some author activity: Trivedi, Barwin, Earl, Anstee, Dennis + Reid,

Amish Trivedi has some new work over at OmniVerse; Gary Barwin has some new work online at Vallum; Amanda Earl has some new visual poems up at h&; Cameron Anstee and Michael Dennis' literary blogs are featured as part of an article over at Apt613; and Monty Reid gets a write-up by Bren Simmers as part of Brick Books' Celebration of Canadian Poetry.

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 12, 2015: Irwin, Steadman, Cumming + Ross,

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series
pre-small press book fair reading
featuring readings by:

Marilyn Irwin (Ottawa)
Dean Steadman (Ottawa)
Alicia Cumming (Kemptville)
+ Stuart Ross (Coburg)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, June 12, 2015;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

[And don’t forget the ottawa small press book fair, held the following day at the Jack Purcell Community Centre]

A graduate of Algonquin College’s Creative Writing program, winner of Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2013 Diana Brebner Prize, and a 2014 Hot Ottawa Voice, Marilyn Irwin’s work has been published by above/ground press, Arc, Bywords, In/Words, and New American Writing, among others. Her previous chapbooks include for when you pick daisies (self-published and above/ground, 2010), flicker (above/ground, 2012), little nothings (self-published, 2012), and tiny (In/Words, 2014). for when you pick daisies was printed in full for the third time in the anthology Ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013). Her most recent chapbook the blue, blue there was published by Apt. 9 Press. She is currently working on her first full length manuscript, runs shreeking violet press and lives with her two cats in Ottawa, Ontario.

Dean Steadman’s work has been published in Canadian journals and e-zines, as well as in the anthology Pith and Wry: Canadian Poetry (Scrivener Press, 2010). He was a finalist in the 2011 Ottawa Book Awards for his poetry collection, their blue drowning (Frog Hollow Press, 2010). His second poetry collection, Après Satie —For Two and Four Hands, will be published by Brick Books in 2016. AngelHousePress will be publishing his chapbook, Worm's Saving Day, in June, 2015.

Alicia Cumming [pictured] is an English-as-a-Second Language support teacher based in Kemptville, Ontario. She became inspired to examine our expectations and experiences of womanhood after spending time in community settings where social norms for women were critically questioned. Much of her work seeks to focus on how such norms, innocuous as they may seem, deeply suppress the autonomy of women. Website: aliciacumming.tumblr.com

Stuart Ross published his first literary pamphlet on the photocopier in his dad’s office one night in 1979. Through the 1980s, he stood on Toronto’s Yonge Street wearing signs like “Writer Going To Hell,” selling over 7,000 chapbooks. He is the author of more than 15 books of fiction, poetry and essays, most recently Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil Press, 2015) and A Hamburger in a Gallery (DC Books, 2015). Stuart’s many chapbooks include three released in 2014—Nice Haircut, Fiddlehead (Puddles of Sky Press), A Pretty Good Year (Nose in Book Publishing) and In In My Dream (BookThug)—and others from Room 3O2 Books, The Front Press, Apt. 9 Press, Silver Birch Press, Pink Dog Press and his own Proper Tales Press, which he launched 36 years ago. He is co-translator of My Planet of Kites, by Marie-Ève Comtois (Mansfield Press, 2015). Stuart is a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective and has his own imprint, “a stuart ross book,” at Mansfield Press. Stuart lives in Cobourg, Ontario, and blogs at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca.

Edric Mesmer reviews Katie L. Price’s BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015) in Yellow Field #10

Edric Mesmer reviews Katie L. Price’s BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015) in Yellow Field #10. Much thanks! And of course, copies are still very much available.

Katie L. Price

BRCA: Birth of a Patient

above/ground press

2015

Of ways inadequate to approach Katie L. Price’s chapbook, with cover image of chest x-ray of female torso, there are many. All found text, these roman numeraled sections guide a reader through stages in the construction of this patient; thereby, the reader is somewhere near witness—at a distance not necessarily safe; and from here the most poignant of arguments for reading as sexed are met. As conceptual poem, this comes perhaps closer than any to representing that x-rayed ribcage—if not heart itself—all too human if far from embrace. The reader is not here to make anything better. In Anne Boyer’s defiantly exploratory essay “The Sororal Death” she maps the separate continents of the personal “I” and the term “cancer.” Price’s approach offers a different way to, occurring in third person, with redacted names of patient and doctors. As goes the analysis that Sappho’s poems may not be about her but “Sappho” in highly ritualized telling, the author is able to stand without. This may [be] the gift of the conceptual poem. Untoward that vacuum the reader comes dangerously close—close to the Reason for Visit, the Family History, the Consent for and Risks of Chemotherapy…How inhabit the reading of such a line as: “24 y.o. […] woman with newly diagnosed ER+/ PR+/Her 2neu 3+ breast cancer undergoing neoadjuvant DD AC +TH”? It leaves out what Sontag called (as quoted by Boyer) “one more story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept, struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage…” Now the poem goes there.

some author activity: dueck, Pirie, Carr, Budde + McCann,

nathan dueck has some new work up at Canadian Poetries; Pearl Pirie is interviewed by Wanda Praamsma over at BookThug; Emily Carr has some new work up at Posit; Rob Budde has some new work up at Lemonhound; and Marcus McCann's homage to David McGimpsey is now up at Open Book: Toronto.

some author activity: Barwin, Earl, Landman, fitzpatrick, McElroy + Hajnoczky,

Gary Barwin has a new poem up at NationalPoetryMonth.ca; Amanda Earl has new work up at Otoliths; the first issue of Seth Landman's Divine Magnet is now online; a new ryan fitzpatrick interview has been posted over at Touch the Donkey; a collaborative poem between Gil McElroy and his cousin, Christina McElroy, is now up at the Chaudiere Books blog; and Helen Hajnoczky has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog.

The Factory Reading Series: A Night of Too Many Poets, May 31, 2015

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series presents: A Night of Too Many Poets

featuring readings by:

Eric Schmaltz (Toronto)
Julia Polyck-O'Neill (St Catharines)
Dale Tracy (Kingston)
Andy Weaver (Toronto)
Carl Watts (Kingston)
ryan fitzpatrick (Vancouver)
Deanna Fong (Vancouver)
Cameron Anstee (Ottawa)
Jessi MacEachern (Montreal)
Jason Camlot (Montreal)
+ philip miletic (Waterloo)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Sunday, May 31, 2015;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

Eric Schmaltz is an artist who works with text & sound.

Julia Polyck-O'Neill is a curator, visual artist, writer, and co-curator of the Borderblur Reading Series in St Catharines, ON. She is a currently doctoral student in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program, and holds an MA in Studies in Comparative Literatures and Arts from Brock University as well a BFA in Visual Art and English Concentration from the University of Ottawa. Her research examines historic and contemporary conceptualisms in Vancouver visual arts and literature.

Dale Tracy has her doctorate from Queen’s University, where she studied contemporary poetry. Currently teaching contemporary literature at the Royal Military College of Canada, she is engaged in Kingston’s arts community, reading at poetry events and arts festivals and collaborating in community theatre productions.

Andy Weaver's third book of poetry, titled this, will be published by Chaudiere Books this Fall. His two previous books, Were the Bees and gangson, were nominated for Alberta Book Awards. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at York University.

Carl Watts is a PhD candidate at Queen's University, where he is writing his dissertation on national and ethnic identities in twentieth-century Canadian literature. His poetry has most recently appeared in The Dalhousie Review and The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2014. He is looking forward to riding the Megabus all the way to New York City next month, when he will join the Canadian Poetry contingent at the Bryant Park Word for Word festival.

ryan fitzpatrick is a poet and critic living in Vancouver. He is the author of two books of poetry: Fortified Castles (Talonbooks, 2014) and Fake Math (Snare, 2007). With Jonathan Ball, he is co-editor of Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry (Insomniac, 2014). With Deanna Fong and Janey Dodd, he works on the second iteration of the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca), originally spearheaded by Susan Rudy. He is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University where he works on contemporary poetics and the social production of space.

Deanna Fong is the author of Butcher's Block (Pistol, 2008). She is also PhD student at Simon Fraser University, where she sifts through the recorded conversations of other poets from 1959 to 1989, so ask her if you want some dirt on your favourite authors.

Cameron Anstee lives and writes in Ottawa ON where he runs Apt. 9 Press and is pursuing a PhD studying Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa. He is the editor of The Collected Poems of William Hawkins (Chaudiere Books, 2015).

Jessi MacEachern is a PhD student at the Unversite de Montreal, where she studies the feminist poetics of modernist and contemporary writers. She received her MA from Concordia University in Creative Writing. Her poetry and criticism has previously been published in CV2, Lemonhound and Matrix.

Jason Camlot is the author of four collections of poetry: The Animal Library, Attention All Typewriters, The Debaucher, and most recently, What The World Said. His critical works include Language Acts (co-edited with Todd Swift) and Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic: Sincere Mannerisms. His poems and critical essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies including New American Writing, Postmodern Culture and English Literary History. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford. Camlot is poetry editor of the Punchy Writers Series (DC Books), and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University.

philip miletic is a writer, dabbling in a little bit of vispo, and is currently in his second year of his English PhD at the University of Waterloo. His work includes the pamphlet silver, the chapbook world 1-1 co-written with Craig Dodman, a short story chapbook and the birds sing, and a forthcoming chapbook from wordsonpages called mother2earth. He lives in Kitchener, ON.

Scott Bryson reviews Susanne Dyckman's Source (2014) in Broken Pencil #67

Scott Bryson was good enough to review Susanne Dyckman’s Source (2014) in BrokenPencil #67. Thanks, Scott!

This review will contain nearly as many words as the dozen poems in Source combined. Empty space plays as important a role here as the text does. These verses are meant to be read with a specific tempo (a slow one) – their words are spread vertically, horizontally and across pages.

While the poems in this collection are titled simply – “:family,” “:sister” and “:city” – this is far from straightforward material. The text of each poem is meant to equate to what’s listed in the title, as the colons in the titles suggest; however, some contemplation is required to determine how lines like “borrowing or digging / where water will not flow easy,” might relate to the concept of “:city.” There are shorter, untitled missives interspersed between Source’s primary poems, which seem to be a mixture of prayers, confessions and proverbs, and are considerably more enigmatic: “I confess to seraphs / the word I strike / is bread / is servant / is forever.”

Thematically, Susanne Dyckman appears to be analyzing the divide between disconnectedness and belonging, with the prayerful intermissions reading like a search for relief. In the final poem, “:home,” the opposing notions make a final collision in a series of lines that gets to the root of Dyckman’s struggle: “Something near, cherished, / but how to cherish // that which is also the same as end.” It’s a bittersweet conclusion to a cycle that hints at a lot by saying little.

Evening Will Come: beaulieu, Earl, Hajnoczky, McElroy, Simpson, timewell + mclennan,

A special "Canadian Feature," posted as the May issue of Evening Will Come, a fragment of The Volta, is now online, featuring poetic statements by a slew of above/ground press authors (and some not-yet-authors), including: derek beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Helen Hajnoczky, Peter Jaeger, Gil McElroy, Erín Moure, Nikki Reimer, Natalie Simpson and lary timewell, as well as a brief introduction by guest-editor rob mclennan.

some author activity: Turnbull, beaulieu, mclennan, Ursuliak, Robinson + Carr,

Chris Turnbull has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog as part of #NationalPoetryMonth, as does derek beaulieu and rob mclennan; rob mclennan is interviewed by Emily Ursuliak at University of Calgary radio's Writer's Block; Elizabeth Robinson has some new work up at Web Conjunctions; and Emily Carr has a new piece posted as part of Amanda Earl's NationalPoetryMonth.ca

some author activity: Baus, mclennan, Hall, Rogal, Graham + Massey,

Eric Baus writes on Eliane Radigue over at Coldfront; rob mclennan has a new poem up at Cosmonauts Avenue; Ruth R. Pierson writes on Phil Hall over at the Brick Books website; Stan Rogal writes on Emma Healey as "Poetry Primer #9" for All Lit Up; Lea Graham has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month, as does Karen Massey.

Karen Massey at The TREE Reading Series

above/ground press author Karen Massey features as part of the Hot Ottawa Voices at The TREE Reading Series. Celebrating thirty-five years of Ottawa's longest-running reading series with readings by three Ottawa poets: Karen Massey, David Stymeist and Susan Atkinson.

open set + featured reader(s)
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
8pm at Black Squirrel Books, 1073 Bank Street, Ottawa

for further information on Massey's latest above/ground press chapbook: http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca/2014/12/new-from-aboveground-press-strange-fits.html

for further information on The TREE Reading Series: http://www.treereadingseries.ca/