Kevin Spenst reviews Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024) via subterrain #102

our pal Kevin Spenst was good enough to review Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024), as part of his regular column of chapbook reviews, in a round-up assemblage in subterrain #102! Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of Tracy's Gnomics, after Daniel Barbiero reviewed such via Arteidolia. As Spenst writes:

     Dale Tracy's Gnomics (above/ground press) is astonishing in how much can be crafted within two- or three-line poems. Tracy's collection is replete with prophecies ("Those who drink the oil of ancient beasts / become the dragons who breathe fire"), persona poems ("Edging Stones // Since I am a garden, / I grow to a limit") and sylloisms ("Sounds bounce into distance. I hear sounds from a distance. Distance lives inside my ear.) This later poem strikes me in its compression of thought, touching as it does on a central argument in Tracy's 2017 book With the Witness: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience, where she theorizes poetry outside the cloying embrace of empathy as understanding another's experience. Instead, Tracy argues "literature helps one to know what it is to encounter another." I hear this nuanced argument again in "Distance lives inside my ear." We hear another person's story but that story only lives within us always at a certain remove.

  

Jay Miller reviews Dale Tracy's The Mystery of Ornament (2020)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to review Dale Tracy's The Mystery of Ornament (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of this title, after Daniel Barbiero was good enough to review such over at Arteidolia. You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Dale Tracy is a mastermind of storytelling, daring, and it’s honestly just a really fun, brief read.

Buta, or boteh (the transliteration I prefer), is defined by Wiktionary as “the droplet-shaped motif on which paisley patterns are based” and though this is my first time encountering this word, I get the sense there’s no way the classification of what it encompasses could be so sparing.

But that’s seemingly where Dale Tracy has gotten her title for this 2020 above/ground chapbook from, The Mystery of Ornament.

Skipping to the acknowledgements section first before describing the cover and analyzing the first poem, which is quickly becoming a habit of mine, we read:

Thanks to Allison Chisholm for presenting me with a booklet of blank pages and the instruction to write a chapbook. Thanks to our writing group for making handmade prompts our occasion for being together. Thanks to Stuart Ross for his generosity and keen editorial eye. Thanks to rob mclennan for making space for so much poetry.

A booklet of blank pages was how this book started, isn’t that incredible? It could have become anything and now I am actively reeling my mind back in before going off the deep end into a rabbit hole and subsequent tangent about Persian carpets. Let’s see what Dale Tracy has to say about them tonight instead.

The cover shows a pixelated motif, of flowers entwined between rows of buteh, or bending in such ways as to suggest the presence of buteh without necessarily explicitly showing in appearance. It’s subtle.

I may or may not have consulted another printed source, or three, on this already, but I will spare my tangent for another part of the review, if not another altogether!

    The Design

    The plan: exchange a false chintz for the paisley pattern.
    They’ll steal its basis in the buta, the “Kashmir cone,”
    a motif of tears out of harmony with production’s speed.

    There is no excrescence in art—design extracted
    advantages new owners, not ornament.
    The black market takes textiles
    with the numbers filed off.

    They will steal the general idea,
    the individual expression,
    the fabric, the dyes,
    the elegant suggestion.

    They will unweave.

So this might explain the absent motif on the cover.

By the middle of the manuscript, Tracy has nearly hit her full stride in a pair of ghazals that are as refreshing as they are committed to the theme of the chap.

I may have mentioned ghazals being very much in vogue earlier this month. It’s hard not to get sick of how overdone the form can be. Some poets try to do spin-off forms, inspired forms, etc., but even reading something about John Thompson’s Stilt Jack earlier today made me roll my eyes hearing for the umpteenth time of Canadian poets doing the ghazal. Honestly, I blame Canadians, not Thompson so much, but as a Canadian reader (or as someone who has studied four Middle Eastern languages perhaps), I still enjoy attention to the form, style, history and potent and often untapped valency of the ghazal.

So to recapitulate, Dale Tracy does ghazals justice. She respects the repetition the form yearns for, with an AA/BA/CA/DA/EA rhyme scheme in each. The two make a formidable pair.

But that’s the best part, it’s not the end of the work, it’s the middle, and she’s still getting warmed up.

    A Ghazal Leaves a Clue

    Every plan frays at the edges, leaves a clue.
    You can never know then who leaves a clue.

    Handicraft sews fingerprints in—poems too.
    Facts in delight do not accrue but it leaves a clue.

    Gold threads flowers’ stalks, the mania of growth.
    Spring is here: against the blue, the leaves, a clue.

    A statue gleams against the square of heated stones.
    Sun in the market, but birds flew; shadow leaves a clue.

    The one who looks and weaves is seen and caught.
    D.A.T. Detective Agency, it’s true, leaves a clue.

I say getting warmed up and by that I misconstrue: Dale Tracy, in her trademark experimenting, has also woven us into a narrative about the rug in question in a way achieving a level of nearly indetectable homage to Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, it feels like, or what Krakovian poet Zenon Fajfer might refer to as liberature, or works of literature that interface directly with the medium and printed forms they appear on.

I have only enough time to either excerpt one more poem or exegete. I think I must defer to Dale Tracy on this and print the final one, spoiler alert:

    Return to Sender

    Forced to return the stolen loot,
    Martha remembers sailing wings, and thinks.
    Air lacks pattern like visible waves.
    To make a mark but no trail, take to the sky.

    The cousins wrap the Kashmir shawls.
    The shipping clerk inks the parcel “Air Mail.”
    In the pause before the cousins gasp in unison,
    Martha’s mind stamps signature designs.

It’s a really cool chapbook and I highly encourage you reach out to rob mclennan to specifically request a copy while you still can if any of this scratches that itch for you. Dale Tracy is a mastermind of storytelling, daring, and it’s honestly just a really fun, brief read.

If you’re down to read a chapbook, I can’t think of anything else at the moment I’d rather recommend. I can’t wait to read more Dale Tracy.

Mahaila Smith wins this year's John Newlove Poetry Award

Congratulations to Ottawa poet (and above/ground press author) Mahaila Smith, who last night was announced as the winner of the 21st annual John Newlove Poetry Award (hosted by the ottawa international writers festival; catch the recorded livestream here, in case you missed it), as run through and by Bywords.ca, with this year's judge Toronto poet Jim Johnstone. Very nice! From her author biography: Mahaila Smith (any pronouns) is a young femme writer, living and working on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the co-editors for The Sprawl Mag. They like learning theory and writing speculative poetry. Their recent chapbooks include Water-Kin (Metatron Press 2024) and Enter the Hyperreal (above/ground press 2024). Their novelette in verse, Seed Beetle, is forthcoming with Stelliform Press. As Jim's judge's comments read:

"In this year's John Newlove Award winning poem word building becomes world building, a powerful meditation deftly stitched together with a seamless, serotonin-inducing hand."

The annual John Newlove Poetry award, launched in the fall of 2004, commemorates the honest, poignant and well-written poetry of John Newlove, an Ottawa resident for almost twenty years and poet who died in 2003. Smith won for her poem "Ugly, Red: A Cento," and now has the opportunity for a chapbook of her work to appear through Bywords.ca next year! And did you hear that another above/ground press author, BC-based poet Dale Tracy, was the honourable mention for this year's award for her poem "Run"? Oh, what a year this has been.

some author activity: mclennan, Webb, Jirgens, Carpenter, Pirie, Tracy + Massey,

a video of rob mclennan reading now exists online as part of the Gap Riot Press summer 2024 launch; there's a conversation between Lindsey Webb and Kelly Hoffer online at BOMB magazine, and Webb also has new poems and book recommendations up at Etcetera; Karl Jirgens has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; J.R. Carpenter has new work in Blackbox Manifold; and Pearl Pirie, Karen Massey and Dale Tracy have poems in the August issue of Bywords.ca

Daniel Barbiero reviews Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024) at Arteidolia

Daniel Barbiero was good enough to provide the first review for Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024) over at Arteidolia. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

“Gnomics” is the name that poet Dale Tracy has given to the twenty-four short poems that make up the content of her new chapbook of that title.

A gnomic utterance is a short, condensed statement of a universal principle or observation, often couched in enigmatic or figurative language that gives it the appearance of profundity. Think, for example, of the aphorisms that earned Heraclitus the nickname “the obscure”: “a hidden harmony is better than an obvious one”; “the nature of things likes to hide”; “changing, it remains the same.” These are pithy statements that purport to speak of universal truths, but do so mysteriously enough that even after twenty-five hundred years there’s no agreement on what Heraclitus really meant.

Tracy’s gnomics don’t share Heraclitus’ willful obscurity, nor do they claim to present universal truths. For Tracy, “a poem is a model for doing rather than an explanation of something” – a way of learning about the world rather than pronouncing on it. Hence her gnomics present her in the process of thinking through the world and doing so in as condensed a manner as possible. They are, in effect, discrete objects in which a thought is totalized in a tightly-bound linguistic enclosure.

Take, for example, “Ars Poetica,” the collection’s opening poem:

You must eat your midnight and roses
or there’ll be no pounder of spices.

This single sentence poem mimics a conditional statement of the “without X there can be no Y” type, recast as a chain of associations. How these associations come into contact with each other is an enigma for the reader to interpret. “Eat” and “spices” may be connected through the implicit but absent intermediary term of “food” (spices make the food we eat palatable); “midnight” and “roses” associate with each other as cliched tropes of sentimental poetry. Are we to “eat” them figuratively, make them and their bland like disappear, in order for real poetry, its more challenging or substantive tropes akin to the spices that give food its pungency and which must be pounded out by the poet, to emerge in their place? Possibly, and a possibility latent in the title. “Ars Poetica” may be totalized syntactically – rendered a complete thought in which each association has its proper place in a sequence of associations – by its logical structure, but its meaning is not. It’s poetry, and not to be exhausted in a single reading. Its meaning resides in the ambiguity of its images rather than in its logical form.

The tension between logical form and poetic content is something Tracy plays with throughout Gnomics. “Logic 3,” one of five poems title “Logic” which play with syllogistic forms for poetic effect, reads:

What can be created can be destroyed.
Knowledge can be created.
Some knowledge nourishes dirt.

The first two sentences give us the premises, which don’t lead to the conclusion we’d expect, which should be “Knowledge can be destroyed.” But this is a poem rather than a syllogism proper, so we have to derive the conclusion analogically rather than logically. Organic matter nourishes the soil as it decomposes (is “destroyed”); transferred by analogy from organic matter to knowledge, the image of decomposition represents the more general idea of destruction which we now can see applies to knowledge, though apparently not to all knowledge.

Modeling the progress of a thought in language – seeing it through from its beginnings in a string of words in search of a meaning to its totalization in a completed unit of signification – is one of the aims of these poems. Tracy has described them as “open[ing] up a line of thought” through which “the thinking emerges from the poem as a process.” As we’ve seen in “Logic 3” that process can consist of drawing conclusions by analogy; we can see another kind of thought process in “Pocket Sky”:

A jagged tree is a key to the sky,
which turns around it slowly.

The thought modeled here mimics the apparent turning motion of the sky: it spirals outward from a central kernel consisting of a single image – a tree whose ramified branches resemble the teeth and notches along the blade of a key, as it protrudes upward in a clearing – and expands into a complex metaphor that reverses our expectations through an incongruity in the way it’s elaborated. A key is something that works by turning within a space, but here it’s the space surrounding the (metaphorical) key that turns; this reversal of the conventional order of things heightens our awareness of the way the metaphor is constructed – we follow the path the thought takes as it rounds a curve we didn’t see coming. If the tree is a key the sky is the cylinder containing it; what’s more, the tree provides a key to our noticing the sky by virtue of its vertical orientation directing our gaze upward. The image of the tree has the added effect of setting up an implicit pun with the title of Tracy’s collection: it “rhymes” with the image of the gnomon, the vertical rod ancient geometers used to measure the length of shadows.

The extended metaphor in “Pocket Sky” works by combining the two more-or-less distant elements of the tree and the key. They combine partly on the basis of a symmetry of physical resemblance and partly on the basis of the similar sound profiles of “tree” and “key”: both are monosyllabic words beginning abruptly with hard consonants and ending with the same long vowel sound. It is a method of forming associations that recalls Surrealist poetics.

We can see this again in the riddle-like “Fallacy”:

A mind like saloon doors:
all spur, no horse ride.

We can imagine a mind being like saloon doors – loosely hinged and swinging open and shut with every random stranger passing through – but the linkage from that opening simile to the implicit image of a horse being prodded with a spur but refusing to move requires an alogical, imaginative leap that on the surface produces a mixed metaphor. But it’s a leap clearly meant to elaborate the simile in a different figurative register since, like the stubborn horse resisting a prod, such a porous mind would most likely be one that doesn’t move itself to think, despite getting a push. Rather than a mixed metaphor, we have a complex and wryly humorous surreal metaphor-by-association. It really isn’t surprising, then, to see Tracy, in an interview last year, describing her way of thinking as having a “surreal bent.” With Gnomics, she makes that thinking the meaning, rather than just the means, of the poetry.

Gnomics is Tracy’s second book with above/ground press, following 2020’s The Mystery of Ornament. The Ottawa-based press, which is curated by publisher rob mclennan, specializes in elegantly presented poetry chapbooks like Gnomics. It has published more than 1325 titles so far and celebrates its thirty-first anniversary this month.

some upcoming author readings: mclennan in Picton, Ebbitt in NYC + Tracy, Casteels + Heroux in Kingston, etc

rob mclennan reads with Kingston poet and Anstruther Press author Y. S. Lee on Thursday, June 20 in Picton, Ontario as part of the PEP Rally series hosted by Assembly Press: 6:30-8pm at Books & Company, 289 Main Street; Katie Ebbitt launches her above/ground press title alongside Riley Mac, Sophia Kiam, Coco Gordon Moore, Krithika Varagur and Stephanie Wambugu as part of Red Room KGB, 7pm on Sunday, June 23 in New York City; Dale Tracy launches her above/ground press title alongside Michael e. Casteels and Jason Heroux chapbook launches on Tuesday, June 18, 7pm, at Novel Idea Bookstore in Kingston, 156 Princess Street ; and you heard the ottawa small press book fair is next weekend, yes?

new from above/ground press: Gnomics, by Dale Tracy

Gnomics
Dale Tracy
$5

Ars Poetica

You must eat your midnight and roses
or there’ll be no pounder of spices.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Dale Tracy is the author of Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press, 2022), her first full-length poetry collection. She also wrote the chapbooks Lines That Open (Surrey Art Gallery, 2023), The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground press, 2020), and Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018) and the academic monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

This is Tracy’s second above/ground press title, after The Mystery of Ornament (2020).

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: Scroggins, Norris, Carisse, Hawes, Tracy, Mohammadi + Cadsby,

Mark Scroggins has a new poem up at talking about strawberries all of the time; Ken Norris is interviewed there, as is Russell Carisse, and so is James Hawes; Dale Tracy is interviewed in the '12 or 20 questions' series; Khashayar Mohammadi has a poem up on the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month, and so does forthcoming author Heather Cadsby!

some author activity: Varrone, Pakdel, O'Reilly, Tracy, Robinson + Earl,

Here's a video that New Jersey high school students Charlie Mawn and Jonathan Kane made of Kevin Varrone’s "Poem I Wrote Sitting Across the Table from You"; Saba Pakdel has a poem in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; Nathanael O'Reilly has new work up at Eastern Iowa Review; Dale Tracy is interviewed by Rob Taylor over at Read Local BC; Ben Robinson also has a poem in the "poetry pause" series; and so does Amanda Earl!

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.

some author activity: Boyle, Clayton, Tracy + Gray,

Frances Boyle has three poems up at Cypress: A Poetry Journal; Conyer Clayton has an essay in the Talking Poetics series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; Dale Tracy is being interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; and Marty Cain mentions Evan Gray's above/ground press title Body Birth (2019) as part of a blog post for Action Books (a title which is totally still available, by the way).

poetry pause : the league of canadian poets

Thanks to The League of Canadian Poets' "poetry pause" series for helping celebrate twenty-seven years of above/ground press! The series allowed me to curate ten authors for recent slots, all of whom are Canadian (and/or Canadian-based) authors with 2020 above/ground press publications. Most of the poems included in the series are reprinted from their collections, but a few even provided new poems! Here are the authors' names, with the links to their "poetry pause" poems: Dani Spinosa, George Stanley, Khashayar Mohammadi, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Sarah Burgoyne, Lance La Rocque, J.R. Carpenter, Leesa Dean, Razielle Aigen and Dale Tracy. Can you believe we're twenty-seven years deep? What might the rest of the year bring? We are so close to thirty!

some author activity: Kasimor, Eleftherion, Archer, Tracy + Sikkema,

Mary Kasimor and Melissa Eleftherion have work in the new issue of MiGoZine: Kasimor's is here, and Eleftherion's are here and here and here; Melissa Eleftherion also has some new work up at talking about strawberries all of the time, as does Mary Kasimor; Sacha Archer has new work up at Grey Borders; Dale Tracy has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month; and Michael Sikkema is interviewed over at talking about strawberries all of the time.

some author activity: Tracy, Kronovet, Banu, Beaulieu + Notley,

Dale Tracy has an essay in the "Talking Poetics" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; Jennifer Kronovet has a new poem in The New York Times; Simina Banu has new work and a statement up in the Spotlight series; Derek Beaulieu has a new visual poem up at Train : a poetry journal; and Alice Notley has a new poem in the "Tuesday poem" series via the dusie blog.

new from above/ground press: The Mystery of Ornament, by Dale Tracy

The Mystery of Ornament
Dale Tracy
$4

Signature Piece

The cousins name the centre of their plan
Captain Quilt’s Wet Stitch:
Martha swims, they sail,
an awl through the weave,
a trawl through the water.
The fish are the cover story
and the symbol of the dive:
Fish, another bird observer,
because we all watch our shadow.
The cousins know Martha saw
curved wings to fall so straight.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Dale Tracy is the author of the chapbook Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018), the four-poem chapoem What It Satisfies (Puddles of Sky Press, 2016), and the monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). She teaches in the Department of English, Culture, and Communication and is currently the associate chair of the Writing Centre at the Royal Military College of Canada.

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 at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Aigen, Flemmer, Nilson, Anstee + Tracy,

Razielle Aigen has a poem in the Poetry Pause series via The League of Canadian Poets; Kyle Flemmer has a new poem up at Train : a poetry journal; Geoffrey Nilson has a new poem up at Watch Your Head; Cameron Anstee has a new essay celebrating Stuart Ross' Proper Tales Press; and Dale Tracy has a poem in the Tuesday poem series over at the dusie blog.

some author activity: Birchard, mclennan, Tracy, Notley, Schmaltz + Rosenthal,

Guy Birchard has a new poem in the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; rob mclennan has had two poems up at Stride magazine here, and here; forthcoming author Dale Tracy is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; above/ground press authors Alice Notley and Eric Schmaltz (among others) will have work included in the next edition of Best American Experimental Writing; and Sarah Rosenthal has new work in ELDERLY #30.

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.