Billy Mills reviews Jon Cone's Against Perfectionism & Other Poems and John Levy's Vast Spaces

Irish poet Billy Mills was good enough to provide first reviews of Jon Cone's Against Perfectionism & Other Poems (2025) and John Levy's Vast Spaces (2026) as part of an omnibus review (alongside Chris Turnbull's If/Then and Henry Gould's Mirror Lake) via Elliptical Movements. Thanks so much! Mills was even nice enough to review Levy's prior above/ground press title, which we also appreciate very much. You can see the full review here, or this excerpt, below:

Jon Cone is a Canadian poet living in Iowa and, if the work in Against Perfectionism & Other Poems is anything to go by, influenced by the New York School, a thought that came to me as I encountered poem titles like ‘The Stationary Engineer at Rest Ponders the World as an Inscrutable Theology of Material Influence’ and ‘The Exile Alive to the Etching of an Hour’, so I was pleased to encounter ‘A Poem for Frank O’Hara’ almost halfway in. To my surprise, it is the shortest poem in the pamphlet:

A Poem for Frank O’Hara

For I shall drink a warm Coke at noon
and trace lovingly
the cracked egg of the world.

Short as it is, this poem captures the humour and the sense of luminous triviality that suffuses much of the work gathered here. And that humour can be self-deprecating, as in ‘A Poem for Mother and Dather (after Tomaž Šalamun)’:

He’s ugly! His face is ugly! His body is ugly!
Ugly! Ugly! Ugly! Jonathan Cone is an awful poet
because he is an awful person and
when he goes for a sprightly march about
the compound of a summer’s dawn
mongrels will stand on hind legs to salute him
and feral cats will trail at acute angles behind.

This absurdist strain melds perfectly with what I called the luminous triviality at the heart of so much of the work here:

A Caffeinated Dream of Spring

The waitress brought us these beautiful white mugs.
They each had a single blue stripe just below the lip.
I mean the simplicity of that singular blue trail upon
that immaculate occasion of white. Then the waitress
poured lucidly from the coffee pot filling our mugs.
And the sound the coffee made was easy and so gentle.
Like the world was home and unsteady on our behalf.

This is one of the things poetry does; it takes the ordinary things and makes them extraordinary, if only the poet is willing to take a chance on seeming mundane. Cone takes that leap with gusto. The pamphlet’s title poem consists in the main of a recipe for a simple meal, salad and dessert. The poem then ends:

I don’t know if this would win any culinary awards. OK I admit
               I know it would not. But I don’t care. It tastes good to me,
& that is ultimately what matters because the world
might come crashing down any second now,
we don’t have time to be perfectionists in all we attempt or do.

Which strikes me as the perfect way to go about poetry in these insane times. Forget about the prizegivers, avoid the overly polished, make something that tastes good. And in these poems, Cone follows his own advice to perfect imperfection.

John Levy’s Vast Spaces is his second pamphlet from the prolific and always interesting Above/Ground Press. Like Cone, Levy has a fine eye for the everyday, but he is primarily a poet of community, and many of his poems are in the form of notes addressed to named friends and/or fellow poets, while others carry dedications. Here’s an example

Sky

for John Phillips

The turkey buzzard that circled above me twice this morning had
beautiful white on the underside of its black wings and a vividly red
beak and if it had been me up there I know I would have loved gliding
like that, not having to move my wings and not caring about the old
man below me looking up as if in the church without a roof that I’d
never enter.

Here, as so often in Levy’s work, close observation of the world opens out to a kind of social sense of what it is to live in that world, a set of interactions between the thing seen, the observing poet, the dedicatee and the reader that is redolent with a quiet sense of illumination. This is conversation raised to the level of art.

Some of the interactions are with strangers, others involve pets, and there’s a thread that runs through several of the poems concerning Levy’s learning to play the piano in his 70s, as in this note to another poet:

Note to Robyn Scheienz (August 9, 2025)

Bunny, our excitable little rescue terrier, barks
and barks, apparently furious at me
for stopping playing over and over
“Claire de Lune,” practicing

the sustain pedal, making mistakes and
correcting them, all of which maybe
he not only silently tolerated but
which intrigued him as much

as when he sits on one side of our French door
watching a lizard or, if he’s even luckier, a rabbit
or small bird, and yesterday that long black snake
like a living middle C elongated by a sustain pedal.

The almost casually conversational surface here serves to conceal the technical craft at work, the repetitions (barks and barks / over and over) enacting the practice, the forward propulsion created by line and stanza endings, the threads of assonance and alliteration that bind those same lines and stanzas together (read it aloud if you don’t believe me). All of which gently serves to convey the ‘meaning’, that to be human is to create, to make mistakes and learn from them, and create better, and that what we make well is as much a part of the world as a bird, rabbit or snake is.

This soft-spoken humanity is what Levy is about, in both senses of the word. His poetry is difficult to write about because the poems are so definitively what they are, complete and in no real need of comment. Read him.

Jon Cone : Omnibus review : above/ground press 2025 : Sandhu, Greene, Berlatsky, Ladouceur, Kelly, Reid, Ross, Sikkema + Browne,

Canadian expat poet [and above/ground press author] Jon Cone was good enough to provide a series of first reviews, short and sketched on an array of above/ground press titles from 2025: THE TEMPORARY SPACE OF A PLACENTA, by Mandy Sandhu (2025); EL REY MURCIÉLAGO // THE BAT KING, by Yaxkin Melchy Ramos, translated by Ryan Greene (2025); Spamtoum, by Noah Berlatsky (2025); The Last Man, by Ben Ladouceur (2025); More of How to Read the Bible, by J-T Kelly (2025); cuba A book: twentieth anniversary edition, by Monty Reid (2025); AND THEN THE GENTILE LIT THE CANDLES: Seven Stories, by Stuart Ross (2025); Just a Minute, Moon's Too Loud, by Michael Sikkema (2025); and Daily Self-Portrait Valentine, by Laynie Browne (2025). Thanks so much! You can see the original post here. Or read, below:

Here are some brief reviews of my favorite titles issued by Above/Ground Press during the year 2025. While I was not asked to write any of these reviews, I will state for the purpose of full disclosure that I was published by this press in 2025 and will appear as a co-author of another title in 2026. 

THE TEMPORARY SPACE OF A PLACENTA by Mandy Sandhu

This is a wonderful collection. Sandhu’s poems are characterized by their concision, allusiveness, a leaping of imagery and wit. The voice behind the poetry suggests great intelligence and familiarity with various poetic traditions. Reading Sandhu’s poems, I thought of Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets. Then reading her bio at the back of the chapbook I was pleased to note Sandhu listed Berrigan as influence. A superb collection.

EL REY MURCIÉLAGO THE BAT KING by 
Yaxkin Melchy Ramos [tr. Ryan Greene]

This work appears to combine various forms and traditions – Surrealism, Concrete (Visual) Poetry, Mythology, Science Fiction – and doubtless others – into a contemporary hybrid that veers between poetry and prose. If you ask your poetry to break down barriers, then this is a chapbook you’ll find rewarding. An added felicity: it is bilingual so you can compare English translation to Spanish original.  Experimental in the best sense.

SPAMTOUM by Noah Berlatsky

This title contains one long poem of 95 stanzas of four-lines each, the titular “Spamtoum”, and a final poem “Hi Noah”. ‘Spamtoum’ with its repeating lines expands the pantoum form. Because I enjoy form, I set out to trace the pattern, then gave up at a certain point because it dawned on me the pattern itself was incidental to the feverish language play taking place before me. Much like John Ashbery’s sestina “Farm Implements and Rutagagas in a Landscape”, Berlatsky’s unfurling of the pantoum is intended to be gloriously screwball. Spam is where language goes to die. Here it is rescued, given oxygen, and a second chance. If you enjoy poetry that delights in language, then “Spamtoum” is ideal reading. 

THE LAST MAN by Ben Ladouceur

Ben Ladouceur writes elegant, well-crafted poems. His poetic imagination is considerable; his evident care with line and stanza enviable. Thus it is impossible for me to read a poem by Ladouceur and not be impressed by both form and content, as if those aspects can ever be fully separated, because his writing achieves its results with apparent effortlessness. He is a poet in full control of his gifts for the poetic art. (Color me envious.)  A brilliant collection.

MORE OF HOW TO READ THE BIBLE by J-T Kelly

Kelly writes poems that deal with his religious life, much like Franz Wright did. And like Wright, Kelly often deals with the struggle to maintain it in today’s world. Like the best love poetry, religious poetry appeals to us because it yearns to go beyond the material world toward a transcendent one. A highlight for me is Kelly’s catalog of sacred names that ends on a culminating moment; another favorite is the prose poem “Morning Exercise”, which has the profound bearing of a meditation one might encounter, say, in the journals of Thomas Merton. A serious and fine example of the art. 

cuba A book by Monty Reid (twentieth anniversary edition)

This reissue contains a brief essay by Monty Reid that describers the circumstances that prompted the writing of the original poem. Reid wrote cuba A book after a period of not-writing, and it impresses by how assured it feels.  None of that hesitancy or searching around for line or voice: from the start it is all there. I suppose that really shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.  For those familiar with Reid’s work and those who would like a good place to start: recommended.

AND THEN THE GENTILE LIT THE CANDLES by Stuart Ross

Stuart Ross is a poet who also writes a great deal of fiction. He’s a wonderful fiction writer. This small collection reminds me at times of Brautigan, at times of early Raymond Carver. (The Carver under the influence of Lish.) In his economy of language, Ross calls to mind another great Canadian short story writer: Norman Levine. The title story is a fine one; however, my personal favorite is “Meredith and Craig Sit in Their Kitchen and Play Stringed Instruments.” In that story you get an ending with a palpable sense of what music critic Greil Marcus called ‘that old weird America’ – a voice haunted, distant, haunting. An excellent collection.  

JUST A MINUTE, MOON’S TOO LOUD by Michael Sikkema

A concise poetry that pays homage to the natural world, the world encountered at the edge of a hike or in a moment of jeweled awareness. Sikkema surely enjoys the ancient Chinese masters, and I’d be surprised if he didn’t enjoy writers such as Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. There’s humor here too, light, whimsical, lovely high seeming, as this complete poem demonstrates:

fav crow
ate my
rear view

When brevity is desired, let these poems answer the need. 

DAILY SELF-PORTRAIT VALENTINE by Laynie Browne

This chapbook, at first glance, is composed of lyrics that resemble those of Emily Dickinson. That is a misleading impression to have. As Browne tells us in an author’s note these poems grew out of “a year-long durational project” in which she “made a self-portrait every day for one year.” The resulting collection enacts a quest, one where memory accompanies Browne, as the outside world of obligation seems to call to the poet in the midst of her purposeful concentrations. These self-portraits are by necessity impressionistic. It is a collection that usefully demonstrates how poetry can come out of a daily practice.  

These are other fine titles can be found here  https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com

Adrian Slatcher reviews an above/ground press launch: Tom Jenks, Lydia Unsworth + David Gaffney,

Adrian Slatcher was good enough to offer his thoughts on a recent above/ground press launch in Manchester, England by Tom Jenks (launching Chimneys), Lydia Unsworth (launching Gag) and David Gaffney (launching Lakes of Titan). Thanks so much! You can see his original post here, or excerpted, below:

The Scene that Celebrates Itself

In the post-Xmas quiet there isn’t much going on literature wise, which may explain the packed house for the above/ground press launch on Thursday. Most of the literary folks in Manchester that I know were at Saul Hay Gallery for David Gaffney, Tom Jenks and Lydia Unsworth. I arrived on time, yet was one of the last ones there, which prompted an early start.

above/ground is a Canadian press publishes small pamphlets, and via some transatlantic links, reminiscent of the old mail-art networks of the sixties and seventies, has found a home for a number of Manchester-adjacent writers. David Gaffney’s stories lean into his earlier “sawn-off tales” but began as explorations of the similarities/differences between prose poetry and flash fiction. If there’s a difference between these, and his earlier work, I think its that it is in the ever-more deadpan absurdity, and embracing of surrealism. In some ways, it was as much a Dada-esque happening as a reading, though without the silly hats. (Maybe, next time.) Despite the humour of the pieces, there’s always a nugget of dark truth in David’s work. The first story, about a next generation of Arts Council staff being grown as clones, was a perfect example. In David’s work the mundane, is never mundane - whether a train journey across a Lincolnshire landscape that looks as if its been “photocopied”, or the absurdity of office politics. The book “Lakes of Titan” is available here.

Tom Jenks can sometimes seem like a P.T. Barnum of contemporary writing, and all he needs is a big coat with his bric-a-brac for sale to complete the image. The “badge” he was flogging for those of us who spend too much time in pointless meetings, “i’m an artist and you’re lucky i’m even here” sold like hotcakes. Tom’s work veers between the minimal (the badges, his posters of famous literary works) and the durational (projects mapping everything he has done in a year around a particular theme.) Yet here he engages with a range of pithy word-pictures, poignant yet funny.

Lydia Unsworth has slightly different tone than the other two. She has four pamphlets from above/ground and a recent publication just out from Knives, Forks and Spoons. It is a free spirited observational poetry that is probably at its best in the longer piece where she lists all the mundane but beautiful things that she experiences with her children on the everyday walk to school. Her books can be bought here.

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell reviews Penn Kemp's Lives of Dead Poets (2025) via The League of Canadian Poets

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell provides a review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) via The League of Canadian Poets. Thanks so much! This is actually the fourth review of Kemp's title, after Jennifer Wenn's review over at The Miramichi Reader, Karl Jirgens at The Typescript and Gordon Phinn at The Seaboard Review. Thanks much! You can see Fretwell's original review here.

In the golden age of Toronto’s explosive poetry scene in the early 70s, Penn Kemp met many vital poets who have since passed away. Her longstanding connections to these revered poets inspired her to write the chapbook Lives of the Dead Poets. As host of A Space Reading Series (this reviewer exhibited on the Members Wall), publishing with venerable Coach House and living on Toronto Island, Penn made soon-to-be-lifelong friends: Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, P.K. Page (P.K. Irwin as artist), Robert Creeley, Allan Ginsberg, and letter-friend Diane di Prima.

Kemp’s elegies respond to the styles of the poets whom she memorializes in verse: “A lament for those who have left/ the present, the planet and possibility/ behind, left us bewildered by/ no more/ words” (“Lives of Dead Poets”). For Gwendolyn MacEwan, Penn praises: “Your fingers/ semaphore a complex code/ we cannot read.// A ring of hands/ ready to catch or pull you up” (“Not Waving But Drowning”). This reviewer also mourned a cancelled reading by MacEwan up north.

In “Gone Fishing”, Kemp elegizes Robert Creeley in the manner of the famous Kempian wordplay: “Reel back the real, back/ to the little wicker// basket carrying trout,/ Creeley.”

For Ontario poet Ellen Jaffe, Penn includes a poignant event: “Ellen   dying in hospice     listens in on/ Zoom     as Voices Israel read    her poems.// How wonderful   to be read to at last.” (“Homage for Ellen S. Jaffe, Poet”).

Kemp honours bp nichol, one of the Four Horsemen, with a high compliment: “our// Rumi, born in all/ their holy,/ poetic fecundity” (“For bp nichol”), the words lovingly dancing across the page. Phyllis Webb, champion of the anti-ghazal, leaves us in a sense of Kempian whimsy: “How can we forget you?   You left/ a whiff of unicorn   in your wake.” (“The Poet in Charge”). Also magical, John Ashbery, the Rowan Bard, is commemorated thus: “‘Rowan is the tree of power, causing/ life and magic to flower. (“Alphabet for Ashbery”).

A lively anecdote revivifies P.K. Page: “P.K. Page was dressed   to the nines … // At the stove’s first growl,   she leapt up and alighted/ for the evening … closest to the door.// An oil stove had exploded on her ….// But she made that perch [couch arm] hers, crossing elegant legs,/ gallantly …” (“The Girl from Sao Paulo”).

For an elegiac taste of the other poets that Penn wistfully sets in stone, read this marvellous paean to influential Canadian [except Creeley and Ashbery] poets, with a nod to William Wordsworth’s “Ode to Intimations of Immortality”: “Only their poetry can still convey/ intimations of immortality ….// Only their poems can transcribe/ mysterium tremendum …// For me.   For you.” (“One by One, They Depart, the Great Ones”).

For Kemp’s essay sourcing her inspiration, see 
https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/03/penn-kemp-one-by-one-they-depart-great.html.

De Villo Sloan reviews Johannes S.H. Bjerg and Charlotte Jung's collaborative eyesore (2025) at Asemic Front 2

De Villo Sloan was good enough to provide a first review of Johannes S.H. Bjerg and Charlotte Jung's collaborative eyesore (2025) over at Asemic Front 2. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As they write:

AF2 Review - "eyesore" by Johannes S.H. Bjerg & Charlotte Jung (above/ground press, Canada)

Stockholm-based poet and playwright Charlotte Jung and Danish writer and artist Johannes S.H. Bjerg have collaborated to produce what might easily prove to be this year’s best collection of visual poetry: Jung’s minimalist concrete poetry and Bjerg’s calligraphic, asemic neoglyphs. 

rob mclennan – above/ground press editor – again displays his talent for locating and publishing the best postavant art and lit in his burgeoning chapbook series.  eyesore is eminently collectible, and the thoughtful reader will want to revisit the book many times to explore its possibilities for interpretation.

Johannes S.H. Bjerg is known in the visual poetry community primarily for his calligraphy-based asemic texts. He eschews the faux abstract expressionist approach taken by many of his contemporaries in favor of a stark, black and white textuality that complements Charlotte Jung’s poetry perfectly. Bjerg's vision of asemics is similar to the vision of Jim Leftwich and Tim Gaze (1993).

Bjerg’s compositions in eyesore are imbued with complexity not fitting a strict minimalist definition. His cursive streams weave in, above, and below the boundaries of our shared language.

Yet each piece is a single entity, drawing from the concept of the neoglyph (a term coined by John R. McConnochie). In the context of eyesore, each of Bjerg’s pieces can be read as a single asemic poem in a dialog with Jung’s work. His asemic pieces, for me, are similar to the approach taken by John M. Bennett and Henry Michaux.

In my review of Charlotte Jung’s Collected (Timglaset 2023), I praised her concrete poetry, which I see sharing many traits with the work of Aram Saroyan. She works within the constraints of concrete poetry rooted in Modernity.

Jung also has a unique ability to present fluidity and subtle expression in a way that surpasses the work of previous generations. eyesore is another valuable addition to the growing body of Jung’s work.

rob mclennan has made an important contribution to vispo with the publication of this chapbook. The audience is presented with a unique opportunity to explore “new poetries” in the form of asemic writing and minimalist poetry in a lyric sequence. In eyesore, we see a glimpse of poetry’s future.

Gordon Phinn reviews Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (2025) and Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Seaboard Reader

Gordon Phinn provides a first review of Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (2025) and a new review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Seaboard Review. Thanks so much! This is actually the third review of Kemp's title, after Jennifer Wenn's review over at The Miramichi Reader and Karl Jirgens reviewed such over at The Typescript. You can see Phinn's original review here.

Premieres Posies by Eudore Evanturel, translated by Jamie Sharpe (Above/Ground Press, 1879/2015)

Chapbooks: As outlined in Eli MacLaren’s Little Resilience: The Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks (McGill-Queens 2021), these diminutive pamphlets have been a low profile but integral element of CanLit for decades. Between 1925 and 1962 Ryerson Press produced over 200. Since the 70/80’s the genre has, with the advent of copy machines, blossomed. Heck, I’ve done about a dozen myself. In its now expansive corral, new work is led out of the barn by poets and prose stylists trying out experiments in form and expression that might not otherwise see the light of day. Once not always so easy to acquire, the digital age, with all its websites, podcasts, and Substacks, has simplified the task. One can observe a wide selection as they canter around the exercise yard, finding their new legs and admirers. One seemingly inexhaustible source is Rob Mclennan’s Above/Ground press, and if I’m not mistaken, his stable has at least 600 residents. Mind you, I’m a past master at being mistaken.

Allow me to remedy whatever lack you may feel by introducing a couple of new contenders, each with a unique and valuable contribution to make. Jamie Sharpe, a Comox BC writer with five books to his credit, has uncovered a long neglected 19th century Quebecois poet, Eudore Evanturel, whose only book, Premieres Poesies from 1879, was not well received by the critics of the day and the disappointment led him to retire and relocate to Lowell, Massachusetts.

In his preface Sharpe reveals that on encountering Evanturel’s work he felt confronted with “a misplaced heirloom, a finely etched reliquary of longing, wit and restraint” and that his approach was “not archival but sympathetic”, and his use of “succinct English cadence” was to “allow the poems to exist without the velvet rope and museum glass.” In this he has succeeded admirably, allowing the shelved sentiments to breathe freely. Many of the verses are tantalizingly brief, some approaching the remote elevation of the haiku:

Village at Noon

Whitewashed walls lean
Under noon’s sunlight.  A lone bicycle
Collapsed by the door.  Somewhere:
Laughter, a  saucepan clatter.
The village slow and bright.
A midday lull in a world
Kept small.
To My Reader

Hold these words close, like a flower
Pressed, preserved, between pages.
Let it oblige your fingers to turn into
Glints of quiet contemplations waiting
For your own heart to finish them.
One hopes for more translations and research on this buried treasure.

Lives Of Dead Poets by Penn Kemp (Above/Ground Press 2025)

Penn Kemp has been regarded as something of an iconoclast and trailblazer for fifty odd years, the composer of thirty plus books of poetry and prose, seven plays and several daring, and dare I say seductive, experiments in sound poetry. If you suspect that there are boundaries that yet require breaking then Penn has already been there, joyously deconstructing. In this chapbook, she fondly recalls the lives and work of contemporaries who have shifted their focus to that universe next door. Let me say: she knocks and gains entry.

Gwen MacEwen, Robert Creeley, Robert Hogg, bp nicol, Jack Spicer, Phyllis Webb, John Ashbery, James Reaney, Colleen Thibaudeau, P.K. Page, Robert Kroetsch, Teva Harrison, Joe Blades & Ellen S. Jaffe: all are evoked, praised, loved and grieved. Her heart is in the right place and her aim is true.

One by One, They Depart, the Great Ones

The sound of voices
I wish I could hear, voices
now dissolved to ether, to

the vagaries of memory, lost in
translation.  What’s that?

How could such
presence disintegrate?

How could so much 
wisdom evaporate with
the body’s decay?

A chasm awaits 
Across the great 
division.

As the poets fall into their tradition,
our beloved dead are more intimate
now than they ever could be in the flesh.

Only their poetry can still convey
intimations of immortality, subtle slips
we grasp as truth, not knowing for sure

what is real, what is fantasy and false,
what lies somewhere in between as true.

Only their poems can transcribe
mysterium tremendum – where they’ve gone.
Their words embodied on the page,

For me.                                               For you.

Cristalle Smith reviews Melissa Spohr Weiss' Motion & Force (2022) via Instagram,

Cristalle Smith was good enough to provide a first review of Melissa Spohr Weiss' Motion & Force (2022) via Instagram. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As she writes:

Motion & Force
Melissa Spohr Weiss
@sonnets_and_sloths

above/ground press 2022
@rob_mclennan_writer

Form frees noise, more than cacophony, in Melissa Spohr Weiss’s Motion & Force. Nip utterance builds alliteration into terse experiences that defy narrativizing: “Can a nature-eater earn / tenure? Can a cute crane // taunt a recent teen?” (“Utterance”). Listen. “O, Calypso! I hold paid holidays,” an unknown speaker cries in “Physical Body” while “Holy playboy ladys abolish / cops.” Find sense in pattern, repetition, an alphabet soup of rules to count to ten. Tin cans spill tomato broth and squishy noodles.

Is that an oboe boo floating in? A clarinet reed? Read the lines down, then up, then down again: “A rat entered yer rented / tavern. Ate yer nerve” (“Everyday Event”). Tercets with enjambment. Some kind of sonnet(not?) That’s okay, “An erect centaur can’t eat / true tuna” (“Utterance”). Did you have a dream(nightmare) you can’t remember? But still hear the sounds? Pluck string taut and mince meaning-acrostic-acoustic-an office, “O conifer comet!” (“Motion & Force”). Some poetry makes sense sounds in pilfering a rabbit tart.

Get in, losers. We are blasting this anthem until 5:00 AM.

De Villo Sloan reviews Nada Gordon's COPIUM (2025) at Asemic Front 2

De Villo Sloan was good enough to provide a first review of Nada Gordon's COPIUM (2025) over at Asemic Front 2. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As they write:

COPIUM by Nada Gordon
Ottawa, Canada: above/ground press, August 2025
24 pages; stapled

Review by De Villo Sloan

rob mclennan has added another literary gem to the list of recent chapbooks issued by above/ground press in Ottawa, Canada, with the publication of COPIUM by Nada Gordon.

COPIUM is a single lyric poem composed of elegant tercets that encode opulent imagery like ornate beadwork. Through associations, wordplay, unexpected juxtapositions, and explorations of poetic discourse, Gordon creates a unique and engaging record of what in Modernity is known as “the stream of consciousness.”

Her narrative melds objective and subjective realities; she skillfully provides multiple perspectives on daily life. The book includes images by Gordon in collaboration with MidJourney AI.

COPIUM succeeds on its Flarfy juxtapositions, irony, popcult references, and occasional absurdist incoherence. She has developed a postavant poetic line that extends Modernist fragmentation into new realms, which I believe is an accomplishment of great significance.

Nada Gordon has a rare ability to create poetic forms that permit (if they do not encourage) multiple but equally illuminating interpretations. In COPIUM, I unexpectedly found a lyric poem of outstanding beauty and insight. The third and fourth stanzas of the poem provide a good example of how its self-reflexivity contributes to the poem’s genesis:

    Peacock fanning out…
    swans entwining necks
    as co-beings

    feathering extremities
    like kelp, flowers, hands
    in a diamond brain (brine) of lost time.

For me, the pleasure of reading COPIUM is found in its self-reflective reverie, (consciously) aesthetic escapism, and its meta-poetical commentary. Gordon gives me the sublime experience of decayed opulence described to perfection with imagery by Charles Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil. I find myself returning to the text for the pleasure of its aesthetic decadence for the same reasons I return to Baudelaire and Poe. 

COPIUM is also a fascinating compendium of English language nouns and adjectives that are useful in both scientific and artistic discourse. Here is an example from COPIUM by Nada Gordon showing her use of particulars:

           Caves of gems, and a pomegranate gem
           as a giant war demon.
           Mendelssohn infuses a dark city

           With the idea of ‘charging’
           (being recharged) –
           rogue elephants

           the tusk, the tree
           the metals, the mortals,
           breath and gourds and reeds.

           what are:

           ‘words’ ‘texts’ ‘friends’
           ‘membranes’ ‘borders’ ‘organs’

           countries’ ‘Jews’ ‘food’
           animals’ ‘cities’ ‘books’
           ‘cells’ ‘Gaza’ ‘gauze’

Paradoxically, however, looking beyond traces of conceptual writing, Gordon’s lyric is built on the solid foundation of, “No ideas but in things.” In fact, a close linguistic analysis of the various catalogs woven into COPIUM would likely produce interesting results.

A worldview present in Gordon’s writing is that language is an inevitable intermediary in human communication, expression and – of course - poetry. COPIUM is a lush sea of imagery and a (sometimes) mechanistic interrogation of language. Nada Gordon often approaches the edge of meaning: the same terrain as asemic writers. She brings COPIUM into the realm of visual and concrete poetry:

    Owls
    Opals
    Opossums

    and a lunar pOnd
    the loss of pherOmOne pOwer
    in the OdORless digital world

    The letter O:
    Just lOOk at it!
    Ketamina LOy.

Nada Gordon's COPIUM is a multi-faceted composition that invites readers to engage with the text often, revealing multiple perspectives and interpretations. She is one of our most important poetic voices. above/ground press has done extraordinary work producing this edition. If you only purchase one chapbook in 2025, order COPIUM by Nada Gordon. 

Gwen Aube's pulp necrosis (2025) is reviewed at Discordia Review

Whoever runs Discordia Review, presumably, was good enough to provide a first review of Gwen Aube's pulp necrosis (2025). Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As the rather hefty review includes, to begin:

Gwen Aube is a plucky upstart. You don’t generally hear much talk about a poet’s “pluck” in more formal reviews. Reviewers love to say things like, “the poet brings a radical softness to spaces of violence that leavens their inherently traumatic qualities” or “the poet has a writing practice attuned to affect, absurdity, and community struggle” or whatever. If labouring under a strict wordcount, they might settle for simply calling the poet “brave.” But the “pluck” of Aube’s poetry—that endearing, good-humoured courage of the small carrying on in the shadow of long odds—is a welcome tonic in these times of paralysis and dread. And look, I know plucky is an adjective usually reserved for like, a stocky mutt that wins the tricounty openweight barking contest or whatever, but I promise it isn’t a way for me to say, “Aube technically sucks but in a charming way.” She’s good.

Groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press: 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023) gets a mention at LitHub!

Happy Canada Day! Yukon poet Dawn Macdonald was good enough to mention Groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press: 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023) as part of the round-up "10 Canadian poetry books to expand your mind" over at LitHub! Thanks so much! You can see the original post here. And have you been seeing the reviews she's been doing via her substack? Legendary! As Macdonald writes:

Chapbooks are a vital layer of the poetry ecosystem, where fresh ideas percolate and germinate. The legendary above/ground press has produced hundreds over the past 30-some years, operating out of a basement in Ottawa.

Lisa de Nikolits reviews MLA Chernoff's ESTRO FLUNKY: FIELD NOTES (2023) at the Wolsak and Wynn blog,

Lisa de Nikolits was good enough to provide a first review of MLA Chernoff's ESTRO FLUNKY: FIELD NOTES (2023), as part of a listing of "great summer reads," over at the Wolsak and Wynn blog. Thanks so much! You can read her original post here. As she writes:

In case you’re new to MLA Chernoff, they’re a Toronto-based poet, performance artist, meme enthusiast and recovering academic. Their debut full-length poetry collection, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in 2021. MLA is also the author of several chapbooks, including delet this (Bad Books, 2018), TERSE THIRSTY (Gap Riot Press, 2019), I'M LIKE THE GREAT GRANDCHILD OF MARX & COCA-COLA (BUT NON-BINEY) (845 Press, 2022) and ESTRO FLUNKY (above/ground press, 2023).

I completely loved [SQUELCH PROCEDURES] and was delighted to read ESTRO FLUNKY. 

I delight in the workings of MLA Chernoff’s wondrous mind as they deftly juggle words, images, emotions, sights and sounds. 

Sharply insightful, citrus and crackling, ESTRO FLUNKY is a reader’s delight. Political, sexual, life-affirming, life-analyzing, brilliantly insightful and incredibly, unfathomably clever, ESTRO FLUNKY’s “pomes” are woven with the minutiae of life’s tragedies and the overwhelming challenges of life: 

“Seasonal Repressive”

    Because feelings are
    H=A=R=D
    and all games
    inevitably 
    stop
    short.

Or from “Soyjacking”

    Lusting prosaic, 
    actually: if anything. 
    If things must be hushed 
    to the extreme, this is a tomato timer, 
    a political fiction, a fear of the self, 
    keying futurity, slashing its tires.

A collection I will repeatedly return to, to plumb the depths of MLA Chernoff’s most wondrous mind. 

Colin Dardis reviews Nathanael O'Reilly's TERMINALS (2025) at Poem Alone

Irish poet (and above/ground press author) Colin Dardis was good enough to provide a first review of Nathanael O'Reilly's TERMINALS (2025) over at Poem Alone. Thanks so much! You can read Dardis' original post here. As he writes:

O’Reilly’s third pamphlet with Canada’s above/ground press is, as the title suggests, comprised entirely of the terminal form. As the book notes, the form was invented by Australian poet John Tranter, where "the final word of each line in a source poem us used as the end-word for each line of a new poem”. A sizeable challenge in itself, as O’Reilly maintains not only this end-words in this new pieces, but the same order of words and stanza structure for each poem.

Sourced poems come from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Jessica Traynor, John Keats, Jane Clarke and others. The terminal device opens up a second level to the collection: the reader can source the originals, read and contrast them to O’Reilly’s re-imaginings, and admire just how inventive and challenging the new works our. Repeatedly, O’Reilly has been able to craft the restriction of the end-words into his own narrative, which often explores the need for isolation, and an affinity with landscapes. In ‘Settling Down’, the poem starts off as an innocent description of a beach scene, with surfers and fishermen. Then, unexpectedly:

    They do not know my remains
    will be scattered on their beach, blown
    out to see, the evidence of me
    settling down in one place at least[.]

This affinity drives the theme of some eco-poems in Terminals: closing poem ‘Autumn Lament’ chides humanity for not taking take of the earth – “The planet won’t let us off the hook | for the debts we owe’. The phrase ‘damaged earth’ is repeated from the opening poem, serving as neat bookend for the theme.

Tied closely to this connection to the land is the want for escape, mostly from other poem. The speaker in ‘The Landscape’s Singing’ hopes “for a fertile summer | writing poetry in the turf-shed”. In ‘Archaeology’, the opening action of ‘I close the door’ double downs on this shutting away of oneself, seemingly a much needed retreat: “I dig for the ancient me | sometimes feared vanished”. Although this is some connection with others elsewhere, such as remembering studying Picasso with a friend, or dwelling over a past love, the separateness creeps in. Equinox asks the ex-lover to “wonder | in my arms are lovelier than aloneness’. ‘Equinox’ sees the speaker wishing for ‘inspiration, solitude’, the two apparently inseparable.

There are a few flexible applications of the end words here and there: Heaney’s ‘place’ becomes ‘homeplace’ in O’Reilly rewriting; Duffy’s ‘hesitate’ shifts to ‘hesitation’; while Larkin’s ‘lace’ becomes hidden in the word ‘placed’. To this reviewer, these liberties are permissible: one would rather see a slight deviation, rather than have the language feel forced and unnatural in order to meet the demand of the original end-words. ‘Sweet Movement’ goes one step further, and retains the syllable count for each line as well from George and Ira Gershwin’s song, ‘Embraceable You’.

Looking at some of the end-words in isolation, one might marvel at the shift from the source poem to the new poem. ‘Remember’ takes from Ellen Bass’s ‘Any Common Desolation’. In one part, the end-words are ruminant, ginger, signs, mother, gathered, toes, etc., potentially unconnected to each other as the answers in a crossword puzzle. O’Reilly transforms these into a call for calmness and patience:

    Wait. Become ruminant,
    Meditate. Peel and grate ginger,
    sip healing tea. Search for signs
    of chance. Remember your mother,
    how she believed in you, gathered
    you in her arms, tickled your toes,
    made you laugh until you lost breath,
    distracted you from darkness. Sit in the yard
    imbibing the moon[.]

Terminals is a work of transmogrification, with surprising and pleasing results throughout, and is certainly the strongest work O’Reilly has published with above/ground press, which is known for championing experimental and restricted writing. A rewarding read, and for fellow writers, one that will inspire them to try their hand at their own terminal form.

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.”

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.