rob mclennan : 2025 Trillium Book Award shortlist interviews: Jake Byrne

DADDY, Jake Byrne
Brick Books, 2024
2025 Trillium Book Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2025 Trillium Book Awards will be announced on June 18, 2025.

Jake Byrne is the author of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) and DADDY (Brick Books, 2024). In 2019, they won CV2’s Foster Prize for poetry. They live in Toronto/tka:ronto.

Much as your first collection, DADDY seems very much constructed as a book-length project. Do you see your books-to-date, or your writing more broadly, in terms of projects? How do manuscripts get built?

I think books in Canada are more likely to thrive in the ‘project’ format primarily because the provincial and federal granting systems, which keep the ecosystem running, reward applications – and therefore books – that have a clearly defined narrative project. It is the same way that grant applications for books that are, say, two-thirds finished already are more likely to succeed, if only because the author can describe their project with that much more specificity and clarity near the finish line versus from the starting line.

If you look at books published in the U.S., there are fewer ‘project’ books, and books tend to be eclectic compilations of very polished (arguably very safe) work, because the competition is so intense that it is contest juries that shape what gets published down there.

But this is a long way to say that I still think it depends on the book.

You describe DADDY as a book-length project like my first book, but from my perspective, Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin had a concept but no actual project until the second last round of editing, when it finally came together. I hated that book until two months before publication because I felt it did not live up to the idea I had for it, which was vague and ill-defined until the last minute.

To me, Celebrate Pride is a more classical ‘first book’ in that there are a bunch of poems in there that were not written for the book – tons of poems I wrote for school that I no longer liked but didn’t want to throw out either, formal experiments, trying on other writers’ voices, using personae, characters, all sorts of games and tricks.

DADDY was written as a project, and the project was to finally start writing poems about my relationship with my dad – poems about my other two parents followed shortly thereafter, and then the second half came as a joyful consequence out of the self-discovery I was doing in the first half. (There’s actually a third section that got cut because the book ballooned, and I wanted to keep this one lean. As lean as a maximalist can manage, anyway.)

I didn’t really think my story was worth telling, but I had been taught to think that my childhood was normal or even good, and I have since realized it was not.

The first poem in the book – “Parallel Volumes” – describes the thought process and genesis of the entire book. I felt I had been protecting my family by not writing about them. Readers can smell insincerity, though. The words don’t connect when you’ve filtered them through several layers of abstraction. Then I realized if I didn’t tell this story I was going to, on some level or another, die. Probably not literally, but there was going to be a big betrayal of my soul there, and that was not going to be good for me or my art.

That said, I listened to a few concept albums at a critical point in my teenage years, and that kind of ensured I’ll be doing the concept album thing forever, for better or worse.

What a long way to say it depends! But it’s true. The job of the artist is to figure out how to build the idiomatic better mousetrap, and the finished product will probably look like a mousetrap even if the internal process that led there was very different.

Curious. I’ve long considered the book as cohesive unit to be an extension, partly, of the west coast poetics (the Talonbooks/Coach House axis) of the long poem across the 1960s and 70s. I recall a complaint by one of them during that period, George Bowering, perhaps, of Irving Layton poetry books, how they were all completely the same: once enough poems in the pile, it became a book, and then onto the next pile. Through all of that, is your preference, then, to compose poems as they come, and worry about the shape of how they might fit into a full-length manuscript once you’ve enough to consider?

Well, I'm about to out myself as a dunce, but I have virtually zero education in the Talonbooks/Coach House axis of the 1960s and 1970s; my long poem comes from the Modernists.

More to read, I suppose. And yes – poems as they come, and the structure to fit them into after. I think poetry must have a somewhat spontaneous element to its composition.

If I were capable of writing book-length projects as planned and sequentially, I’d be a novelist – there’s more money in it.

I came to this art form mostly because my undiagnosed ADHD made it difficult to stick to the disciplines that required many hours of consistent practice. Poetry you still practice, but over long periods of spontaneous composition. There is a finite number of poems you can write in a day – and that number is three.

Oh, hardly a dunce: I think each of our different experiences through reading provides us different elements of information, including what to read and even how to read. Your answer made me wonder if I’m too often too comfortable within a set of held facts (new information to reframe and reshape is the key, I suppose). And we’ve spoken before about ADHD, and our different avenues there, also. Do you find a difficulty with completing projects, or even working on one project at a time?

Absolutely to both. The last 10-20% of any project is the worst for me, and I always have about four book ideas on the back burner.

People with ADHD are said to abandon things once they get past the point of proficiency, when there isn't the immediate feedback of ‘difficulty’ to keep the brain engaged.

And as a testament to that, I have about 70 video games in my collection played to the two-thirds mark and then cheerfully abandoned.

This is less cheerful a phenomenon when applied to vocations or relationships.

I think writers with ADHD should focus their thoughts on publishing during the last third of working any manuscript, to be aware that that the true difficulty of any writing project, in fact, might lay elsewhere. Given that, what loose strands have you been focusing on since DADDY was completed? And might that excised “third section” of DADDY ever see the light of day?

I hate to report this, but I have done zero literary work since editing DADDY. Zero grant applications. Haven’t even attempted to fix my busted literary website. Maybe wrote thirty poems in the last two years.

Life has been all maintenance work: resting, meditating, couples counseling/therapy, physiotherapy. Boring, necessary things. I'm proud of DADDY but publishing it came with a pretty serious cost to my family relationships.

That third section will be published eventually, but it’s about a – corniness warning – “spiritual journey,” and it feels a bit presumptive to publish on that subject.

It might be a while before I publish another book. I dunno. Ask me again in two years.

It sounds as though you are doing exactly what you need to be doing, and that’s a good thing. We can’t get to anything else until that stuff is properly covered. And thirty poems across two years is a lot for some writers, so I think you’re still fine. Separately, and this might seem like a foolish question, but has the Trillium nomination added or changed any of how you see the book, or your work generally?

I wouldn’t say it has changed it, but it’s definitely provided a little spark of hope. It’s silly – I want my practice to be immune to prize culture, but my ego is obviously not. The external validation is helpful, especially in light of my family estrangement. And it’s always humbling to be recognized by your peers.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Oh, and a newchapbook is out now via Ethel Zine (but you already know that). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

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

rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Manahil Bandukwala

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. She is the co-creator of Reth aur Reghistan, a multidisciplinary project exploring folklore from Pakistan through poetry, sculpture, and community arts. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

Manahil Bandukwala reads in Ottawa on Thursday, November 28, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest.

rob mclennan: When did you first start writing?

Manahil Bandukwala: In some ways, ever since I can remember. But more seriously, around my first/second year as an undergraduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa. I formed strong writing connections, both within the English department and in Ottawa’s poetry community. This helped me improve my craft, publish my work in journals and magazines and such—leading to now, with my second poetry collection, Heliotropia, out with Brick Books. 

rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?

MB: My early work was modelled on what I was reading and hearing at open mics. I think, like many people, my impressions of poetry revolved around Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and generally this very white, British, masculine space. I’m fortunate that I arrived to poetry at a time when the big Canadian poets include ones like Dionne Brand, and on a local level, the wealth of poetry we have here in Ottawa. Writing involved trial and error, figuring out what my poetic “voice” was, and understanding what I wanted my work to look like as a recent immigrant teen (at the time) threading an in-between space of Pakistan and Canada. 

rm: How did that, as you call it, “in-between space” begin to make itself known in your work? What were you attempting to articulate from or even through that particular space?

MB: Back then, a sense of loneliness, confusion, and rupture. Almost a decade on from that time, I’m more grounded in where I write from, although my work certainly is still interested in liminal spaces. The geographies, locations, and imagery that appears across my poetry tends to fall back towards this theme, whether through the presence of ghosts/spirits, spacetime, or a feeling of uncertainty. 

rm: Had you any models for that kind of work? Between then and now, what writers or works have provided examples of those kinds of explorations?

MB: My MA at UWaterloo really modelled that, especially through courses I did with Professors Veronica Austen and Mariam Pirbhai. I studied ghostliness and haunting in the South Asian Canadian literary imagination. So the work of Farzana Doctor, Soraya Peerbaye, and Shani Mootoo has always been influential. From a poetry side, lots of South Asian and Arab writers like Sheniz Janmohamed, Sanna Wani, Natasha Ramoutar, and natalie hanna, to name a few. I especially appreciate work that isn’t like my own, as that’s where I learn about poetic forms, styles, and voice. I love that poetry is always changing, always in a state of growth.

rm: Do you think you have influences that anyone familiar with your writing might be surprised by?

MB: This is a really good question...and has stumped me. I’m certain there are surprising influences. I asked my partner, Liam Burke, for help with this question, and he said what appears in my writing feels like a natural extension of the influences of my life—but he’s also familiar with the plethora of writing influences. I do remember with MONUMENT, including a poem about the video game Animal Crossing was surprising. I’m sure there’s similar in Heliotropia, and I have to say, I’m keen to find out what that surprise is!

rm: You mention moving to Ottawa for your undergrad: what was the experience of first encountering writers in the city? Were there any particular writers or exchanges that shifted your thinking around writing?

MB: It was intimidating, partly because I was eighteen and meeting published writers for the first time. Probably every conversation has shifted my thinking about writing in some way. Recently, I spoke with Dave Currie about how, almost a decade ago, he came to my first-year English class to talk about writing, and careers you can have with an English degree. And now, recently, we’ve been speaking about poetry submissions, compiling manuscripts, and more. Lots of music/sound-focused writers, like Liam Burke, nina jane drystek, and Conyer Clayton have helped me think about the sonic qualities of poetry. Poets like Sandra Ridley, natalie hanna, and Christine McNair helped me think about manuscripts more conceptually, and how to thoughtfully think through the overarching flow of a collection.

rm: I know you published a handful of chapbooks prior to the release of your full-length debut. How did you get from individual poems to chapbook-length manuscripts? Did your approach shift through attempting to cohere poems together within the boundaries of a chapbook? What did you see as the result of publishing chapbooks?

MB: All sort of by accident. My very first chapbook was just me realizing I had enough poems to fit a chapbook-length manuscript. More recent chapbooks have been more intentional in making, but that is also in part because these have been collaborative projects—you have to define the parameters when you’re working with another person. Publishing chapbooks really helped me with poem sequences—I have two 20ish page poems in Heliotropia. It was an understanding of long poems, a surprising realization that I could write them, and an insight into how to edit a poem that spans multiple pages.

rm: Your first full-length collection, MONUMENT, is very much constructed as a single unit. What were the origins of this particular work? How did it begin?

MB: When I started MONUMENT, it was meant to be a single poem that sought to highlight obscured Mughal women in history. As I researched, I found out more, and the poem became longer and longer. I had just started publishing chapbooks then, and thought the poem could be a chapbook. But then it outgrew that length too. Really what solidified the poem into a collection was submitting Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grants, and receiving a very kind note from Alayna Munce at Brick Books, saying the press was interested in seeing the full-length collection.

In my second year of university, I took a poetry workshop with Amal El-Mohtar, where she talked to us about long poems. I was amazed to learn that poems could go on for pages and pages—and then that’s exactly what I did.

rm: I’m curious about how MONUMENT developed, being so specifically project-based. Had you a shape in mind for the collection, or did it shape itself more organically.

MB: It’s difficult to find a shape for a project you’re so closely entangled with—this is where outside eyes come into play. A lot of the shaping happened in my editorial process, with Cecily Nicholson, who advised me on how the manuscript could come together more cohesively. I also swapped manuscripts with my friend Sanna Wani, who suggested a lot of the order of the book as it exists now. So the ideas were there, but the flow of the poems from one to the other took many hands. 

rm: With the amount of writing and publishing you’d done prior to the appearance of your full-length debut, were there poems you had to set aside in the process of putting together manuscripts? If so, might these pieces fall into another project down the road, or are they, at this point, too far behind you?

MB: When putting together Heliotropia’s manuscript, I took out a number of poems that weren’t quite the right fit. I thought they might go in another manuscript, but truthfully during editing realized that the deleted poems were simply repeats of themes that had already been explored in much stronger ways in the actual book. So no, these pieces likely won’t appear in another project down the road.

There was one poem, written as a point-and-click adventure game, that I took out of Heliotropia, that will probably appear in a collaborative manuscript I’m (theoretically) working on with Liam Burke, but that will appear more as form rather than the same content.

rm: You’ve been exploring collaboration for some time. What do you feel collaboration allows in your work that might not otherwise be possible? And do you approach collaboration differently with each different collaborator?

MB: Collaboration gets me out of my head and into a process that is both more intuitive and more methodological. I have existing relationships with the people I collaborate with, whether that’s a sibling or friend or partner. Having a prior connection is what really allows for the collaboration to flourish, as we have knowledge of each other’s artistic practices, and trust in the creation. Sometimes we know what the end product will look like, other times it’s a matter of playing and finding out together. But I learn so much about my own practice, and in turn my solo work changes and becomes stronger. 

rm: You’ve published two chapbooks so far as part of the collaborative group vii. How did the group come together, and how does a collaboration between so many individuals manage and maintain such a coherence? Has the group anything currently in the works, or plans for further publications ahead?

MB: In 2020, during the first lockdown, Helen Robertson messaged a few of us asking if we’d be interested in collaborating on an exquisite corpse poem. We all knew each other prior, but this was the first time really working together to create something. We edited a lot after writing to bring a coherent voice to our poems, but embracing the chaos was also part of the final poems. Truthfully, our last chapbook, Holy Disorder of Being, was the last time we really did collaborative writing. As lockdowns lifted and we got back to our “normal lives,” we didn’t have time in the same way to write together, even asynchronously. But our group chat is always buzzing. We meet up, show up for each other’s events, and provide feedback on work. And we haven’t put aside the idea of working on more poems together—if only to find the time!

rm: Tell me about Reth aur Reghistan. How did that begin?

MB: From a place of play, and of realizing that stories from Pakistani folklore weren’t easily accessible in English in North America. The title means “sand and desert,” and speaks to the geographical landscape of the province of Sindh, where Karachi is located. It’s a project started in collaboration with my sister, Nimra, when both of us were coming up as artists in our respective fields. Going back to the question on collaboration, I think that sense of playing together has always been a part of my life, and so naturally extends to being a part of my practice.

Actually seeing the project through has been something else entirely. We took it slow, applying for grants to make it happen piece by piece. And really, there were a lot of people who believed in us, in the importance of sharing cultural stories, and the fun of interdisciplinary arts practices.

rm: Beyond obvious elements of subject matter, how do you feel this new collection, Heliotropia, is different from MONUMENT? Do you see your work moving towards a particular as-yet-distant point, or are you working purely from poem to poem, manuscript to manuscript?

MB: The quality of the poetry is better, more lyrical. Although there are quite a few long poems in Heliotropia, the individual pieces, for the most part, stand on their own. Although in editing with Sonnet, we did discuss an overall “arc,” so there is a sense of almost science fiction and futurism as you get into the last section of the book.

In terms of the movement of my work, I can never tell where it’s going until I’m past it. I realize my published works are often in the form of projects, but I don’t really set out to undertake a project until I’m well into it. Oftentimes a project takes shape because I’m writing a grant application, for example.

Right now I’m working short story to short story, a project that blossomed into a manuscript as I realized my pieces circled a similar set of themes. And these stories do continue from the themes explored in Heliotropia in a way. They’re speculative, introducing elements of magic into the real world. I approach writing fiction the same way I do poetry, with just writing and letting the story elements figure themselves out along the way.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan [knitted hat by Dawn Macdonald] currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

Kim Fahner : Optic Nerve, by Matthew Hollett

Optic Nerve, Matthew Hollett
Brick Books, 2023

 

 

 

St. John’s poet, Matthew Hollett, comes at this debut collection as a poet, walker, and photographer. Funny, how so many of us (as poets) are of a similar ilk. It makes sense because poets see the world differently, taking note of specific details and transforming those particularities into poems. An image—seen through either human eyes or a camera lens—becomes a line and morphs into a stanza and, before you know it, the poem is there on the page. In “Cloudlarking,” the speaker notes that they are “halfway up Duckworth when the guillotine/gives way, veering mercifully east, a dull blade of vapour/scraping razor-burnt sky. It macerates and sinks/billows over the Narrows like a burial shroud.” Later in the poem, the speaker meets another photographer who “nods at the clouds and says: It’s something to work with.”

Further in Optic Nerve, poems like “Prisoner’s Camera,” “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees,” “Portable Keyhole,” “The Observable Universe,” and “Suomi Snowball” are populated by images of cameras, tools that create mirrors of what the speaker sees with the naked eye, and then those images are translated and transformed into new ways of seeing. Nothing is as it seems, and everything seems to suggest that the reader should be more observant in their daily life. The notion here is that perception and perspective can alter if you look more closely at things that you usually might too often take for granted.

Newfoundland itself becomes a presence and character in this collection, and the wind and rain make quick work of slicing through several poems. For those who know St. John’s, there are many references to well-known places. In “Wind in St. John’s,” the reader is reminded that “the wind in St. John’s snorts saltwater/in the parking lot by Cabot Tower before cannonballing/down Signal Hill Road as if it’s spotted its house/on fire from afar.” Those who have attempted to hike the North Head Trail (whether they’ve been successful or not!) will recognize the way in which the weather can turn on a dime and become fierce, when “the waves are unfurling/and the wind curls around the Battery Hotel/and the shadows of clouds are cartwheeling/down the side of Signal Hill.” And, in “View of the Narrows,” Hollett writes in a painterly fashion of how “the horizon is roughed in/with a paint roller” and how the “hills on the south side of the harbour” are “just floating there, without the clothespin/of a tiny stone tower.” All of Hollett’s poems are visual and some are ekphrastic, as well. 

Go further afield, away from town, and find poems like “Coriolis Borealis,” where the speaker warns the reader not to get lost in the woods. A forest, after all, is a bit like “an aurora of revolving doors, every spruce or fir is/a celestial body that wants you in its orbit. For the first/twenty-four hours, you’d be wise to stay put.” In “Walking on Moss,” which is inspired by collaged fragments from Audubon’s Labrador Journal of 1833, a sailor goes ashore with the captain for exercise, seeing only “A velvet growth of vegetation/that would astound any European garden,/yet not a cubic foot of soil!” Here, the sailor notes, is a wide expanse of land that encompasses just: “Granite, granite, granite,/moss, moss, moss, and nothing but granite and moss/of thousands of species.” In “Somewhere Near Hodderville,” observing the capelin rolling leads the poet to describe the event as “a group/of knackered pocketknives heaved up/on a beach, gleaming and googly-eyed,/each twerking…as if…they can’t quite/believe this is the end of it, twitching/turning to flip-flopping turning to/thrashing themselves breathless.” These are ordinary occurrences that are common to Newfoundland’s shores, but less so for those of us who live inland. What Hollett does, in so skillfully evoking landscape—water and land, even as they are marinated in rain and wind at times—is showcase how a poet observes (as Mary Oliver often said) the natural world around them and makes poetry of it.

Optic Nerve is a beautifully crafted debut collection. As a reader, you’re left feeling as if you should be thinking more clearly about how you are in the world, and about how you take note of what you see, hear, and feel. Mindful observation by way of walking—as well as witnessing and documenting life’s events and patterns through the lens of both human eye and camera—is Hollett’s centre point. In his poetic documentation, he calls his readers to take part in a similar fashion. Hollet suggests that what we see is just the beginning of things, and if we look carefully enough—underneath surfaces, even—the world will open itself to us poetically.    

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for 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. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

rob mclennan : Baby Book, by Amy Ching-Yan Lam

Baby Book, Amy Ching-Yan Lam
Brick Books, 2023

 

 

 

The latest from Tkaronto/Toronto-based artist and writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam, author of the speculative fiction Looty Goes to Heaven (Birmingham UK: Eastside Projects, 2022) is the full-length poetry debut Baby Book (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2023). Ching-Yan Lam utilizes a compelling meditative structure to her stretched out narratives, where the point of each poem is suggested to be in one direction, if any, instead sneaking up from another. Offering poems that open large questions around story and storytelling, she speaks of stories told, poured and passed down in their tellings and retellings. Is a story retold and remade a matter of regeneration or one of loss? She writes of family, including elements of continuity, displacement and origins, and how language can be mangled, misunderstood and manipulated. Her stories appear to meander, until one realizes that every step, every sentence and phrase, was highly deliberate, and provided the only logical journey towards a remarkably clear, precise and complex portrait. “In the beginning, the ground was the milk of beans,” she writes, to open the poem “LAND MADE OF FOOD,” “until it was boiled and squeezed into tofu. // Then hot sauce shot up from below and filled up the seas. // Rocks appeared—peanuts. // Then trees / with leaves and roasted nori / and trucks of nougat. // When it rains, it rains perogies.”

She writes of belief, and how such beliefs, such as with any other story, can be turned, confused and reworked, whether deliberately or across time, as well as how such stories can shift beyond the borders between cultures. “This week I am learning about the truth of expression.” she writes, as part of the sequence “ENGLISH ACCENT,” “My teacher says that if you smile, even when you are feeling sad, / you can still receive some of the benefits of being happy. / Even if you are simply smiling while sad. / He says that shame is similarly a physiological reaction. / It exists in your body and you can get rid of it with a physical / action.”

I hesitate to call these pieces prose poems, although they are poems structured in a form of narrative prose; her extended sequences exist from the bones and flesh of the narrative sentence, many of which collude to form prose blocks, but not always, and not necessarily. It is through the order she places her sentences that provide her narratives their power. As the six-page extended piece “ENGLISH ACCENT,” a poem that moves through navigating a series of narratives foreign to one’s own, ends:

Decades of no apologies or fake ones.

Decades of art about war.

Art that is fluent, rhetorically successful.

A beautiful carved wooden box.

That which blocks the truth is physical.

It’s a hot, stuck feeling in the body.

It’s a heavy heat. It’s a heavy box.

The physical remains physical.

The physical can be moved.

The physical can be destroyed.

When destroyed, it doesn’t disappear.

But it can be moved.

There is something curious as to how this book-length exploration on the connections and disconnections of family and family stories echo further other titles that Brick has produced since the publisher/editorial shift a few years back, a particular thread of titles that would include Andrea Actis’ Grey All Over (2021), David Bradford’s Griffin Prize-shortlisted Dream of No One but Myself (2021) and Nanci Lee’s Hsin (2022). Each of these, in their own way, as well, offer book-length explorations through new and unusual structures, allowing the shapes of the poems to provide startlingly fresh perspectives on the otherwise-familiar complications of family, cultural collisions and the disappearance of stories. Offering a tale of her grandmother and the slow release of family stories through “WE PRAY BEFORE DINNER,” Ching-Yan Lam writes:

I know why you’re asking me so many questions.
Why?! I said.
She said, Because you want to make a movie of my life!

Oh, I said.

Other facts have been told to me in the same way.

The other day in Chinatown:
A woman with white hair, in soft flowered pants, let out a big
loud sigh.

She leaned herself against a fire hydrant.
She lowered her plastic shopping bags to the ground.
She said, Aiya, so painful!
I went over and asked if she needed help.
She said, No, it’s OK, I’d rather walk.
She said, Do you know what the doctor told me?
The doctor said the only option is to chop the leg right off. Yes,
that’s what the Western doctor said. And my daughter told me,
If you chop it off I’m not going to push your wheelchair for you.
I said, Oh my god.
Your daughter said that?! I asked.
She said, Yes. this is the way human life is.
Then our conversation ended.

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com