new from above/ground press: Retrofit Me, by Alyssa Bridgman

Retrofit Me
Alyssa Bridgman
$5
 

Towers

the physics of towers always baffled me
glass and steel—all windows—all sides

poplars in the breeze bend but don’t break
each branch knows exactly where to go

geometry in all things reflected—except perhaps
in the jagged shard of a piece of glass turned

light means nothing to eyes that remain dark—
looking inwards always and never out

but this natural math doesn’t work when you’re
counting calories and the mirror adds ten pounds

we are consumers in all that we do for ourselves
covetous eyes greedy for that new piece of metal

no concept of cost or what was lost in the hurried
rushing from A to B and so on and so forth

algorithm—I always thought it was spelled
rhythm like a song danced out in numbers

these figures ripple in the sun glinting blind
and we look down to see the sky in reflections

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover illustration/design: Alec Bridgman

Alyssa Bridgman is a Vancouver based poet who lives on the unceded territories of the Kwikwetlem, Tsleil-Waututh, Katzie, Musqueam, Squamish, Quay Quayt, and Sto:lo First Nations. She has recently completed her MA in English literature at Simon Fraser University and has a particular interest in local ecological poetry. Her first chapbook, Hedge, was published by above/ground press in 2017.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Terrence Abrahams reviews Alyssa Bridgman's HEDGE (2017) at Broken Pencil

Terrence Abrahams was good enough to review Alyssa Bridgman's HEDGE (2017) over at Broken Pencil. Thanks much! This is actually the third review of Bridgman's debut chapbook, after Greg Bem's review over at Goodreads and Ryan Pratt's review at the ottawa poetry newsletter. You can see Abrahams's review here.

Hedge
Chapbook, Alyssa Bridgman, above/ground press, $5

Beginning a chapbook with Pink Floyd lyrics and a bright lime-green doesn’t tell me much about what to expect from this chapbook. Like the cover colour, Bridgman’s poems are arresting.

Charting the etymological history of the word “hedge” and ending with a political plea (“I want a world where the word border is not a brick”), this work combines the pleasant tenderness of a garden with the tension of world that surrounds it.

These poems are acutely aware they are not alone. They are always looking out or keeping in, preventing or allowing something to pass, creating the “organic barbed wire” referenced in the poem “Quick hedge.” Bridgman draws attention to how something so natural (a thickleafed, bright green, brushy plant) can be made into something so unnatural, as she explores in a set of haiku aptly called “Unnatural Haikus”:

unnatural fence
created out of what was
once a common right

Whether she is referencing land, land ownership, plants, gardens, the very right to take up space, I don’t know; regardless, I am moved.

Bridgman turns, lastly, to the written word itself: “but I don’t want to write bricks,” begins the third section of the long poem “Between cracked words.” Perhaps feeling trapped by conventional poetic structure, Bridgman reflects on how she wishes to breathe when writing, to not feel walled in or bogged down or “in the dark room” of an ideological echo chamber. Letting the hedge grow every which way, left to its own devices, untrimmed and understood as the wild thing it is, is preferable, it seems, to the anxiety a closed-off world brings to Bridgman’s poetic effort.

some author activity: Cook, Earl, Jarvis, Bridgman + Iijima,

[the first park day of spring] Sarah Cook has a new essay, "Poet in Space," over at So To Speak; Amanda Earl is interviewed by Vanessa Shields for AngelHouse / DevilHousePress, and also has a poem and brief interview posted online at Canadian Literature; forthcoming author Jenna Jarvis has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month, as does Alyssa Bridgman; and Brenda Iijima writes on Roberto Harrison for The Operating System.

Ryan Pratt reviews Alyssa Bridgman's HEDGE (2017)

Our pal Ryan Pratt was good enough to review Alyssa Bridgman's HEDGE (2017) over at the ottawa poetry newsletter. Thanks much! This is actually the second review of Bridgman's debut chapbook, after Greg Bem's review over at Goodreads. You can see Pratt's review here.

Greg Bem reviews Alyssa Bridgman's HEDGE (2017)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Alyssa Bridgman's HEDGE (2017) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

The dynamic qualities of these poems gorge and throttle. They are filled with movement and inspection. They heave, sit ecstatically upon the waving sensations of form. Though the book contains potentially hyperbolic conceptualizing, and is weighed down by this overly visible backdrop, the book is fiery, foremost, and at once phantasmic. Violence and compassion meet into a middle space where Bridgman, early poetics clearly seasoned by craft, is able to explore the limitations of Wall and Barrier, of Hedge, through an unending associative platform a la society and economy.

new from above/ground press: HEDGE, by Alyssa Bridgman

HEDGE
Alyssa Bridgman
$5

We Should Be Together

barbed bushes grown into wire
nurtured by time and paranoia
dead hedge petrified into stone
concrete poured over wire frame
cement hedge contortion curdled
steel briar entombed in mortar
twisted frame beneath cement
petrified quick hedge dead
rebar roots clawing dirt
wrapping around ancient bones
crushed under the weight of the wall
bone to dust to concrete mix
mangled steel skeleton sealed
contorted corpse of ancient feuds
clotted blood cements to stone
seeping into the soil sews
mutually assured common destruction

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2017
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Alyssa Bridgman is an English student at Simon Fraser University. Her main area of focus is Emily Dickinson’s scrap poems. Alyssa has recently been workshopping her poems in a creative writing class taught by Stephen Collis, with a portfolio that focuses on comparing Trump’s border wall to the eighteenth-century enclosure movement in Britain.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com