FEATURING:

COLUMNS:
Alienated by Darren Wershler-Henry
Mean Old Man in Training by Joe Ollmann
Nernies by Claire Gibson and Marian Churchland
Movie Mythos by Taien Ng-Chan
The Self-Esteem Workout by David McGimpsey
Billy Fong Parade by Ian Orti & Sophie Caird

REVIEWS:
The Real Made Up by Stephen Brockwell
The Notebook of Roses and Civilization by Nicole Brossard, translated by Robert Mazjels, Erin Moure
The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon
At the Bottom of the Sky by Peter Dubé
Long Story Short: a novella and stories by Elyse Friedman
Ovenman by Jeff Parker
Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price
More to Keep Us Warm by Jacob Scheier
Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing Edited by Michelle Tea
Obon: The Festival of the Dead by Terry Watada
The Alphabet Game: a bp Nichol reader edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson

Read by Nick McArthur

Given the breadth and variety of his work, it’s frankly amazing a book like this exists. In a career spanning 27 years, Nichol composed novels, comics, songs, essays, drawings, stories, teleplays, pamphlets, and, most famously and most impressively, thousands of pages of concrete, visual and lyric poetry. To have condensed such an oeuvre into a 300-page “reader” is a feat requiring considerable self-restraint, and the editors should be commended for having represented Nichol’s obsessions and experiments as exhaustively as they have. The Alphabet Game traces, among other things, Nichol’s career-long fascination with the relationship of the spoken to the written word and of the written word to the individual letter; his continuing obsession with saintliness and corporality; his facility with puns and multi-lingual wordplay. The editors attempt admirably what is, essentially, an impossible task: to compile a coherent and representative cross-section of Nichol’s immense body of writing.

Having said all this, there are several notable omissions, and a few strange inclusions. Unlike its (arguably better, but also flawed) predecessor— 1994’s An H in the Heart: a Reader— the new reader includes none of Nichol’s songs or comics, and none of his collaborative work. There is also, considering the length of the book, an alarming abundance of “sound poetry,” and a shortage of Nichol’s more lyric short poems. Nichol’s prose writings are also underrepresented— his novels, especially For Jesus Lunatick, are truncated almost into nonexistence, and the brilliant but hard to find Reading and Writing: the Toronto Research Game is left out entirely, as are many of Nichol’s best micro-fictions. The nine-book long poem, The Martyrology, is by far the most thoroughly excerpted work, though it too seems unjustly reduced as it appears here. Considering the expansiveness of The Martyrology, and its availability in most bookstores, it may well have been better to have omitted it entirely.

The Alphabet Game is currently the only book of its kind available in book stores, and, though it’s a hundred pages lighter than it rightly should have been, it performs its function impressively: it offers a useful introduction to the depth and scope of Nichol’s writing. With any luck, this book will inspire readers to explore Nichol’s work at greater length, and will help them to navigate his vast and diverse catalogue. For aspiring students of Nichol’s work, it is, at least, a good place to begin.

Read by Lateef Martin

Baby Remember My Name explores queer writing and experiences from the pens of 24 women.  The variety of experiences and the distinct voice of each short story keeps things fresh.  Stand outs include:

Claudia Rodriguez’s Juan the Brave is a tale of a little Latina named Erica who so desperately wants to be a little Latino named Juan. Already put in a box of what she can and cannot do, Erica seeks the freedom to be rough and tumble, fearless and independent the way she only sees fit.

Robin Akimbo’s Laundry Day is a sobering account of the fear a queer girl of colour can experience on a simple romp to the Laundromat. Painted in lush tones, San Francisco and its economic landscape provide the backdrop for a story that is both fragile and indestructible.

Titties At Stake by Dexter Flowers is a humorous story of a girl who joins a group of embattled queer vegans in their quest to emancipate their mammaries from social slavery. Hoping to cause a ruckus with a march of signs, music, public presentation and boobies bouncing in the sun, the reactions the group gets is a mix of surprises and unexpected results.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s Snow Fight harkens back to the daze of high school through the eyes and voice of Black girl from an under-privileged hood.  Reminding the reader that despite metal detectors, security guards and fights, magic is still tucked into the rambunctiousness of youth.

Peppering the text are few excerpts of graphic novels. In childlike strokes, Katie Fricas’s Nobody Will Find Me Here chronicles the de-evolution of the mind through the inundation of free cable amongst herself and her two female roommates.  Nicole J. Georges, through patches of notes and art narrates a story of a girl who worked with ailing animals in Invincible Bummer #2.

Baby Remember My Name is a peek into diverse worlds that share a common thread. However, a more discerning eye would pick out some of the more lagging tales, fraught with run-on sentences and clogged with “telling” instead of “showing” narrative.  Although a wide variety of styles is presented, the same effect could have been served with fewer writers to maintain a higher caliber. Despite these drawbacks, Baby Remember My Name gives you a taste of a world seldom explored by mainstream media.

Read by Mike Spry

In his debut novel, Ovenman, Jeff Parker has created a vivid and honest recollection of a world that exists in the periphery of even the strangest of sub-cultures.  Set in early 1990s Central Florida, Ovenman is the story of When Thinfinger, a skateboarding, poorly tattooed anti-hero who falls from restaurant job to restaurant job, doing his best to stay barely afloat in a society that has no respect or place for him.

Parker has provided himself with a difficult challenge.  He has chosen Thinfinger to narrate Ovenman and yet he has given the protagonist little if any redeeming qualities.  Thinfinger steals from his employers and friends, is dismissive of his girlfriend, and has blackouts so frequently that he has taken to writing himself Post-It notes before passing out so as to inform his sober self what his drunken self has done.  It is nearly impossible for the reader to like Thinfinger, let alone find any degree of empathy for him.  His one quality is his odd affection for his McJob duties: pride in a well-run pizza oven (hence the title), his love for a well-mopped floor and an Ajaxed sink.  But this one quality is sad and indicative of his failing: his lack of any desire to grow beyond his pizza station in life.

Parker manages this choice delicately by surrounding Thinfinger with an element that rivals his lack of moral substance: skinheads, faux hippies, liars, cheats, whores and miscreants populate Ovenman to the extent that society’s norm is forgotten and the periphery becomes the main focus.  Once absorbed by this world, one can’t help but be entranced by it.  The reader has no desire to see Thinfinger grow or find some moral salvation, but rather takes delight in his appetite for destruction.  Guilty pleasure is taken in the disdain for Thinfinger, and we cheer his every incompetence.

What certainly doesn’t lack competence is Parker’s employment of language in fuelling the hectic and destructive pace of the narrative.  Ovenman is propelled by tight and precise sentences that fall from one into the other as Thinfinger’s life falls apart.  The writing is wonderfully specific, creating a vibrant image of the setting, both physical and temporal.  Above all, the pleasure one takes in the writing and the story is emboldened by the dark and twisted humour.  Ovenman is at once funny, sad, disturbing and insightful, and a promising debut from a talented writer.

Read by Aaron Tucker

Within the Canadian poetic tradition there is an amazing history of the long poem, particularly ones like Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which centers around the biography of a mercurial American icon. Steven Price’s Anatomy of Keys carries on in this tradition, weaving a masterfully dense and complex retelling of Harry Houdini’s life.

Like the famed escape artist himself, the book is a constantly shifting set of poems, morphing between sections of long claustrophobic poetic-prose to expanded lyrical works. The reader must then work like Houdini did, twisting and altering, which in turn creates a very physical, tiring reading experience. The reader too feels “ropetrod or strangled stage/ right rumpled in trunk trick, flushed, tousled…contrary, quarrelsome.” The slipperiness of form creates then the unique and exhilarating experience of a reader having to inhabit his/her own body and reacting, reading not just mentally but physically into text and in turn working the muscles of forearms and calves in an effort to compress and understand the work.

This physicality is due mostly to Price’s attention to poetic language. While the theme of celebrity and performance courses throughout, the actual theme and plot progression are overshadowed by Price’s impressive specificity of language. The verbs and adjectives here are expertly timed, the sentences and phrasing striking, all together creating and reinforcing the vivid repeated images of the “lock”, “key”, and “flesh” throughout. This deliberate and arresting poetics ensure that the images and phrases do not simply slip by, but pile up and resonate deeper and deeper as the reader strains towards its climax.

At the end, with the “hidden/ache of muscle, bruise in the spleen, stubbornness of dark/anatomies” (“XXVII”), the reader emerges refreshingly haggard, appreciative, and weary not from effort but from the satisfaction of reading and feeling one’s own body at work.

Read by Jenny Sampirisi

At the front of Long Story Short is Elyse Friedman’s tender, funny and emotional novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing.” In it a teen boy, amused by the fermented irony of 80s B-list actors, befriends a former sitcom star. What is striking about this story is its ability to show adolescent cruelty alongside adolescent confusion over what constitutes cool. The main character experiences the world as a series of ironic moments and so, when faced with the raw vulnerability of a sincere relationship with a girl or an emotional investment in his friend, he falters. The tension between the characters is writhingly palpable throughout and succeeds in asking us to question our own cultural filters.

The short fiction that follows the novella is peppered with individuals who seek love and meaning in their lives. Any other collection and this would be banal and predictable. The quirky path to truth that each story takes however, saves this book from dullness. The characters are bright, funny and oddly genuine despite the dripping irony that coats many of the stories.

Within the dark humour there are larger social, class and gender issues, which are handled with sincerity. Female characters are especially ensnared by the tensions between old social mores and new ones. In “Lost Kitten,” a debate between two male roommates reveals a deep misogyny; in “Truth,” a couple on a first date reveal their insecurities and expectations, unsheathing a multitude of ingrained gender conventions; in “A Bright Tragic Thing,” the actor’s memory of a teenage love affair is often tinged with misogynist retellings among the more tender accounts. However, the strongest story in the collection, “The Soother,” turns male gender stereotypes on their heads as we watch a patriarch cope with the frustrations and exhaustions of his role through infantilism. Long Story Short allows us to engage these uncomfortable larger issues through humour and sharp prose, and the result is unexpectedly empathetic and fun.

Read by T.K. Murphy

Dumuzi is trying to have sex with Anna. Runner Cogshill is trying to have sex with Dumuzi. Runner likes Anna. Runner would like to be Anna. But Runner is not Anna. You could even say that Runner is the in-Anna. (Dumuzi is in Anna too, but just once. Talking about it makes him kind of anxious.)

The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, to which Runner belongs and into which she inducts (with varying degrees of success) both Anna and Dumuzi – that book club caused this reader some concern. Because they act out their books. Art, life, life, art, words, words, words, words. At first it seems the book might go that way: theory mocked up to move like people, and people like puppets with a script one step too glib, trendy, poppy, slippery, fast. Clever but sexed-up. Energy-intensive, less-than-nourishing, easily consumed, heavily eroticized textual theory. A low-cal, DeLillo-esque Name of the Rose.

This reader, however, was glad to be wrong. This book is actually about something very simple. It’s about a book that helps Runner to help her little brother Neil. Runner and Neil are both sad because Runner’s twin sister Ruby is dead, and together they study The Epic of Gilgamesh, so that they might learn how to overcome death without dying too. With some input from the Baghdad Blogger, Neil figures it out (though it’s too late for Runner, who, like the Sumerian goddess Inanna, follows her sister to the underworld.) So even though this is a book about a book club, and even though the narrators mention Margaret Atwood, Irving Layton, Anne Carson and Michael Ondaatje in the first twenty-two pages alone, The Girls Who Saw Everything isn’t really about books. Instead it’s more about archetypes, and the durability of myths, and their changeability too: how myths respond to the demands of contemporary experimental storytelling. The Girls Who Saw Everything turns out to be a poignant, highly effective and personable dramaticization of its source texts.

Read by Hermonie Xie

The romantic title lured me into picking this one up. It suggests the mingling of man and nature – and a notebook, a battered bundle of paper; provenance and tome of ideas that flit in and out of the mind like ecstatic hummingbirds. Before reading, I believed it to be a scrapbook of some sort, filled to the rim with thoughts dictated, both long and short, simple and complex. A mosaic, perhaps.

The book does somewhat resemble a scrapbook. Countless stanzas are sprinkled generously across 81 pages of text; among them each individual one may effectively stand as its own poem of vivid, short, almost cryptical nature. But I suspect this book of housing only one poetic composition, one whose presence lingers and treads upon all sides of the bound volume. While reading, words rush forward in a hasty flood of letters, arresting my attention and loosening its grip only after the last page has been turned. The unusual structure of Brossard’s poetry is comparable to the curious paintings of Picasso. In style the works of both artists have a liberating quality that proves them unbound by conservative expectations of their genre.

Brossard is a photographer, capturing with ink and words what others would with light and pigment. Snapshots of conventional day to day objects are presented to readers in macro mode. Each curve, line, and texture is pleasantly drawn out by words selected with care. Brossard’s wispy words bind our world to the world of language and the alphabet. Parallels are made between the rolling of waves and pages turned (as if the sea//were about to surge up at your back//in pages of foam and foment), then there are “the words cerise, olive, words we stick in our mouths”; words are fruits or berries, hurriedly scrambled between keenly chomping teeth.

Through Brossard’s diction, so “shredded” at times it seems as if she were narrating her work in an alien language, one may decide for themselves what aspects to sample on this multifaceted dish of poetic cordon bleu. As for myself, I prefer to nibble my way into the pages – one line at a time.

Read by Jesse Patrick Ferguson

Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell’s fourth collection, The Real Made Up, is formally diverse. Its split personalities lead it from conservative to avant-garde poetics: a free-ranging spirit that is uncommon in Canadian poetry. The roughly 100 pages of short and medium-length poems can be divided into four general types: standard lyrics; a series of “wisdom poems” centering on a character named Karikura, which evoke the poetic traditions of China and Japan; experimental “randomization” and machine-recognition poems; and conventional dramatic monologues.

The collection’s strongest poems fall under the first category, in which Brockwell turns his curiosity, playfulness and sound craft to memorable lyric effect. “Ingredients for Certain Poems by Al Purdy,” for example, makes good use of humour – “Wild Ameliasburg grapes / crushed by two hundred pounds of fifty-year-old Al” – but is also carefully researched, citing various technical procedures for the crafting of spirits, beer and wine. This and other poems like “Helium” delight in the minute or obscure details of science and culture, and they sometimes exploit the musical potential of unusual diction with a daring that might make even John Donne chuckle.

The weakest poems fall under the dramatic monologue category, a sub-genre made famous by Robert Browning. Certain of Brockwell’s monologues do engage by means of unusual phrasing and strong rhythms – see “Corporal Jensen’s Afghan Rug” – but others lack the richness of sound field and/or density of poetic device found in the collection’s lyrics. Some monologues such as “Mark Bradely’s Wife” and “Nicole’s Children’s Happiness” come very close to plain speech, or are narrowly saved by a semantically ambiguous turn of phrasing toward the poems’ end.

Perhaps inevitably with a text of such wide technical and tonal span, each reader will prefer different poems, but in any case, Brockwell’s unfettered curiosity and his sensitivity are commendable. It is rare to encounter a poet who is as interested in experimentation as in engaging with the tradition, is as comfortable “making it new” as writing “what oft was thought be ne’er so well express’d.”

Read by Jakub Stachurski

In Obon: The Festival of the Dead, Terry Watada evokes the eponymous Japanese-Buddhist holiday on an aural and physical plane. The lines are radically enjambed and the convention of the dropped line is often utilized. Punctuation is used sparsely, and this absence of commas and periods opens the poems to the white space of the page as well as silence:

I awoke.
the air
was
heavy
wet
and still -paralyzed
insects crouched
in mid-cry

Without clunky punctuation, end stops become muted, and all of these conventions work to create long, slender verse evocative of quiet contemplation. The sound and shape of the verse and Watada’s mining of Japanese-Buddhist rites is a potent combination, evoking the artifice as well as the underlying emotions of the festival.

While the holiday is a celebration for the departed, the somber mood beneath the dancing and beating of taiko drums is present in Watada’s syntax and diction. In the first poem, Watada creates his own version of the origins for the festival. Later poems render the various traditions of the festival—the lighting of paper lanterns, the music of flutes and drums, the offerings of rice and oranges—with a careful attention to detail. Watada uses the proper Japanese names of instruments, foods, and other specifics. A glossary is provided at the end of the book, and the collection of words is small enough as not to obstruct a seamless reading of the poems.

Between the ceremonial poems, Watada includes a series of his own elegies to his departed family and friends. This creates a sense of conflict within the collection, as the stylized form of verse used to denote the festival is also used to write about heroin junkies, oppressed Asian-Canadians, and 9/11. The syntax and diction do not always translate into scenes of urban angst or the isolation of a Tim Hortons. However, the poems concentrating on the festival are skillfully rendered and a welcome departure in style and scope within Canadian poetics.