Chris Johnson : KINAUVUNGA?, by Aedan Corey and Hold Steady My Vision, by Emily Laurent Henderson

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

 

Chris Johnson : some sentences about some of the raccoon poems

 

 

 

“The writer must speak (somehow and always) to the contemporary moment.”
      —    Geoffrey Nilson, “The Poetic Body in Architectural Space”

 

 

April is National Poetry Month. A Wikipedia list tells me it’s also Arab American Heritage Month, Jazz Appreciation Month, National Pet Month (in the UK), and Sexual Assault Awareness Month, among others. In Canada, specifically, April has lots of National Days and Observances, including World Autism Awareness Day, Tartan Day, Vimy Ridge Day, World Book and Copyright Day, Holocaust Memorial Day, and Journey to Freedom Day, which I had never heard of until doing this little bit of research for a preambulatory paragraph to a write-up on a chapbook that has little-to-nothing to do with any of these special days. Well, in 2019, a fledgling friendship with another poet, Ashley Hynd, lead to ranting about how distracted we both were and how we hadn’t been able to write as much as we would like. So, logically, during April we both agreed to write a poem every day and pop them into a shared Google Drive folder to hold each other accountable. To up the risk (and reward, potentially) my partner in this month-long project proposed that for every day that we missed writing a poem we’d owe the other person two poems—and this was on top of the poem we had to write for the next day. We forced each other to write poetry—lots of poetry—in April 2019. Turns out the accountability of this grueling practice was more helpful than harmful, and we have kept it up in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It has become our own little month-long observance. Turns out that when you engage with poetry every day for a month, your writing actually benefits from that sustained engagement. (Who knew?)

That first year of attempting to write a poem every day, I composed multiple poems in which raccoons made appearances. This didn’t come out of nowhere. As a child, my favourite stuffed animal was a raccoon I named Ricky. Perhaps because of the stuffed animal, my favourite song by The Beatles was “Rocky Raccoon.” Growing up in Toronto—the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples—also meant growing up amongst a large and ridiculously behaved urban population of raccoons, getting into the trash or getting struck and killed by drivers of motor vehicles on highways. Fast-forward a few years, the virality of Toronto’s and Ottawa’s raccoons in the news brought about a new admiration of the procyonid’s antics. Raccoons were and are always just around, and I decided it was time that they were around in more of my poetry.

To be honest, the raccoon poems were a joke. I was trying to find connections to other works that mentioned raccoons, but largely I thought the poems were just amusing. At an event near the end of 2019 that rob mclennan was hosting at his favourite hole, The Carleton Tavern, I debuted a bunch of raccoon poems. The positive response I received in front of a small audience in that beautifully crappy bar motivated me to keep working on the poems, and at the end of 2020 I received a small grant from the City of Ottawa for this project. Fast-forward to the end of August 2022 when rob emailed me with the subject line “hey old man,” as many of his emails are headed, and ended with an off-the-cuff question: “oh, and are we ever doing a second chapbook?” (My first above/ground chapbook, Gravenhurst, was published in 2019.) It’s a privilege to have someone in your local poetry community who makes a point of asking you about your writing, and even more of a privilege when that person is willing to print your work, staple it together, and mail it to hundreds (thousands?) of readers around the world.

some of the raccoon poems is many things beyond a chapbook of poems that feature appearances by raccoons. These poems live in the intersection of nature poetry, confessional poetry, and political/social commentary. Many poems take inspiration from other poets and artists in content, form, or style. Of course Ashley Hynd’s poetry makes an appearance, as does some of my favourite writers from Ottawa’s poetry community. A Bill Callahan song slips in, and so does a poem I discovered through The New Yorker Poetry Podcast. Oh, and the title rips off an Artie Gold collection: some of the cat poems (CrossCountry Press, 1978). Beyond poetic influences, this chapbook is also a snapshot of who I am at this moment, communicated though lines and references that are a sum total of my experiences. That’s how I speak to the contemporary moment in my writing: naming who I am reading and talking to, who I am collaborating with, listening to, learning from, growing with. We’re all a part of a community with shared resources and holidays and communal spaces, and we’re building up that community when we acknowledge the people or places that brought us to where we are. We’re past the age of the lone genius. Let’s start mythmaking a world of collaboration, reconciliation, and respect.

 

 

P.S. It seems only fitting to add an end note here thanking Manahil Bandukwala and nina jane drystek for help editing this essay/note/preface/thing.

 

 

 

 

Chris Johnson (he/they) is a settler poet from Scarborough currently living on unceded Algonquin Anishinabe territory. He is the Managing Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, a board member at the Ottawa Arts Council, and a member of the creative collective VII.

Author photo credit: Nicolai Gregory

Emily Izsak, Adam Clay, émilie kneifel, Chris Johnson + Natalee Caple : virtual reading series #4

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Emily Izsak : from Never Have I Ever (“Been Drunk,” “Split a Sundae with Frank O’Hara,” and “Cried Over Mini-Golf”)

Emily Izsak is the author of Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem (Signature Editions, 2017), Twenty Five (above/ground press, 2018) and Stickup (shuffaloff/Eternal Network, 2015). Her work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Puritan, House Organ, Cough, CV2, The Doris, and The Hart House Review. In 2014 she was selected as PEN Canada’s New Voices Award nominee. Emily currently writes clickbait so she can afford rent in Toronto. She also married a doctor, so that helps.

Adam Clay : “Only Child (III)”

Adam Clay is the author of To Make Room for the Sea (Milkweed Editions, 2020), Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016), A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, Boston Review, jubilat, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. He is editor-in-chief of Mississippi Review, a co-editor of Typo Magazine, and a Book Review Editor for Kenyon Review. He directs the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

émilie kneifel : “grocery story” previously published in Lighthouse Journal, “<3” previously published in Unbroken

émilie kneifel is a sick fish, goo fish, they fish, blue fish (critic, poet, editor, and co-creator of playd8s, a show for you if you need it). find 'em at emiliekneifel.com, @emiliekneifel, and in Tiohtiáke, hopping and hoping

Chris Johnson : “Social Media” (battleaxe press broadside, 2016), “Without Discrimination” from Phyllis, I have never spoke your name (In/Words Press, 2013)

Chris Johnson is the Managing Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine. He currently lives in Ottawa, which is located on unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe Nation. His recent chapbooks include Listen, Partisan! (Frog Hollow Press, 2016) and Gravenhurst (above/ground press, 2019). @ceeeejohnson

Natalee Caple : “So Far”

Natalee Caple is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction. Her work has been nominated for the KM Hunter Award, the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the ReLit Award and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Her latest novel, In Calamity’s Wake, was published in Canada by HarperCollins and in the US by Bloomsbury. The novel in translation was published by Boréal and has been sold separately for publication in France. Her latest book of poetry, Love in the Chthulucene (Cthulhucene) is published by Wolsak and Wynn. Natalee is an associate professor at Brock University.