Kyla Jamieson, Body Count

she brings me watermelon, a magazine,

ice cream

he brings me a belgian waffle, a mango,

everything for the dinner he makes me

he says,

,

&

/

I’m sick & can’t remember what he said

I wasted the years I could remember

every word on a man who stalked me

when I closed the door of my body

she asks why I call him            my evil ex

I explain & she says, oh.

yeah. (“SEX WAVE MOON NEST”)

I was eager to see Vancouver poet Kyla Jamieson’s full-length debut, Body Count (Gibson’s Landing BC: Nightwood Editions, 2020), building upon the poems Kind of Animal (Vancouver BC: Rahlia’s Ghost Press, 2019). Jamieson’s poems are constructed upon a powerful first-person narrative of insistence, resistance and discourse, including critiques of literary and other cultural spaces for their treatment of women. “I’m grading papers & trying not to be biased / against students who objectify women.” she writes, in the second half of the short lyric “CANADIAN WOMEN IN LITERATURE,” “Later, I will realize I’ve inflated their grades.” As Rob Taylor notes in his recent interview with Jamieson at Read Local BC, she and Kayla Czaga each include poems to the other in their new collections, providing a curious kind of mirror-effect in the call-and-response between two peers, between two friends. As Jamieson’s poem responds, “Your Dear Kyla poems / make me feel better / about my name, though it / means lovely & I can’t / relate to femininity. Kayla, / I’m at the bus depot / & I’m so cold.” I am quite fond of the rhythms of these poems, from the prose poem to the accumulated and more traditional short lyric burst. There is also something quite compelling in the way she utilizes accumulation, short lines and even exhaustion in certain of her longer poems, such as the mid-section of the poem “THE BOOKSTORES IN NYC ARE GREAT WOULD BE / A WEIRD THING TO SAY OUT LOUD,” that reads:

I can’t be the only one

who doesn’t have time

for resistance. I didn’t

have to ask about

your flight or the border

b/c nobody stops you

meanwhile executive order

meanwhile frostbite

meanwhile Third Country

& here I am with

my internet & iPhone

& heat & money

in the bank.

Her short lines and line-breaks seem to propel the poem forward, pushing and collapsing against the slowness of her lyric, and the deliberateness of her language. The second half of the collection centres around her experience recovering from a concussion, sketching shorter lyrics through a fog of exile, even from her own thinking. “Last month I counted / the five hundred extra / hours I’ve spent sleeping / in this new state / where sunlight augurs / pain.” she writes, as part of the poem “IN EXILE I DRAW THE TOWER CARD.” I am enjoying the explorations here, the movements through thinking and frustration, and even the ways in which, via her concussion, she attempts to write and claw her way back into being. “Kayla,” she writes, to open the poem “SIZE MATTERS,” “I’ve decided / I don’t want to be small // anymore, but it’s a habit.” One hopes it is a habit that, through the process of writing, she is continuing to break free of.

30 under 30 : an anthology of Canadian millennial poets, ed. a.m. kozak

This anthology is filled with poets across the country who have their own unique experiences but are united in the context of time and space. Some are award-winners and major award nominees. Others are recently starting to perform and publish. When soliciting poets for this collection, we wanted to include a range of voices from various pockets of the country with special attention to poets part of the ‘scene’: the ef-fervescent community that takes relentless dedication, energy and care to build. Though we are all different, what keeps us strong is our togetherness.

Here is a little window into some of these ‘millennial’ poets, resisting through words, if you’re curious enough to peek. The next time you overhear someone characterizing this generation as spoiled or disinterested, just think—where’s the evidence? (a.m. kozak, “Foreword”)

I salute the ambition of Ottawa’s In/Words for producing the anthology 30 under 30 : an anthology of Canadian millennial poets (2017), a rare perfect-bound publications put together by the long-time chapbook and literary journal publisher. Edited by Ottawa poet and In/Words editor a.m. kozak (b. 1989) alongside “Editorial Team” Barâa Arar (b. 1997), Doug Dumais (b. 1994) and Justin Lam (b. 1994), the anthology features work by Trevor Abes, Adèle Barclay, Joelle Barron, Jessica Bebenek, Dominique Bernier-Cormier, Selina Boan, J.C. Bouchard, Emily Chou, Kayla Czaga, dalton derkson, Klara du Plessis, Claire Farley, Elise Marcella Godfrey, Kate Hargreaves, joseph ianni, Chris Johnson, Jessie Jones, Ben Ladouceur, Curtis LeBlanc, Julie Mannell, Ian Martin, Cassidy McFadzean, Patrick O’Reilly, Ashley Opheim, Jay Ritchie, Ellie Sawatzky, Bardia Sinaee, Mallory Tater, Chuqiao Yang and Adam Zachary. This is an impressive collection, although, in terms of design, I must say I’m distracted by the glossy pages and would have preferred better margins; poems shouldn’t feel squished, and I don’t want to have to crack the spine to be able to fully read the text.

Plastic Watermelon

Welcome the sky inside of you. Hold me closer in the tiny rain, baby, I have been wondering about the time zones of waiting and the phenology of watering.

Waking up inside of my self isn’t always beautiful, but waking up beside you is beautiful all the time. The pattern we make together is crystalline. Baby, the compost in the biodegradable bag in the plastic bin is a symphony of decay, and flowers are sometimes spaceships.

All beautiful things die, but think about the space between mountains anyways. Think about the space between breathing. I am a woman for you, baby. I am your gigantic earthly delight.

Come rage, come uncertainty. Baby, brilliantly. Come, avoid the ambient watermelon. It is too heavy. Hold me in the gentle rain with certainty. Hold this time zone of waiting.

Together we make a watering mouth. Together we wonder about the pattern between mountains and the smallest crystals. I am gigantic for you. I am a tiny spaceship. I am waking up beside you in certainty, baby.

I am wandering between the time zones of our longing. I have been a watermelon seed. I have wilted. I have decayed, for you, baby. I am new. I have been waking up as beautiful as wondering.

Love is the space between mountains that holds distance together. Love is a watermelon smashed on the sidewalk. I have been waking up as open as the sky for you, baby. I am all guts and seeds and rain. (Ashley Opheim)

There are a number of poets in this anthology whose work I’ve been excited about for some time—including Bebenek, Czaga, du Plessis, Farley, Hargreaves, Johnson, Ladouceur and Yang—including a couple I didn’t realize were still not yet thirty years old. Others in the anthology are new to my attention, and I’d been curious to see who In/Words might have selected (on first glance, Ottawa poet Sarah MacDonnell becomes a curious omission, especially given In/Words recently produced her debut chapbook).

Pushing the point of age, the book is sectioned by birth year, opening with “b. 1987,” a structure about as arbitrary as any (including alphabetical), but is intriguing in that this is something I’ve not seen anthology do before. Does age matter? I like that, here, it both does and doesn’t. Still, part of the limitations of such an anthology become clear pretty quickly; in the introduction, kozak references an idea of resistance, a social and political awareness, that his generation has embraced, yet the work in the anthology doesn’t really show much evidence of overt resistance, including those working within radical forms as part of their their resistance (as many older-than-thirty Canadian poets have been doing for some time: Stephen Collis, Christine Leclerc, Sonnet L’Abbé, Cecily Nicholson, Aisha Sasha John, Donato Mancini, Liz Howard, derek beaulieu, Brecken Hancock, George Elliott Clarke, Jordan Abel, Colin Smith, etcetera). As part of this, one notices through the author biographies that, once the list of contributors move beyond the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal range, they predominantly seem to be poets with contributor’s notes that include Arc Poetry Magazine and/or PRISM International. While this isn’t meant as a complaint against the anthology or the work of the editor, it does seem a limitation of structure and style in the collection. Were there no poets under thirty from Calgary, for example, working more radical forms? Or Vancouver, doing the same?

Nemieiben Road

we’ll dock the boat after late night skinny

dips and scar our legs, pummel lichen,

slip and fall into animal burrows, mark

our palms with pine needles, weeds paddle

blisters and beer bc up north it’s only

you me the ghosts and trees and

your white picket family, who’ll insist I

come back soon, indulge me with hot dogs

those red skins cracking all the towels and

all the books somehow I got through war

and peace without remembering a thing

and your brother will drive us back

through la ronge and we’ll see two native

boys running through the rain fists clenched

around garbage bags full of clothes brown

bra spilling not even November yet but one

of them made rouge lips out of a poppy

red velvet smeared across window

cocking his head to see what chased him

past the mud the rain and dirt the weight

of the crucifix hanging around his neck

your brother cackling to a halt gravel

road upturned pilfering folds of black

plastic frills of a dress peeking out

we were all laughing at those nobodies

driving out the city past tombstones

those gray tongues wagging at trucks

trampling infants clothing, we’ll

tell the story of them holding a funeral

wreath, those pebbles slicing cheeks

that rain and them crying and screaming

and arguing to get the dresses back

in the bag, we’ll get a postcard of

this ghost town for all the world

to see before forest fires torched

it all in 2015 that was a good time

to be alive, nemeiben road on fire

two townies hoodwinked by such

a nice family, pine needles burning

footprints of our interruption sinking

but who cares because who knows

about their history, and how little

we knew of everything. (Chuqiao Yang)

What also becomes curious is the fact, even, that another publisher or editor hadn’t already taken such a project on, providing a really interesting opportunity for In/Words; my generation, for example, had a pretty good amount of coverage (slanted towards more formally conservative work, obviously) through Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier’s two anthologies of “best” new poets under thirty—Breathing Fire (Harbour Publishing, 1996) and Breathing Fire 2 (Harbour Publishing, 2004)—prompting Jon Paul Fiorentino’s chapbook anthology-in-response, Pissing Ice: An Anthology of “New” Canadian Poets (BookThug, 2004). Such projects are healthy for the sake of a living and ever-expanding literary culture, although I do wonder about some exclusions, which are, of course, difficult to really explore without knowing how old certain authors actually are. How old is Calgary poet Kyle Flemmer, for example, or Toronto poets Emily Iszak or Eric Shmaltz? What of Emily Ursuliak? Who else might they have missed? But still: the argument of exclusions become rather arbitrary when one considers the potential scope of their project: even the first Breathing Fire anthology took months of submissions to put itself together, and the final product was considered woefully slanted and incomplete (again, due in part to the lack of more experimental and radical forms of writing).

All in all, the work presented in the collection is intriguing, if a bit uneven; even poets I had been excited to read had poetry included that I know doesn’t represent their finest work. The wisdom and saving grace of 30 under 30 is their lack of declaration of arbitrary and impossible “best,” but instead, a showcasing of thirty Canadian poets under thirty that are simply worth paying attention to: in that, I completely agree.

announcing : VERSeFest 2017 : March 21- 26, 2017

Six days, sixty poets, one festival. Celebrating written poetry and spoken word in English and French, VF ’17 brings you some of the most exciting poets on the planet.

Our seventh annual festival! With a schedule that includes readings and performances by Alan Gillis, Alessia Di Cesare, Ali Blythe, André Narbone, Benoit Jutras, Bertrand Laverdure, Beth Anne Ellipsis, bill bissett, Brandon Wint, Cannon2X, Carolyn Smart, Chus Pato, Erika Soucy, Erin Moure, Eva HD, Faizal Deen, Gregory Scofield, Guy Jean, Jill Jorgenson, Kay'la Fraser, Kayla Czaga, Leanne O'Sullivan, Lisa Robertson, Louis Bertholom, Lounat, Madhur Anad, Marco Fraticelli, Marilyn Irwin, Mark Doty, Mark Frutkin, Maxianne Berger, Paisley Rekdal, Patrick Friesen, Phoebe Wang, Rhizome, Robyn Sarah, Roger Des Roches, Sandra Ridley, Sharon McCartney, Stephen Collis, Steven Heighton, Tereza Riedlbauchová, Thierry Dimanche, Ulrikka Gernes’ and Zachary Richard.

And the announcement of Ottawa's first two (English and French) Poets Laureate!

For further information (including a complete list of participants) on poets, schedule and tickets, check out the link here.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Tostevin, Tucker, Czaga, Christie, Kronovet, Abel and Poe.

Anticipating the release next week of the seventh issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the sixth issue: Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel and Deborah Poe.

Interviews with contributors to the first six issues, as well, remain online: Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming seventh issue features new writing by: Stan Rogal, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi and Suzanne Zelazo. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks and months for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of the first six issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. We are minutes away from anything.

Kayla Czaga, For Your Safety Please Hold On

FUNNY

On the bus today, a man looked like you with your teeth

removed, his lips a wild party on his face. Father, you

are not dead yet, though doctors keep removing bits

of you. Soon you’ll carry me around, a few floaters in a jar,

you should through the phone. That shouldn’t be funny,

but is, the way it was funny you telling me to apologize

to objects I bruised myself on as a child—Don’t tell me

you hurt the cupboard door. It stopped me from crying.

In this city where so many beggars look like you, I am

stitching what I know about you into poems, sewing you

together before you die, before I have to oblige you

by just dumping your body into the ocean. How do I say

you loved my mother through thirty years of sickness

alongside your love of pork ‘n’ beans and Pilsner? To what

do I affix your Russian moustache? I know I will never fit

in the fishing lessons I failed, the grey days I wandered

away from you into the bushes. Father, I never told you—

I drank river water; I flipped over dead fish with a stick.

Vancouver poet Kayla Czaga’s first trade poetry collection is For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), a book constructed out of a series of dark, lyric vignettes of small town living, fear of what lives in the darkness of humanity, and the relief of surviving the worst of it, as well as being able to recognize the many shades of beauty and dark humour. A series of short lyric twists in five sections—“Mother & Father,” “The Family,” “For Play,” “For Your Safety Please Hold On” and “Many Metaphorical Birds”—her rough lyrics evoke a history of small town brutalities, approached as a series of open and honest explorations into family, sexuality, gender issues and violence, and yet, never allow themselves to lapse into pessimism. Her poems explore circumstances, possibilities and a series of questions, as well as allegations, accusations and what otherwise might not have been discussed in polite company. In lyrically-packed poems about drunk uncles, youthful violence and what terrible things girls do to other girls, this is a poetry collection that explores a series of very specific stories. Not that this is simply a matter-of-fact collection; I might even call it optimistic. The narrator of For Your Safety Please Hold On, one might suspect, managed to “hold on” through a series of experiences, some of which might not have seemed as traumatic until much later, and not only survive, but thrive.

A FEW BOYS, JULY 1997

            a few boys set fire to their shorts,  few threw sticks for big black dogs, one rode his wheelchair to the Kit-Kat store, a few disturbed shit, a few had it coming, some jerks and some nice young boys, a few flirted, one helped his girl into a tree, a few caught fire, jumped over sprinklers, a few rode scooters, fewer drove cars, a few listened to rude music at the gym and were asked to turn it down but they didn’t, so a few were followed and shot down by the creek—three killed, a few photos on the evening news even though it was only a small-town crime, only a few boys—a few were just a shame, a few still pedalled blue bicycles, a few stopped at the half-mast flag and felt ashamed, and went on collecting frogs

Given the poems that make up Czaga’s debut, one might suspect that Nightwood editor and publisher Silas White has a more than ongoing interest in the rough and complicated coming-of-age lyric of small-town British Columbia, given how this collection is reminiscent of, say, Vancouver poet andrea bennett’s first trade poetry collection, Canoodlers (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2014) [see my review of such here], or even some of Vancouver poet Elizabeth Bachinsky’s early work, notably her Home of Sudden Service (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2006). The poems that really strike in Czaga’s For Your Safety Please Hold On are some of the ones in the third section, “For Play,” which do exactly what she suggests, playing with the line and metre and song of the lyric, utilizing similar kinds of darker stories that run through the collection as a whole, but musically jagged, bouncing and articulate in ways that really need to be heard aloud, such as the second section of the poem “Gertrude Stein Loves A Girl,” “two—a two of girls,” that reads:

A girl will sometimes pair, hold hands, skip

and be a horse, play house. A girl will share.

A girl will love another little girl if she is

Amanda and little and brown and lucky. A two

of girls is as cruel as exclusive. A two of girls

wrestles and throws each other from windows.

A two of girls plays Nintendo together and plays

Nintendo together and plays Nintendo together.

A two is two different girls, girls, girls. A two

of girls yells at their mothers for each other.

A two of girls sleeps over and over. A two

of girls stomps and cries and hates her and

phones her afterwards for a come over later.