I frequently think of Joanne Epp and Angeline Schellenberg in the same thought, and both had books out during the pandemic. Joanne's second collection, Cattail Skyline (Turnstone Press, 2021), deeply considers place, both what we know and see and what we can't. In "What we don't know about winter," she asks, "If we stood on the shoreline now,/ what shapes would pass overhead" (99). Angeline's collection Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020) dives into the prairies and her family's history. Anchored by her grandparents' immigration story and poems based in their love letters to one another, Schellenberg precisely charts one iteration of what it means to make a place home.
Prairie Fire's Fall 2020 issue is anchored by Living in a House on Fire, edited by Sheri Benning. In her poem "Forest Fringe," Winnipeg writer Jess Woolford lovingly visits "all that remains/ since brush cutters/ cut through countryside." Her elegiac commemoration of the Parker Wetlands, the"life - way[s] lost" to is interrupted sharply by the "patter practised/ pitched progress!" It's a sharp cut, mimicking the brush cutters, and ending so abruptly that the progress side of the equation can never balance what it consumes.
The first two titles in Model Press's current series are Nathan Dueck's Brecht/Cage, a mesostic that essays to work out the aesthetic connections between Bertolt Brecht and John Cage, and ryan fitzpatrick's Local Pleasures, a collection that wrestles with various disconnections in a way that seems uniquely apt in this now. The next chapbook, out the first week in October, is my long poem, poseidon's cove/ athena's cave. It charts a family rupture and sets out the stakes and motifs of an in-progress lyric fugue that centres on two sisters and their decades-long estrangement.
September's Tree Reading Series (Artistic Director Brandon Wint) featured Winnipeg poet and lawyer Chimwemwe Undi and Toronto poet, Natalie Wee. Both writers' poems celebrated the relational in all its complexities. Undi's epithalamia and Wee's last two pandemic poems were stand outs in extraordinary readings. The open mike was dynamic, featuring Jane Shi, Natasha Ramoutar, and Jessica Robinson, among other poets, who each read one poem. The next Tree Reading will be held online the third Tuesday in October.
The Winnipeg International Writers Festival is running a hybrid program this year. In-person events will be held at McNally Robinson and video will be archived at thinairfestival.ca until October 18th. On their website, pre-recorded readings by the festival authors are also available. Notably, on September 30th, Louise Bernice Halfe - Skydancer and Dallas Hunt will be performing.
I can't keep up with all i'd like to read, but books and journals that are recently out or forthcoming that i'm looking forward to are Kristian Enright's second collection Postmodern Weather Report (Turnstone Press, 2021), Begin by Telling by Meg Remy (Book*Hug, 2021), Issue 2 of +doc: a journal of longer poems (null pointer press), and with/ holding by Chantal Gibson (Caitlin Press, 2021).
