Jay Miller reviews Vivian Lewin's Colville Suite for Mixed Voices (2021)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Vivian Lewin's Colville Suite for Mixed Voices (2021) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

I am reviewing this book by looking at the Colvilles first.

Vivian Lewin is a Montrealer transplant from the US who studied English at Oberlin, taught quilting, and worked in communications. She is also a licensed Anglican Lay Reader and spiritual director, which I think is neat, and has published poems in Ariel, Fiddlehead, Field, and Matrix, among others.

This book came out with rob mclennan’s above/ground press in 2021. Each poem uses an Alex Colville painting as a reference point.

These paintings are so well-known, it is sometimes uncanny to look at them in the context of writing a review and realize I will be writing about a poem.

These are the ones I picked:

A woman peers directly into your face with a pair of gradient baby blue lensed binoculars aboard a ferry boat ride to PEI.

Alex Colville's To Prince Edward Island (1965)

The opening and closing poem reference this painting. Due to formatting and time constraints combined, I will skip printing out the first poem as I usually do and merely comment on the vibe set by the opener of the chap.

We are greeted in this poem by quatrains, spaced out on all but the first line to the right, while the poem is aligned left, sort of resembling the seating arrangement of the perspective of the viewer of the painting and its subject.

Vivian Lewin comments: “the woman holding binoculars up to her eyes / and propping her elbows / on a wood bench as if she intends to watch forever – // carries the poignancy of transitory meetings / far from home, at airports / or the courthouse cafeteria / where we outdistance // the push and pull of our lives. [...]”

This is, of course, the famous Rhoda Colville, who was herself a talented artist and poet, as well as the frequent model (when it wasn’t a dog or a blind man) of Alex’s paintings.

Lewin returns to the painting in her closing poem, as well:

“[...] I stare at the reproduction / until I see only / geometry again, perishing / imperfect colours, // less certain than ever (and also now my back hurts). / It’s no different than / what we all do to one another. / So ordinary // that even if you went and stood so close your / eyelashes almost touched / the surface of the original / you might not be sure.”

A black Labrador dog impedes us from seeing the profile of a supine priest on the dock, overlooking the bay with his furry companion.

Alex Colville's Dog and Priest (1978)

This painting Lewin helpfully curates by including an epigraph from Alex himself underneath the title, which reads: “...there is no limbo, purgatory, / or hell for animals.”

In such delicate ways, each Lewin and Colville obscure the holy man with the pagan beast, if I can take such a liberty to compare them comically. Colville is taken very seriously and I don’t intend to crack wise here, either. But as someone with family members who, in the past, were involved with the holy life and one who was a trainer of hunting dogs, and hunter, you do get to form a relationship with canine that is simultaneously holier and more grounded than one might form with any so-called god, you know? That is very much what Colville’s painting speaks to me on, while taking Lewin’s perspective in good faith as someone involved with Christianity herself as she is.

A very famous painting of a German Shepherd crossing a two-lane wooden bridge for trains as dusk descends over the dirt hill in the background. Human presence is implied. The dog looks straight ahead at the viewer of the painting.

Alex Colville's Dog and Bridge (1976)

This painting, Dog and Bridge, has been described elsewhere as demonstrating a “subtle profundity,” and I think that very much applies to both the human and canine scenes common to his imagery.

Lewin, in her sixth poem of the collection, references the above work and its associated studies. Colville spent years preparing for its execution on canvas. To quote the source linked in the paragraph just above:

    The drawing Seeing-Eye Dog, Man and Bridge and its preparatory study (both 1968) were made nearly a decade before the large painting Dog and Bridge (1976). This chronology tells us important things about the later image. First, Colville had been ruminating on this theme and site for all this time. It is the same bridge, the same dog. Yet the drawings were not literally preparatory studies for the painting but rather parts of Colville’s characteristically long, and in all senses measured, thinking process.

Two naked middle-aged adults stand around a fridge at night, the husband (right) chugging a glass of cold milk, carton atop the appliance, and the wife (left), holding the door ajar gingerly, allowing their three cats to approach with curiosity. The post-coitalness depicted is homely, intimate, not gross or obscene.
Alex Colville's Refrigerator (1977)

Lewin is deft in not only her curation of Colville’s artworks, but in responding to them in verse that is as observational and deliberately meek as the paintings themselves. She embodies a transference of the visual medium to the verbal medium with poise and savoir-faire. There is no way to subtly put it, her choices and versification are breathtakingly spiritual and resonatingly sparing. She at once plays curator and visitor in a way that intimates such a familarity with the subject yet ushers you in at the same time.

This is some highbrow stuff, respectfully.

For the final painting above, she writes:

    7. Colville’s Night Kitchen

    Our eyes, getting used to the dark,
    pick out a milky half-moon on the right
    and lower, a man’s most private parts
    not entirely in shadow.

    Here’s life together, when it’s not
    closed away altogether from what we see.
    His refrigerator opens a gash of light
    right down the middle,

    revealing the man and woman of the house
    wearing the slightly heavy limbs
    of statues of gods whose skin
    contains all colours

    as they descend, spilling cold light
    on black and white linoleum
    and on three cats with tails that twitch
    and noses that smell the milk.

Jay Miller reviews Stephanie Bolster's Ghosts (2017)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Stephanie Bolster's Ghosts (2017) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Ghosts is Stephanie Bolster’s fourth above/ground press title. It came out August 2017.

Bolster is a creative writing prof at Concordia with an impressively detailed CV.

I believe Brick Books provided me a copy of her 2011 poetry title A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth in my salad days. Alas, I had a different criteria for which books to review back then, and, intimidated by most, ultimately chose against picking it up at all and donating it to charity.

I have a different modus operandi these days and am happy to say this is the first work of Bolster I’ll be reading.

Many of the blurbs and descriptions of her books seem to defy dictionary definition, and maybe because it’s meant to be obvious. I gather from the title and the opening shot of what resembles a remote Appalachian or British Columbian mining town that this chap is going to be poeticizing a ghost town of sorts.

The photo inside reminds me of Welch, West Virginia, where Youtuber Peter Santenello visited in 2023.

Looking at the Wikipedia article for the town used for the title of the opening poem of the book, Sandon, I see it’s classified as a “near ghost town,” although someone who’s actually been there just calls it a ghost town flat out.

Although I live in Montreal myself, the sort of ghost towns I’m used to are those abandoned one-road-town type places northwest of the Greenbelt in Ontario. I find the ones advertised for Quebec resemble those of BC much more, although naturally each one has its own particular charms.

Stephanie Bolster’s opening poem for Ghosts, then, gets right into things, with a four-page opener including a footnote. She mentions that Sandon was site of one of the Japanese internment camps in 1942.

Curiously, by page three, she’s already deep in the weeds of this poem, writing:

    Sometimes someone chooses
    a use for the empty.
    (Ghosts are not empty.)

The next poem comes with two footnotes, the one on the first page showing the source for a ghost town that went by the name of Bolster.

The thing about ghost towns is that sometimes, info can be so scarce as to make the place out to be nothing more than a rumour or hearsay. Bolster seizes the ripe opportunity to dedicate several poems to the subject so snug they fit like a glove to the topic at hand. She never straight up asks but her verse seems to pose it rhetorically by dint of their very function: why don’t poets talk about ghost towns?

Presumably, a ghost town the author of this chap shares a name with was too good to pass up, so the source is appreciated. It’s copied from the Omak Chronical archives of Frank Emert, who describes having visited the town around 1916, when there were no longer businesses operating there, but a handful of souls still residing:

    My first view of Bolster was on a cold December night in 1916. I had been met at the railway station at Myncaster, B.C. about two miles north of Bolster by J.B. Jones, Chesaw banker. As we rode up the valley behind a fine team of horses in an attractive black sleigh, I suddenly saw many lights from kerosene lamps shining from windows. I asked for the name of the town we were approaching, thinking that perhaps it was Chesaw, where I was informed I had obtained a position as teacher. Then I was informed that it was the town of Bolster. A number of people still lived there but no business houses had been operated there for a number of years.

Bolster very much shows her prowess in long stretches of stories in verse. In each poem, we are spoiled rotten with history, sources, facts, images, places. Brief as this collection may be, we even get a delightful bon mot on dinosaurs as a last word:

    Where did they come from, where
    did they go? That is the story
    we wish to know.5




    5 Jane Werner Watson, Dinosaurs: A Little Golden Book. Racine, Wisconsin: Western Publishing, 1959

I can see myself now, propped up with a jelly glass full of iced tea in an Adirondack chair now, reading this book at sundown on an August day, letting inspiration for road trips permeate through me from her words. This chapbook seems almost exactly crafted for that.

I look forward to encountering the rest of Stephanie’s poetry. These are the sort of poems I wish I had grown up with way back when. Something more appealing reading a poem about a ghost town than any used hard cover with dust jacket could ever give. Thank you for reading.

Jay Miller reviews Cary Fagan's then / here / now / there (2025)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Cary Fagan's then / here / now / there (2025) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

He makes it look effortless, but these poems are elastic balls of references, stories and allusions begging to be unraveled.

I have to steal this guy’s idea for a blog.

I don’t know how I’m only finding out about this now, but I am sat here this evening with Fagan’s 2025 above/ground chap then / here / now / there and reading his bio in the back to get a foot in the door to begin this draft and I wish I had stumbled upon this in my piles of books sooner.

Now I have to go read every review he’s written.

The words then and there are deictic opposites from now and here, a qualifier I don’t often have occasion to toss into casual conversation. There’s probably a pretty good XKCD chart floating around out there to illustrate my point.

But parlour yap isn’t the point of my writing tonight. I want to take a good look at this object in front of me, which has a sepia-like photograph on the cover of a dirt road banked up over a stretch of water running perpendicular to the viewer, with wooden railings on either side and a T-bone bridge structure at the vanishing point. It’s a very cozy picture that perfectly illustrates place and time by way of metaphor of a foot journey.

Opening the work, a cryptic message epigraphs the page opposite the first poem: various kinds of sake, it reads.

Let’s not get discountenanced so soon. It’s a curve ball, granted, but we’re in this reading together. We’re gonna make it.

The first poem has no title, which I am fond of (besides, titles are hard, as are opening lines, closing lines, and the stuff in between, in that order):

    a man on tenth street planting begonias / how afraid
    and yet desperate to get up before class / she’s trying
    to learn harmonica / torn / you say to him, ’you are my
    torturer’ / last night dreaming that i was dreaming of
    my father / it isn’t necessary to finish war and peace,
    is it? / when I have a good pen i want to write for its
    sake

So many things happening here:

    we are introduced to Cary Fagan’s style in this poem
    the preference is for lowercase letters where possible
    we have one capital I in the last line of the poem
    the poet doesn’t mind having single-word lines in a poem
    the poet doesn’t mind italics, which are multi-functional
    but no periods, colons, semi-colons, or dashes
    only slashes, commas, apostrophes, and a question mark
    the last word bringing up the epigraph again, sake

It will be a small miracle if I don’t have to photograph the poem to get the typesetting to appear in its correct format from the book to the screen (Update: didn’t have to (on desktop)!).

All that being said, I think we have established sufficient ground rules to proceed on this mission together. What do his poems have to say?

Let’s circle back to this poem once we’ve looked at the next one the next page over:

    sweetener / the marionette cellist dressed identically
    to the man above / dink car left in a stocking by my
    angry mother / yo, you have to be naked / getting the
    4, 5, or 6 from astor place / i listen to solange because
    sophie asked me / am i the only one who wants to be
    thought of as nicer than i am? / the various kinds of
    sake in the hiromi kawakami novel

So here we are once again woven sporadically through a biography that is in the process of being revealed to us through the slits of the blinds, one index finger peek at a time.

We are now immune to most orthographic devices because of the bulleted list we extracted from reading the first poem.

We are surprised, however, by the homograph plot twist of ‘sake’ being turned into a disyllabic loan word from the Japanese rather than the, I wanna say Norse Germanic, monosyllabic ‘sake’ we had assumed for the first two pages of the work.

We are provided more clues: astor place, a minuscule slice of New York; solange, the singer, no doubt; hiromi kawakami, a Japanese writer.

Now that we have encountered the two most obvious interpretations of the grapheme ‘sake’, I wonder what other various ‘sakes’ we’ll run into in the poems to follow.

Something about this chapbook, having been written by someone who occasionally reviews chapbooks, makes it feel like a treasure hunt. There’s a thrill to it. What we may discover.

In the least conventional line breaking manner, with as few safety railings against misinterpretation as possible, it does feel once again, to borrow the computer science phrase as I did the other day, like these poems operate pretty close to the metal (of the poetry machine).

This section ends, giving way to the next section, dutch novels. I realize now what I mistook for an epigraph is in fact a section header. It appears on the back of the page, or the left when the chap is spreadeagle, in all lower case letters, of course.

When I think of Dutch novels I can only conjure two to wit: In the Dutch Mountains, Cees Nooteboom, and Strike Out Where Not Applicable, Nicolas Freeling, the former being a Dutch writer of considerable repute and the latter being a novel set in the Netherlands and billed in the précis as “the thinking man’s Ian Fleming.” It’s all right so far, I just started it the other day. Sometimes no idea where the books I have come from to be quite frank.

Remembering the tangent I was on, I realize Fagan has stayed true to the title of his work: then takes place in these poems in the first two-three lines; here follows next, place taking priority over time; now is the natural segue from current physical location to current temporal; and there very much leads us astray, but not a red herring—it’s exactly as printed on the tin.

Taking it all in with a sharp inhale makes reading the following poem so much more relieving:

    cars sluice through the college street rain / a cat
    whose need is never sated / curve of the blade to make
    the spoon’s bowl / tic tacs i carried around as a boy
    like cigarettes / the splintered end of a season /
    listening to allison de groot’s banjo / the air, the air

We can finally rest easy taking in the imagery, the metaphor, the combination thereof, the nostalgia, the unexplained use of italics, and the music tie-in, with a melodic enough coda to say Cary Fagan has tied it all off with a neat little bow.

The last poem of the section asks rhetorically at one point “why are there so many writers” and may or may not be a stray piece of unanswered dialogue.

There are two more sections proceeding, keeping true to the implied structure of the book. They are “any moment now” and “waiting by my father” and suddenly everything in this chap feels too brief. I want more. It’s not even over yet and I feel the impending, undesired burden of the abrupt end to come.

The other thing I notice about these words that may not appear explicitly to every reader is how prone this poetry would be to translation. There’s nothing ambiguous, despite the lack of orthodox structure; the poems aren’t long nor long-winded. Each page is one stanza, six lines apiece, and the last line sometimes only one word. It is perhaps a privilege of having been translated so frequently that Cary Fagan can write this way, he’s already familiar with the life and longevity of any given work.

As far as reviews go, I am no Colm Tóibín, although I truly wish I were. He would know exactly which bits to go after without giving an exegesis of every line in the work, even though he probably could. I am getting distracted again, aren’t I?

Something about reading Cary Fagan’s chapbook weakens my resolve to stay on topic. I want to gush about my own favourite writers, musicians, memories and anecdotes, too, although that may mischaracterize the nuanced tone of each poem here. There are wisps of pain, of lucidity, of dubious regret, and quiet delight. It’s all rolled into one, but as brief and nebulous as the poems are, it’s clear when you read which is what.

So, it’s rather impressive, in that light, how succinct and barebones Cary Fagan was able to make this book. He makes it look effortless, but these poems are elastic balls of references, stories and allusions begging to be unraveled.

On a closing note, in the process of formatting and fact-checking this review, I have just discovered Cary Fagan also publishes chapbooks, under the name Found Object Press. Now, I can’t wait to read those, too.

some author activity: Armantrout, Browne, Turner, Stebner, Dean, Barwin, Nichol + Heroux,

Rae Armantrout discusses two poems from her latest collection with Laynie Browne, Julia Bloch and Al Fireis as part of PoemTalk #207 at Jacket2; Michael Turner has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month, as does Kevin Stebner, and even Leesa Dean; Gary Barwin has posted new music over at bandcamp, "I before H: music after bpNichol"; and Jason Heroux has a new poem up at unbroken.

The League of Canadian Poets : Lifetime Achievement, Penn Kemp : Life Member, Gary Barwin

Congratulations to above/ground press author Penn Kemp (author of the recent Lives of Dead Poets), for receiving this year's Lifetime Achievement Award through The League of Canadian Poets! And to Gary Barwin (author of eight titles through above/ground press, most recently MY STRUGGLE WITH NOUNS), for receiving this year's Life Membership! Hooray! As the website for The League of Canadian Poets offers:

Poet, performer and playwright Penn Kemp has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication of poetry by Coach House (1972), a “poetic El Niño”, and a “one-woman literary industry”. The League of Canadian Poets has honored her with the Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award  (2025),  as Spoken Word Artist of the year (2015), as a foremother of Canadian Poetry, and Life Member. Penn has long been a keen participant/activist in Canada’s cultural life, with more than thirty books of poetry, prose and drama; seven plays and ten CDs produced as well as award-winning videopoems. She was London's inaugural Poet Laureate (2010-13) and Western University’s Writer-in-Residence (2009-10). Her project was the DVD, Luminous Entrance: A Sound Opera for Climate Change Action, performed at Aeolian Hall, London. Her other Sound Operas have been performed there and at venues across Canada. She has been writer-in-residence at universities throughout India and Brazil with her work widely translated. Her “poem for peace in many voices”, for instance, is out in 136 languages. Her many collaborations with artists are up on Youtube and River Revery. Out now is POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, an anthology for Ukraine. Penn’s sound poetry, INCREMENTALLY, is up as e-book and album. New collections in 2025 are available through Silver Bow Publishing and above/ground press. Penn is active across the web on her website; on Facebook, X, and Instagram; on her blog; on Substack; and on Soundcloud.

The award selection committee writes:

Penn’s contributions to community are wildly impressive and undeniable. The tendrils of her devotion to poetry and literature not only span decades, but extend across mediums, forms, and the country. Directly or indirectly, so many of us have benefited from Penn’s contributions to our literary landscape.

Over a career spanning six decades, London ON poet Penn Kemp has done it all: poetry in both voice and print, editing anthologies, publishing, mentoring countless young writers, writing for theatre and sound operas, extensive collaborative and community engagements, and promoting poetry in all its forms. As important as her poetry, and integral to it, is her activism and commitment to social justice. Translated into multiple languages and performed around the world, Penn’s poetry addresses peace and justice, environmental activism, domestic violence and a range of other social and political concerns.  With books and multi-media projects published as early as 1972 and as recent as, well, yesterday, Penn is more than deserving of this celebration of a lifetime very full of achievement.

On winning the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, Penn writes:

To be the inaugural winner of the League's new Lifetime Achievement Award is a profound honour, given the wealth of senior poets across Canada. Throughout sixty years of writing and publishing, poetry has been my lifeline.  But there is so much more to explore! At eighty, I feel at the beginning of all that poetry can offer... I still stare daily at the blank page until words unfurl. In accepting this award, I'd also like to pay tribute to our elder poets, for whom this ongoing award is so pertinent. A deep bow to the League for supporting poetry in Canada over the decades, and on.

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 34 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 and, with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts, Muttertongue: what is a work in utter space. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates which won the Leacock Medal and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize and was longlisted for Canada Reads. His last novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was the Hamilton Reads choice for 2023-2024. His last poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures also won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His most recent novel, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead will be published in 2026. His art and media works have been exhibited internationally.

His poetry installation, The Ambitious Sky was projected on a five-storey wall in Hamilton in February 2025, an interactive multimedia poetry exhibition (created with Elee Kraljii Gardiner) was exhibited at Massy Arts (Vancouver) in Fall 2024, and Bird Fiction, and an interactive multimedia work (with Sarah Imrisek) was featured in Hamilton Arts Week in June 2025.

Known for his dynamic and engaging performances, Barwin has given hundreds of readings and multimedia poetry presentations (with live music, interactive computer systems, and/or projections) in Canada and internationally. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com

Jay Miller reviews the suitcase poem, ed. Amanda Earl (2025)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of the suitcase poem, ed. Amanda Earl (2025) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

The Baggage Handlers, The Suitcase Poem

This is something only Canadian small press poetry could produce. The baggage handlers.

The Baggage Handlers is a shorthand for: Marie-Andrée Auclair, Gregory Betts, Jeff Blackman, Ellen Chang-Richardson, AJ Dolman, Amanda Earl, Doris Fiszer, Gwendolyn Guth, Jenna Jarvis, Chris "Stop" Johnson, Tanis MacDonald, Roz Toner, MW (Matthew Walsh).

This is an eight-page poem without a title, published by rob mclennan's above/ground press in 2025 and compiled by Amanda Earl.

What is this document and what is the nature and meaning of it?

George Steiner mentioned something similar Octavio Paz collaborated on 50 years ago with each collaborator producing something in their own language and appending it on to the original before passing it on. Steiner mentioned it in After Babel but I can't be arsed quite frankly. If you've read it, you already know exactly what I mean.

The Suitcase Poem reminds me of that.

There is something to be said about the uptick of writing groups, but a handful of these folks have been at it for quite a while and clearly it works for them so game on. Letter Killers Club.

How does the poem open?

    a suitcase [...]

I'm gonna skip ahead from here, because the poem doesn't pick up until the second page over, whereas the first feels very much like finding footing:

    stellar interstices, everything
    packed in, or un-, elbow of hinge
    distraction

    the cot/caught merger like traffic, the measured incursion

This is where a software development metaphor would come in so handy, because this is the type of verse that is so close to the metal it becomes abstract on a surface level but delightfully functional on a close-to-the-metal level when it comes to analyzing the prosody, meaning, metaphor, scansion and poetics.

What did you expect from a collaborative effort of over a dozen well-versed poets?

This is poetry for the poetry-maker. I don't even know if a hobbyist printer would appreciate this as much as a publisher such as rob mclennan. We may never have another one of him in the future.

This is something only Canadian small press poetry could produce. The baggage handlers.

The collaboration effort becomes apparent in cento-like instances such as:

    earlier today, when dad finally won
    their little game of telephone tag/hide/seek
    he told her that he'd heard it might rain
    maybe early next week
    maybe the one after

Honestly, I'm aware I'm cherry-picking excerpts, but what does this collab poem not say?

The same page ends, after an alternately-aligned bit of text that signals a counter-narrative running throughout the same length of the poem left-aligned:

    dad, a retired travelling salesman
    run as ragged at the edges
    as the empty garment bag
    at the back of the closet
    still yearns for the breeze
    and the emptiness of the road
    and waits for the day he can make off
    with the snugly packed suitcase
    he still keeps tucked under the bed

Obviously, I am glad Canadian poets are working on these collaborative efforts. It speaks to a certain level of cohesiveness, closeness and camaraderie. But doesn't reading this make you want to participate and feel bad for missing out on being invited? Amanda Earl refers to this phenomenon as JOMO: the joy of missing out.

    When we talk about suitcases, we want them tough
    and serenely riding the conveyor belt
    toward us in the airport of our choice

Amanda Earl writes the afterword:

    I invited poets I know, first in Ottawa and then further afield, to take part in a collaborative poem about a suitcase to see what its contents might be and where we might go.

Honestly, this is ephemera worth holding on to. A poem that directly challenges the concept of object, of poiesis, of what it means to be a Canadian poet? Immaculate.

some author activity: benedict, Robinson, Pittella, Logan, Smallfield, Boughn + Trivedi,

alex benedict is zoom-interviewed on his periodicities essay, the poetics of Rilke, Celan, etc.; Ben Robinson is interviewed via All Lit Up; Carlos A. Pittella has a new poem on the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month; Nate Logan has new work up at Community Mausoleum; Edward Smallfield also has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog; the video of Michael Boughn's recent Toronto reading is now online at YouTube; and Amish Trivedi now has a substack.

new from above/ground press: INVENTORY, by Brook Houglum

INVENTORY
Brook Houglum
$5

CITY OF INVERTED CONTAINERS

hummingbird feeder; vitamin D

Vitamix; Cuisinart; Instant Pot

toaster oven; salt, pepper

loose leaf, strainer; sheet music

parrot piñata head; pop cans

candles; pencils; whistles

shelf-stable milk & soup cartons

condiments; Lego mini figures

fish tank with pink rocks and hollow

plastic log; box of shakers &

tambourines; box of balloons &

wrapping paper; water bottles

rubber bands; cotton/acrylic/polyester

/wool folded clothing; leather &

plastic & rubber shoes; tiny working

replicas of Hungry Hungry Hippo

& Operation; incense; framed photos

boxes of screwdrivers/nails/screws

baskets of dice/beads/playing cards

paperweight; calculator; globe

night-vision goggles; binoculars

containers of toothpaste/deodorant/

gel/floss/shampoo/sunblock

sunglasses; nail clippers; hair ties

batteries; scissors; flashlights

boxes of tissue; boxes of garbage sacks

laundry soap; lemons; apples

chargers; keys; hooks; bins

brackets screwed to the walls   

 

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Brook Houglum published the chapbook Anthronoise with above/ground press in 2024. She teaches at Capilano University and lives in Vancouver on unceded Skwxwú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ lands.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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