Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one: Rose Maloukis, Ksenija Spasić + Kristjana Gunnars,

By now you know we’ve come and gone through the 30^th anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair [see my notes from the spring 2024 fair here and here, by the way], which was the largest (by a third or so) to date of our semi-annual event, which is quite remarkable. And all the vendors I heard from said it was the best in sales they’d ever had! So that is deeply exciting. And did you see this report Amanda Earl made after the event?

Be aware that our next two dates are already booked and confirmed! Saturday June 21, 2025 and Saturday November 22, 2025, again at Tom Brown Arena, just west of Ottawa’s downtown core. If you lose track of those dates, you can always check here, of course. And make sure to keep track of theoccasional posts at the (ottawa) small press almanac, our small collective of Ottawa-based small publishers, yes?

myself, Stuart Ross (Proper Tales Press) + Cameron Anstee (Apt. 9 Press)

Montreal QC: I’m a bit behind, clearly, in my reading of Montreal poet and visual artist Rose Maloukis’ work, only now catching her chapbook Offcuts (Montreal QC: Turret House Press, 2023), a follow-up to, among other titles, Cloud Game with Plums (above/ground press, 2020). Her chapbook-length sequence “Offcuts” suggests an element of collage, of stitching lines and sentences together, each page a self-contained burst of phrases held together with precise intent. “one / thousand / would that be / enough to send / into the world / to say,” she writes, early on in the sequence, “here / look at these / and just for / a moment / yield [.]” There is a curious way that Maloukis works her own ekphrasis, engaging through text her own ongoing visual practice, allowing the one side of her creative work to reveal itself through another form, akin to a kind of commentary or poetics of her visual art.

to save my life for eleven days
I made drawings
                            my body
                            smoked
the novelty

lay on the floor
under a table

burnt ultra-thin candles
not to flame the paper
                            only to mark
                            with soot

this dirty foul smoke
and dangerous wax
                            affirms

all the charred days
bring back
                            my thirst

Ottawa ON: I was intrigued to see that Jeff Blackman’s Horsebroke Press has expanded to include single-author chapbooks, with the new title, the beautiful the bearable by poet Ksenija Spasić (November 2024) appearing, according to the colophon, as “These Days #29.” There isn’t an author biography included for Spasić, although a quick online search reveals the Moscow-born author currently lives in Montreal, after studying at both the University of Toronto and Concordia University. Has she published anywhere else? Either way, the beautiful the bearable is a chapbook about family and war, offering ten first-person poems documenting response, aftermath and how one can never fully escape. Referencing The Complete Works of Primo Levi (2015) by the Jewish-Italian chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919-1987), Spasić offers: “Levi writes madness, / but describes method / orderliness, the gears that make it go. / Like transposing the patterns of life/ to give intelligible form / to death.”

There are small gems within these poems, some of which really strike, and make me curious about what else she might be writing or working on. “Into these words,” she writes, to close the poem “Ritual,” “I take a part to flee the whole, / perform the ritual / that shrinks a shoreline or a man / into the beautiful, / the bearable.”

jwcurry, Room 3O2 Books

Toronto ON/Vancouver BC: I’m frustrated to only now discover (via our small press fair “free stuff” table) Canadian poet and artist Kristjana Gunnars’ chapbook sequence At Home in the Mountains: A Report on Knowledge in Twenty Parts (Toronto ON: Junction Books, 2019) [catch the essay I did on her fiction a while back here]. As she writes at the offset: “I want to acknowledge the University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies for hosting the writer-in-residence anniversary event in 2016, which became a precursor to these poems.” This is wonderful to hear, but frustrating, as I had also been part of that event, and had even produced a new chapbook of poems by Gunnars as part of it (and a further one since). I had no idea this existed! As Gunnars writes as part of her “PRELUDE AND INTRODUCTION” to the collection:

            Because I have fused the traditional poetry manuscript with the more academic or literary essay, with the attendant paraphernalia, I am thinking of this work as “essay-poetry.” Mixing genres can be illustrative of a way of thinking that is not strictly “according to rule” and doing so often opens up avenues otherwise left untouched. We are not living in the age of Rumi, or in the age of the chanting of lyrics, unless they come to us as musical presentations. We live in a textual age, brought on by the uses of the computer with all its tentacles. We are now used to seeing “hypertexts” and feeling comfortable with many layers of text and information coming to us at once. I have simply followed an inclination brought on by contemporary technology in creating the present manuscript, and I feel I am able to imply a great deal more this way, and allow some of the voices I have left out of the poems to enter the field.

A sequence of twenty poems, Gunnars moves through and across prose poems to the more traditional lyric mode, offering a sequence of meditations on writing, thinking, living and solitude. “and yet the life of everyday is nice; food and drink,” she writes, to open the poem “LOVE’S INEBRIATION,” “walking, sleeping, talking, regular life, as we know it; / how nice also for Milarepa when he returned home from the mystical heights / and the villagers spread for him a feast of food and happiness— [.]” I complain of a lack, and yet, if I could figure out where I put my copy of her more recent collection, Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems (Brooklyn NY: Angelico Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], this particular poem-sequence is most likely and completely included in there as well. Is my attention really that fractured?

without a word, without even a thought. I am trying to decipher
the botanical prints leaning against the wall, the faded cardboard
and singed edges of our hearts—the ones we have tried to read
like maps or graphs or mathematical formulas, our long-lost

perspective that hangs by a thread, and how we cannot say
the words. how speechless we are, how mute, how afraid we seem
of the possibility it will all be destroyed again: as it will, as it will

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrick Grace

Patrick Grace is an author and teacher from Vancouver, BC. His poems have been published widely in Canadian literary magazines, including Best Canadian Poetry, EVENT, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and Prairie Fire. He is the author of two chapbooks: a blurred wind swirls back for you (Turret House Press, 2023), and Dastardly (Anstruther Press, 2021). His debut poetry collection, Deviant (University of Alberta Press, 2024), explores intimacy and fear within gay relationships. He moonlights as the managing editor of Plenitude Magazine. Follow him @thepoetpatrick.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My debut poetry collection Deviant takes pieces from my two previous chapbooks, a blurred wind swirls back for you and Dastardly. I like to think of them as singles released before the full album. The theme of male intimacy—in all its ups and downs—runs through all three.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I didn’t. I wrote fiction first, long before poetry. Fan fiction as a kid, short stories as an adult. I wrote some cool stories in workshops with Lee Henderson and Lorna Jackson at UVic. I still want to do something with them, someday, rewrite them and send them out. Poetry sort of took over and wouldn’t let me look back.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I write poem notes on my phone and when there’s a good number, I transfer them to my computer, tidy up the possibles and leave the weak ones. Then I hash out the possibles and create longer pieces, sometimes break them up into two or three poems. Some first drafts feel magical and so I leave them alone; poems like “The Calling” and “soft stalker,” both in Deviant, came out near untouchable in the very first draft. I didn’t have to do much with them. Others have been sitting on my hard drive for years that I still don’t know what to do with.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem begins with a memory or a feeling, translated into a single line. I pick out uncommon words that I like using in poems, or motifs that I find myself returning to (fire, light/dark, voices), and write a few more lines. It’s a balance of concrete images and clarity, wisdom. As a manuscript, I always knew Deviant would focus on queer love and intimacy, the fear that often comes with it, but there were a handful of short pieces that didn’t quite fit, so we removed them. I’m very happy with the final product in its cohesiveness.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

It’s important for authors to get out there and showcase their work. Writing is a lonely process, even when you’re sharing ideas by email or chatting on social media. It’s still just you and your phone, you and your computer. With Deviant’s publication, I’ve done a handful of readings, both online and in the real world, and I’m learning to enjoy them more. I’m quite a shy person so having a room full of people staring at you can be nerve wracking, but then I remember they’re all there for me, to hear my stories, my experiences.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I want to document parts of my life before I’m too old to remember.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I enjoy it, but I don’t think it’s always necessary. Everyone has a different opinion, style, mood. You’ll never please everyone. It’s a careful game, sharing your poems with another. Editors for publishing houses are a different story—if you want your collection published, that is.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

The standard: don’t stop writing. Write every day, as much as you can. It’s simple but easy to forget, and sometimes the weeks turn into months and you haven’t written anything! Take it seriously and make time, even if it means passing on your favourite Netflix series after dinner.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Surprise question! It would have to be red roses, or concord grapes, or blackberries. All of these grew around our house in Vancouver.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Nature does it for me. I go jogging in a nearby park several times a week, and it’s here that words, lines, ideas come to me as I’m covered in sweat and circling the paths.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

My pillars are W.S. Merwin and Anne Carson. I come back to them often. Carson in particular does neat things with dialogue, asking questions in poetry. It grounds me in my own work.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Start a chapbook publishing company. Or swim with dolphins.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

As a kid I dreamed of being a translator. It was a romanticized career that I didn’t know much about. In my mind, I imagined Gandalf poring over old texts in spooky libraries. The real thing is much more boring, underpaid, and not well recognized.

My other dream career was a marine biologist. Again, swimming with dolphins.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It wouldn’t leave me alone! Write write write, my mind chants at me. My full-time job is a teacher, and I also work part-time in the literary publishing world. It’s a nice balance so I don’t go nuts feeling guilty for not writing all the time.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

As for Me and My House by Sinclair Ross will always be one of the greatest books. When it comes to movies, I like them thoughtfully scary—M3GAN was a good one.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Poems about my childhood home. The house itself was big, old, and sometimes scary. We got broken into one night while everyone slept. Most of my writing lately is about that. Since the death of my mother a few months ago, I’ve also been writing about her condition and the dismal state of care homes. And, here and there, queer love poems, always love poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: late June, 2023: Scott Cecchin + Patrick Grace,

Odd to think that my mother would have been eighty-three today; my father would have been eighty-two this past Monday. Oh, and don’t forget I have a substack, yes? I think I’m gearing up for another book-length non-fiction project (possibly).

Montreal QC: A resident of Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, poet Scott Cecchin’s second chapbook is HOUSE (Montreal QC: Vallum Magazine/Vallum Chapbook Series No. 35, 2022), following Dusk at Table (O. Underworld! Press, 2020). I’m intrigued by the breaks, breaths and halts, the rhythms of this particular chapbook-length suite, and his poems expand upon their rhythms as the poems progress. What I find most interesting is how and where he holds the small moments and fragments of speech, appearing far more compelling than later on in the collection, as his narratives stretch into more traditional and even conventional plain-speech. But there is something here, and I am intrigued. As the opening title poem, “HOUSE,” reads:

The house flowers
in light. Be-
low that,
dirt. Deeper,

a glacier. And deepest:
fire.
        Inside you, a moon. And
            in the moon, somewhere, is

            you. The sun gets inside every-
            thing; and when the sun’s out
            we are too.

*

            The house, pressed
            into the deep,

            like a seed,
            sinks. Look up:

            air, so
            many ships sinking up

            there. Above that,
            ice—and higher:
            fire.
                      The earth

is shaped by fire and water, while
water enters earth and air. The air,

sometimes, holds fire and water,
and fire gives earth to the air.

Montreal QC: One of the latest titles from James Hawes’ Turret Press is a blurred wind swirls back for you (2023), a second chapbook by Vancouver poet and editor Patrick Grace, following Dastardly (Anstruther Press, 2021). Set in three sections of sequence-fragments—“a brazen thing,” “the sky cottoned” and “a blurred wind swirls back for you”—this is a curious chapbook-length sequence, offering one step and then another, towards a kind of expansion, say, over a particular ending or closure. The first section offers what might be a flirtation, writing as the third page/fragment:

lightning came             lightning          lit the night
it gave us an easy in

                        an ice
                                                to break

What strikes most are the rhythms, the pacing; a very fine patter across a length of tethered fragments, although there are some moments in the language that strike far less. Either way, there is something interesting here, and worth paying attention to, to see where Grace moves next. I say keep an eye on this one.

Ongoing notes: late March, 2023: Amanda Earl + Nada Gordon,

I can’t believe you’ve been missing out on our thirteenth annual VERSeFest: you know you can stream each of our events for free, yes? Whether live or archived? There’s so much going on!

Ottawa ON/Montreal QC: From James Hawes’ Turret House Press comes Ottawa poet Amanda Earl’s latest chapbook, Fear of Elevators (2023). Given how much of her past few years have featured heavily on producing visual works, most of which is part of her work-in-progress “The Vispo Bible,” it is good to see Earl still exploring ideas through text as well. Working through her anxieties around elevators, living on the nineteenth floor of a downtown Ottawa apartment building, her introduction to the collection begins: “Fear of Elevators began when the elevators in my building were being repaired and replaced.” Constructed as a collage of prose—essay, fiction, fairy tale, archive, memoir—and poetry, from the narrative lyric to the visual. Earl playfully moves back and forth with ease across fragments and directions, and even offers her own reworking of Robert Frost’s infamous poem “The Road Not Taken” (first published, as I’m sure you know full well, in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic) through her poem, “The Elevator Not Taken.” She manages to echo the cadence and rhythms of Frost’s piece quite well, and the playfulness of this particular poem is rather delightful, as the first half reads: “Two elevators fell and rose in a highrise. / And glad I could not travel both. / And be one traveler, long I stood. / And looked up at once as high as I could. / To where it lurked on the top floor. / Then took the other, as just as dangerous. / But having perhaps the more expedient claim, / because it had arrived and I had to pee. / Though as for that elevator passing / there was a worn down as the other, / really about the same.”

There is something curious about the way Earl utilizes collage for this particular item, furthering a structure she’s been employing for a while now, simultaneously pencilling a through-line across what might be seen as a scattershot of layered sections, one on top of each other. The effect is interesting, and one she’s explored for some time, with varying degrees of success. It is interesting to see her expand the possibilities of chapbook-length structure; might this be something eventually book-length as well?

In the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo, Japan there have been 32 accidents involving the revolving door since the building’s opening in April. A six year old boy was killed. Seven people became stuck in the revolving doors & three had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance for treatment after suffering serious injuries. The company also said 20 accidents have occurred involving smaller, hand-pushed revolving doors. The sensor doesn’t activate at first & the door continues to revolve for at least 25 centimetres. Mori Building is Japan’s biggest private developer. Sanwa shutter fell 14 yen, or 2.2 percent to 619, on Friday.

Evil revolving door tries to kill clueless innocent people! Looks like someone tries to enter the wrong way from the left? Is this a hit and run? Or is the wind blowing too fast? The glass shattered perfectly fine, like safety glass is supposed to: Instead of large dangerous pieces of glass which could kill, safety glass breaks into tiny pieces which won’t do as much damage.

Brooklyn NY: For a while now, Brooklyn poet Jordan Davis has been producing chapbook-length volumes of selected poems, one of the latest is by Brooklyn-based American poet Nada Gordon, her The Swing of Things (Subpress, 2022). This is the first of Gordon’s works I’ve encountered, so I’m unaware of the larger scope or scale of her work, so this “remix” is a curious introduction, and one reminiscent of how Phil Hall reworked selected scraps to assemble his own critical “selected poem,” Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015) [see my write-up on such here]. The chapbook-length poem “The Swing of Things” is structured through untitled sections (as well as an array of photographs, some of which suggest their own collage-works), short bursts that exist across each page; some of which group, or even cluster, allowing for its own kind of collage-work possibility. Her visuals and text both suggest the familiar but one that is twisted, turned and shaped into what is unerringly new, and some of which is just enough to unsettle, question or even simply wonder. Gordon’s poems hold a delightful heft, subtle in its play and dark corners, writing from both the shadow and the sudden light.

I believe in meerkats –
Where’re you from, you long skinny
curious dark-eyed thing?

 

If I fall into the hole of this poem
will you pull me out?
It’s a hairy catastrophe,

 

like putting HOT PINK PAINT
on an apocalyptic feeling, stinking a little
of the would-be sublime

Ongoing notes, still-early-June 2022: Elizabeth Wood + Simina Banu,

Isn’t it good I’ve started doing chapbook reviews again? Oh, why am I always behind on things? I know I have a couple of stacks of titles I have yet to get to (and still hope to). Perhaps I should get on that. And have you been keeping up with the interviews I’ve been posting weekly with Ottawa (either current or former) writers? More than one hundred so far!

And above/ground press turns TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD in a couple weeks; can you imagine?

Montreal QC: Another title from James Hawes’ Turret House Press is Elizabeth Wood’s Outlaw, Rainy Day (2022), another pandemic/lockdown-specific project, through which Wood examines and re-examines erasure, offering both source text and erasures side-by-side. The chapbook is offered as a kind of ongoing or even final report from the period, sketched notes from a period of uncertainty, as though she works to excise or even rework time, distilling eleven erasures from an original source material of over two hundred and fifty prose poems. As her introductory notes offer: “In the case of erasure poetry, defining specific interventions mirrors the transit example above in its multiplicity of options: is it best to condense, but preserve the same spirit, tone, rhythm? Or to determine the poem’s essence, and carve away the superfluous?” Further on, writing: “At home, all I could do was to describe the outside COVID-world to my mother locked inside. Reality became medical appointments disguised as phone consults, endless work deadlines missed or botched, and a ritual of blithe pretense that all would be fine.” Her poems hold and rework the anxieties of the period, lifting up and even lifting out different elements at different points. How easily can we excise the present, or the past? How much or how little are we allowed to revise?

Standardization                                                drives forward.
                          time out, fish awhile. Swirl
                  what matters. 

Crave salt and find a dime. Or a
Field                     and take the leap.

Sweet salt-sweat trickles                                               a family
                                          in raucous chaos,
                                                small branches overhead.
scream

Sweet saliva                                               of discovery: taste, touch.
                              Rapacious heart.

Toronto ON: With a collaborative chapbook with Amilcar Nogueira forthcoming with Collusion Books, Canadian poet Simina Banu’s latest [see my review of her full-length debut here] is the chapbook harmony in Beach Foam (Anstruther Press, 2022), a chapbook-length sequence of small points along a fragmented, almost disjointed thread. Banu composes small moments across pandemic-isolation, articulating a sloth interiority, flares of depression and other elements of mental health, what so many individuals were experiencing at different points of Covid-19 lockdown and isolation. “I can’t pronounce anesthetist.” she writes, early on in the collection. “I don’t comb my hair // because the plants survive // regardless. The ants // haven’t colonized. The mold’s benign.”

This apartment

looks like a relaxing place to die.

A sleepy sort of death,

undramatic.

Can you believe the hardwood?

It’s like a tree curled

into my kitchen.

roots tangle in my hair

and I finally do a dish

because there are no balconies

to leap from

now.

Ongoing notes: early June, 2022 : Douglas Piccinnini + Sarah Burgoyne,

Did you notice when we posted a new poem-a-day throughout April over at the Chaudiere Books blog, as part of our ninth annual acknowledgement of National Poetry Month (I mean, you did notice that, right?). And of course, the new issue of periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, where I’ve also been interviewing the shortlist for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize?

New England: I’ve been going through American poet Douglas Piccinnini’s [see my 2016 “12 or 20 questions” interview here] latest title, the chapbook A WESTERN SKY (Greying Ghost, 2022), a lovely title produced in a numbered edition of seventy-five copies. Piccinnini’s A WESTERN SKY is a twenty-nine poem sequence of fragments composed as a lyric meditation on change and space. He writes an abstract sequence on breaks and blocks, attempting to reach beyond the boundaries of this sequence of sketch-out notes into something larger. “Money, no money – // say where to speak and break,” he writes, early on in the collection, “the clockhands as my own. // The hands of a prisoner speaking up. // Don’t let them hit you. / Don’t let them take you apart.”

The future approaches as if it were fixed—no
days but days multiply. Rooms of a house
you know and have entered—remember
change—this custom like a place you feel

studded in a sky, swept away, in a substance
like a signal departing as it arrives, to keep time

to see a tree top touched breeze
to say that, for example, you lose
the keys everywhere to find them.

Montreal QC: You’ve probably heard that Montreal poet James Hawes started a chapbook press, yes? Over at his Turret House, one of the most recent titles is Sarah Burgoyne’s Double House (2022) [see my review of her latest book here], a handful of poems composed during, as she writes in a brief note to introduce the poems, “domestic exile,” thanks in no small part to Covid-19 lockdowns. As she writes: “Something had begun to come up in the poems I was writing and the poems my friends were writing: domesticity (b)loomed. Our interior spaces puffed up their lungs and insisted on their presence in our work. I started to see my home more and more like a living body—with currents, with moods, with breath (sometimes poisonous), with infection, also. I came to know much more intimately the rhythms of my hitherto unknown housemates (a pigeon and a mouse) and they inevitably made their way into my poems. In a way, through domestic exile and through these poems, I discovered the porousness of my home’s conceptual borders (and its physical borders every time the mouse emerged).” I’m fascinated by the shifts in Burgoyne’s work through this small collection, an assemblage of experiments, one might say, as much as anything else, flexing her muscles and seeing what other possibilities the lyric might offer, or allow. Also, there’s something really interesting in the way she notes at the back of the collection, how the poem “Double House Poem” was composed “by adapting one of C.A. Conrad’s (Soma)tic exercises. I studied the light in every room of my house. I listened to my refrigerator. I made myself steamed broccoli with olive oil and salt. I lay on the floor listening to Philip Glass’s ‘Music in Contrary Motion’ and reflected on violence.’” Honestly, in many ways, the writing she offers to speak of her writing, and her process, is equally interesting to the writing itself, and this small collection offers tidbits of both. And the poem itself, “Double House Poem,” that includes:

The sink is my palm, upturned on the floor
for you. Think of your house. Descend.

The fig tree’s shadow is a ladder
for you to climb.

Press your ear to the fridge
inside is a cautious poet echoing your poem.

 

Ongoing notes: mid-March 2022: James Hawes + Mark Truscott,

Is it spring yet? Soon enough, I suppose. I think by the time you are reading this we are in Picton with father-in-law, but who is to say, from here, a week prior. What are days? 

Montreal QC: Published as part of his new chapbook press Turret House is Montreal poet James Hawes’ latest, under an overpass, a fox (2022), a meditative sequence composed as homage to his friend and mentor, the late and legendary Montreal poet Peter Van Toorn. As the short sequence opens: “It’s nighttime and I’m awake thinking / about my friend. Outside is autumn / under streetlights in orange and pale / yellow and the fury of squirrels. And / the moon. The hum of cars in the air / in the distance. Something drips in / the kitchen. My friend is in a box / somewhere, his body burned away. I / start to feel cold in my chair.” There is an element to Hawes’ work—through the full-length collection and two chapbooks I’ve seen—that present the impression of the finely-tuned quick take, writing around a subject to attempt to catch from multiple sides, whether writing the hotdog through the chapbook-length sequence via his above/ground press title, or writing out grief around a friend’s death, set around the core of a particular memory. Hawes’ combination of pause and rush, pause and break are interesting, and in certain ways, this collection could have been longer.

            And then a fox. He is a fox. 

Toronto ON: The gracefully-produced three-poem chapbook RAIN (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2022) furthers Toronto poet Mark Truscott’s deep engagement with the condensed lyric (across, to date, three full-length collections and a couple of chapbooks), although more straightforwardly-lyric than some of his prior works, which echoed structures akin to the work of Cameron Anstee, Marilyn Irwin, the late Nelson Ball or certain pieces by Michael e. Casteels, jwcurry, Stuart Ross and Gary Barwin, etcetera. There is something curious about the thickness of his lines and phrases. “If a pattern settles into / freshly relevant contours,” he writes, to open the poem “LEAVES,” “think / breeze perhaps, though the world / may be opening there too (by / way of changes shaped solely / within). And where are you?” He composes three poems each less than two dozen lines long, but from a writing history made up of poems short enough that eight or ten of his prior pieces combined might only achieve the same word count as a single piece here. He writes on physical features of leaves, rain and water, each poem akin to a single, experienced moment, slowed-down and stretched. “The chaos of rain / is the desperation / of a crowd hemmed in.” he writes, to open the third and final poem in the collection, which also happens to be the title poem. “We can watch it / through the window. / I’ve seen it / on the front page.” The shutter clicks, one might say, and there it is. How to write deeply on something so thoughtfully, strikingly condensed?