KINAUVUNGA?, Aedan Corey
Publication Studio Guelph,
2024
Hold Steady My Vision, Emily Laurent Henderson
Publication Studio Guelph,
2024
Although they’ve been around since 2009, the Publication Studio network might be flying under the radar even for the most attentive small press aficionados in Canada. Publication Studio isn’t a traditional publisher by any means, but instead a network of artists and creatives who are interested in publishing original books on-demand, creating something unique and individual for each author. Originally starting in Portland, Oregon, there are now eleven Publication Studio partner locations including three in Canada: in Vancouver, Edmonton, and Guelph. The studio location in Guelph (stylized as PS Guelph) was initiated in 2013 by a charitable foundation for the arts, Musagetes, which has a mission of promoting the arts as a means for social transformation. This foundation’s mission has informed all of the releases by PS Guelph. One of Musagetes’ programs is Indigenous Otherwise, curated by Elwood Jimmy and primarily engaging Indigenous artists whose practices are mindful of the Earth and all living species that inhabit our planet. The support of this program aided in PS Guelph’s publication of Taqralik Partridge’s debut book of poetry in 2020, and Partridge returned to the studio to curate and edit two new poetry collections for PS Guelph in 2024. Aedan Corey’s KINAUVUNGA? and Emily Laurent Henderson’s Hold Steady My Vision are compelling contributions of Inuit and Inuk voices to the world’s Indigenous literature, as well as beautiful book objects from PS Guelph.
The good things about
Aedan Corey’s and Emily Laurent Henderson’s books from PS Guelph are multiple,
and many of those good things can be applied to the books as art objects. Both
books are almost pocket size, slightly smaller than the standard 5.5” by 8”
dimensions of many poetry books. Corey’s cover is a full-colour version of an
illustration that is also included inside their book, and Henderson’s cover is
purple cardstock with a stamped illustration and text of the book’s title. The
back covers aren’t adorned with any blurbs or barcodes, just the embossed logo
for PS Guelph. These details contribute to an aesthetic enjoyment of these
books before a reader will even engage with the writers’ poems, which are just
as expertly typeset as the books are made. It’s always a pleasure when a
publisher understands that putting care into a book’s design can elevate a
reading experience, not distracting from but contributing to the enjoyment of
engaging with the text.
It might be contradictory to qualify the reading of poems
(or any writing) on difficult subjects as enjoyable, but engaging with art
about hard truths can help soften the impact. Aedan Corey’s rewarding poetry is
straightforwardly lyrical, brief and effective, exploring topics of family,
identity, and grief. The title of the collection, KINAUVUNGA?,
translates to “Who am I?” as per a glossary at the back of the book. Despite
the title’s question about identity, Corey’s poems don’t seem uncertain, but
rather mournful of the culture that the author has lost in the colonization of
Turtle Island, as demonstrated in “throat singing” when the poet-speaker
laments the loss of the their people’s songs: “Now my throat is raw / at the
thought / and the world is quiet / without our words.” This collection laments
many of the ways that the colonial project has utterly failed Indigenous
communities, including the rural and urban Indigenous populations facing homelessness,
a lack of clean drinking water, unfair treatment by the judicial system, and
various other hardships. The longest poem in the collection is “atausiq,” which
appears in the middle of the collection. It is effective in presenting a
sampling of the collection, including a repeated refrain of italicized words
that translates to “one / two / three / four / five.” The counting in this poem
is echoed in the speaker’s exhaustion by keeping count of their siblings,
cousins, and friends that they’ve lost to suicide. These messages stick with
the reader, even though there are moments of levity in the book. At the end, it
is inevitable that Corey’s goal is to build community in their poetry.
Community in Emily Laurent Henderson’s Hold Steady My Vision appears as roots and woven threads. This Kalaaleq (Greenlandic Inuk) and Settler writer’s debut poetry collection is also similar to KINAUVUNGA? thematically in its exploration of grief, love, and identity. The image of a thread plays double duty as it can fray to represent the poet-speaker’s lost connection to the land of their cultural roots: “Have you ever heard the fraying of the word home,” opens the poem “Belonging and unbelonging” near the beginning of the collection, where maps are first mentioned in connection to an ambiguous and omnipresent feeling of displacement. The poem ends by naming this complex feeling of disconnection for the poet: “for home is a fraught migration / and I am already there.” Moments of certainty are almost immediately cut off and questioned, as with the appearance of a missing mapbook in a later poem: “There is no mapbook / for the chapstick and the way you will search / and heal” (“In absence of a rite of passage, I spend my 20s in the city”). The mention of an endless search for chapstick provides an example of Henderson’s humour in the collection, and the small details that personalize and make these intimate poems relatable. With all of the poems titles appearing after the poems, there is new context or a different reading one can bring to the poem after discovering the title below the poem’s last line. Perhaps this too is meant to contribute to the book’s beautifully crafted sense of place and displacement.
For the amount that these poets’ small and intimate lyrics communicate anger and grief and love and longing, the poems easily leave an open-hearted reader full and comforted. Corey and Henderson’s collections are filled with a variety of emotions, tough subjects and difficult truths, but the poems are also accessible and welcoming. These are both poets exploring their Indigenous identities and the way their existence is political in 2024. The Indigenous Voices Awards’s 10th anniversary will have just passed by the time this review is posted, and KINAUVUNGA? is a finalist selected by the esteemed jury in the “Published Poetry” category. This review is being written before the awards are announced, so the outcome is to be determined. It would be beautiful, however, for this landmark year of the IVAs to also be one in which they recognize the talent of a singular poet like Aedan Corey. Regardless, I hope that the recognition of even being shortlisted means PS Guelph gets a little more attention. After the strength of Aedan Corey’s KINAUVUNGA? and Emily Laurent Henderson’s Hold Steady My Vision it will be interesting to see what books PS Guelph puts out next.
Chris Johnson (he/him) currently lives on unceded,
unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. His latest
chapbook is 320 lines of poetry (counting blank lines) (Anstruther
Press, 2023).
photo credit: Curtis Perry
