Ryan Pratt reviews Dennis Tourbin's THE STREAM and other poems (2014) and Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014)

Ryan Pratt was good enough to review Dennis Tourbin's THE STREAM and other poems (2014) and Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014) over at the ottawa poetry newsletter. Thanks, Ryan! This is the second review of Martin's Sugar Beach, after Jack Goodall's review over at the Flat Singles Press blog.

"poem" broadsheet #327: Birthday: forty-four, by rob mclennan

    Disturbed. My body follows
    me around.
        Rosmarie Waldrop, Love, Like Pronouns

Endless, numbered. An accidental thought. Geometry of calendars, reflect. We interrupt. Collapse punctuation, sulphur, deoxygenated blood. Intention. Were we not traffic, clipped. Misplaced, adjacent. As prepositions. Endless, snow. The very thing. I refuse. I take my distance. Forty-four years, equally distributed. Uncertainty of facts, persist. These grainy pronouns. Mother, may I. Tilt, a noise, distracts. Narratives, out of details. Question: falsehoods. To be born. Who are you, comma. Consequences, approach. Make a point of. I have less to say.

Birthday: forty-four,
rob mclennan
March 15, 2014
above/ground press broadside #327

rob mclennan’s most recent titles include numerous chapbooks, as well as the trade books notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014) and The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), as well as the forthcoming poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014).

some author activity: Pirie, Barwin, hastain, Barton, Douglas, McKinnon, Simpson, Abel,

Pearl Pirie has a new poem in the March issue of Bywords.ca; Gary Barwin offers the fourth "first reading" of M. NourbeSe Philip's 'Zong' #6 over at Jacket2; j/j hastain responds to Jennifer K. Dick's series of essays on the fragment; John Barton has two new poems up at TRUCK, near the end of Colin Morton and Mary Lee Bragg's month curating March, as does Rhonda Douglas; Paul E. Nelson writes on Barry McKinnon; Rachael Simpson participates in the "My Writing Process - blog tour" interview; and Sean Cranbury interviews Jordan Abel for 49th Shelf.

"poem" broadsheet #326: On Water (from Elizabeth to Jenny), by Elizabeth Robinson

It touches its own body to measure ambiguity.

Where do I go, asks the hand of the touch:

gas, liquid, solid.

I am not who I am.

What was once blue, was green, white, black, translucent.

And is so again. 

Water mates with itself, a lover falling hard through

soft,  betraying through trustworthy,  torrent through

opacity.

All that we knew of each other in our form,

where do I go, blunt and insinuating.

The touch paired with itself.  A humid air.

The point of contact as it bathes and thirsts.

A hand on a real body, its mutable fact.

On Water (from Elizabeth to Jenny)
by Elizabeth Robinson
above/ground press broadside #326

Elizabeth Robinson’s must recent books are the hybrid essay On Ghosts and the poetry collections Counterpart and Blue Heron.  Robinson is a co-editor of Instance Press and the literary periodical pallaksch.pallaksch.

Poetry Month at the Ottawa Public Library: Pirie, Young, Jennings + Ridley;

Ottawa Public Library National Poetry Month Reading Main Branch

Monday, April 14, 2014 - 7:00pm
Celebrate National Poetry Month with readings by above/ground press authors Pearl Pirie and Deanna Young alongside Chris Jennings and Sandra Ridley. Offered in partnership with VERSeFest.

some author activity: Earl, Schmaltz, Betts, Young + Pirie,

Amanda Earl is (willingly) led astray by Anne Carson, and she even has a new poem up in the March issue of The Steel Chisel; Eric Schmaltz has some new work that went online recently, EVERY DAY IS BLACK FRIDAY, hosted by GAUSS PDF, and he reads on April 15th in Toronto as part of the Art Bar Reading Series; he also writes on Stephen Collis over at Lemonhound; Gregory Betts contributes an essay to the "On Writing" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; Deanna Young has a couple of new poems up at TRUCK; and Pearl Pirie does a talk on "Remixing your Poetic Source Material" for the Canadian Authors Association in Ottawa on April 8, 2014.

The Factory Reading Series: Pirie, Spenst + Madhavan-Reese

The Factory Reading presents:
a night of readings and chapbook launches

with readings by:

Pearl Pirie (Ottawa)
Kevin Spenst (Vancouver)
+ Sneha Madhavan-Reese (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Wednesday, April 23, 2014;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
Raw Sugar Cafe
692 Somerset Street West (1 block west of Bronson)

author bios:

Pearl Pirie has a few chapbooks, a micro press, several blogs, a gig as literary radio host and irregular gigs to teach poetry. She has two poetry collections, and a third forthcoming with BookThug in 2015. None of these poems are in them so you have to buy them both.

She will be launching the chapbook vertigoheel for the dilly (2013), her fourth above/ground press publication and second chapbook, after oath in the boathouse (2008).

In addition to the UK, the United States, Austria and India, Kevin Spenst’s [pictured, above] poetry has appeared in over a dozen Canadian literary publications such as Freefall, Prairie Fire, CV2, Dandelion, filling Station, qwerty, and Poetry is Dead. His work has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and his manuscript Ignite has come in as a finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. In 2011, he won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry. In 2014 he is going to do a 100-venue reading tour across Canada with his chapbooks Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press, 2013), Retractable (the serif of nottingham, 2013), Happy Hollow and the Surrey Suite (self-published, 2012), What the Frag Meant (100 tetes press, 2014) and Surrey Sonnets (JackPine press, 2014). Follow the chapbook tour at kevinspenst.com

Born in Detroit, Sneha Madhavan-Reese calls Ottawa home. Her poetry has appeared in Arc, Descant, and The Antigonish Review. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming in 2016 from Hagios Press.