Disposable Adult Emergency Raincoat, Jaime Forsythe
and Stuart Ross
Proper Tales Press, 2026
I’m always curious at the ongoing relationship Cobourg, Ontario writer, editor and publisher Stuart Ross has with the collaboration-as-form, having worked multiple collaborative poetry and fiction projects over the years, both through book-length and chapbook-length projects (and chapbook-length excerpts of works that haven’t yet seen book publication), including (but not limited to) The Pig Sleeps (with Vancouver poet Mark Laba; Contra Mundo Books, 1991), The Mud Game (with Gary Barwin; Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 1995) and 70 Kippers: The Dagmar Poems (with Ottawa poet Michael Dennis; Cobourg ON: Proper Tales Press, 2020), not to mention the collection of short poem collaborations composed with twenty-nine individual collaborators in In Our Days in Vaudeville (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2013).
I mean, I know Gary Barwin has been working a number of collaborations lately (including one with Elee Kraljii Gardiner), so there certainly have been others. A shortlist of other recent collaborative poetry works by Canadian writers would include: Christine Stewart and David Dowker’s Virtualis: topologies of the unreal (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013); Douglas Barbour and Sheila M. Murphy’s Continuations (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2006) and Continuations 2 (University of Alberta Press, 2012); Stephen Cain and Jay MillAr’s Double Helix (The Mercury Press, 2006); Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s Sybil Unrest (Vancouver BC: LineBooks, 2008; New Star Books, 2013), Oana Avasilichioaei and Erin Mouré’s Expeditions of a Chimaera (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009); Gary Barwin and Derek Beaulieu’s Frogments from the Frag Pool (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2005), Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts’ The Obvious Flap (BookThug, 2011), and Gary Barwin, Craig Conley and Hugh Thomas’ Franzlations: the Imaginary Kafka Parables (Vancouver BC: New Star, 2011); Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler’s apostrophe (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2006) and update (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010); George Bowering and Ryan Knighton’s Cars (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2001); Peter Norman and Stephen Brockwell’s chapbook-length sonnet-collaboration Wild Clover Honey and the Beehive: 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2004), as well as The Capilano Review’s “Collaborations” issue (3.4; Winter 2008). There’s Gary Barwin and Tom Prime’s A CEMETERY FOR HOLES (Gordon Hill Press, 2019) and Bird Arsonist (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2022); Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick’s PLEASURE BRISTLES (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2018); Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov’s DUCK EATS YEAST, QUACKS, EXPLODES; MAN LOSES EYE: A Poem (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2023). Collaborative duo MA│DE, “established 2018,” produced ZZOO (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025), with a second collaborative title forthcoming. And there are the chapbooks Sprawl: the time it took us to forget (Collusion Books, 2020) by Conyer Clayton and Manahil Bandukwala, and Leguminosae Delusion Athletics (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2021) by Andy Martrich and Nicole Raziya Fong. One could also mention derek beaulieu and Neil Hennessey’s TransCanada Research Team, various ongoing works by jwcurry, earlier works by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery’s Toronto Research Group, Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie’s sound-collaborations, and sound-poetry groups The Four Horsemen and Owen Sound, as well as an earlier collaboration between Stewart, Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang produced as The Barscheit Horse (Hamilton, ON: Berkeley Horse, 1993). When one produces such ridiculously-long lists, one might think the collaborative form should be taken a bit more seriously, certainly. As Ross wrote as part of the introduction to In Our Days in Vaudeville:
Collaboration has been
part of my practice since I was a little kid. My first collaborator was Mark
Laba, who lived in a triplex on the other end of Pannahill Road, where we both
grew up in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighbourhood. As children, Mark and I collaborated
on a cotton boll weevil cemetery; on drawings on sheets of cardboard we pulled
from our dads’ laundered shirts; on Man from U.N.C.L.E. scenarios in my
backyard that inevitably included us jumping repeatedly off the back porch into
the grass.
In the experimental high school we
both attended—the Alternative and Independent Study Program (now Avondale
Alternative)—we began our literary collaborations. Inspired by Joe Rosenblatt,
bill bissett and the Four Horsemen, we began creating sound poetry together. At
sixteen, in the mid-1970s, we were doing readings at our school, and downtown
at the Axeltree Coffee House in Trinity Church. We also wrote stories together,
on yellow foolscap fed through a manual typewriter. A decade later, in the
computer era, or maybe it was just the electric-typewriter era, Mark and I
wrote a novel together, The Pig Sleeps. Broadly speaking, I provided
plot and Mark provided the most bizarre similes in the history of Canadian
literature.
The latest of Ross’ collaborative projects to land in print is the book-length assemblage Disposable Adult Emergency Raincoat (Cobourg ON: Proper Tales Press, 2026), composed with Halifax poet Jaime Forsythe, a work that holds this note as post-script:
Disposable Adult Emergency Raincoat began as a way for us—living a few provinces apart—to keep in touch. We met in Kingston in 2010, became great friends, and went our separate ways the next year. The poem grew in starts and stops over a decade—some very long stops—with each of us alternatively adding a single line, a stanza, or a page at a time. We never discussed where the poem was going, except to eventually decide when it had ended.
A curious voice emerged, and this poem developed a mind of its own, falling somewhere between our wildly different respective styles: surreal, absurd, questioning, sincere, alarming. This Raincoat zigzags, jumps, and frolics in its sudden swerves, moving from soap bubbles playing pinochle to a town called Weevilville to a salted mountain. The result is a world that’s both impossible and just a beat out of step with the one we thought we knew: “It was different, but different from what?”
Ten years is a long stretch of time to sustain any kind of project, let alone one such as this, and certainly neither Ross nor Forsythe would or could be the same writer they were by the end that they’d been at the beginning. In 2010, for example, Forsythe hadn’t published a book yet, having since released three poetry titles, the first two directly edited by Stuart Ross: Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield Press, 2012), I Heard Something (Anvil Press, 2018) and Yield (Wolsak and Wynn, 2026). The scale of such a project, a decade’s attention of back-and-forth (despite whatever gaps of time), one might suspect, would provide a different sense of ongoingness across the whole stretch: not the short sprint, but an open-ended back-and-forth. A slow and steady accumulation, even as they offer, to open the sixth section: “Accrue. A crew. Ack-roo! / Gezunheit. / Heightened, the nose blew / clean across the prow / of a permanently moored home.” There’s something of the theatrical improve “yes, and” to the way these moments build upon each other, one step upon one step, playing off sound, texture, word-play and surreal narrative. Or the twelfth section, that begins: “Four is the number / stamped on my nose. / Roses are the way / we smell the thorns / A hen in the oven / makes the pig lament. / Lately, cloves don’t / burst when you / scatter them in the snow. / Grief is a night / that nudges the milk / out of the bowl / and into the fire.”
Set in twenty numbered poem-sections across less than seventy pages, each held as small clusters of lines and stanzas, the ongoingness is interesting to consider in parallel to Forsythe’s own solo titles, having evolved from two collections of shorter lyrics to a third collection, a single, extended, book-length poem. One might suggest this progression simply a matter of her own evolution in attention to the poem getting larger as she continued, albeit alongside a project seemingly running across the length and breadth of her time as a published writer (and it would be interesting, certainly, to hear how she might consider what this particular project may have provided her own solo work). As the opening poem in Disposable Adult Emergency Raincoat begins:
We hung the mittens on a
car antenna.
The milkman tried them
on, said
they reeked of residual
mailman.
The dog had been waiting
for a postcard
commanding her to sit. The
clouds were full
and the flags in the
yards frozen still.
Don’t Jump on the Floral
Clock
read a sign in Buddha
Boo-Teek.
We mostly avoided the Buddha
Boo-Teek.
All deities seventy-five
per cent off
their rockers. Sitting on
benches,
new-fangled nurses
clasped their hands.
rob mclennan has a new chapbook out this month, and another that came out a couple of years ago (but the publisher forgot to mention or mail until now), but that's cool. His latest poetry collection is edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). His prior collection, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), recently won the 2026 Archibald Lampman Award.
