I tend to be (seemingly) all over the place with my reading and reviewing (having composed and posted some 150+ poetry and fiction book reviews a year for the past few, if you can imagine), so here are some of the highlights of what I’ve been going through, lately. I suppose once one takes a step back, the threads and patterns might begin to reveal themselves, but at the ground level, it appears, quite deceptively, as a scattering. I mean, today alone, I’m reading through Maggie Nelson’s Like Love , A Question of Belonging, Crónicas by Hebe Uhart, translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, Melanie Siebert’s Signal Infinities, Amy De’Ath’s Not a Force of Nature and The Avengers, Vol. 2: Twilight Dreaming. Like I said, all over the place.
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Cabin Fever, by Anik See
I’ve been an admirer of See’s writing for more than a decade, ever since discovering her work through the stunning prose of her memoir-essay collection Saudade: The Possibilities of Place , so I was eager to see what she’s been up to lately, especially through the realm of the novel. There are few writers working in contemporary Canadian prose so evocative about being in and within a landscape as See, and Cabin Fever moves through threads of what could be considered a kind of autofiction, a variation on the author herself (or possibly not; but echoes, certainly). Hers is a first-person examination as clear as W.G. Sebald, blending the fictional alongside elements of non-fiction, as she sets the author Anik See against the creation of the book’s first-person narrator. Just who is this narrator we’re hearing from?
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The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky, by Stuart Ross
If you haven’t read the work of Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, fiction writer, mentor and publisher Stuart Ross, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky might be the place to begin, a collection that is probably his finest across five decades of publishing. As well, with so many contemporary collections seeking to cohere through shared tone or structure, this seems a highly deliberate miscellany, allowing for what each poem or situation might require, whether poems that reflect on quieter moments, homages and responses to friends, including Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell or the late Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, his late brother Barry, or offering his annual New Year’s poem, a tradition he’s kept up for a number of years. “In Michael’s office,” the poem “MICHAEL’S OFFICE” begins, “we are surrounded / by poetry. each passing month, / the space for books expands while / the space for people contracts. You feel / the poems on your clothes, your skin, / and your tongue. It is paradise.” I appreciate that Ross wears his influences openly, wishing both to give homage and work in conversation with other writers, other pieces, almost as a way of better understanding a particular work by engaging and responding to it through writing, and this collection seems entirely built around that central thought. “As James Tate once said,” he writes, as part of the poem “LIFE BEGINS WHEN YOU BEGIN THE BEGUINE,” a poem “for Charles North and Ron Padgett,” “‘My cuticles are a mess.’ Inspired, I wrote / a broadway musical about cuticles, choreographed / by Busby Berkeley. It closed after just one day / but changed the lives of those who saw it.”
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cipher, by Chris Turnbull
Kemptville, Ontario poet and curator Chris Turnbull’s cipher is a book of listening and attention; of being present, and outdoors, as she extends her note-taking across a slowness, writing moments and local through a book of ecological space. “in now, when, then –,” she writes, as part of the first section, “compression – generated – / for this / instant-on-instant, [.]” Compression is a perfect word to describe Turnbull’s poem-structures, a kind of book-length accumulation of note-taking, composing short bursts of lyric that stretch out across a wide canvas, compelling and attending an ecopoetic of minutae and magnitude. “littoral zone – hundreds / list,” she writes, as part of the first section, “founder – dark reshaping clusters – /// easy / does it /// these domains / are fluid [.]” Turnbull’s words hold, erode, corrode, and slip into soil. There is an element, also, that echoes Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior,” although, unlike Niedecker’s infamous poem that emerged as an extension of work-related research, Turnbull’s lyric exists as both research and reportage: these poems are simultaneous study and result, and of something ongoing, deeply intuitive and regularly attended.
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The Principle of Rapid Peering, by Sylvia Legris
Smart readers know that a new poetry title by Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris is worth noting, thus her latest, The Principle of Rapid Peering, following prior collections Circuitry of Veins, Iridium Seeds, the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning Nerve Squall, Pneumatic Antiphonal, The Hideous Hidden and Garden Physic. There are few poets working this kind of tone and scale, writing a particular intimate depth across both the expanse and distance, although one might see Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley, a poet originally from Saskatchewan, holding echoes (tendrils?) of Legris’ lyrics throughout her own. Legris has evolved into composing poetry collections as field studies, and her attention to the natural world, centred on and around her garden, expands across this collection into a framing of those first two-plus uncertain years of the Covid-era. As the poem “Forecast Issued 6:00 am CST / Friday I January 2021” begins: “7:00 AM the sky a hypothetical blue / blue outside the geographic range of blue, / accidental, a blue-grey gnatcatcher.” There are moments the Covid-era shows itself only through the particulars of those dates, those seasons, and that underlying uncertainty, held into certainty through what otherwise remained unaffected: the colour of the sky, for example, or the attentions of birds. If her prior collections focused on the what and why of plants and planting, this collection offers itself as a way into the routine of attending that same garden as, again, a grounding, offering a way to find footing across an uncertain era; through her attending to birds, moths, plants and seasons, Legris charts those uncertainties, all amid her ongoing and continued search for possibilities.
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Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti
The cover flap of Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries writes that “Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.” The sentences assembled thus might at first appear scattered, even random, to the point of ordered without meaning or purpose, until one moves deep enough through the text to catch small echoes; small threads and echoes, through which one begins to garner a kind of portrait of the author, even if that portrait might only cohere and exist within the reader’s imagination (and with as many potential variations on that portrait as there might be readers). From The Middle Stories to Ticknor to How Should A Person Be?, Heti’s books dismantle genre from the inside, and rebuild narratives into impossible shapes that reveal far more than the limitations of genre might ever have allowed. Her books are filled with story scaffolding, even while twisting the fable across The Middle Stories, or the expectation and purpose of the modern/postmodern novel through Ticknor. As Heti she writes: “A sudden happiness pierced me. A sweet kiss with him in front of the grocery store on Bloor, he kissed me on my cheek and I kissed him on the lips, just a sweet, little one. A tendency to idealize the past—that’s me.” The questioning is essential, and her books respond. There is something, perhaps, that Heti’s own thinking is trying to get to, one step and one book at a time.
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Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge, Michael Boughn
There is something about reading through Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn’s essays that made me wish I’d been one of his students at the University of Toronto: there’s an enthusiasm and passion for his subject matter that really comes through in this collection. Produced with an introduction by Charles Stein, Measure’s Measures is a delightful and lively collection of essays of consideration, reconsideration, histories, accumulation, agreements and disagreements, attending a sequence of curiosities around some important decades of contemporary poetic form and thought. Boughn focuses his collection around The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), the infamous poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen that attempted to define the upcoming generation of American poets, as well as connect a diverse array of contemporary poetics around the country for the first time, clustering poets into genres (some thought, arbitrarily), from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School and San Francisco Renaissance. Stretching multiple essays on the anthology generally, and on specific poets such as (and specific arguments upon or around) Robert Creeley, Robin Blaser, H.D., Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, as well as pieces surrounding multiple of these and their concerns, battles and poetics, Boughn provides a wonderful foundation of information around an incredibly lively and productive period of American writing that still holds rippling effects across contemporary poetics across the United States, Canada (in part through influences into 1960s TISH, Talon and Coach House poets and poetics) and far beyond. If you want to have some sense of how we got here from there, this is required reading.
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Graphis scripta / writing lichen, by Clare Goulet
I really enjoyed Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia poet Clare Goulet’s full-length poetry debut, Graphis scripta / writing lichen, a collection of poems approaching language as the means through which to articulate a detailed study. “So pretty it shocks: pink smarties / shaken out of the box,” she writes, to open the poem “Icmadophilia ericetorum / candy,” “picked on a whim / for the green-room rider, pleasure spreading / its plush blue blanket every which way / over moss.” There is a curious way that Goulet’s language propels, composed as field guide, scripting a detail through language that suggests hers is a somewhat slippery subject matter: is this a collection around the collection and study of lichen, or a means through which to discuss something else entirely? Possibly both, honestly. Goulet’s poems provide a kind of layering, of waves and sweeps, writing around and through the subject of lichen, multifaceted enough to ply meaning upon meaning. “Lichen as armour is truth inverted: / a bullet-hole flowers,” she writes, as part of “Parmelia sulcata / hammered shield,” “cancer / takes root, a wound is blessé.”
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Authenticity Is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART, Jacob Wren
Not a new title, I know, but a book I caught only recently, preparing myself (psychologically, perhaps) for his upcoming novel. Set as a critical memoir around the years he’s worked with the PME-ART collective in Montreal, Wren writes on collaborative performance, one that can’t live in a vacuum, requiring audience participation and response. He writes of self-awareness, and of meaning, amid the realm of capitalism, and seeking out to critique and better comprehend his own choices, for right or for wrong. He writes of thirty years of fearless, anxiety-ridden artistic practice. He writes of optimism, despite. Wren writes of doubt, but in the end, this is a book about authenticity: seeking and honing while simultaneously imagining it might be the artists’ own version of the unicorn. Might it even exist? “My performance work has been a search for authenticity, but I don’t think authenticity is something that exists. A work of art cannot be authentic, it can only feel authentic for certain people at certain times. Which is to say that, for me, authenticity is a feeling and about what we feel. In much the same way one might feel sad or feel joy, one can feel something to be authentic.”
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On Beauty is a provocative collection of moments, confessions, overheard conversations, and memories, both fleeting and crystalized, revolving around the small chasms and large craters of everyday life. Situated at the crossroads of prose and poetry, these 33 vignettes explore the rhythm, textures, and micro-moments of lives in motion. Composed with a poet’s eye for detail and ear for rhythm, rob mclennan’s brief stories play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, creating a Polaroid-like effect. Throughout the collection, the worlds of literature and art infuse into intimate fragments of the everyday. A welcome chronicle of human connection and belonging, On Beauty will leave readers grappling with questions of how stories are produced and passed through generations.