Jamie Kitts : on Gridlock Lit

 

 

 

Thursday, February 8, 2024: I’m reading at Fredericton’s vegan art-throb Abbey Café & Gallery for the Word Feast Literary Festival’s Poetry Bash. I’m flanked by two absolute giants of the game: Fawn Parker, who’s having an absolutely killer career year with Soft Inheritance and Hi, It’s Me, and Spencer Folkins, longtime if-you-know-you-know young guardian of the New Brunswick poetic tradition. With our emcee Jennifer Houle, we pack the Abbey’s gorgeously cozy performance space with patrons and powerful poems.

At this event I’m on tremendous painkillers after spending two weeks in a Montreal convalescence home recovering from surgery. By all rights I should not be performing right now because buddy that wound is fresh and there’s still a catheter tucked in my jeans, but it makes me feel like a fucking unstoppable badass. I don’t think I’ll ever yell my protest poems with that same exact energy again.

Spencer and I are in a workshop group called the Egg Poets. My first chapbook, Girl Dinner, was about to come out with Ian LeTourneau’s Emergency Flash Mob Press. Fellow Egg Poet Ambrose Albert’s new chap mal à l’aise had just come out with Anstruther Press, who also published Emma Rhodes’ Razor Burn and void vida clark-nason’s liquid birth. The only one in the group who hadn’t been published in a collected form yet was Spencer. But I knew he had a collection in him. I’d been editing his work for three years. So in the middle of my Word Feast set I took a second to gas up our supergroup and mildly threaten Spencer. “I know you’ve got 12 good poems motherfucker, start submitting manuscripts or I’ll publish you myself!”

I’d already been publishing chapbooks through Qwerty Magazine. When I took on a co-managing editor position in 2022, I decided to expand our production schedule to include two chapbooks a year through the Homerow Chapbook Series. But I was running into a problem: too many cool projects, not enough space to work on them. Homerow started as a way to get back to Qwerty’s roots of being by grad students for grad students, and I wanted to keep it that way as much as possible. But there were all these professional doors opening for me and no space to act on them in Qwerty’s capacity. So I said, fuck it, I’ll just make my own micro press!

Both Gridlock Lit and the Homerow series were born from a need to honor folding publications. I started developing the Homerow series for Qwerty when I heard Frog Hollow Press was closing. The idea to call my micro press Gridlock came from Grid City Magazine, which closed just last year. Grid City was an arts & culture mag covering all the cool shows going on in Fredericton. Fredericton is my hometown and New Brunswick is in my blood — I love this place with everything I have. My mom worked for Goose Lane and they published my dad’s first books. Both my parents were patrons of the arts scene, emceeing Harvest Jazz & Blues Fest shows and Frye Fest events. The New Brunswick Book Awards’ Alice Kitts Prize is named after my grandmother. I wanted Fredericton to be core to the press’s identity, so when I heard the guy running Grid City was ready to move on, so I thought the name Gridlock would be a nice tribute. Plus the word gridlock’s a crass in-joke but you’re not getting that explanation here.

 So fast forward to Poetry Weekend 2024. I’ve decided I’m going to start Gridlock Lit, and because I have no chill, I’m doing it at the same time that I’m graduating from my Master’s, starting my PhD, launching my own first chapbook, curating the next issue of Qwerty, and wrapping-up work on editing a best-of anthology. Spencer shows up on the first day of Poetry Weekend and hands Ian LeTourneau, Jim Johnstone, and myself manilla envelopes. I already know I’m going to say yes but I still read each poem in the package and think about them as a collection. I make the announcement during my set: Gridlock Lit’s first release will be Spencer Folkins’ debut solo chapbook.

As for the other envelopes, well, you’ll just have to keep an eye out. I think you’ll be seeing more Spencer Folkins poems pretty soon.

 

 

 

 

Jamie Kitts (she/her) is the Managing Editor of Qwerty Magazine and the Editor-in-Chief of Gridlock Lit. She is the author of Girl Dinner (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2024), co-author of All Things to Keep You Here (w/Egg Poets, Qwerty Homerow, 2023) and the editor of Qwerty Crystal: The Best of Qwerty Magazine—Part I, 1996-2010 (Qwerty Magazine, 2024). She is also a poet and a PhD student living on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik People.

Kim Fahner : Gay Girl Prayers, by Emily Austin

Gay Girl Prayers, Emily Austin
Brick Books, 2024

 

 

 

Emily Austin offers her debut collection of poems, Gay Girl Prayers, as a series of subverted prayers and biblical stories, upending things to spin them inside out from a queer, feminist perspective. In “Deuteronomy 32:18 & John 6:35,” the flip of gender is purposeful, and presented early in the collection, as the poet writes: “You were created in the image of God--/man and woman, God created you/so, man and woman God must be.” In “Words of Consecration,” she writes: “Don’t take this, any of you, and eat it—/this is her body.//Don’t take this, any of you, and drink it—/this is her blood, which pumps for its own ends.” Catholics, active and lapsed, will recognize the phrases as part of the Mass, when the priest blesses the host before communion.

The poem that sets the tone for the book is “Genesis 37,” conjuring witchy wisdom in its lines: “Shall we resurrect, strange women?/Rise like steam, like birds from a subway station?/Defy the convention of the proverbs?/Write with our fingers?/I am.” The best way to do this, as Austin demonstrates, is to upend seminal Catholic prayers and memorized mantras. Readers will see this in poems like “The Virgin Jeff,” which begins “Hail Jeff,/blessed are thou among men,” and in “Hey Mamma,” which begins: “Hey Mama/who art in a lesbian bar,/hallowed be thy yearning” and ends with “Lead us not into bigoted churches,/deliver us from conservative politicians.” The second last poem in Gay Girl Prayers is “Joy to the World,” which subverts the Christmas hymn of the same name and reappropriates it from a queer perspective: “Do you hear what I hear?/Heaven and Nature are singing/they’re drag queens/they’re harmonizing/queer joy to the world/while two men slow dance.”

Austin’s quick, dry wit is evident throughout her poems as she uses her voice to highlight and expose the injustices that have been done by the Catholic church to women since the beginning of time. She uses the architecture of biblical verses and parts of the Mass, but then repopulates the traditional religious language with poetry that empowers girls and women. As a queer poet, Austin alludes to feminist, queer, and trans women, raising a rallying call that challenges the oppressive and patriarchal dogma of the church by forcing it to look to itself to discover and recognize its own sins.

A number of poems that refer to the infamous vestal virgins thread themselves through the collection, offering the reader places to land and gathering pieces of the collection together. “Matthew 25:1” is: “Heaven is ten girls/who take their lamps/to one another’s bed chambers/to light their rooms/until they sleep,” and then “Matthew 25:2” follows a bit later with “Heaven is ten girls/who take their lamps/to one another’s bed chambers/to read lesbian erotica/and make out.” The sequencing of the successive Matthew poems continues, and the subversion intensifies along the way. This series of poems is a bit reminiscent of a series of Russian nesting dolls, in many ways, and often left me wanting to skip ahead curiously to the next poem in the sequence to see how the image and symbolism would remake itself over and over again in a new and innovative way.

Austin’s wit is quick, acerbic, and pointed to specifically splice the various patriarchal and colonial organizations that would oppress women. In “Matthew 1:18,” she writes: “If you are ever forced to conceive of anything,/by a condom or a government that fails you,/by a Tinder date who ghosts you,/by God, your father, or by some unholy spirit,/let it be that you are important and good, like Mary/but with more choice.” In “At Calvary,” a poem about being oneself, about coming out in the midst of a non-supportive family, the speaker says: “She’ll climb on her cross at Easter dinner/while her homophobic uncle serves sour wine,” and “She’ll say, “Mom, they know what they’re doing,” alluding to the crucifixion. In this re-writing and re-imagining, the story takes a resurrective turn, so that the speaker will “rise from her chair,/contemplate going through hell to forgive them,/ascend to the room she prepared for herself,/and find peace in the miracle of her life.” Here is a poem that speaks of stepping into self, of speaking up clearly, and of reclaiming truth and identity in opposition to any organizational structure that is oppressive and misogynistic.

What Emily Austin does in Gay Girl Prayers is brilliantly clever as she revises traditional pieces of prayer that were fashioned by an archaic religious structure and turns them on their heads, transforming them into hymns of resilience and celebration for queer, feminist, and trans women. The result is a grouping of poems that will make you laugh out loud as you read, but also make you well aware of the careful poetic crafting of artful subversion that’s taking place in front of you on the page. Gay Girl Prayers fashions a new kind of poetic dogma that speaks of struggle, survival, empowerment, self-love, and of feminist solidarity in a way that is inclusive and spirited.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her newest book, a novel, is The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024). Her next book of poems, The Pollination Field, will be published by Turnstone Press in 2025. She recently won first place for her CNF essay, "What You Carry," in The Ampersand Review's 2024 essay contest. As well, Kim was named as a finalist for the 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She may be reached via her website at http://www.kimfahner.com

Catriona Strang : on What If I Sang “Flower of Scotland”?

 

 

 

 

“Hoots mon! Whar’s me heid?” What If I Sang “Flower of Scotland”? is in some ways a personal project, interweaving language from three strands of research: Scottish history, rugby writing, and Scottish women’s material culture. I am a first-generation settler of almost entirely Scottish descent, and my very Scottish upbringing was steeped in rugby and its values; my father played and refereed the game and one of my brothers played at the international level – and recently a niece has taken it up.

Rugby evolved during the nineteenth century and was shaped by industrial demands – under pressure from factory owners, it was reduced from a multi-day collective communal event to a ninety-minute spectacle between skilled players for audience consumption.  Later employed during war to “improve moral” and foster “leadership” and “team spirit,” the game offers a rich vein for a study of violence, its containment and commodification, and its deployment by forces of empire.

I am a devotee of the fibre arts and a descendant of women who might well have used the cooking and fibre-arts objects I find preserved in Scottish archives, and my text prioritizes women typically occluded in the historical record. So just as my use of rugby language gestures to my paternal heritage, my weaving together of three disparate strands of research mirrors and honours the techniques practiced by my foremothers.

The text’s structure will echo that of a rugby match – divided into two halves, with pre- and post-game commentary as well as “shouted” interjections from the “crowd,” drawn from my research into Scottish resistance and rebellion.

 

 

 

 

Catriona Strang is a first-generation settler of primarily Scottish heritage who lives on stolen xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands. Her most recent publication is Unfuckable Lardass (Talonbooks, 2022). She is the author of five other books of poetry, several written in collaboration with the late Nancy Shaw, whose selected works, The Gorge, she edited (Talonbooks, 2017).