some author activity: Dreiblatt, Adams, mclennan, Nećakov, Novak + Hofmann,

Ian Dreiblatt responds as part of the "12 or 20 questions" interview series; Carrie Olivia Adams was recently interviewed by Zach Savich for Tupelo Quarterly; rob mclennan has posted a memorial poem on his blog for Phyllis Webb; forthcoming author Lillian Nećakov has a poem in the "poetry pause" via The League of Canadian Poets; JoAnna Novak has a piece in The New Yorker; and Ava Hofmann has some new work up at Territory.

some author activity: Hogg, Mody, Carpenter, Earl + Niespodziany,

Robert Hogg is interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; Monica Mody is featured in Episode 223, S3 of the podcast Jazz Ready, hosted by Magdalena Gómez, Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA; J.R. Carpenter was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize; Amanda Earl writes on the artist statement, and revisiting old ones; and Benjamin Niespodziany has new work up at HAD.

Zoe Tuck reviews Monica Mody's Ordinary Annals (2021)

Zoe Tuck was good enough to review Monica Mody's Ordinary Annals (2021) over at their blog. Thanks so much! This follows the lovely paragraph Lantern Review offered, as well, earlier this year. See Tuck's original post here. As they write:

It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in extraordinary times, although as Monica Mody writes in her new chapbook Ordinary Annals, “Everything was being shredded long before we noticed.” And yet, Mody’s title is unassuming. Ordinary: run-of-the-mill, quotidian—right? Still, the ordinary world, and her revolutions, are a marvel: “Every season that turns brings us back / to pitted dark, moon folding into sun.” Poets have a responsibility to record the revolutions of the world, hence annals.

The extra/ordinariness of our times—that is to say, the admixture of the unprecedented and the cyclical—gives a spiral shape to Ordinary Annals. Mody reaches for the extraordinary but is still “entangled with the world, that place / I become / me, ordinary / shattering into we.” Grief and weariness lead her to lay her body down (I think here of the Nap Ministry), enabling her to “connect with tendril, still—,” drawing energy from the hurt and beautiful earth to be reborn.

Mody lovingly but firmly critiques the desire to erase the specificity of our griefs:

Now don’t say,

We’re all the same
& love is the answer.

What does it take to attend—
not flinch—at different

trajectories of suffering?
Can we honor healing

histories,
their immense particularity

and is that love
rehearsing?

and elsewhere:

If through our gestures
we take away

another’s power
—enable colonization—

we fail
Earth & Waters.

She also critiques the impulse (imperative?) to ‘return to normal’ and repress our grief (since we can’t simply erase it) at the interlocking crises of our time.

Mody begins Ordinary Annals knocking into the glass walls of language: “I want to rise above my limitations.” What limitations? “I want to let bird shapes of words flock together into language that will / change skies.” Can language change skies? Mody writes elsewhere, “I’m just so sick & tired of being Poet” and in that moment it is because “losses stitch [her] tongue into clawed mouth” and another of the responsibilities of the poet is to sing the losses. I read into this not just despair for the losses themselves, but despair at not having been able to forestall them with the poet’s tool, language.

This desire to solve or resolve or memorialize in tension with another mode, that of, “rocking in this moment of undecidability, not becoming anything at all,” a formlessness that presents itself as a space of repose in between breaths or throbs.

Ordinary Annals is the work of a poet attuned to the entanglement of word and world, memory and moment, love and suffering. With her willingness to share her progress in language through “this time of grave despair,” Mody joins her elders in:

tell[ing] us of the many gates around the world that are opening
Gates opened by great white wings of love—of sorrow

Each gate points straight to our hearts
That place where broken

            realities are woven

She models her movement toward these gates for all of us ordinary would-be weavers “shattering into a we” and I’m grateful for it.

new from above/ground press: A Wolf Lake Chorus, by Phil Hall

A Wolf Lake Chorus
Phil Hall
$5

A Wolf Lake Chorus is a dramatic voice-poem for poet, birds, & saw:
1 poet, 8 birds, & 1 musician bowing a saw.

    .

Silence.

A podium rigged with a microphone at centre stage.
Two high screens behind.

The poet & the musician walk onto the stage.

The poet goes to the podium.
The musician sits on a chair at the side of the stage.

The musician plays the saw.

Silence.
        ("Stage Directions")

Note

A Wolf Lake Chorus began as an invitation from Madhur Anand in 2015 to write a poem using only the words contained in one of her academic articles. The article chosen is mentioned in the poem.

Originally called The Overstory, it was performed in Guelph at Silence on Friday May 18, 2018 as part of an evening of performances in support of Wolf Lake. Also presenting were Madhur Anand and Gary Barwin.

The cast included David Lee on bass and Georgia Urban on musical saw, plus 8 volunteers who were the birds. I am grateful to everyone involved, especially the birds for their overlapping voices.

A video of the evening, with A Wolf Lake Chorus as the final act, may be viewed at: http://improvisationinstitute.ca/document/wolf-lake-tones/

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

Phil Hall's most recent books are The Ogre (Trainwreck, 2021), Toward a Blacker Ardour (Beautiful Outlaw, 2021), and Niagara & Government (Pedlar, 2020).

This is Phil Hall’s fourth above/ground press chapbook, after Verulam (2009) and the collaborative Shikibu Shuffle (with Andrew Burke; 2012) and Alternative Girders (with Stuart Kinmond; 2018).

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

Cole Bisson reviews Nathanael O’Reilly's BLUE (2020) in Broken Pencil

Cole Bisson was good enough to provide the first review of Nathanael O’Reilly's BLUE (2020) over at Broken Pencil. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

Litzine, by Nathanael O’Reilly, 40 pgs, above/ground press, abovegroundpress.blogspot.com, $5

Ever wonder what the working-class white guy around the corner is thinking? You know, the one who has bumper stickers of Nirvana, screams that Trump is an idiot, and has teeth stained yellow from cigarettes? Surprisingly, he’s got an in-depth mental life, and he’s writing a book about it. Or perhaps that’s not a surprise.

Blue by Nathaniel O’Reilly is a tender song for male alienation and longing. O’Reilly has a vulnerable touch that fully flushes out the themes in each poem. He grapples with losing friends as he ages, the fear of becoming a father, and childhood memories that teach him something new every day.

The main drawback is that, for all of it’s loneliness, O’Reilly’s work sounds like many others, and comes off as wannabe edgy. Juvenile warbles like “I lay on the floor / listening to Nirvana / writing my first letter / to her” give the vibe of someone trying desperately to stand out from the crowd, and that inevitably falls flat. O’Reilly isn’t saying anything new or adding a different voice, and thus drowns himself out in a saturated market.

Granted, there are certain poems where he tackles issues with tenderness and altruism. In an ode to who I imagine is his child, he asks “Will you love learning / like your parents, will you / be athletic, artistic, scientific?” When ruminating about who his child might grow up to be, O’Reilly touches on real parental anxieties and demonstrates them. He presents wishful thinking and imagines himself walking hand-in-hand with his child for as long as possible.

It’s these touching moments that give Blue a sense of urgency. Contrasted with lines like “The orangutan reaches the peak of his climb, / surveys the scene where he defecated,” the vulnerability of a man comes off as authentic. You just wish there wasn’t a warped edge to this sensibility.

new from above/ground press: how to count to ten, by Kevin Varrone

how to count to ten
Kevin Varrone
$5

the important thing about one :
it stands alone––
        
like a song
bird––its sound––

alone––can, sometimes, maybe-
almost, be enough––

causal yet caused by something, un-
moved & moving, one
is something beautifully done
whose doing
cannot ever be known.

there is nothing in the universe
more tenuous
than beautiful
more beautiful
than one
& the important thing
is that it stands tall, stands all
tender flag half-
blown
stoic
waiting
alone

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

Kevin Varrone is the author of three full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks. He lives outside Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.

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

some author activity: hanna, Tracy, Niespodziany, Betts, Beaulieu, Siklosi, Spinosa, Mavreas, Flemmer, Archer + Barwin,

natalie hanna has some new work up at where is the river; Dale Tracy participates in the Spotlight series; Benjamin Niespodziany has a new poem up at The Indianapolis Review; and Gregory Betts and Derek Beaulieu have co-edited a new short visual poetry anthology available as a free pdf, 14 Ways of Being Kinder to the Earth, with poems by fourteen visual poets, including Kate Siklosi, Dani Spinosa, Billy Mavreas, Kyle Flemmer, Sacha Archer and Gary Barwin.