list of poetry
titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. And, if you can
imagine, this is my seventh annual list [see
also: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] since dusie-maven Susana Gardner
originally suggested various dusie-esque poets write up their own versions of
same (although I think I’m the only one who actually did).
Most
years I’ve been quite active as a reviewer, but I’ve slowed considerably since
the emergence of our two wee girls (Rose turned 4 in November; Aoife turned 1
this past April; I am home with both), meaning the pool from which I draw is
smaller than it once was. These days, two reviews a week is a hefty goal, which
is slightly improved since Aoife began her two mornings a week of preschool and
Rose began junior kindergarten. I know there are still a considerable amount of
2017 titles I’ve been unable to properly discuss, including Steve Venright’s The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings (Anvil Press) (among others, certainly; you
have no idea how large the mounds of not-yet-reviewed currently is, whether
sitting upon or beside my home-office desk), and I haven’t even seen Calgary poet Nikki Sheppy’s debut yet, published through University of Calgary Press;
nor did I review my dear wife Christine McNair’s stunning Charm (BookThug). Simply consider them, I suppose, as part of this
list as well. And yet, I know these lists get longer ever year: how am I supposed
to focus on a mere ten? There is so much amazing work being produced right now
(and a lot of awful, also, but we aren’t talking about that here, at this
moment). So here, in no particular order, some of my highlights from 2017:
1. Certain Details: The Poetry of Nelson Ball, ed. Stuart Ross: It really is wonderful to see the publication
of Certain Details: The Poetry of Nelson Ball,
selected with an introduction by Stuart Ross (Wilfrid Laurier University
Press, 2017), a collection showcasing some fifty years of poetry production by
Paris, Ontario poet, editor and bookseller Nelson Ball. Ross certainly has been
busy lately, with a selected poems he’s edited by Ottawa poet Michael Dennis
out any day now through Anvil Press, and moving his long-running imprint from
The Mansfield Press over to Anvil, with the first titles from such appearing
over the next year. For those familiar with Ball’s work—produced over the years
through numerous small press books, chapbooks, pamphlets and leaflets—his
precision and timing is unmistakable, composing sublime poems that are infamous
for their capacity to hold both volume and breath in such small spaces. However
quiet and unassuming both he and his work might appear (Nelson is notoriously
both deeply humble and generous), Ball’s work has gone on to influence multiple
generations of Canadian poets, including jwcurry, Gary Barwin and Ross himself
as well as Mark Truscott, Kemeny Babineau, Michael e. Casteels and Cameron
Anstee, among so many others. One might suggest that such a selected volume is
long overdue. See my full review here.
2. Suzannah Showler, Thing Is:
The follow-up to Showler’s debut poetry collection, Failure to Thrive (ECW Press, 2014), Thing Is (McClelland & Stewart, 2017) continues Showler’s
exploration into the lyric, composing poems of uncertainty that explore the
very nature of being and consciousness, while attempting to come to terms with
just how it is the world exists, and we, individually, upon it. Showler
composes her poems as lyric essays, each poem working towards a single,
book-length goal. Despite, or even because of, the author/narrator’s inherent
skepticism, the short poems of Thing Is
seek answers to impossible questions, as Showler patiently and meticulously
disassembles the world through language in an attempt to understand how the
mechanism works. To open the poem “Not Not,” she writes: “When it comes to
classification, / the thing you aren’t after isn’t // the worst place to
start.” The idea of naming is one that comes up a couple of times throughout
the collection, such as in the poem “False Negatives,” where she writes:
“Naming a substance is an act of feeling / for principles of unity.” To name
something is to make it tangible, and this collection is ambitious, seeking out
what might be impossible to find, and yet, fascinating to engage. See my full review here.
3. Aisha Sasha John, I have to live.:
Toronto poet, choreographer and performer Aisha Sasha John’s third poetry
collection is the absolutely thrilling I
have to live. (McClelland & Stewart, 2017), a book-length suite of
lyric poems running lengthwise across the entire stretch of being, exploring
the physical, the sexual and the spiritual. Composed as a poetic diary, I have to live. is an incredibly sensual
and deeply personal book, and sketches out across titles such as “Something
softens me,” “I sleep in a room.” and “When I leave here I don’t know where I
am.” to “What’s the big fucking deal about,” “The landlord said he lost his
phone.” and “How much of your body is in your head.” There is something
memoir-ish, even “confessional” in her first-person poems, carved as a
combination between lyric essay, storytelling and myth. “I am low and found; I
am high and found.” she writes at one point. In another part of the collection,
she adds: “If I’m wrong / If I’m wrong – who gives a fuck? // I have to live.” See my full review here.
4. Douglas Barbour, Listen. If:
I’m thrilled to see a new title by Edmonton poet, editor and critic Douglas
Barbour, his Listen. If (University
of Alberta Press, 2017), a collection comprised of nine seemingly
self-contained sections, four of which had previously appeared as chapbooks,
via Greenboathouse Books, Rubicon Press and two from above/ground press
(including one available online as a free pdf). While he has been part of two
more volumes of an ongoing collaboration with American poet Sheila E. Murphy—Continuations (University of Alberta
Press, 2006) and Continuations 2 (University
of Alberta Press, 2012)—it really has been more than a decade and a half since
the appearance of his previous poetry titles: Fragmenting Body etc. (NeWest Press, 2000) and Breath Takes (Wolsak & Wynn, 2001). Even the aforementioned
chapbooks are more than a few years old: a
flame on the spanish stairs (greenboathouse books, 2002), It’s over is it over: Love’s Fragmented
Narrative (above/ground press, 2005), Wednesdays’
(above/ground press, 2008) and Recording
Dates (Rubicon Press, 2012). Not that any of this is a specific complaint,
but an observation: I’d been years wondering where and when new work by Barbour
might appear, despite the knowledge that his two prior collections also held
quite a book-silence before they appeared. Between breaths, one might say, a
silence. See my full review here.
5. Stephen Cain, False Friends:
After a gap of a dozen years since his previous full-length poetry collection,
Toronto poet and critic Stephen Cain’s latest poetry collection is False Friends (BookThug, 2017),
following his previous full-length collections dyslexicon (Coach House, 1998), Torontology
(ECW, 2001) and American Standard/ Canada
Dry (Coach House, 2005). Constructed as a series of seven sections, False Friends follows Cain’s interest in
constructing books out of chapbook-length sections, whether single pieces,
suites or sequences, that accumulate into full-length works. It’s worth noting
that four of the sections included here—“Etc Phrases,” “Zoom,” “Woodwards” and
“Stanzas”—appeared previously as chapbooks, via BookThug, above/ground press
and NO Press. There is something very compelling about how Cain tweaks and
twists language from his various sources, writing out references to and
information upon his many interests and concerns, from Theodor Adorno to
Canadian Modernist writers to Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde. In False Friends, Cain revels in a play of
sound and meaning, bouncing his narrative as a pinball across the field of
language. Where is the falseness in False
Friends? I wonder if the falseness he suggests is, perhaps, one to do with
meaning, whether our adherence to “meaning” in poetry as an absolute, or to
meaning, as some of the language poets have suggested, is something that can be
completely set aside. It seems precisely this pair of extremes that Cain’s work
manages to exist between, and play off of, refusing to remain fixed but instead
fluid around narrative, meaning and even the argument of the narrative “I.” As
he writes to open the poem “Sportstalk”: “There’s no “I” in L = A = N = G = U =
A = G = E Poetry.” See my full review here.
6. Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, edited by Shannon Maguire: I’m amazed and
thrilled to finally see a copy of Planetary
Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, edited by poet and critic Shannon
Maguire (Wesleyan, 2017). Planetary Noise
manages the seemingly impossible task of articulating and selecting from
Moure’s sixteen trade poetry collections, as well as from a collaborative work
and a selection of translations, to create a remarkably coherent whole. Editor
Shannon Maguire has done an incredibly thorough job of putting together an
impressive volume of Moure’s work, along with an equally impressive critical
introduction to the context of Moure and her expansive, playful and voluminous
writing/translation practice(s), including an array of details that add
enormous amounts of information to Moure’s ongoing work. Moure’s early
engagements with the ‘work poets’ of Vancouver—including Tom Wayman, Zoë
Landale, Kate Braid, Phil Hall, Calvin Wharton and others—for example, is well
known, but did you also know that she was briefly a student of Pat Lowther? Her
introduction illuminates, as well as shines. See my full review here.
7. Michael Dennis, Bad Engine: New and Selected Poems: It is good to see the release of Ottawa poet
Michael Dennis, Bad Engine: New and
Selected Poems, “edited and introduced by Stuart Ross” (Anvil Press, 2017).
Given I was the editor of Dennis’ only other volume of selected poems, This Day Full of Promise: Poems Selected and
New (Broken Jaw Press/cauldron books, 2003), I’d been intrigued to see what
directions Ross might head into for this new volume. Apart from the immediate
difference of Ross conducting line edits on the poems (something Dennis hadn’t
allowed before), Ross was also given access to a wide variety of unpublished
and uncollected work, opening up the possibilities enormously for a volume of
work by a poet far more productive than even his multiple book and chapbook
titles over the past four decades might suggest. As Ross writes in his
introduction to the collection: “And so Bad
Engine offers up revised versions of just about all the selected poems, as
well as a big complement of recent works. The couple thousand poems I read to
concoct this mixture drove home to me that Michael Dennis is the real thing
when it comes to poetry without artifice: poetry delivered directly from the
various organs of the gut.” Opening with some two dozen pages of new material, Bad Engine provides less of a linear
trajectory to Dennis’ forty-plus years of poetry production than an exploration
into a short list of concerns that have occupied his writing throughout the
years, from more personal poems on and around various members of his family,
commentary on his current reading and poems that write out the immediacy of his
day-to-day, from doing dishes to sitting in pubs to reading the newspaper. One could
say that Michael Dennis is a no-nonsense and straightforward poet of plainspeak
and the immediate, and there is something curious about how not a single piece
in this collection feels dated. His view may have gained depth, wisdom and
widened his scope over the intervening years, but Michael Dennis is a poet who
has cared about what is immediately in front of him, right now, for a very long
time now. See my full review here.
8. Erin Robinsong, Rag Cosmology:
Poet and interdisciplinary artist Erin Robinsong’s first poetry collection is Rag Cosmology (BookThug, 2017), a poetry
collection constructed as a “pulsating meditation” that blends fragments,
visual poems, performance and the lyric essay on ecology and the personal, and
how they can’t help but interact. In the poem “PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A
SYSTEM,” she writes: “we delivered a formal apology to the salmon / did a
controversial pregnant photoshoot / in front of a nuclear reactor, all those
nice curves / we made page 15 of the New York Times, ok / and delighted in the
letters to the editor that said / I was ‘going to give my baby cancer’ well
exactly / then got scared and moved but it was everywhere / we went like my
unstable worth rolling / oblongly on pink shadows of information / glamping
among facts. Friends came / and were astronomies.” There is something of the
collection that exists between the book-length unit of composition and a
collaged kind of catch-all, as well as elements of the text that read as though
the script of a performance, set aside the more traditional poems. In many
ways, the structural variety throughout the book is the glue that bonds the
collection together, allowing the different elements of her explorations
through poetry to interact. One might even say: the performance aspect is key. See my full review here.
9. Emily Izsak, Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem: For some time now I’d been looking forward to
Toronto poet Emily Izsak’s first trade poetry collection, Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem (Signature Editions,
2017). Whistle Stops is constructed out of an extended sequence, with a
shorter sequence included as a kind of coda. The poems in the title section run
from the end of August to the middle of April, utilizing notation-as-title,
specifying destination and time of each trip, alternating “London” and
Toronto’s “Union Station.” The specificity of her titles are reminiscent,
slightly, of the day book poems of Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days,” as he
too titles his poems with a precise date (via the Julian Day calendar; given so
few are aware of the workings of the calendar, the specifics might be there,
but the effect is obviously and deliberately softened) and composing a poem
using details in such a way as to work against precise description and
narrative, instead focusing on sound, shape and language. As she writes to open
the poem “MAR 1ST 74 TO UNION STATION 07:35”: “Distance seeks luxury / among the
cedars / offstage decoys // guide our larvae / to a pagan grasp / of self
portraiture [.]” Most of the poems in the first section have the effect of
short, sketched meditations, but also allow for the possibility of other formal
and informal intention and invention, and even allowing for the possibility of
poems constructed out of anything and everything, while still connecting to the
other pieces via the open-ended structure. Each poem might exist on its own
(presumably composed during the train jaunt referenced in each poem’s title),
but each live in conjunction with every other poem in the collection. There
have been numerous books composed on trains (I’ve even done my own, more than
once), and the extended travel of trains somehow lends itself well to the
composition of longer works, whether long poems, sequences or suites. In so
many ways, the hours of rattle and rail can’t help it. Curiously, the effect of
such poems-in-transit suggest that each piece is composed in the same “place,”
writing out both the samenessess and differences of a new day along the same
track (much like Auggie’s photographs in the 1995 movie Smoke, or Frank O’Hara’s infamous 1964 collection, Lunch Poems). The samenessess allow for
structure, but the differences, however slight, contain multitudes. See my full review here.
10. Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos, selected with an introduction by Gregory Betts:
The latest in the “Laurier Poetry Series” is Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos, selected
with an introduction by Gregory Betts (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017).
I’ve long considered that there hasn’t been nearly enough attention paid to
Christakos’ ongoing work, so am thrilled to see both this collection, and
Betts’ lengthy and informative introduction, in which editor Betts lists a
series of threads that have existed throughout Christakos’ published body of
work, writing that while her first collection “explores the intersection of
prose and poetry, and the movement of a body in a landscape, her works since
then have increasingly included puns, anagrams, reversals, permutations,
neologisms, found texts, digital meditations, and other fragmenting methods
that depict the swift movement of language in the world and on her page.”
Perhaps it is worth noting that Christakos has, through her seemingly uninterrupted
writing and publishing activity since the 1980s, been a rare Toronto linkage
between experimental Canadian writing in the 1970s and 1980s and the more
recent explosion of experimental writing over the past two decades. Through
Christakos, one can see echoes of the play (joyously so) and syntax of
bpNichol, who one of her early writing teachers and mentors, as well as echoes
of the writing on politics and the body of Nicole Brossard (the list goes on),
all of which Betts explores and discusses at length. Christakos’ work has
always managed a joyousness to it, even through a deeply critical gaze; playing
and pausing and pushing, always, the possibility of what writing should be
about, and how writing should even be approached, from the large canvases upon which
she works, and the precision upon which she holds and places each individual
word. See my full review here.
11. Shane Rhodes, Dead White Men:
Some of Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes’ most compelling work, and much of his focus
over the past few years, has been in utilizing the words of others—rearranging
and shifting context—and he continues that exploration through Dead White Men (Coach House Books,
2017), a book that delves into “exploration and scientific texts from the
fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries – texts wrapped up in the history and
ongoing present of colonization [.]” There is something fascinating about how
Rhodes and Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel are, from their separate vantage points
and backgrounds, both exploring and reworking texts of the colonizer, engaged
in the acknowledgment and exploration of erased and overwritten Aboriginal
histories and presences in Canada through European exploration and settlement. Dead White Men also furthers the
archival work he began through his previous collection, X (Nightwood Editions, 2013), a collection that reworked and
responded to “each of the eleven numbered treaties (the Post Confederation Treaties
between many of Canada’s First Nations and the Queen of England).” The poems
that make up Dead White Men sample,
shift and/or excerpt journals and texts, for example, from explorers, writers
and historians such as John Franklin, Abacuk Pricket, Alexander MacKenzie,
George Best, Edward Dodding, Alberto Cantino, Pietro Pasqualigo, Thomas James,
John Davis, Jacques Cartier, James Cook, Luigi Galvani, William Gilbert, Robert
Boyle and Galileo Galilei, among others. There is something interesting, as
well, in the fact of a writer of European descent openly exploring and
critiquing settler texts, and through such, the foundational myths and
self-justifications that made European settlement possible. By shifting and
repurposing the context of some of these archival materials, Rhodes deliberately
highlights elements that might have otherwise been overlooked, and his
explorations throughout the collection move from the lyric to the fragment to
entire prose sections, in turns tweaked and selected and reproduced whole.
Moving away from the purposes of the original, he crafts a series, even a
collage, of highly critical lyric essays. See my full review here.
12. Kate Cayley, Other Houses:
I am intrigued by the narrative precision of Kate Cayley’s lyrics in her second
collection, Other Houses (Brick
Books, 2017). I was initially struck by a series of poems that thread through,
each titled “A Partial List of People Who Have Claimed to be Christ.” Four poems
in all, each poem writes a kind of case history on different historical figure
who claimed, in their own way, some version of the divine: Ann Lee (1736-1784),
Arnold Potter (1804-1872), William W. Davies (1833-1906) and Laszlo Toth
(1938-2012). There is something quite sympathetic in her
sketches-as-case-histories, blending elements of irrationality with their own
relationships and awareness of the divine, as she writes in the William W.
Davies piece, “Everything comes // again, and what is, was.” Cayley’s lines are
incredibly precise, pointed and sharp, carving metaphysical queries into
character studies, and short sketches that encapsulate the entirety of human
history. Utilizing historical research and figures, Cayley’s short narratives
write out an exploration of fissures, breaks and even collisions between
mythologies and reality, searching throughout the past few centuries for
examples of those who broke through to the other side, or were broken in their
attempts, and even, occasionally, both. As she writes in the poem “Hans
Christian Anderson Becomes Acquainted with / His Shadow”: “There must be a
light / somewhere.” See my full review here.
13. Gary Barwin, No TV for woodpeckers:
Hamilton writer, composer and editor Gary Barwin has been on quite a roll
lately, receiving a grand amount of attention and accolade for his latest
novel, Yiddish for Pirates (Penguin,
2016). The latest in his long line of poetry titles is No TV for woodpeckers (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017), produced as part
of editor Paul Vermeersch’s Buckrider Books imprint. Opening with a sonnet on
blackbirds (one that, possibly, suggests an extra way of looking at a
blackbird, beyond Wallace Stevens’ classic and endlessly-reworked “Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”), No TV
for woodpeckers quickly establishes itself as a collection of poems thick
with detail, distraction and play, constructed, if not to unsettle, but to keep
the reader slightly off-balance, albeit through rhythm, chants and repetitions.
This book requires attention, one that requires the reader to dig deep into the
quick repetitions, the variations on sound and play, and thrums and twists of
both language and meaning. Barwin’s work has long been associated with that of
Stuart Ross, along with a whole slew of “Canadian surrealists,” and much of
Barwin’s ongoing work circles around the surreal, bad jokes, quirks and twists,
as well as the physical and emotional landscape of his hometown and domestic of
Hamilton, Ontario, where he and his family have lived for years. The surreal,
one might argue, is as much an element of what he does in his writing as means
for his writing to actually be surreptitiously doing something entirely different.
Any conversation on his writing should include surrealism, but shouldn’t end
with such. See my full review here.
14. Marcus McCann, Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe: Toronto poet Marcus McCann’s third trade poetry
collection, Shut Up Slow Down Let Go
Breathe (Invisible Publishing, 2017), continues his trajectory of composing
an incredibly dense and gymnastic lyric, one that is remarkably linear and
precise, even in its use of language as seeming-collage. The poems that make up
Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe are,
one might say, an incredible mouthful: smart and sassy, thoughtful and wise,
thick with swagger, impulse and a great deal more experience than his prior two
collections. There are also a number of intriguing call-backs in this collection,
from his “Sex at Thirty-One,” a selection of “chubby sonnets” composed in
homage to Montreal poet David McGimpsey (“Labradoodle: An Essay on David
McGimpsey,” which appeared previously as a chapbook through above/ground
press), and three poems—“Never Straighten Is My Advice,” “In All Your Days May
Three Days Be Your Works,” and “There Are No Tense Problems at the Great
Imaginary”—that he calls “psycho-projective New Year’s letters,” writing in the
notes at the end of the collection that he utilized a similar form in his first
collection: “The game is to imagine what friends might be doing on New Year’s
Eve. These three ‘letters’ were written for K. Louise Vincent, Steven
Ruszkzycky, and Brandon Perlberg, respectively.” The extension of the
epistolary form is curious, and the first of these poems, subtitled “Psychoprojective New Year’s Letter to
Galiano Island,” includes: “Ideally your feet aren’t anvils / but updraft,
your brain and heart aren’t storms / but transformer and transformer joined by
sizzling / wire. Shift work, bawdy work, a firework / is emotional labour.
Exegesis.” See my full review here.
15. Emily Ursuliak,Throwing the Diamond Hitch: Calgary poet Emily Ursuliak’s first trade
poetry collection is Throwing the Diamond
Hitch (University of Calgary Press, 2017), one of the first two titles in a
new poetry imprint produced by University of Calgary Press. In Throwing the Diamond Hitch, Ursuliak
writes the 1951 road trip adventures of Phyllis and Anne. Shifting between
prose and lyric, diary entry and poem-sketch, Ursuliak combines fact and
occasional fiction alongside archival photos, postcards, artifacts and direct
quotations from her grandmother’s travel diary for an exploration of friendship
and western adventure. Ursuliak writes her collection as a collage of
individual moments and experiences along Phyllis and Anne’s journey, writing
out less a linear narrative than a sequence of events, akin to a photo album of
short sketches. As well, there is something curious to the construction of her
collection through poetry, as opposed to made into a novel, non-fiction title
or play, yet including elements of fiction and theatrical performance that
reads as a narrative, and could easily be adapted, say, into a staged
production. This structure is reminiscent of those early works by Vancouver
poet Michael Turner—Company Town (Arsenal
Pulp, 1991), Hard Core Logo (Arsenal
Pulp, 1993) and Kingsway (Arsenal
Pulp, 1995)—all of which were originally produced as poetry titles, with the
second of these, obviously, later adapted into a feature film (and subsequently
a graphic novel). In an interview posted at Touch
the Donkey, Ursuliak discussed the structure of the collection, writing:
“I’m relentlessly attracted to the idea of narrative and it’s interesting for
me to explore how I might tell a story through poetry as opposed to fiction.”
In the end, the book exists as an intriguing portrait of these two fiercely
independent women on an unlikely and unusual journey, portrayed through
monologues and character sketches. Part of what fascinates through this
collection is the multiple structures the book holds, suggesting a myriad of
directions Ursuliak’s work could move in, subsequent to this. Could she write a
play, a novel, a collection of lyric poems? Where might she go next? See my full review here.
16. Jay Ritchie, Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie:
Montreal writer Jay Ritchie’s first full-length poetry title is Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie (Coach House
Books, 2017), an immediate and self-aware collection of first-person lyrics.
The author of the poetry chapbook How to
Appear Perfectly Indifferent While Crying on the Inside (Metatron, 2014)
and the short story collection Something
You Were, Might Have Been, or Have Come to Represent (Insomniac, 2014), the
poems in his Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie
shift and shimmy from straightforward to dreamy to surreal. His poems are an
intriguing blend of description and abstract, moving easily between thought and
activity, simultaneously a part of the world and a witness, as the poem “AUGUST
SLOUGH” opens: “I did not go with the rest of the class / to see the meteor
shower. // It happened anyway.” There is both disillusionment and epiphany
throughout Ritchie’s poems, one that comes from, as the back cover suggests, an
“alternating sense of wonder and detachment,” and one that shifts and evolves
throughout the collection. The title shows the author/narrator’s uncertainty,
and the poems explore both an engagement and distrust with the outside world,
articulating an inner life of great complexity, concern and angst. One of the
finest poems of the collection has to be “DUMB BODY,” writing a fine line
across multiple actions, a through-line against the collage, both moored and
unmoored to the real world. See my full review here.
17. Trish Salah, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1: I’ve
long been curious about the work of Kingston poet, fiction writer and critic
Trish Salah, a name I first heard during those early 1990s Montreal days of
Corey Frost and Colin Christie’s ga press. Salah’s latest release is Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 (Metonymy Press,
2017), the first Canadian edition of a title originally published in 2014 by
New York publisher Roof Books. The author of a previous title – Wanting in Arabic (TSAR, 2002; 2013) –
Salah’s Lyric Sexology Vol. 1
suggests the opening salvo of what will continue, at least to a second volume,
if not further. There are elements here that read as memoir, something she
plays with as she writes through the legendary Greek character Tiresias, and
one can make a rather obvious comparison to Anne Carson writing the Ancient
Greek figure Griffin in her Autobiography
of Red (Knopf, 1998). In Lyric
Sexology Vol. 1, Salah composes her own blend of book-length lyric essay
and long poem on metamorphosis, gender and expectation, and one that includes
references to Ovid, Glee, Ed Wood,
Atlantis, high heels, mythologies, National Geographic, Gail Scott’s Heroine and the October Crisis.
Salah’s
essay-poem Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 is
an ambitious work that combines the lyric with the narrative, writing out poems
that wind their individual ways around and through each other; writing out,
even beyond gender, the potential elusiveness of identity itself. Through the
voice and character of Tiresias, “a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous
for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years.”
(Wikipedia), a character mentioned in numerous works by Sophocles, Euripides,
Pindar, and Ovid, Salah is able to explore and articulate an identity that was
never fixed, but one that evolved as Tiresias did, and as his/her own
situations required. As Salah writes in the poem “Godtears”: “Her break with
form was primarily intelligible as wanting the impropriety of your hand / in
me, sous la table, the exquisite
corpse giving way to hewn simply exercises / (spoonerisms) in French or Greek.”
Through writing a whole volume through and around Tiresias, Salah is able to
write out beyond the purely physical, and beyond the initial, and somewhat
expected, poems that Tuck suggests have already been composed; by composing
nearly two hundred pages of this first volume of Lyric Sexology, Salah manages to write through Tiresias, as well as
utilize the legendary Greek figure, as a way to explore the very nature of
fluidity, concerning gender, sexuality and the core root of self, bringing in
all the cultural expectation, uncertainty and complications that come along
with such shifting. See my full review here.
18. Sennah Yee, How DoI Look?:
Following the release of two poetry chapbooks through American chapbook
publisher Dancing Girl Press – THE
AQUARIUM (2014) and THE GL.A.DE
(2017) – Toronto poet Sennah Yee’s first full-length collection is How Do I Look? (Metatron Press, 2017). How Do I Look? is a collection of short,
self-contained, observational prose-poems, a number of which reference a
variety of degrees of sexual and racial violence, from microagressions and
offhanded comments to far, far worse, and the ways in which women are required
to constantly be on guard. Utilizing a series of pop culture references,
including an array of film titles as poem titles, the poems in Yee’s How Do I Look? are smart, wonderfully
playful, precise and straightforward, all the while shining a spotlight on some
rather dark corners of how people insist on treating each other. “I want to cry
when locals ask me where I’m from,” she writes, in the poem “SIEM REAP,”
composing out a short tourist scene from Angkor Wat, “because I know they are
trying to bring me closer, not push me away.” See my full review here.
19. Cecily Nicholson, Wayside Sang:
Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson’s third collection with Talonbooks – after Triage (2011) and From the Poplars (2014) – is Wayside
Sang (Talonbooks, 2017), a collection of six extended lyric
sequences/suites with an accompanying “Afterword.” Nicholson’s work has long
been engaged in the book length poem/suite, but there is something about this
new collection that holds itself together as a complex breath, constructed as a
single, ongoing line. As she suggests in her “Afterword,” Wayside Sang is an exploration through geographic, historical and
cultural space, attempting to discern something of her birth father, something
the book’s press release reaffirms: “This is a poetic account of economy travel
on North American roadways, across the Peace and Ambassador bridges and through
the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath rivers, between nation states. Nicholson
reimagines the trajectories of her birth father and his labour as it
criss-crossed these borders, in a study that engages the automobile object, its
industry, roadways and hospitality, through and beyond the Great Lakes region.”
Hers is both a real and imagined space of a lost parent, moving between the
archive and the spaces he occupied, writing out automobile production, border
crossings and the fossil fuel industry, writing: “low crude prices continue to
take their toll / and we continue to live […]” (“Fossil Fuel Psyche”). As much
as anything, Wayside Sang is a book
of origins, as Nicholson attempts to hear those songs from the side of the
road, exploring and critiquing the multiple facets of that space from which she
emerged. See my full review here.
20. Nancy Shaw, The Gorge: Selected Writing, ed. Catriona Strang: As her friend, editor and frequent
collaborator Catriona Strang writes in her incredible introduction to Nancy
Shaw’s posthumous collection The Gorge:
Selected Writing of Nancy Shaw (Talonbooks, 2017), Vancouver poet, scholar,
curator and art critic Nancy Shaw (1962-2007) was an important part of the
informal group of poets around The Kootenay School of Writing for a number of
years, and collaborated with a wide group of writers, artists and curators over
the length of her creative life, including, as Strang writes: “[Stan]
Denniston, but also Gerald Creede, Jeff Derksen, Eponymous Productions and
Management, Monika Kin Gagnon, François Houle, Jacqueline Leggatt, Eric
Metcalfe, Lisa Robertson, me, and Mina Totino (the results of several of these
collaborations are included in this collection).” This current collection
selects from a range of Shaw’s published works, including Affordable Tedium (Tsunami Editions, 1987), Busted (with Catriona Strang) (Coach House Books, 2001), Light Sweet Crude (with Catriona Strang)
(= Line Boks, 2007) and Scoptocatic (ECW
Press, 1992), as well as a variety of pieces pulled from catalogues, journals
and anthologies, and even an array of previously unpublished works, including
“ARCADES LETTER” (below). Part of what becomes immediately clear about going
through the work in this volume is how fresh the pieces remain, presenting both
a critical eye and a lively sense of language, meaning and sound, still able to
remind one just what might be possible in writing. Even for those of us who
might already have copies of all her trade collections, such a selected,
especially with previously unpublished and uncollected works included, allows
for such a wonderful opportunity to revisit the work of an author one might not
have looked through in some time; and, too, to mourn such a significant loss. See my full review here.
21. Mercedes Eng, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes: Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng’s second
collection is Prison Industrial Complex
Explodes (Talonbooks, 2017), an incredibly powerful and intimate
exploration of the Canadian prison system and systematic racism through
archival material and her own biography, specifically that of an absent and
imprisoned father. There is something akin to George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press,
1970) to the way Eng goes back and forth between the personal and the archive,
and a line between the two that often ceases to exist, working through a
portrait of her father, his incarceration, and the effects it couldn’t help but
have upon her childhood. This is a difficult and complex work, one that exists
as much as a non-fiction critique on the inherent racism throughout the prison
system as it does an intimate long poem utilizing her father’s words against,
one might say, the words of the state. Given how deeply Eng composes her long
poem as critical essay, it does feel very much that she has opened the
boundaries of what had been done previously with a form that Dorothy Livesay
termed the “documentary poem”; Eng isn’t simply reshaping the archive into the
space of her poem, but discovering, instead, a space where the form of the long
poem and the critical essay, in part through her use of found and archived
materials, meet. Furthering the work of what has come before her, this is the
long poem realized in an entirely new way, all while articulating some very
difficult terrain. And the question becomes: now that we’ve Mercedes Eng’s Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, how
are we to respond? Where do we go from here? After the emergence of such a
poetry of witness, might it perhaps spark an action? See my full review here.
22. Shannon Bramer, precious energy: Toronto
poet Shannon Bramer’s latest trade poetry collection is precious energy (BookThug, 2017), and is her fourth collection
overall, as well as her first in over a decade. Through her assemblage of short
lyric narratives, it is lovely to be reminded of what first struck me about her
poems in the first place—back to the poems in her first collection, suitcases and other poems (Exile
Editions, 1999)—the ways in which she writes with such intimacy, and deliberate
smallness, in a collection that includes breastfeeding, weddings, birds,
collaboration, children, mothers, dreams and cancer. There has always been an
unusual quality to Bramer’s poems, one that isn’t easy to describe, whether
part dream, part fairy-tale or simply the haze of parental exhaustion. Perhaps
the closest answer is, in fact, all of the above, articulating the sharp
clarity of a dream that begins to fade as soon as it gains its focus. Who else
could write a triptych of poems on towels? As her poem “Precious Energy: A
Triptych” includes: “My towels, on the other hand, look like the towels / of
someone who has given up. […] I’d rather buy some expensive wine / and drink
that and forget about whatever it is I think / I might want.” Her poems are
elusive, yet grounded, achieving a kind of magical state that exists between
the familiar elements of the domestic blended with the dreamy electricity and
dark spaces of fairytales. As she writes in the poem “The Land of Thieves”:
“Children steal the bodies / of their mothers; marriages steal doors and
closets. A new love / will steal from an old one, the way a cat eats birds,
without remorse / or self-consciousness. The story steals the poem.” See my full review here.
23. Fenn Stewart, Better Nature:
After publishing a small handful of chapbooks (including one from above/ground
press), Vancouver poet Fenn Stewart’s first trade poetry collection is Better Nature (BookThug, 2017), a
wonderfully playful and urgent collection adapted from one of American poet
Walt Whitman’s diaries, composed while he was travelling through Canada: Whitman’s Diary in Canada, ed. William
Sloane Kennedy (Small, Maynard and Co., 1904). Set against Whitman’s
Victorian-era diary of the Canadian wilderness, Fenn counterpoints with, as the
press release informs, “found materials including early settler archives, news
stories, email spam, fundraising for environmental NGOs, and more to present a
unique view of Canada’s ‘pioneering’ attitude towards ‘wilderness’—one that considers
deeper issues of the settler appropriation of Indigenous lands, the notion of
terra nullius, and the strategies and techniques used to produce a ‘better
nature’—that is, one that better serves the nation.” Her titles (listed in the
table of contents as “List of Whitmans”) include such whimsical, and lengthy,
titles such as (I mention two here only, for the sake of length) “if Walt
Whitman were a youngish woman walking to work along Northwest Maine Drive in
the Endowment Lands, just west of Vancouver, BC: if to her north were a series
of mountains, on the other side of Burrard Inlet; if to her south were
mansions, mansions, mansions up the hill; if she had a first trimester
miscarriage, and then another one.” and “if Walt Whitman were a wealthy
Vancouver resident bobbing about in a life raft in the suddenly much deeper Burrard
Inlet; & if the occasion of this bobbing led to reminiscences about the
creation of the city, via Major Matthews’ Early
Vancouver archives (re: the ‘purchasing’ of land in the late 19th
century) & Jean Barman’s historical research (on the destruction of the
Kitsilano Reserve in the earth 20th).” The blend is compelling,
mixing Whitman’s Victorian-era gaze of the Canadian “wilderness” against her
own hometown of Vancouver, as well as a lengthy list of both “Major
Debts/Reading List” and “Sources,” from William Shakespeare to Liz Howard to
Chelsea Vowel to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. From the opening line to the
final yawp on its last page, Better Nature is a rich and provocative
exploration and critique of colonized space, composed in such evocative collisions
of language, sound and meaning, and allowing the collisions to bring out new
ways of seeing what had been there all along. See my full review here.
24. Sharon Thesen, The Receiver:
B.C. poet and editor Sharon Thesen’s latest poetry title The Receiver (New Star Books, 2017), a collection of lyrics and
prose-poems, some of which focus on family and memory, reminiscent, slightly,
of George Bowering’s Autobiology (Georgia Straight Writing Supplement,
Vancouver Series #7, 1972), working through how stories are told and retold,
and shift in both telling and memory, sometimes deliberately, and often harden
into those variations, some of which are very far from the facts. Set in five
sections – “The Receiver,” “My Education as a Poet,” “Around then,” “Charles,
Frances, Ralph, and Me” and “Book of Motz” – the first three sections evolve
from a lyric exploration of family histories to more literary matters, akin to
the essay-poems of, say, C.D. Wright (a quote by Wright is one of two that
opens the collection) or Anne Carson. Thesen visits and revisits, reexamining
her own memories and influences, from family to writers, in poems that write of
visiting her mother, recollections of her youth, or the poets Shelley and Anna
Akhmatova. Not that any of this is a new thread in Thesen’s work; one might
even suggest that these are the foundations upon which Thesen’s work exists,
but there is something about her view, perhaps, that is bringing new elements
to light here. Particularly curious is the inclusion of the poem “The Pangs of
Sunday,” a piece that shares a title with her first volume of selected poems,
published in 1990 by McClelland and Stewart (a title that is otherwise unseen
throughout the selected). Did it take this long for Thesen to complete the
poem? Although this isn’t the most interesting in the collection (my preference
remains with the longer prose poems over the shorter lyrics), but it furthers
the throwback element that Thesen presents in the book as a whole. Really,
Thesen’s The Receiver is an
intriguing blend of the past and the present, composing poems that work to
revisit and reconsider her history, memory and influences, as opposed to simply
repeat or re-hash, as she manages perhaps her strongest collection in quite
some time, going back to News and Smoke:
Selected Poems (Talonbooks, 1999), A
pair of scissors (Anansi, 2000), or even my personal favourite, the
intimate smallness of Aurora
(Talonbooks, 1995). See my full review here.
25. Catriona Strang, Reveries of a solitary biker: I’m intrigued at how Vancouver poet and editor
Catriona Strang’s latest, Reveries of a
solitary biker (Talonbooks, 2017), could be seen as connecting to Meredith
Quartermain’s collection Vancouver
Walking (NeWest Press, 2005), George Stanley’s BC Transit-influenced Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) or
even Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and
Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Clear Cut Press, 2004; Coach
House Books, 2006; 2011), each meditating through their individual Vancouver
terrains in different, non-car ways, something that one could say Vancouver
poets have been doing regularly for decades (there are plenty more examples,
but you get the point). Strang’s Reveries
of a solitary biker is composed as a quartet of lyric suites, composing
each section for the suits in a deck of playing cards, and an epilogue, “On Not
Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” as a short suite of six poems.
The
poems in Strang’s Reveries move
through meditation, and the sections appear to be structured as much around
rhythm as content, holding a suite of, for example, mishaps, discord and
destruction in her “Diamonds” section, perhaps utilizing the section-titles to
suggest, or even trigger, into a particular series of directions. Part of what
appeals about her structure is in understanding, even from her perspective, how
seemingly arbitrary the order of the poems actually is, opening up to the
possibility of performing or reading in an entirely different sequence; the
downside to the printed book is that it holds the sequence in a single order,
what in the 1960s or 70s, possibly, via Coach House, might have actually been
produced as a deck of playing cards, thus opening up the possibility of
multiple orders, readings and understandings. See my full review here.
26. Joshua Whitehead, Full-Metal Indigiqueer: Calgary-based storyteller and academic Joshua Whitehead’s
first trade collection of poems is Full-Metal
Indigiqueer (Talonbooks, 2017), a spirited collection of text that “focuses
on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together
the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binary) in order to
re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity.” Exploring Indigenous
representations and mis-representations through blending pop culture references
up against those images, Whitehead’s Full-Metal
Indigiqueer shifts and spins, smashing preconceptions from within and
without his immediate vicinity. Fiercely intelligent, the poems in this
collection move at a pretty high speed, playing with narrative, visual and
concrete poetry structures and image, and includes a list of sources at the end
some three pages long, from Seinfeld
reruns to The Faerie Queene and A Christmas Carol, King Lear, Mean Girls,
Richard Van Camp, Zora Neale Hurston, Leanne Simpson, Annie Proulx, Larissa Lai
and Harry Potter. Even with all of
the research and reference, there is a heavy performance and narrative aspect
throughout, akin to the stripped-down narrative of Michael Turner’s original Hard Core Logo (a title originally
produced as a poetry title, since republished as a novel), which makes one
wonder if an adaptation for this work might also be possible? See my full review here.
