some author activity: Davis, Flemmer, Armantrout, Bartczak + Tardi,

Jordan Davis has ten poems posted at The Fortnightly Review; Kyle Flemmer is interviewed via The Miramichi Reader; Rae Armantrout writes on Fanny Howe for The Fortnightly Review, and has four new poems up at Granta, and a further poem via the website for the Poetry Foundation; and Kacper Bartczak has a new poem up at Poetry Northwest, as translated into English by Mark Tardi.

Jennifer Wenn reviews Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Miramichi Reader

London, Ontario poet and reviewer Jennifer Wenn was good enough to provide a review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) over at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of this particular title, after Karl Jirgens reviewed such over at The Typescript. You can read Wenn's original post here. As they write:

From Penn Kemp, one of our true elder trailblazers, is a new chapbook, Lives of Dead Poets (Above/Ground Press) A lament for those who have left/the present, the planet and possibility/behind, left us bewildered by/no more/words.

This is a poignant, affectionate collection leveraging a variety of forms and voices, for the most part a tribute to a remarkable era in Canadian literature centring on the early 70’s, one I very much wish I had known personally. At the time Kemp found herself in the middle of Toronto’s flourishing poetry scene, publishing her first book Bearing Down in 1972, editing the first anthology of women’s writing in Canada next, and then hosting a new reading series at A Space Gallery. Due to the Canada Council’s generosity at the time, it was possible to bring in poets from across Canada and even the United States. All this placed Kemp in a remarkable circle, as reflected by those she elegizes. She also reminisces in an separately published essay:  https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/03/penn-kemp-one-by-one-they-depart-great.html

After two introductory pieces (“Lives of Dead Poets”; and the punningly entitled “Die Verse”) the first memory is of Gwendolyn MacEwen (“Not Waving But Drowning”). This is a simply brilliant piece, for me the strongest in the collection, very heartfelt and sad.  It tells of a time when MacEwen (who was to pass on in 1987 at age 46 from complications of alcoholism) showed up for a reading a day late (The night after what would have been/triumph if you had appeared/you appear, bleary, beckoning to me/against the wall) and proceeds to reflect on her tragic decline.

Two other poets who died young are included: bp nichol (For bp nichol: A loss as alive now as/then) and Teva Harrison (Not One of These Poems Is About You, said Teva), perhaps best known for documenting her journey with metastatic breast cancer.

One of the minority of American poets found in these pages (the others are Canadian), Robert Creeley, is gifted two poems (“Gone Fishing“; and “Wednesday’s Man”), quite appropriate given that for Kemp of the old poets, the one/I most/miss is Creeley.

“Reading: Bob in the Light of” provides a sketch constructed of anecdotes for Bob Hogg, and some wisdom on a poet’s body of work: …The night//before you died, you/replied— /it goes on even when we no longer do!” Along the same lines is “The Girl from Sao Paolo”, a humorous narrative of a visit by P.K. Page to Kemp’s Toronto Island home: At the stove’s first growl, she leapt up and alighted/for the evening on the couch arm.

Special mention must be made of James Reaney and Colleen Thibaudeau, husband and wife icons of Souwesto (a term for Southwestern Ontario popularized by Reaney). A pair of beautiful tributes are happily included here, in the form of updated versions of two pieces that originally appeared in Kemp’s collection Local Heroes: the lightly revised “Drawing in Miniatures” for Reaney; and the significantly reworked “Social Justice Recounted”, ReStoried (formerly titled Recounted, ReStored, ReStoried) for Thibaudeau.

Two American poets (that, as Kemp has written in the aforementioned essay, she did not meet but whose poetry she admired) are also represented: Jack Spicer (“For Jack Spicer”) and John Ashbery (“Alphabet for Ashbery”). The latter is a very nice piece whose enjoyment would be enhanced by possessing a good appreciation of the subject; and my enjoyment of the former, I have to admit, suffered on account of my unfamiliarity with Spicer.

Lovely homages feature Phyllis Webb (“The Poet in Charge”: You are the glimmer     between sea/and sky/your poems still arrest us) and Robert Kroetsch (“A great illumination”: Of prescient kindness one/of a kind).

The last two elegies are both unusual. “Joe for Joe, Encore” is an affectionate dual tribute entwining Joe Blades and Joe Rosenblatt (Yet what I recall/most tenderly is your kind selves). In “Homage for Ellen S. Jaffe, Poet”, we meet Jaffe on her death bed, but still engaged: Ellen,     grey,     lying on//pillows,     blows us kisses   from her bed.

Closing the circle, we have the concluding piece “One by One They Depart, the Great Ones”, a touching reflection on times gone by and poets and friends passed on.  For one who wasn’t there, this chapbook is a precious glimpse into an extraordinary time and a special group of writers. Happily for all of us, we have their works, and, as Kemp says, “As the poets fall into their tradition/our beloved dead are more intimate/now than ever they could be in flesh.”

Catherine Marcotte reviews Micah Ballard's Busy Secret (2024)

Kingston, Ontario-based reader, editor and writer Catherine Marcotte was good enough to provide the first review for Micah Ballard's Busy Secret (2024) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Marcotte writes

Micah Ballard’s latest chapbook Busy Secret is a quippy, somewhat resigned meditation on the liminal spaces between life and death, and wealth and work. For Ballard’s narrators, these themes are central, presenting the questions that both create and disrupt the everyday textures of our lives. Through its repeated allusions to failed occupations, a distrust of wealth, and a meandering sense of self, the collection considers the relationship between our inner and outer lives and ultimately demonstrates the fragility of the relationship between the two.

In “Moscow on the Hudson,” the speaker treats poems like “diamonds cut for consignment,” gesturing to the modern devaluation of poetics. “Anything misleading count me in,” the speaker adds, as if to confirm that the life of the poet is not often what it appears to be. Indeed, the inner life of the dedicated poet does not always (or even often) translate to the successful outer life of an established one. “Whatever I had to become I became,” the speaker muses, gesturing to the necessity of adaptability in the arts. For Ballard’s narrator, and perhaps Ballard himself, a poet must be ready for a chameleon career, must be willing, as the speaker has been, to not only be a poet, but to be an aspiring poet, an artist cloaked under labels such as student, academic, or even, as in “Moscow on the Hudson,” unlicensed fortune teller.

In “Name Value,” the speaker similarly contemplates life in academia, commenting on the policing of poetry and subtly integrating a metanarrative into the text — a secondary narrative that breaks the so-called fourth wall between the reader and the poem. “Name Value” both acknowledges the supposedly dwindling state of the poetic genre and the fact that the text itself is a poem, beckoning readers to consider the seemingly endless possibilities of the poetic form. Here, Ballard is honest and reflective, imbuing his work with a compelling vulnerability and nuance. Although melancholic about the state and status of modern poetics, Ballard’s narrator is, in a way, also deeply hopeful. Despite his fears for the genre, he continues to write, affirming the writing form’s value in the face of its hardships. In a way, Busy Secret rejects binary organizations, presenting failure and success, as well as delight and disgust, not as opposing states but as conjoined ones. While a “rotting mansion” and a well-populated “Museum of Death” are central scenes, delightful images of mouth-watering “gumbo,” “jambalaya” and “crawfish etouffee” regularly compete for the reader’s (and the speaker’s) attention. The text’s dealings in both extremes are as compelling as they are off-putting, creating a unique blend of short, punchy narratives that spur reflection (and re-reading). A short, impactful read, Micah Ballard’s Busy Secret is a strange, almost enigmatic chapbook that considers the boundaries between our lives and our selves. It is just as sure to resonate as it is to disconcert.

Pearl Pirie reviews Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025)

Quebec poet, editor, writer, reviewer, editor, publisher etcetera (and above/ground press author) Pearl Pirie was good enough to provide the first review for Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Pirie writes:

I Am So Calm by Alice Burdick (above/ground press, 2025) is the latest from a poet who has been putting  out surreal books since at least 2002. Her most recent full collection is Ox Lost, Snow Deep (A Feed Dog book/Anvil Press, 2024).  

From what I’ve read this chapbook seems consistent in style, although I won’t offer a title by title comparison. I Am So Calm sets mid-field in surreal. The poems feel like disorienting lists of non-sequiturs or axiomatic koans. That said, “non-sequitur” presumes one thing should follow from the previous when that sort of linkages is a construct and her objects and awarenesses are discrete and independent, explicitly “a tapas of small moments.” (p. 17). Line progressions outright refuse cis-het military industrial late-capitalist hierarchical culture of How Sense is Conveyed.  

Grounding phrases break in and flit away. Marginalia is welcomed into the body. What does it matter for, as she concludes with admission of ephemerality of both grief and grace, “Our bodies take everything in, then dispose/ of the everything, gradually.”  

Because the sentences and semantics in each line are simple, short and small it seems to instruct the reader to move quickly, but the collective run of sentences confound a quick reading. How does anything fit?  One needs to squint or look at middle distance to not see so literally a pattern or progression. We get permission to not have authorial authority over all we see, whether we read of speak. See the foci  captures chosen in the last fifth of “The Bed Book”, (p. 14-15)  

Floorboards creak, heels of a bouncing child  
smash down from above. That  
was a successful quesadilla.  
I like the idea of beginning  
in the middle. Then please,  
don’t worry about the fog.  
Aureola? Or corona?  
What is the light  
that carries us all?  
What is the light that embalms?  

It is the barely differentiated everything, the chaotic flourishing that carries us, illuminates us, not the still profundity of interstitial reflection. Rather than staid and proper it’s vivid and irreverent urging to live, live, live, “bounce meaty bellies off each other, dance.” (p. 20)  

In “A Real Success”, Burdick writes, “To not speak is to succeed” and continues,  

"Let concerts happen with more air  
about them. The audience  
a required entity."  

It echoes the absurdist play In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (Grove  Weldenfeld, 1967) when the Player said, “the single assumption that makes our existence viable—  that somebody is watching…every gesture and pose vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds.” What matters is the sharing, the joining of focus, not the  containing, elevating and perfecting on plinths a historically inaccurate construction of calm order.  If the poetry were to have a theme song it might be “Chicks Dig It”, (“pain hurts, but only for a  minute. All you’re left is with the memories you made. Life is short. Best live it.” I hope I’m nailing that and not paraphrasing).  

It may be a different form but as with artistic expression, it wrestles with how to live well. Towards the last 10% of “If you do this, honour will result” we have an index of values of sorts:

"...We’re all  
just doing the best we can. Graft a tree onto another tree,  
a wedge to reanimate flowers. Shelter your loved ones’ bodies  
and listen when they tell you who they are, what makes them  
feel safe, what they need, what they notice. Instruct destruction  
to fold its retractable blade. Hold me, my own arms.  
Upend honour and drain the rigid globules."  

Destruction as a switchblade, grafting to another as resurrection to blooms, flush the parts that clot your flow. Yet said fresh and to be confoundingly slow so it can’t be quickly glossed over. There is something toward a profound lesson and closure at the end of poems and something of a flotsam, jetsam swirl around a theme that prevents it from being random and more towards bastard ghazal. It is a hyperactive sort of mind but one that insists on kindness and accepting in what is and asks what could be if we think without the usual blinders, partitions, rules and boundaries?

Pearl Pirie reviews Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (2025)

Quebec poet, editor, writer, reviewer, editor, publisher etcetera (and above/ground press author) Pearl Pirie was good enough to provide the first review for Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (2025) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Pirie writes:

Andy Weaver teaches poetry and creative writing at York University and has published three books of poetry, most recently this (Chaudiere, 2015). I feel I’ve read Andy Weaver before, or maybe I only saw him perform. Or I’ve read so many reviews with excerpts by rob mclennan that I am familiar his work that way. From what I’ve seen his form of poetry makes use of the whole page, not as in scattered individual words but as metrical spacing of phrases.

I recently reread ligament/ ligature by Andy Weaver (Model Press, 2022). ligament/ligature, his previous and longer chapbook, used space and line breaks enact the physical space and the leaves in the mental tree turning, and controls pacing.

That chapbook is a poetry not much more of quotidian observations but meditating on our individual responsibility to create love and tenderness and connection. They don’t feel didactic so much as being let into a secret room of the head without social filters, some showmanship caper. The reader is given a chair as an equal, rather than a back seat in the lecture hall.

The Robert Duncan at Disney World has something of the same convention of adding space to the poem. The poems take up the amount of page it needs rather than be tidily obedient to the left margin. They are not built up as a prose argument of a stone house but more of a metal framed glass structure. The air in the poems signal the reader to slow down but the ideas being digested are heavier but on a comparable tack.

The poems are starting with a thesis of what-if to explore if Robert Duncan were dropped into the commercial epicentre of branding, what would he think and by extension, what might we if we paused long enough.

The precise word choices makes it akin to a haiku series. That aesthetic may be an influence given his references to other Japanese practices throughout the work. In section 4 of 10 (p.4) the imagist of “childhood snow/forts to escape/into blazing sunlight” with the volta that surprises, not to escape into snow forts, but what is built is escaped by returning to sunlight.

He floats interesting concepts, such as in the same section above, abundance as the blind spot with the continuity effect perhaps bridging gaps between negative content.

In a way, I’d like poetry to be transmitted like a Ted Lasso script hyperlinked to all embedded references so I could chase every tangent, to lazily help me unpack a phrase such as “a fordist/ assemblage of hope” but I guess I know what he means of the shallowness of modernist capitalism doing pre-fab assembly line work for identity, like Ford’s practice aimed at Manifest Destiny of patriotism. We are in a system we can’t control.

His criticism of the distraction/entertainment era, the rides (literal and figurative) that make for a collective screaming, “terror’s new grace note” has not so much cynicism as a call to do better as individuals and as a society, to dig deeper. He does so in lovely language and with a love for language “the ichor oozing from heel blisters/an anchor”. Who knew there was a word for that translucent stuff in blisters except water?

To chime it off anchor is rather sublime. Our pain is what can ground us to meaningfulness, to a sense of significance. If it is not a threat, or trauma, if it floats without repercussions, we can safely turn off our critical faculty. When amusement dominates, that evasion becomes a Trojan Horse, he seems to say earlier but by section 8 makes more explicit.

Overall the chapbook is thoughtful and considered and makes space for us to interrogate what a considered life of our own would look like, rather than let ourselves be railroaded by urgency of marketing and frenetic clickbait of news and the Muchness of Paying Attention to Everyone.

The poetry demonstrates a slowing down, a coming around to make the world we would choose to live in.

some author activity: Burgoyne, Houbolt, Downs + Mangold,

Kevin Heslop interviewed Sarah Burgoyne for The Miramichi Reader; Kyla Houbolt is interviewed via the Of Poetry Podcast; Buck Downs has a new poem up at HillRag; and Sarah Mangold has new poems up at Ghost Proposal, and is interviewed by Shriram Sivaramakrishnan for Poetry Northwest.

Catherine Marcotte reviews Cary Fagan's Fifty-Two Lines About Henry (2024) at The Miramichi Reader

Kingston, Ontario-based reader, editor and writer Catherine Marcotte was good enough to provide the first review for Cary Fagan's Fifty-Two Lines About Henry (2024) over at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

Mourning favourite colours, cooking for dachshunds, and feeding birds gummi-worms: these are the kind of adventures that animate Cary Fagan’s charming new chapbook, Fifty-Two Lines About Henry.

Faithful to its title, this fifty-two-line collection is a fragmented look into the strange and whimsical life of a man named Henry. His is a tale of misplaced energies, unlikely luck, and lasting anxieties about anything from flag-raising and hat-wearing to door-slamming.

And as these small, out of context stories multiply and expand, clarifying our sense of our protagonist, the book ultimately reminds that no one line can aptly convey the absurdity of human life.

Although Henry contemplates dancing to calm an enraged bear, orders enough sardines to fill two bedrooms – I hope they’re canned – and writes an 861-page chapter to a novel, his unlikely battles remain rooted in a world well-recognized where neighbours are suspicious, dinner parties are taxing, and things learned at school are revealed to be alternately fateful (the sousaphone, surprisingly) and superfluous (trigonometry).

Punctuated by unexpected guests like a thorn-ridden lion and existential questions about littering, Fagan’s work engages the surreal and the hyperreal to lay bare the unknowability of life’s many moments. And as these small, out of context stories multiply and expand, clarifying our sense of our protagonist, the book ultimately reminds that no one line can aptly convey the absurdity of human life: “My life, he said into the dark, can’t be reduced to a single line.” A funny, heartfelt ride, Fifty-Two Lines About Henry is a fast-paced, witty, and undeniably charming meditation on the many thoughts and feelings that populate our strange, unknowable days.

some author activity: Davis, Robinson, Eleftherion, Mohammadi, Earl + Boyle,

Jordan Davis has a new poem up at the arts fuse; Kevin Heslop interviews Ben Robinson over at The Miramichi Reader; Melissa Eleftherion has new work up at Barren Magazine; both Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi and Amanda Earl have new work in the ex-puritan; and Frances Boyle has a poem in the new issue of consilience.

some author activity: Armantrout, O'Reilly, Sikkema, McElroy, mclennan + Turner,

Rae Armantrout has a new poem posted in the London Review of Books; Nathanael O'Reilly has work in the debut issue of Bealtaine magazine; Michael Sikkema has a new poem up on the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month, as does Gil McElroy; and rob mclennan and Michael Turner (among others) have new poems posted as part of The Mirimachi Reader.

some author activity: Aigen, Burdick, Clayton, Barwin + Cooley,

Razielle Aigen is interviewed over at Train : a poetry journal; Alice Burdick has a new poem up at The Miramichi Reader; Conyer Clayton has a poem reprinted up at Concrete&River, and has new work up at Long Con magazine; Gary Barwin has an essay on the CBC website on living through the pandemic; and there are new poems online by Dennis Cooley!