FEATURING:

ANXIETY
ed. Mikhail Iossel & John Goldbach
Pasha Malla
Myna Wallin
Josip Novakkovich
Malcolm Sutton
Amy Jackson
Claire Tucker
Thomas Burke
Jeff Parker
Paul Edmund Lessard
Danielle LaFrance
Mike Steves

COLUMNS:
Billy Fong Parade by Ian Orti
Milo & Sam by Joe Ollmann & Andy Brown
The Self-Esteem Workout by David McGimpsey
Alienated by Darren Wershler-Henry
Movie Mythos by Taien Ng-Chan
End Game by Rebecca Rosen

REVIEWS:
feria: a poempark by Oana Avasilichioaei
The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada by Robert Bringhurst
Noise from the Laundry by Weyman Chan
The Tablecloth Trick by Rick Crilly
The Steve Machine by Mike Hoolboom
Marrying Hungary by Linda Leith
Noble Gas, Penny Black by David O’Meara
The Sentinel by A.F. Moritz
The Invisibility Exhibit by Sachiko Murikami
Aide-Mémoire by Ruth Roach Pierson
is/was by Jenny Sampirisi
More to Keep Us Warm by Jacob Scheier

Read by Andy Brown

This is the flagship title of the new Atkins Library, a series of books about books published by CCSP Press, the brick and mortar arm of the respected SFU publishing school. So right away I am intrigued. A subject I can believe in. And the icing on the cake is that it is done by Robert Bringhurst, best known for his seminal The Elements of Typographic Style (1992), but also known as an accomplished poet and writer. Bringhurst brings his typographic eye to books by John Newlove, P.K. Page, Marshall McLuhan, Leonard Cohen, Jan Zwicky, Lisa Robertson, and of course their respective designers, with lush full colour reproductions of artwork and page layout.

Sometimes the image of the spread open book is centered spine to spine so there is a visual trick of looking at two books at once. But Bringhurst isn’t about visual tricks, his appetites are sober, classical, richly researched, and as such there is a bias toward the letterpress aesthetic: type heavy, second spot colours, woodcuts (by such luminaries as Frank Newfeld). In the back is an appendix of all the Alcuin Design Award winners. The same publishers come up again and again.

It’s great to see book page layouts in the format of a glossy art monograph. Ghost pages, stitched spines, watermarks. Some of these pages have enlarged microscope-shaped images to highlight the font choice, for which Bringhurst provides detailed notes. What is also great is the recognition of early Native language books, dictionaries of lost languages, documents of an oral culture. Bringhurst gives more than a passing nod to these publications and should be commended for it.

A fantastic debut from a quality new press.

Read by Keith Waterfield

Linda Leith’s most recent book, Marrying Hungary, is an autobiography of her marriage and subsequent divorce to a Hungarian refugee. The preface describes her very sweet relationship with ex-husband Andy and the times they shared together. She writes from a place of comfort and understanding, (unusual, at least among the divorced people I’ve known). Leith writes that her acceptance of this change in her life would not have been possible without her many experiences as an “outsider.” Born in Northern Ireland to Communist parents, Leith has lived in London, Basel, Brussels, Paris and Budapest, and has always worked hard at making the transition to new territory and new experiences.

This struggle is detailed throughout the book, as the story of her marriage and divorce is not complete without the story of her and her family’s lives. Leith understands that any one moment of life is attributed to everything else that has occurred prior. She outlines the struggles with her family and the harsh relationship with a father whom she both adored and feared; her obsession with literary classics (which was the precursor to her writing novels, editing magazines and founding festivals) and her attraction to Hungary (influenced by My Fair Lady); her 30 years plus marriage to her husband and the birth of their three sons.

What Leith has achieved is a book that is more than just an examination of a marriage’s success and failure. It is the autobiography of a writer and the kinds of changes that writers go through in a lifetime. It is a story about families and cultures which are so different from each other yet relatable and similar in terms of emotion. In Leith there is a constant need to question the idea of “home.” Is home a geographical location, an emotional connection, or a persona illusion? It is all and none for Leith, who is always forced to stand in at least two places at once:

I am a lifelong outsider, and my world consists of places that are both mine and not mine.

Leith focuses on the theme of  the outsider — that preoccupation of so many literary greats — and draws the reader into an intimacy; she leaves nothing to be guessed. I was, in short, enthralled by Leith’s narration as she travels from childhood to her present  with great style that seems to come easily to this talented writer.

Read by Drew Halfnight

In The Steve Machine, the debut novel by Toronto video artist Mike Hoolboom, the reader encounters less a plot than a series of reckonings, less a novel than a video collage of memories, dreams and impressions.

After learning he is HIV-positive, Auden hauls anchor and moves to Toronto, an obscure purgatory of all-night doughnut cafes, hospital waiting rooms and featureless studio apartments. Once there he meets real-life video artist Steve Reinke, who helps him build a machine (read: write a book) that will record and process his new life with the virus.

An ethereal, fleeting presence, Reinke serves as Auden’s companion and alter ego. In meditations on Reinke’s videos and ideas, the aesthetic propositions underpinning The Steve Machine are given full play:

Steve lived inside the books he encountered; he threw himself between the covers knowing that soon there would be no one left to read them. Oh sure, someone would always be able to pick up a book and go through the motions, twitching over miles of letters all lined up in a row like a firing squad. But to really read a book was to feel it as an echo of all the books written before it.

And later:

Personality was only an imperfect collection of memories, and now that art had set itself the task of leaving personality behind, we would pass in and out of one another like so many interchangeable parts. Like a machine.

There is little action to speak of in The Steve Machine, but what does occur – an orgy, some office work, bouts of vomiting – unfolds like a most inconsequential dream. The real action is the steady circulation of pathogens in Auden’s blood.

At points, Hoolboom’s prose is alternatively underdeveloped and overworked, though the same could be said of the prose in most first novels.

Other times, it punches the lights out: “The room swelled up with every breath and then shrank down to the size of a shot-glass.”

At the end of the novel, Hoolboom permits a gust of humanity to blow through his hero’s otherwise cold, detached narration. In a night club, Auden gushes:

I looked down in horror to see that my foot was also keeping time with the beat while my pulse raced with an emotion that could only be named as joy. Ohmigod. I was enjoying this.

After so much morbid exposition, the book’s sudden bright ending stings the eyes. Still, the effect is warming enough.

Read by Hermonie Xie

Rick Crilly’s The Tablecloth Trick is ninety pages of prose, footnotes, and endnotes; it is a collage made of hard facts and unusual images, which together serve to tell a tale of a vulnerable young man, who is this story’s unnamed narrator. His timid sincerity draws our sympathy from the beginning:

“I was born premature (4 pounds, 5 ounces) with a two inch tail appended to my spine.”

The narrator, born colourblind and a Roman Catholic, is a peculiar fellow who spends the majority of his childhood in the Winnipeg Centennial Library, reading and dissecting books with Caroline, his friend and willing accomplice. We learn that he loves Caroline, but she doesn’t love him back. As the story progresses, Caroline notably becomes the center of gravity to the narrator’s universe; her relationship to him is the glue that holds his story together as a cohesive whole.

To read The Tablecloth Trick is to engage in an extensive game of guesswork, where each fact unearthed opens to any number of interpretations. Crilly is an unconventional storyteller who likes to present hybrid ideas, coupling trivia torn straight from wikipedia with a toss of descriptions to paint abstract images that tickle the mind:

I left the meeting early and emerged into a dark, overcast night — St. Peter’s Apocalypse I jokingly told myself — “flesh devouring worms so many in number as to form a colossal black cloud.”

While his tale progresses in a chronological fashion — more or less — the storyline moves in an erratic manner. The narrator’s mind often flits from one idea to another, pulling parallels between yeast and heaven, astronauts and Caroline’s boyfriends. Flashbacks and memories are hung like loose strings waiting to be assembled into a coherent bundle of meaning. The resulting compilation is, at its best, stunning; with sparse-lined compositions of seemingly unrelated facts singing to life emotions of great profundity, e.g.,

There was a big oak in Caroline’s backyard called the Cancer Tree, because no matter what her father did to it, it kept growing into infinity.

At its worst, the narration is like disorientation in a way that distracts rather than entrances. Despite such faults, The Tablecloth Trick succeeds most remarkably in making readers empathize with its roundest central anonymous character whose tenacity both frustrates and endears. This book is neither a safe nor easy read. But it is a book that has much to offer.

Read by Jesse Patrick Ferguson

Noble Gas, Penny Black is the third collection from a poet known for craft and scrupulous revision. Few of O’Meara’s readers are likely to complain about his limited output, however, because his poems achieve an easy grace that belies much authorial attention. Such polish can result in a collection of little derring-do, of few risks, but O’Meara’s humour and casual tone — conveyed, for instance, in the disarming title “Japan was Weird” — tend to lighten things up and invite the reader in.

The collection’s title offers an oblique entry into O’Meara’s pet themes — home, love, and travel. Noble gases are slow to react, are stubborn and “chemically lonely,” and many of O’Meara’s poems, such as “Arriving Early,” capture the dialectic of loneliness: “down off the bus, puzzled, alone, rattling your doorknob, / pacing the lanes… Poor slob” and the miracle of love. When the lonely noble gas unexpectedly reacts with another element (a lover, in O’Meara’s poems), the resulting attachment is precious. The dialectic, however, is never fully resolved; love is tenuous, as in the poem “First”: “[I] was scared that in the interlude / you’d vanish, or were never really there.”

Yet the second half of the title — penny black, the first viable adhesive postage stamp — cues us to the need to enter into the experiences of life without hesitation, a shift signified by the stamp’s demand of prepayment, instead of payment on delivery. As the poem “The Postal Museum” informs us, we must remain open to life’s bittersweet flux: “There’s a sudden thought; the street / turns. A door opens like memory.”

Amid the nuts and bolts of rhythm, rhyme and sound, O’Meara proves himself a deft mechanic. He unobtrusively deploys internal, slant and full rhyme, adding a measure of dignity to otherwise domestic material in such poems as “I Used to Live Around Here”, he sculpts a soundscape through alliteration and other phonic devices, delivering some musical lines: “marks on next year’s calendar / as the ploughs scrape skeins / of snow toward the buried curb” (“Sick Day”); and, with few exceptions (notably the sequence “The Old Story,” which contains flat passages and clichés: “said love’s never assured,” “prepared for the hurt”), his poems hold up their end of the author-reader compact. Noble Gas, Penny Black gives evidence of a fruitfully divided sensibility.

Read by Karis Shearer

Oana Avasilichioaei’s second collection of poems, feria: a poempark, is a sophisticated exploration of history, geography, language, and textuality in the phenomenological or proprioceptive tradition of Robert Kroetsch’s The Ledger and Daphne Marlatt and Robert Minden’s Steveston — both of which Avasilichioaei cites as influences in the book’s bibliography.   Like the latter two volumes, feria: a poempark concerns itself with the complex and sometimes fraught histories of a local space (in this case, Hastings Park, Vancouver), which the poet delves into by treating Hastings Park as a palimpsest whose many layers include George Black’s 1869 slaughterhouse and hotel, the Pacific National Exibition grounds, the Japanese-Canadian internment memorial gardens, an Italian garden, and a racetrack, among others. This process of excavation is enacted poetically in a section titled “Spirit of the West!” in which Avasilichioaei creates new texts through the partial erasure of older documents relating to the park’s official and unofficial histories from 1910 through to 1973 — including the minutes of PNE annual meetings, The Vancouver Daily News, a letter from Muriel Fujiwara Kitagawa (an interned Nisei) to her brother Wesley, and the Bulletin of the Vancouver Exhibition Association:

culture in all its phases                  will

Be     major imp                        ,

the Board of Control   at    attention

of our provincial          act…

What is particularly remarkable about this volume, however, is the way in which Avasilichioaei makes the book’s material textuality one of her subjects: aspects of the traditional book become matter for poetry: “In the building of a book / there are techniques / one must learn / to keep the wolves out” and, in the process, the boundaries between poem and park are frequently collapsed: “For one brief moment no boundary was a boundary,” as the compound word from the volume’s title, “poempark,” suggests. Refusing a single point of origin (“origin is unoriginal”), the first fourteen pages (a poem called “Prologue”) are unpaginated, while its table of contents presents itself as a poem called “some streams.” In the Olsonian line of open form poetics,

the book opens and questions

leaves imprints

in the wet grass

The lovely pun on “leaves” here is characteristic of the larger linguistic playfulness of this book; “leaves” is potentially both a verb (the book leaves imprints in the grass), or one of two nouns (leaves of a tree or leaves / pages of the book). Similarly, a later poem, “Momiji Garden,” frequently deploys the same word as both noun and verb: “writing / the letter of needs / animals the animal” and “artery of the palm / faces the palm’s face.”

Published by Wolsak and Wynn, feria: a poempark was printed by The Coach House Printing Company on Zephyr Antique Laid paper with green flyleaves; it is thus not only an aesthetically gorgeous reading experience, but one in which those who appreciate the tactile experience of reading will revel.

Read by Carrie Schmidt

I learned a harsh literary lesson when I was fifteen years old: never read the introduction until the actual story has been read. That was how Lord of the Flies was ruined for me — the ending was revealed in those first few pages of the introduction. is/was does not have an introduction, but the plot description on the back of the book reveals details better left discovered within the story, especially as the entire style of the book is the slow, deadly reveal.

And now, a new lesson to mutter to myself: do not read the backs of books, judge books solely by their cover. Fortunately, reading the descriptive summary on the back of is/was did not ruin the story entirely, but it did dampen the brutal, disturbing magic of this strange book and it’s exploration of loss. is/was is a dark and disturbing first novel, thick with sexual malevolence and unease.

Sampirisi has created an unsettled, murky atmosphere; physical descriptions of people or locations are stark, exacting, morbid; but narrative facts remain wholly or partially hidden. This deliberate narrative confusion is extremely effective at contributing to the overall tone of something-is-festering-and-all-is-not-well. A young girl, Abigail Wren, has gone missing in a small community, but there is more here than just the loss of a young life. Loss hovers over the entire community, but the novel focuses on one specific family dealing with their own private – or not-so-private – losses, at the same time as the larger community is dealing with the loss of a child.

is/was opens with a visceral, almost nauseating description of the mother/wife’s post-surgery pain, as she attempts the once-easy task of descending a flight of stairs. The portrayal of intense physical pain sets the tone for the entire novel — there is much suffering and loss to be witnessed within this family.
The novel’s structure is unique in that the “chapters” are incredibly short — some a few words, others a few pages. The shorter sections are small bursts of staccato poetry, and it takes a little while to realize they are telling another part of the story, the facts of the case of the missing little girl. These odd poetics turn into harsh facts, and are grim, unsettling reminders of multiple forms of emotional and physical loss — what is, and what was.

Jacob Scheier
More to Keep Us Warm (ECW Press, 2007)

Sachiko Murakami
The Invisibility Exhibit (TalonBooks, 2008)

A.F. Moritz
The Sentinel (Anansi, 2008)

Weyman Chan
Noise From The Laundry (TalonBooks, 2008)

Read by Holly Luhning

There’s been no shortage of discussion about the GG nominees and winners recently. While the controversy surrounding the poetry category this year has provoked a plethora of blog rants, this review aims to focus on the work of the five nominees. 

As the back cover blurbs suggest, More to Keep Us Warm addresses “the toughest of subjects,” such as God, religion, love, hate, relationships, illness, poetry, with an almost-earnest, sometimes-meandering, narrative voice. Scheier repeats the words love, god, hate, poetry frequently throughout the collection. At times, his longer poems use these touchstones in an innovative, intelligent manner; at others, the poetry spins in a too-pedantic circle. In poems such as “Red Diaspora,” “Tricking into Suicide,” and “North America,” Scheier combines a just-loose enough narrative voice with sharp irony to create original, surprising poetry. For example, in “North America,” he strings together Jerry Springer, fatherhood, Buddhism, hair conditioner, Hare Kristnas, vegetarian restaurants in Prague, Jesus, and Toronto at a quick clip, but manages to make the disparate connect. Speaking of Hare Kristnas, Scheier writes:

I didn’t want to tell them
I like my hair and turtlenecks too much
To ever be one of them.

But then again,

I guess I wouldn’t “need” conditioner.
Jesus didn’t use it
And he turned out okay.

Often, Scheier’s narrative approach leaves space for the poems to find their way to a rare, wry sensibility. However, there are times when this strategy falls short.  In “Stuff” Scheier includes a manifesto on love that borders on abstract and glib:

But I don’t hate them —
god and love.
I’ve heard they are the same thing.
This is so absurd , it might be true.
I respect that
as much as I hate
that love requires an equal amount of respect and loathing.
Why am I having trouble getting laid recently?

Some of Scheier’s shorter, more lyric poems are among the most successful work in this collection. In “That Night,” Scheier speaks of relationships, choices, and time elegantly; the speaker insists “We are past that now, / quickly approaching the beginning, / the invisible rip in your summer dress.”

Throughout More to Keep us Warm, Scheier engages with the speaker’s relationship to Judaism and poetry, sometimes separately, but often in combination. He creates an engaging discussion, but there are some confusing, though potentially challenging moments. In “Kaddish for 1956” Scheier begins by musing on Ginsberg, “Howl,” America, New York, and Baraka, but moves the poem towards a musing on the relationship between the speaker’s poetry and CanLit, saying “Though I could use a latté, before I get started, before I deliver / the first blow to CanLit sensibility.” He follows this sentiment with “Fuck, I’m not contemporary enough for publication. I’m too narrative, too personal. Or, I should just tell CanLit to go / fuck yourself with your regional aesthetics.” Interestingly, Scheier doesn’t reference CanLit, or any Canadian writers (with the exception of Di Brandt) in the rest of the collection. While Scheier likely isn’t alone in having this sort of frustration gaining publication, I wonder if he might have been able to follow through on this discussion with a more subtle, or sophisticated manner. Overall, More to Keep Us Warm tackles some big issues: religion, gender relations, death, love, hate, and takes some poetic risks while doing it. The results range between the sparkling and the absurd.

A.F. Moritz’s The Sentinel, like Scheier’s collection, addresses some large-scale subjects, such as love, the body, and spirituality. Moritz’s language is beautifully wrought, precise and hypnotic. Poems such as “Hospital,” “Place,” and “Cassandra” among others epitomize poetic fluidity and grace. Moritz employs a canny sense of metaphor; he uses the device often sparingly, but with great effect. In “Nostalgia,” the speaker repeats, gently, of his/her reckoning with a crossroads:

And then: the corner. Why
Did I wake there, at that crossway with its closed
and faintly glowing store, and a few faces,
a smile, a serious look, in the café window?

Moritz also has a talent for looking at abandoned minuate of everyday life. In “The Jar,” the speaker uses an old, store-bought glass jar as the root image for a poem that branches into considerations about domestic space, personal histories, and possible futures. Moritz also weaves pieces about the natural world with poems about the urban and the domestic. Moritz closes the collection with “The Sun,” a poem that considers the cycle of life and death brought about by “My sun” which the speaker “see[s] your colour fall / again on everything on earth.” Overall, Moritz deftly explores philosophical questions with well-crafted, smooth language.

The Invisibility Exhibit marks the absent, humanizes the statistics. Murakami’s collection revolves around the realities and myths of missing women in Vancouver’s East Side; the poet focuses on “the girl, a folded unit,” (“News Development”) and on the wake their absences create, both for the people they have left behind and the legal and media systems which process and re-tell the disappearances. Murakami’s poetry is tense, vibrant, and exceptionally crafted.

The first section of the book frequently employs the second voice, addressing and involving the reader directly. In “Exhibit A (Boxes)” the speaker instructs the reader to “Leave the box beneath the tree. Leave parents to their cruelty. / For dinner, try pasta, try fury, try feeding after fray. / Try a split lip. Try Exhibit A.” Murakami connects the quotidian with the violent; she repeatedly illustrates the two are close bedfellows. In “Restrictions” the speaker explains “we are well-heeled we / are posted we have no trouble invoking a royal tone” but ends the poem warning “all these rights to language we have and enact / not knowing how easily we could choke.” Malice and violence do not make exception for women who have privilege or voice; Murakami’s “well-heeled” women are less, but still susceptible to the same violence that assumedly claimed the women listed in “Portrait of Sonnet as Missing Woman.”

Murakami references fairy tales, modern and traditional, throughout the collection. The poems graphically shatter the gloss and happy-endings of such tales, illustrating not only the limited, objectified roles women play in these narratives, but also how the objectification of women, taken to the extreme, results in a fractured perception of the female body. In “Allusion,” the poet writes:

Two girls walk in different stories
Towards two words
Of satisfaction and the crowd

That would catch the bouquet.
The carriage rolls up to the corner.
In it, the prince’s face, shadowed;
we see instead that shoe turned up
as evidence. What else?  The parts
that fit into other parts, unearthed
self, her bartered sex.

The collection skillfully navigates the paradox of revealing the extent of objectification of women in both forensic investigations and media reports, while humanizing and individualizing missing and deceased women.  In “We Were the Smallest Humans on Earth,” Murakami references the Bodyworlds 3 exhibit and questions how the exhibit displays female bodies. Bodyworlds aims to present bodies in a supposed anonymous fashion. The speaker wonders “If the women are bent by strangers to protect that which marks them female”; the poem concludes with the speaker moving to imagine “Then in parts that name her/our life become imagined / or snuck out on a cell phone” and asking “Can ____ be emptied of space and self and other?” Murakami’s poems challenge the generic with the specific, anonymity with the personal.

The final poem of the collection insists “What gentleness we must muster now, to lift DNA // from a microscopic edge, to protect / the whole of the woman contained there.” Murakami’s collection succeeds in embodying this gentleness, along with a startling poetic sensitivity and strength.

Ruth Roach Pierson’s Aide-Mémoire is a bold and honest retrospective of the speaker’s personal history; Pierson’s voice is strong and frank without straying into the sentimental. Pierson’s work is a risk; it is simultaneously personal and public, but the poet’s linguistic skill and subjective sensibility render gems of poems that chronicle not only one woman’s life, but a woman’s life contextualized and illuminated by the (modern) historical periods in which she has lived. In “A Distant Caw,” a poem set in the speaker’s early adult years, Pierson writes

You complained that I collect experiences
The way boys collect baseball cards.
And I did. Repose, an empty canvas
To be filled, still water to be stirred.

At times, Pierson speaks of places and times as much as the speaker’s personal experience. In “Jim Dine in Ludwigsburg” Pierson writes “Jim Dine / spurted to the top of New York’s art charts. // It was the 1960s, / the colours psychedelic.” Conversely, Pierson does not shy away from marking or defining a period of time through private experience. In “Thinking of a Former Student in Early Autumn” she recalls “we lied to you then / who lay frail against pillows, / wasted from within by cells run /amok, charting your future.” Pierson’s work is undoubtedly heartwrenching, but she never once strays to the arguably easy road of emotion evoked through sentimentality. Her work is bare, unabashed, and beautifully written.

Weyman Chan’s Noise From the Laundry negotiates ancestral history with lived experience. Chan charts bridges between the speaker’s understandings of new and old; he links China of a generation ago with Airdrie ranches and sprawling Calgary. In “children of the corn” Chan identifies both tension and strength in both geographical and generational differences. He writes “For too long, these hooks / called family these transfusions called daily grind / have coursed through like iodine.” Chan layers Chinese food, tastes, smells at first, seemingly over Western Canadian experience, but soon the distinction between “Chinese” and “Albertan” experience blurs, undermining categories of difference and challenging labels such as immigrant, native, home, away. In “goodbye to the foster parents” the speaker explores the merging of spatial and familial change; temporary situations flow into permanent settlements. The speaker explains “Now Dad’s come for me and my sister… / In his pocket is a photo of our new mother.” Chan writes:

Dad gets to left me up to the saddle.
His holding me is the same as Uncle Phil’s —
blanket-comforting safety.  But
who is he I’m taught he’s my Dad but tiny feet and bud-fingers
Don’t know where to hold.

In his negotiation of change, stasis, home, and identity, Chan makes the familiar strange and vice versa. In “spaceships” he moves the discussion of difference beyond earthly limitations of geographical and ethnic history. A boy and his brother watch a U.F.O.; the speaker realizes

that the aliens were at least a curious as we were,
only looking down at us from their spaceship windows
but not only looking down at us. They were deciding
on which snowy roof to land.

“Pick ours,” I whispered under my breath. “Pick ours.”

Chan celebrates this curiosity and presents the desire to connect with the new and different as a positive, universal drive. Noise From the Laundry broaches its subject matter in an original and frank manner with a lush, honest, and provocative narrative voice.