Jay Miller reviews Lance La Rocque's Glitch (2020)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Lance La Rocque's Glitch (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Lance La Rocque, I believe, contains such perspicaciousness and self-awareness. I trust his poetry.

It is election night in Canada in what many may consider the most monumental federal electoral happening of their lives, I know I certainly do. Nothing, besides a Xanax dressed as Big Bird from Sesame Street or a steam bath of chloroform could knock me out.

So I am finally picking up a 2020 chapbook by none other than Lance La Rocque to soothe my nerves. I have been saving this work for a special occasion, for not only is it published by rob mclennan’s above/ground press, La Rocque acknowledges two favourites of mine, Stuart Ross and Alice Burdick, in the back of the chap for “generous editorial advice.”

Lance La Rocque is a beloved and celebrated professor of literature and writing at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, has poems in Ross’s Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian poets under the influence, and other creative and academic work reaching back as long ago as 2002 (the last palindrome year of the Gregorian calendar we will witness until 2112).

From Surreal Estate:

    HISTORY IS THE EXCEPTION

    This present
    is this
    present.
    The other ones
    are sleeping,
    their eyes red with
    dreaming.
    Or not.

    The others: imaginary skeletons
    deprived of bodies,
    writhing under
    the linoleum. The asphalt.
    The earth.
    Or not.

    I awaken to this.

    Most things are
    never born.

    But some things are/
    born dead.
    And ghostlike,
    they make their ways
    among the furniture,
    wandering on the brink
    of resignation and despair.

As a millennial, I am of the stubborn inexplicable opinion that some of you reading this might share that in the year 2025, you could still very much base an entire writerly career on the concept of despair and make a life out of it. I think only a handful of Spanish-language writers and a handful of Canadian poets understand this, although it probably has roots in something like Lautréamont.

Regardless of whether you write poetry, non-fiction, or blogs, the theme of despair is such a Mariana Trench of irony and narrative force, like the deep sea itself, I would consider the majority of it unexplored. That, even by mere mention of it, no less in the final line of a surrealist poem, I take it as a sign of perspicacity and awareness unobtainable by a vast swath of living writing authors around the world today. It’s just one of those things to me.

Lance La Rocque, I believe, contains such perspicaciousness and self-awareness. I trust his poetry.

And I say millennial even though the roots extend into the past well before my time because it is exceedingly rare as time goes on, but has been sparse looking back. Sure, you may find themes of despair in works by someone such as Victor Hugo or Bloy (author of the novel Le Désespéré, one of the few titles mentioned by Borges in his inimitable column Biblioteca personal)—it is perhaps best depicted by Alfred de Musset in his 1835 poem Le Pélican [English follows original]:

    Quel que soit le souci que ta jeunesse endure,
    Laisse-la s’élargir, cette sainte blessure
    Que les séraphins noirs t’ont faite au fond du coeur ;
    Rien ne nous rend si grands qu’une grande douleur
    Mais, pour en être atteint, ne crois pas, ô poète,
    Que ta voix ici-bas doive rester muette.

    Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,
    Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots.
    Lorsque le pélican, lassé d’un long voyage,
    Dans les brouillards du soir retourne à ses roseaux,
    Ses petits affamés courent sur le rivage
    En le voyant au loin s’abattre sur les eaux.
    Déjà, croyant saisir et partager leur proie,
    Ils courent à leur père avec des cris de joie
    En secouant leurs becs sur leurs goitres hideux.
    Lui, gagnant à pas lent une roche élevée,
    De son aile pendante abritant sa couvée,
    Pêcheur mélancolique, il regarde les cieux.
    Le sang coule à longs flots de sa poitrine ouverte ;
    En vain il a des mers fouillé la profondeur ;
    L’océan était vide et la plage déserte ;
    Pour toute nourriture il apporte son cœur.
    Sombre et silencieux, étendu sur la pierre,
    Partageant à ses fils ses entrailles de père,
    Dans son amour sublime il berce sa douleur ;
    Et, regardant couler sa sanglante mamelle,
    Sur son festin de mort il s’affaisse et chancelle,
    Ivre de volupté, de tendresse et d’horreur.
    Mais parfois, au milieu du divin sacrifice,
    Fatigué de mourir dans un trop long supplice,
    Il craint que ses enfants ne le laissent vivant ;
    Alors il se soulève, ouvre son aile au vent,
    Et, se frappant le cœur avec un cri sauvage,
    Il pousse dans la nuit un si funèbre adieu,
    Que les oiseaux des mers désertent le rivage,
    Et que le voyageur attardé sur la plage,
    Sentant passer la mort se recommande à Dieu.

    Poète, c’est ainsi que font les grands poètes.
    Ils laissent s’égayer ceux qui vivent un temps ;
    Mais les festins humains qu’ils servent à leurs fêtes
    Ressemblent la plupart à ceux des pélicans.
    Quand ils parlent ainsi d’espérances trompées,
    De tristesse et d’oubli, d’amour et de malheur,
    Ce n’est pas un concert à dilater le cœur ;
    Leurs déclamations sont comme des épées :
    Elles tracent dans l’air un cercle éblouissant ;
    Mais il y pend toujours quelque goutte de sang.

    Whatever may be the concern your youth endure,
    Let prosper this holy wound
    That black seraphims left in the bottom of your heart—
    Nothing makes us so grand as a grand pain;
    But, to be afflicted by it, don’t believe, dear poet,
    That your voice henceforth must remain silent.

    Most desperate are songs most beautiful,
    And I know of timeless ones forged of pure sobs.
    Such as when the pelican, from long journey spent,
    Returns to his reeds under the immesurable fog of night,
    His famished nestlings run along the shore,
    Seeing him from afar alight upon the waters.
    Yet, thinking to seize and share their prey,
    With shrieks of joy they run to their father
    Shaking their beaks upon their hideous glands.
    And he, ascending a tall rock with measured pace,
    Ushering in his flock with pendulent wing,
    Melancholic fisherman that he is, looks to the skies.
    Blood pours out in long streams from his open chest—
    He foraged the sea deep in vain:
    The ocean was empty, the beach was barren—
    For all sustenance he gave his heart.
    Sombre and silent, laid out on the stone,
    Sharing his paternal innards to his offspring,
    He cradles his pain in a sublime act of love.
    Upon seeing his bleeding breast,
    He falters and submits to the feast of his death,
    With tenderness and horror, drunk on pure will.
    Yet betimes, amidst his divine sacrifice,
    Weary of dying from too long a feast,
    He fears his children won’t leave him alive;
    So he rises, opening his wing to the wind,
    And, beating his heart with a wild shriek,
    Cries out a farewell into the night so deathly
    That the birds of sea abandon the shore
    And the straggling beachcomber in his surprise
    Prepares to meet his maker with a little sign.

    Poet, it is thus that the greats perform their craft.
    They let those who live a while make merry and well;
    But the human feasts they serve at their fêtes
    Mostly resemble those of pelicans.
    When they speak thus of false hopes,
    Of sadness and oblivion, of love and malice,
    It makes not a concert to delight the heart;
    Their harried words stick like swords
    And draw a stunning circle in the air,
    But therein always lingers some drop of blood.

[Editor’s note: translation my own —J.M.]

It is with this that I leave you, time no longer permitting me to linger with La Rocque, with a poem of his that encapsulates this:

    Child

    Dark night. Nothing but dreams. That means I have slept, sifting the
    rusty coils.
    and staring through slits on the upper deck where I’ve lost my dime
    again. Again.

    I’d rather have been encased in the silent black rock, and you scrape
    away all the marks
    on the shell. All that I’ve done and not done.

    The silver lining is the long needle. Repeated punctures. Lungs. Ear
    drums. The soft valves
    in sounds it sounds like love is the punishing machine.

    I am begging you god guide my child through the passages and
    creatures
    of this crowded circus. Until he’s done. I can’t.

    I awaken paralyzed, blind from the hammering
    injustice or indifference builds on a face.

Jay Miller reviews Eileen Myles' Teenage Whales (2025)

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

Let’s talk about Eileen Myles. Teenage Whales was published in March, 2025 by rob mclennan’s above/ground press.

It is a chapbook of poems, the cover printed on off-buff colour paper, with a charcoal drawing of what appears to be a crown with royal jewels in it floating upon a body of water with the moonlight falling upon it. Myles illustrated it themself.

The text of the chap appears to be written in a typeface akin to Lucida Console, one of my favourite fonts. Although it might not be that specific one, the intended effect is perhaps the same overall, appearing to have been produced by a typewriter, perhaps for a telegram, or on a CRT monitor with a Pentium 4 machine bearing a similarly coloured case, hypothetically speaking.

Eileen Myles is a journalist and poet living in two places, New York City and Marfa, Texas. They have published more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and theatre according to Wikipedia. This is the first time I’m reading anything by them.

I read the first lines before reading any of their bio and knew it had to be the chap I reviewed tonight.

The whole chap is the titular poem, Teenage Whales, which I will excerpt up until the first ellipses (which they space out extra between the second and third dot, impossible for me to reproduce here at this moment in time):

    the birds
    push
    the diamonds
    the reddish
    weave
    of my knee
    Honey’s heh heh
    that shakes
    her belly &
    her back
    it catches
    in the back
    of her
    throat
    ma-ma
    goes the child
    we want
    to go
    what the fuck
    are you
    doing here
    with your
    children &
    a black
    duck dips
    his head
    behind
    a wave
    is gone
    I naming shit
    ripe crest
    darkening
    as it goes
    thun-dar
    goes a plane
    then mumble
    grumble
    I cld
    go down
    & say hello
    yesterday
    when I was
    so morose
    they were
    making me
    glad
    now the tip
    like a dick
    like a clit
    speaks tiny
    shadows
    pouring
    in the sun

This middle section specifically tells so much of the story unfolding in these opening lines: “ma-ma / goes the child / we want / to go / what the fuck / are you / doing here / with your / children & / a black / duck dips / his head / behind / a wave / is gone / I naming shit / ripe crest / darkening / as it goes / thun-dar / goes a plane / then mumble / grumble”

So is the voice of the poem the teenage whale, the ma-ma the child speaks to? The whale is cussed out by the black duck but too self-aware to pay him any heed, admitting slash self-referring “I naming shit” before launching into an onomatopoeia of natural phenomenon, the wave crest ripening, darkening, which then melds into a plane overhead thun-darring, then mumbling, grumbling.

It is very telegrammatic. It is very sound-oriented logic. It tells a story, it presents parable-like animal characters, it has dirty words, it has imagery. It has a lot going on for an opening page.

So much is happening it’s hard to quite tell what the point is, but perhaps the point is disorientation:

    will event
    ually
    tell me
    about Patrice
    Lumumba.
    did he
    pass bad
    checks
    probably not
    that poet
    is the
    CIA
    can’t
    I arrange
    anything
    that supports
    empire
    this beach
    touched
    the shore
    of Mozambique
    Anthony
    Bourdain
    went
    there & ate

This is Myles’ second mention of Patrice Lumumba in the poem, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, assassinated in 1961 after being forced out of office.

Stuart A. Reid put a book out with Knopf in October 2023 called The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination covered in The New Yorker the month of its publication. Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker goes on to describe it as a book explaining how Congolese independence was never given a chance.

I was following current events in Congo for about 3 weeks in April 2024, reading the news about it every day. Cobalt, cholera, control.

Just last month, the agreement signed yesterday by the DRC and Rwanda, was just starting out in the form of peace talks. There was no mention of US-led economic involvement a month ago.

So circling back to Lumumba, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence for a long-lasting ceasefire, when ostensibly, the US is waging a diplomatic warpath to seize mineral resources in every country imaginable, including Canada and Ukraine, by any means necessary.

Even Chotiner in his review of Reid’s book on the CIA topic mentions “the geopolitics of the era were by no means straightforward.” He goes on to narrate:

    By August of 1960, the White House, galvanized by Lumumba’s turn to the Soviets, had authorized a secret C.I.A. scheme to “replace the Lumumba Government by constitutional means,” whatever that meant. The same month, at a Cabinet meeting, Eisenhower made comments that some interpreted as a call for assassination. (Lumumba, Reid notes, “offended his sense of decorum.”) C.I.A.-sponsored protests started disrupting Lumumba’s speeches, and then the agency began scheming to kill him.

[...]

    The question that Reid leaves mostly unanswered is what a different policy might have looked like. What if Eisenhower had shown the foresight that he displayed during the Suez crisis? Lumumba’s death occurred three days before the Kennedy Administration took power, but the hope of a substantial shift by a Democratic Administration proved futile. Within three years, the United States had taken over from the French in Vietnam, and went on to fight its own decade-long war there. As has often been said, the habitual error of the United States during this period was to view nationalist struggles for independence through the lens of anti-Communism, and to turn people who might have been allies (Ho Chi Minh is typically cited) into enemies.

So this critical parsing of history sort of becomes a passing context clue for the meat and potatoes of this line in Myles:

    CIA
    can’t
    I arrange
    anything
    that supports
    empire

The follow-up immediately down below of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, then, paints a scene the dizzying depth of confusion we find ourselves in within the greater context of the last half century of Western imperialism, American exceptionalism, and red scare.

Of course Anthony Bourdain fucking ate in Mozambique. I can hear his voice intoning the country’s name as I write, the imperialism of it rank in my ear, though imagined. This is Eileen Myles in full effect.

The between-the-lines commentary borders on risible, if you’re a fan of dark humour, and is such a deep cut as to show even the shadow in the wound.

The wordplay of “can’t I arrange” riffing off the letters in C.I.A. immediately beforehand is the neat little bow tying this package of verse together. It’s not Eileen Myles who is patently absurd, it’s the state of affairs that they versify, that we find ourselves in.

Taken as a whole, Teenage Whale reads like a telegram presaging the rapture (or rupture) of late-stage capitalism.

Then the title of the poem comes into focus shortly after:

    In a jail
    in Scotland
    I learned
    the young
    whales
    have fashions
    the teenagers
    all like
    to swim
    around
    with a
    dead fish
    on top
    of their
    head
    what a lark

It recalls a recent headline that orcas were spotted off the coast of Washington appearing to wear dead salmon as hats. In the orca world, this is their equivalent to a meme.

Eileen Myles is not one to pass up a double entendre as a segue. And in true Rimbaldian fashion, they continue the next page over literalizing the off-hand remark of a lark into an actual bird.

This work is no less discombobulating than the poetry chapbook I reviewed yesterday. Through Eileen Myles’ astringent lean, severe tone and stark zoological metaphors, however, I find solace. An olive branch for understanding this surrealist farce we call the real world.

We are living in truly fucky times, to quote a recent episode of the Ologies podcast.

Eileen Myles seems to have the edge to perfectly bottle it into this poem and they make quite a wry statement in the process, that results in impact more implicit than tacit, even when you have to read between the lines. I can’t wait to read them again. Thanks for reading.

Jay Miller reviews Rose Maloukis' Cloud Game with Plums (2020)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Rose Maloukis' Cloud Game with Plums (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Rose Maloukis is indecipherable, but has rhythm—her poetry must be crackable.

Rose Maloukis’ chapbook opens with a Samuel Beckett quote: Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.

This chapbook is a 2020 pub with above/ground press.

Without jumping to the last page of the chapbook as I usually do, but judging this book based on the perusal of the first several pages, I can say with confidence that these poems delight in the experimentation of form.

The first poem begins with three lowercase O's aligned right and getting one space less right-aligned with each line break before the poem, two tercets, really begins:

    I saw this on the
    sidewalk
    painted white

    I took it as
    a sign of
    song

The next poem begins with three vertical lines, standing above three horizontal ones of half-equal length.

In the background of this review, I am listening to the 2024 remaster of Queen performing live in Montreal and thinking... this is very much a Samuel Beckett je ne sais quoi sort of situation.

“Twitch” and “A Form of Desire” are likely the most significant poems in this collection and I am judging by my lack of instinct on this.

There are also poems that are written out with margin-respective spacing, which is impossible for me to reproduce in this written blog without special research on CSS rules or old-school HTML tags. But pretend it fits the margin of the chapbook page when I reprint it here, as though there are 3-4 spaces in between each word:

    Moved by a small spirit they hover
    parts of completeness incomplete in turning
    the mobile pivots round upon itself
    we see it come & go & turn back again
    make odd patterns against the wall
    is one turn more believable than another
    & see there is a different shadow cast
    when my hand propels the motion

Owing again to the difficulty of printing superfluous spacing in web code, the poem wherein the title of the collection is printed would not appear formatted correctly unless photographed:



It’s not superfluous to me.

Some books I understand the premise of. Some require more attention. Unfortunately, I cannot admit to understanding the premise of this chapbook. But it does, in my headcanon of poetics, fall into the category of machine. This is a different type of mechanism, however, that Rose Maloukis has developed to render this book.

Several pages later she produces this, unexpectedly:



For the unnumbered pages in the chapbook we are provided two hints in the end of the work:

    Page 17, Lines five and six are partially taken from the folk song, “Billy Boy”.

    Page 23, the mandala referenced is Tibetan and is from the Palace of Buddha Bhaisajyaguru. It is called “Healing Buddha with medicinal plants.”

I cannot say I understand everything happening here, but I can, for reference sake, say I am a completionist when it comes to crosswords and sudoku and chess puzzles, but cryptic crosswords don’t speak to me. So suffice it to say, there is something cryptic happening here, but maybe that speaks to you.

All this being said, I cannot determine whether or not Rose Maloukis speaks to me:

    blurbed shadows diffuse car shapes in some damp
    idea of panic that I have seized by touch tight on the steering for
    you or me to pull to the side close by a bird disoriel hung
    in mesh, no nest, crumpled lost depth of field wind wail
    thunder, count, crooked bolt snap, ended edge bland and I
    could see where bird-I stopped and all the rest kept moving

Undeniably, Rose Maloukis writes verse that is statically in motion, like a freeze frame on a VCR fuzz.

I would hate to use the John Ashbery cop-out and say “I like it even though I don’t understand it” but I will say I reserve judgment because I haven’t cracked the code yet. That, itself, is part of the thrill of poetry, sometimes. And Rose Maloukis has it in spades, hence undeniable. Rose Maloukis is indecipherable, but has rhythm—her poetry must be crackable.

Last minute mention: she thanks Sarah Burgoyne in the acknowledgements section.

Spoiler alert to end the review: we have one other Maloukis title on the desk to review, from Turret House Press, by which point... who knows? Maybe we will figure out her method by then. I’m locked in.

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.

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.

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.

Jay Miller reviews Lillian Nećakov's 3¢ Pulp (2022)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Lillian Nećakov's 3¢ Pulp (2022) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Lillian Nećakov is a sharp-witted, empathetic, and really cool human being. Her Mansfield Press poems, Hooligans (2011), introduced me to Mos Def’s Mathematics in a time of my life when I was listening to everything I could get my hands on of conscious rap-inspired songwriters like k-os and Buck 65. It sort of blew my mind.

The majority of her work I am woefully unfamiliar with and today is my attempt to rectify that lack of familiarity by reviewing her 2022 above/ground chapbook 3¢ Pulp.

Funny enough, she might be the only Canadian writer I can think of who bears a diacritic on the C in her surname, so seeing the cent symbol in the title of a chapbook of hers sort of makes me think of that. Is it a little inside joke about being Nećakov, perhaps, or am I reading too much into it? It’s probably actually something relating to philately.

I believe I was around to witness the work-in-progress for her 2021 collection, il virus, published with Anvil Press under Stuart Ross’s imprint A Feed Dog Book. The poems were published on social media during the 2020 lockdown in Toronto and widely shared and discussed if I accurately recollect. I look forward to revisiting those poems in an actual review someday soon.

But for the time being, let’s dive into the chapbook at hand.

The cover design is her own, and the inside of the chap has a ferocious pink flyleaf, front and back.

The first poem is preceded by an epigraph by Diane di Prima, an American beat poet, which reads: My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind..., a line from the third stanza of her poem “An Exercise in Love”.

The first poem opens with a vivid setting of the scene:

    When Birds Were Just Birds
    for those who were...

    1

    Remember that time we were just kids
    and so many of us were still alive
    and we watched Lawrence of Arabia naked
    in our small apartment on Isabella

It’s a poem about nostalgia and a kind of reminiscence in the form of an ode to her friends.

A beautiful line occurs several spaces below:

    and sometimes we’d remember old streets
    we lived on with brothers as subtle as lumberjacks
    and we sat up late listening to records
    on Steve’s old portable, a bottle holding
    down the vinyl so it wouldn’t skip
    we were Trotskyists and sometimes Partisans
    but only for a minute
    mostly we were poets in our tiny kitchen
    and Yonge street
    where voices and faces and the horizon
    all came and went like snow
    was enough

Then the poem concludes the next page over:

    and we were just kids
    and we never thought we’d end up
    we never thought we’d end up
    orphans

You couldn’t ask for a better closing line to an opening poem. Nećakov’s staying force, sense of dramatic build-up, and absolutely nailing the delivery is the same Nećakov I recall from all those years ago seeing her read at The Grad Club, where she read poems such as “Why?” and “Boneshaker” (the name of the bicycle on the cover of the Mansfield book, as well as of her former Toronto reading series).

More than empathetic, I have always found Nećakov to be sentimental. It’s a quality lost on most writers, I think. With the depth of her emotion and her undeterred ability to read the room with every poem and enunciate accordingly, it’s no surprise Boneshaker lasted as long as it did (2010-2020).

Jim Smith (a writer who knows the true meaning of love), said in response to Nećakov’s shuttering the series, “It was the very best, curated by the best, read at by the best, attended by the best! It will never be bested, and on behalf of the readers and the read-to, you are the best! Thank you for the incredible loving effort it was.” Smith and Nećakov go way back, of course (and I’m pretty sure is mentioned in the opening poem of this chap, “two friends named Jim”, in fact).

So that’s what this book is about, I sense. Three-cent, perhaps being a Canadianism for threepenny, speaks to Nećakov et co.’s Brechtian ambitions as young poets in Toronto in the seventies, etc. These are poems about friendship, celebrating what made every person unique, the grassroots atmosphere and intellectual era they shepherded into the 21st century, and so much more.

They are poems but could equally be considered tangible historical record for a period of time stretching two or three decades that has been abundantly documented yet haphazardly archived, that of the late 20th-century Toronto arts and culture, I mean; so many mementos and souvenirs in so many exhibits, documentaries and interviews, to which Nećakov has added a humbly sentimental slice of her own.

From the poem labelled simply “2” the next page over:

    Remember when birds were just birds
    and not a thousand ways to wish
    for the body to stop being broken
    and we cradled our books like dying girls
    because there were never enough words
    or skin to explain what we yet did not know
    and some of us got married
    and some of us got punched
    and we wandered the streets shadow to shadow
    under a softening sky
    while the oak trees creaked and moaned the blues
    all the way down Gloucester
    where we ate pizza and talked about god and
    sometimes Kurt Schwitters
    and we tallied up how much we owed Charlie
    at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library
    for all those damn books we kept buying
    and we wrote our childhood dogs into every ending
    and sometimes our thoughts were as scattered
    as grasshoppers
    and we borrowed jars from Carlo the waiter
    in an attempt to collect every last one of them
    and hurried home to listen to their divinity

Every poem begins with the word “Remember”, sorta how David W. McFadden used to do it, borrowing the technique from Georges Perec, but interestingly putting the verb in the imperative, absent the singular first-person subject pronoun. It’s an intimate invitation to revisit the past with her.

The fifth poem opens with this incredible hook: Remember how it was before we met our heroes / each day a museum, I can’t help but linger on the opening lines, only to speed through the rest of the poem and arrive at the end too soon to prevent heartache:

    and we remembered that one day we would sit Shiva
    one day the tether would break
    one day we’d remember how easily we forgot

This opening poem is 7 in total, in fact, but afterwards, the poems begin to have titles again instead of numbers but never shift in tone:

    Zero Sky
    for Gary Barwin

    Remember telegrams and long-distance operators and that time they asked
    Beckett if he had any new year’s resolutions and he said;
    resolutions colon zero stop period. And how I cut my hair and we drove to
    Hamilton in Shirley’s Reliant K for Beth and Gary’s wedding. [...]

This is Nećakov’s contribution to the Beat tradition, something that has always held a special place in readers’ hearts, I imagine. And she is true to the spirit of the letter, really. Toronto’s poetry scene really was a beat-like movement, in its own way, although the movement maybe transformed into an era as background characters gave space to the lead actors and the world stage lurched forward through time.

It is bittersweet to read Nećakov’s poems here, and realize simultaneously how fortunate we are to get this inspired series of anecdotes, with all the names and places sprinkled throughout like we know them as well as her, and she lets us, and how we will never have another generation of poets, so brilliant, so self-reliant, so unfettered, so raw, and so talented, ever again. For a book so brief and light to the touch, it nearly brings a tear to my eye just to hold it and read quietly in my apartment’s warm and cozy solitude of afternoon weekend silence

Villanelles
after Mark Laba

Remember Mark Laba standing in the crow-black, in the crow-black eyes of Goya, always, standing, in the front rooms of John and Peggy’s, above the tailor shop while the Queen car lured 5 am doorways into sleep, standing in the Harpo Marx grins of slaughterhouses, in the 24 hour Freshmart on Church street, standing, carving villanelles into Thursday’s corned beef while the rest of us dreamed punk jesus swinging from the power lines. Remember too, those beautiful boys in stilettos with painted mouths, standing, waiting on the crow-black hearts of monsters, standing, in the jerk-off alleys behind the butcher’s, standing on unsteady legs, like spooked colts. Remember walking north, then south, and always ending up just west of the darkness but east of the light. Remember how every book was a holy cross, a bus out of here an un-hexing, a long nights’ journey into the sun’s holler. Remember decades later, standing together in two different cities, standing, on the shores of permanent wartime, surrendering to all those poets humming in their crow-black coffins.

I read this poem and feel momentarily speechless. I don’t expect most people to relate. Even though, as a reviewer, I should probably at some point slip in a sales pitch for the author at hand, if you haven’t already read any Mark Laba, him and Nećakov are really the take-home points of this review here.

When you’re done reading, go find their works; you won’t regret it, and better yet, you’ll know why I can’t help but shut up and share this poem. It is so Mark Laba. What a prize. All these poems are so good, but this one especially speaks exactly to everything I was saying above. I guess we can just leave it at that.

And John is none other than jwcurry, who also captured the scan of the chap’s cover used in this review.

It’s like Stuart Ross said in his Book of Grief and Hamburgers; I’m paraphrasing: sometimes you catch yourself grieving in the past, present and future tense, and you don’t even know what for.

The number of poets Stuart has introduced me to, on paper and in person over the years, Lillian included, is simply too many to count. Coming from a completely separate generation myself, I know the poets they remember are beyond too many, and I think that’s why, when you stumble across a quiet little black-and-white chapbook such as 3¢ Pulp, hiding its hot pinkness right behind its grayscale cover, you begin to understand the ethos of the group.

It’s not a clique. You’re allowed in. It’s a generation we’re in the process of losing one-by-one, and only a poet like Nećakov could pin down exactly what that feels like and how to lay it down in poems for everyone to reminisce.

The next time I'm travelling and someone asks me what Canadian literature is, this is what I’m gonna tell them it’s all about. Lillian Nećakov is walking-living-breathing Canadian literature. Or, in a word, to quote Jim Smith: Lillian Nećakov is the best.

Jay Miller reviews Jessi MacEachern's Television Poems (2021)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Jessi MacEachern's Television Poems (2021) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

This [past] weekend in Montreal, Jessi MacEachern, author of the 2021 above/ground chapbook Television Poems, will be launching her latest work Cut Side Down. It’s a party and you're all invited.

Her publisher, Invisible Publishing, describes Cut Side Down as “a false autobiographical engagement with desire and memory,” and could, by an elongated stretch of the imagination, be seen as a technical extension of the approach used for Television Poems, so now seemed as good a time as ever to proverbially crack the thin stapled spine of this deliciously purple book of poems.

On her Instagram, MacEachern has an excerpt of a review by Manahil Bandukwala in Quill & Quire for her début poetry collection A Number of Stunning Attacks, also 2021, and also with Invisible Publishing, which reads:

MacEachern taps into what poetry does best, which is to bypass logical explanations and dive into an emotional core that here sings of strength above all. Whether the poems aim to draw attention to the interrupted nature of a gendered existence, or uncover a beauty to be embraced in deconstruction, the collection brings a new dimension with each read.

These poems, each of which captures a TV episode wherein poetry is featured in a manner the poet herself describes as “ekphrastic,” speak to me. Granted the suspension of disbelief (Coleridge!) as to why this review is not appearing sharply at 7 am for my newsletter subscribers, quite honestly, I was enjoying a triple feature of Mrs. Doubtfire, My Spy, and No Time to Die with my partner till the wee hours of the morning last night, and am now throwing aspirin and coffee back listening to FKJ do some funky stuff on the keys in “Live From The Greenhouse” to take my time and give Television Poems the attention it deserves.

Suffice it to say, media rules everything around me. Curiously, MacEachern writes: “After all, television is also an art form. It has no national month (as far as I know); of course, this may be because it doesn’t require the publicity.”

When I think of TV, I can’t help but think of Twitch City, a two-season CBC show from 1998-2000 starring Don McKellar and Molly Parker, and, at the time of writing, is available to watch in its entirety on YouTube. Don McKellar’s character, Curtis, is (more specifically than a TV addict) a Jerry Springer addict, although the show uses the stand-in of Rex Reilly for Springer in the series’ fictional canon. He is a fanatic and his unwavering love and admiration for Reilly exemplifies the surrealism of Toronto existence in entirely unexpected ways.

If Montreal is Canada’s ekphrastic city par excellence, Toronto is very much Canada’s surreal city ipso videlicet demonstrandum.

Bref, Jessi MacEachern may very well be to ekphrasis what Don McKellar is to surrealism. Hold my pineapple cookies.

The first poem in Television Poems frames an episode of Taxi. I'm a big fan of Judd Hirsch personally (a big fan of Numb3rs actually), but I never watched Taxi—lots of big names and, more importantly, lots of acclaim. The Wikipedia for it says “widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time” and I’ll have to take the internet’s word for it for the time being because I am an uncultured swine who has literally always never seen that thing you’re talking about. Pretend there’s a salient New Yorker comic between these two paragraphs to illustrate my point about competing listmakers of movies and physical TBRs.

The remarkable thing about MacEachern's poems, however, is that each page has a TV-like window filled with words on every page in the chap:

Photo of first poem in Television Poems, to demonstrate the "TV-like window" that appears in each one in the book.

 

A lot of full episodes of Taxi are available on YouTube but I am only seeing a clip of Danny DeVito for the episode cited for this poem.

On that inspiring note, this poem is full of bangers:

    flowers sun themselves
    looking costs little more / than opportunity
    Into the garage rushes the not-yet-famous actor. Next rushes studio laughter. It sets off a chain reaction. Andy should have known this.

Magnificent. No notes. Jessi MacEachern knows ball.

But I’m not gonna shy away from writing about poems if they’re based on shows I don’t know, that wouldn’t be right.

The next poem is “She Was a Maid of Cleopatra” based on Inside No. 9’s “Zanzibar” episode. I have quite honestly never heard of this show, either, and it’s been on for the last 10 years.

The whole episode is in iambic pentameter and is directed by David Kerr, who’s also done a dozen and a half or so episodes of Mitchell and Webb.

The poem: all iambs. And I’ve gotta hand it to her, they are as sumptuous as calembours:

    You’re stressed. I’m not.
    Daddy, get the knife.
    I am sleeping now.

I have to go back and re-read it two, three times to bask in it, recite it with an RP accent in my head where the emphasis hits correctly. Stunning. I’ll try not to speak like an Islander now.

The following poem is about the pilot episode of Little Fires Everywhere. This series (I strongly dislike the nomenclature “mini-series,” quite frankly, but it’s eight episodes long) is based on the novel of the same name by Celeste Ng and stars Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon. In the first episode of the series, so much happens I feel unqualified to paraphrase. But MacEachern’s poem here is titled “The Words are Purposes” which has a special allure to it, being a poem:

    The artist’s daughter twirls
    in the lens of the camera
    held by her mother’s leaning out

    The window is white clapboard
    the boy is a white child who asks
    about the line of poetry in the air

    I came to explore the wreck

    One wall turns blue
    the white mother makes an attempt
    places her hand in the child’s hair

    Repulsion is hair burnt black compulsion
    is the exact measurement of 125 ml
    of white wine

    The television star pulls in sympathy
    he is the favoured parent

    The television star maintains his standing
    in white briefs the artist’s daughter
    is stopped by the size of it

    The house it is a magnificent testament
    to generational wealth

    The artist’s daughter accepts the whipped
    potatoes from the older brother
    she is stopped by the size

    The bird in the throat

Then, in the box in the upper right-hand corner of the page:

    The answer comes
    with blaring sirens.
    What is shown has not
    happened yet. In the
    next moment is the
    present disbelief. Guilt
    sparks a second riot.
    The spectacle is the
    closeness.

Little Fires Everywhere has all the complexity of an ancient myth but is set in 90s Ohio.

The thing MacEachern gets about ekphrasis and TV is that these poems work like Easter eggs: if you’ve seen it, know it, and then read the corresponding poem, it can be a portal of discovery. A sweet treat. Some poems I can only appreciate at the level of craft because I employed the same technique for 90s PC games for my 2023 chapbook Virtual Lands: MS-DOS Series, with a slightly different execution, but the intents overlap enough for me to get where she’s coming from as a writer.

Do they not have a similar effect, though, if you haven’t seen the series? I can’t make good on my word in the midst of writing this review (in media media res) by copping out saying, “I’ll totally watch it now!” but does it not make you want to see it now that you get this extra layer? Read the novel, watch the series, read the poem: you are now a completely different person. It’s not necessary, we owe the poem nothing, but the possibility lingers. What else is on? Don't flip the channel.

The remainder of the chap (spoiler alert) delves into the following series for a trove of poetic souffle: Sex and the City, The Leftovers, Lovecraft Country, Call My Agent, ER, Mad Men, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gilmore Girls, The Get Down, Transparent, Buffy, Parks and Rec, Roseanne, Dawson’s Creek, Breaking Bad, Dickinson, Simpsons, Deep Space Nine, Better Things, Bob’s Burgers, Ramy, Fargo, Avatar, and finally West Wing.

So, take a show I’m most familiar with and dissect it, shall we? I choose The Simpsons, naturally (she actually has 2 Simpsons poems in this chap). I grew up with them, in an era where most kids’ parents wouldn’t let them watch grown-up shows like that. I never saw the issue. I remember once getting judged by my parents for sneaking into the basement to watch an episode of Barney & Friends in 1999 (never again); and I get it. Compared to peak Simpsons, Barney was not good brain food. It's like Robin Williams said in Doubtfire: don't play down to kids, just play to them. It’s like the 90s TV equivalent of that scene in Ratatouille where Remy teaches Émile about taste. And MacEachern, for all my faults, undeniably has it.

Towards the end of her book, MacEachern writes a Simpsons poem for the episode “Behind the Laughter,” a VH1 parody episode.

How can I not share it? I’ve already printed two of MacEachern’s poems above. I can only resist the urge by writing my thoughts: this is the perfect fan service poem, it incorporates lore while depicting a non-canon episode, while also making room for the dénouement of the episode taking place at hand, and pays homage by way of relying on classic Simpsons tropes like casually dropping crossword-like words mid-dialogue: Gates were closed to the father. / That night, fate wore a cummerbund.

Literally a word I heard Bill Hader use in a clip this morning I saw on Instagram, describing his younger self as looking like Charles Manson. Which then leads MacEachern to what I consider the pinnacle of the poem: Gin, evergreen cash, piles of loose caviar. It perfectly encapsulates the episode and the series all at once. I exhale deeply before concluding my review. I have to.

You may remember me from such poems as...

    Take a Penny, Leave a Penny

    The father is weeping
    while the son receives a shoulder massage,
    a manicure, a foot rub and says yes.
    Learn the secrets
    of rising and falling.
    Swing then rock, rock then swing,
    dissolves into musical argument.
    The dream was over.
    The town in Somewhere, USA
    was put on hiatus. As a young female artist,
    begins the young woman. She is
    cut off by the television,
    always the parental figure. Was the dream
    really over? It was.
    Gates were closed to the father.
    That night, fate wore a cummerbund.
    Backs were turned. But is it
    really over? It is. The red braids lift.
    Will things stay the same? Gin,
    evergreen cash, piles of loose caviar.
    The clown is not the father
    but he is embittered and old.
    Behind the streamers, the family rises
    and falls. The clouds,
    the opening shot,
    Somewhere, USA.

Then, in the bottom right-hand corner of the page:

    We are overly familiar
    with the wife from the
    very beginning. The
    daughter has a face
    streaked with saliva,
    not her own. It’s meta,
    the way real life enters
    the television script.
    Firehouses of respect.

In my ultimate fantasy crossover, my friend Shawn Berman and Jessi MacEachern would do a crazy collab. It would go so hard.

Because, at the end of the day, this chapbook represents a machine that Jessi MacEachern has invented, in the sense that it has a mechanism: pick a show, find poetry literally mentioned in it, and turn that episode into a poem, and don’t forget to add the poem-within-a-poem. Ostensibly infinite in potential.

I was watching Deep Cover the other day and Jeff Goldblum literally quotes Delmore Schwartz, one of my favourite poets of all time, mid-conversation with Laurence Fishburne. I totally freaked out. So it occurred to me: you could always break the rules and reinvent it, include movies for example, and expand the possibilities, truly without end.

I look forward to reading Cut Side Down. Jessi MacEachern is a gem. In an alternate timeline where Elon Musk didn’t acquire Twitter, this review would have been live tweeted, minute by everloving minute. But if they ever invent time travel, I would gladly go back to 2021 to do so. It was a gorgeous read. Thanks for tuning in.