Kevin Spenst reviews Hope Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land (2024) via subterrain #102

our pal Kevin Spenst was good enough to provide a first review for Hope Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land (2024), as part of his regular column of chapbook reviews, in a round-up assemblage in subterrain #102! Thanks so much! As Spenst writes:

    Two different dimensions of aging are explored in Monty Reid's Vertebrata (Turret House) and Hope Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land (above/ground press). In the former, the poet writes in the poem "CV5": "The long string of bones I hang from / was never right according to doctors / who looked at the scans." The series of poems takes us from the top of the vertebrae down, reflecting on the physiological construction of the body, the Latinate and Germanic naming of parts, and Reid's own history with spinal issues. The tone and divergent subject matter are stunning fluid and touching. Hinging less on physiology, Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land are poems of family lore and slipstream lullabies dedicated to the author's grandchildren and family written from his new home in "that town, hermetically / Known as Muffin Land" (known to the rest of us as Victoria, BC). What I love in this unique blend of myths and fables is how I'd often finish a poem with a sense that the last line rhymed, only to  look back and see it didn't. (What is the secret to Hope's ghost rhymes?) My favourite poem in the collection, "The Rolling Calf", reads as a lullaby that simultaneously presents danger and the promise of safety to the poet's granddaughter Nadja. 
    In a photo taken in Victoria in 1984, Hope Anderson is in a group of poets that include Amiri Baraka, George Bowering and bpNichol. The event was organised by Hope Anderson and in a recent interview with Wayde Compton for the Capilano Review, Anderson explains the context of Sunfest and how "Poetry always comes back to us."

 

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.

  

new from above/ground press: Ghosted Under the Christmas Tree, by Kevin Spenst, with Onjana Yawnghwe, Joshua Pitre, Gary Barwin and Derek DeLand

Ghosted Under the Christmas Tree
Kevin Spenst, with Onjana Yawnghwe, Joshua Pitre, Gary Barwin and Derek DeLand
$6

This Machine Kills Fascists 
— co-written with Onjana Yawnghwe 
 
From sunlight in fall to birdsong in spring, 
the spokes of the seasons turn us to tarry. 
The cars are burning electrical corners 
as fumbling fingers button and unbutton.

The spokes of the seasons turn us to tarry
a tad longer in flustersongs we lob at the road.
As fumbling fingers button and unbutton
the edges of a white shirt, and also grief.
 
A tad longer in flustersongs we lob at the road
built as it was on the backs of lost species
waving the edges of a white shirt. And also grief
still and growing, in the process of repair –

gilt as we are on the backs of lost species,
we dig creeks back to cradle some survival.
Still, growing, and in the process of repair,
this machine makes animals of our sins.

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

Kevin Spenst has made many chapbooks and four full-length books of poetry. He’s an organizer for the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and teaches poetry at SFU’s The Writer’s Studio in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory.

Onjana Yawnghwe writes, draws and makes little books. 

Joshua Pitre teaches ESL classes in Montreal, and is the co-author of Recto, Verso, Chez the Devil’s Printers (with Kevin Spenst, Collusion Books, 2022). 

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 35 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984. Recent work includes Bird Fiction, an interactive poetry multimedia work (with Sarah Imrisek) and Muttertongue, a poetry book and recording with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts. He lives in Hamilton and at garybarwin.com

Derek DeLand is an award-winning design architect, published writer, sportsman, artist and musician. His creative work is interdisciplinary and dynamic, and often locates the hidden energies connecting things.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

The Factory Reading Series: Kevin Spenst’s grand tour! w Conyer Clayton + rob mclennan,

The Factory Reading Series Presents:

readings and chapbook launches by:

Kevin Spenst (Vancouver)
Conyer Clayton (Ottawa)
+
rob mclennan (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Doors 7pm / Reading 730pm
Ten Toes Coffee House and Laundry
837 Somerset Street West (at Rochester Street,

Kevin Spenst (he/him) [pictured] is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, and Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse (all with Anvil Press), and over a dozen chapbooks including Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press), Upend (Frog Hollow Press) and an upcoming holm with the Alfred Gustav Press. His most recent writing has appeared in the anthologies Event 50: Collected Notes on Writing and Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing. His book launch during the pandemic was featured in a book about creative practices: The Creative Instigator’s Handbook. He teaches creative writing at Vancouver Community College and Simon Fraser University and he lives in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory.

Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer, editor, and musician whose multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, the climate crisis, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Finalist for the Pat Lowther Award and Raymond Souster Award), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the 2021 Ottawa Book Award), and many solo and collaborative chapbooks. They are the Nonfiction Editor for untethered magazine, a Poetry Editor for Augur, and a member of VII; an Ottawa-based poetry collective.

The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), the chapbook The Alta Vista Improvements (above/ground press, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Robinson, Earl, Armantrout, McNair + beaulieu,

Elizabeth Robinson responds (as do many others) to a request to reflect on "The Work of Poetry" for the 25th issue of Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics; Amanda Earl has a new visual poem up at Truck: a small article on Rae Armantrout's poetry appears in The Portland Mercury; there is now a video online of Christine McNair's reading in Vancouver as part of the Real Vancouver Writers' Series Third Anniversary Celebration, May 24, 2013; and Vancouver poet Kevin Spenst's performance of derek beaulieu visual poetry suite "quartet for 6 voices" is now up at soundcloud, as is Spenst's nephew's sound response "quartet for kevin."

The Factory Reading Series (a report): Madhavan-Reese, Spenst & Pirie,

Pearl Pirie [photo of Pirie with handmade trebuchet lifted from her blog] was good enough to post a report today on the reading she did last night with Sneha Madhavan-Reese and Kevin Spenst as part of The Factory Reading Series, organized, in part, for the sake of launching Pirie's most recent above/ground press publication. Given that Spenst is touring the country, Broken Pencil magazine is posting his reports twice a week on their site, and his report of his Ottawa adventures appeared earlier this morning. Good travels, sir!

The Factory Reading Series: Pirie, Spenst + Madhavan-Reese

The Factory Reading presents:
a night of readings and chapbook launches

with readings by:

Pearl Pirie (Ottawa)
Kevin Spenst (Vancouver)
+ Sneha Madhavan-Reese (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Wednesday, April 23, 2014;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
Raw Sugar Cafe
692 Somerset Street West (1 block west of Bronson)

author bios:

Pearl Pirie has a few chapbooks, a micro press, several blogs, a gig as literary radio host and irregular gigs to teach poetry. She has two poetry collections, and a third forthcoming with BookThug in 2015. None of these poems are in them so you have to buy them both.

She will be launching the chapbook vertigoheel for the dilly (2013), her fourth above/ground press publication and second chapbook, after oath in the boathouse (2008).

In addition to the UK, the United States, Austria and India, Kevin Spenst’s [pictured, above] poetry has appeared in over a dozen Canadian literary publications such as Freefall, Prairie Fire, CV2, Dandelion, filling Station, qwerty, and Poetry is Dead. His work has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and his manuscript Ignite has come in as a finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. In 2011, he won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry. In 2014 he is going to do a 100-venue reading tour across Canada with his chapbooks Pray Goodbye (the Alfred Gustav Press, 2013), Retractable (the serif of nottingham, 2013), Happy Hollow and the Surrey Suite (self-published, 2012), What the Frag Meant (100 tetes press, 2014) and Surrey Sonnets (JackPine press, 2014). Follow the chapbook tour at kevinspenst.com

Born in Detroit, Sneha Madhavan-Reese calls Ottawa home. Her poetry has appeared in Arc, Descant, and The Antigonish Review. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming in 2016 from Hagios Press.

some author activity: Cochrane, Armantrout, mclennan, Higdon, Wilkinson, Butler, Betts, Cooley + Barbour,

[photo of Mark Cochrane reading Cat. on the poetry bus at Vancouver's WORD festival on September 29, 2013; photo credit: Kevin Spenst] Rae Armantrout and rob mclennan both have new work in the second issue of N/A; Hailey Higdon has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; there's a new interview with Joshua Marie Wilkinson over at Under A Warm Green Linden, Christopher Nelson's poetry blog; Jenna Butler guest-edits a Canadian poetry section in the October 2013 issue of Connotation Press online, including new writing by rob mclennan, Gregory Betts, Dennis Cooley, Douglas Barbour and plenty of others.