A Painful Homecoming: Quill & Quire on Robyn Sarah's My Shoes Are Killing Me + Tour Dates

Montreal poet Robyn Sarah's  latest, My Shoes Are Killing Me, is featured in the new 80th anniversary April issue of Quill & Quire, where reviewer Jason Wiens calls it a collection of "poems recollecting emotion in the (in)tranquility of boomer twilight."  Here's more: 

The title of Robyn Sarah's My Shoes Are Killing Me speaks to the nostalgia that her poems explore: if nostalgia literally means "painful homecoming," then the "shoes" - read as metonymy for the past of her life's journey - cause at times painful reflection on the rest of the voyage...the frame widens to include the broader public spaces of Sarah's Montreal, then extends this frame further to the global scale....the nostalgia encompasses memories of the Jewish diaspora alongside the motto of the poet's province: "a past continuous, a past as presence. Je me souviens. A motto you can make your own."  

Robyn Sarah will reading this spring along the 401 in Ontario as well as the East coast and Montreal. For a listing of upcoming dates, see below. 

April 20th - Montreal, @ The Word, w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 21st - Kingston @ Novel Idea w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 22nd - Toronto @ Dora Keogh w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 23rd - Hamilton @ Bryan Prince Bookseller w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 24th - Windsor @ Biblioasis  w/ Robert Melançon and TBA
May 19th - Halifax @ Halifax Public Library w/  Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane
May 20th - Lunenburg @ Lexicon Books w/  Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane
May 21st - Moncton @ Attic Owl Reading Series w/ Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane

Among the Quick: Sum by Zachariah Wells reviewed in Quill & Quire + Tour Dates

Zachariah Wells's third poetry collection Sum was on deck in the 80th anniversary April issue of Quill & Quire, and reviewer Jason Wiens calls Wells "a poet who delights in sound patterns—internal and end rhyme in particular." Here's more:

Highlights include "Squalid," which recalls "the dollars / squandered down urinal drains in bars / of dubious repute," and "The Parkinsonian Reflexologist," which mixes cliches to sometimes hilarious effect: "if you get caught fucking the dog / deny the devil his Scooby-Doo." "Magic Man," in its celebration of the retired Blue Jays player John McDonald, is a paen to the underdog, one "Consigned to ride pine for lack of thunder / in his bat." Appropriating Hopkins's "The Windhover," Wells traces the inscape of this infielder, "sensei of the second sack."

Wells will be presenting from Sum as part of IFOA's 7th Annual Battle of the Bards on Wednesday, March 25th @ 7:30PM. He will also be embarking on an Ontario and Montreal tour with Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon in late April, as well as an East Coast tour with Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane in May. For full listings, see the dates below.

April 20th - Montreal, @ The Word, w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 21st - Kingston @ Novel Idea w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 22nd - Toronto @ Dora Keogh w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 23rd - Hamilton @ Bryan Prince Bookseller w/ Robyn Sarah and Robert Melançon
April 24th - Windsor @ Biblioasis  w/ Robert Melançon and TBA
May 9th - PEI @ Confederation Center Public Library w/ M. Travis Lane
May 19th - Halifax @ Halifax Public Library w/  Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane
May 20th - Lunenburg @ Lexicon Books w/  Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane
May 21st - Moncton @ Attic Owl Reading Series w/ Robyn Sarah and M. Travis Lane

Suffering Fools Badly: Career Limiting Moves reviewed in The Rover

A wonderful review of Zachariah Wells's witty and engaging essay collection Career Limiting Moves by Brian Campbell in The Rover. Here's a taste:

As we progress through the Essays and Reviews section, we discover in Wells a thorough reader and masterful critic. Poets he takes down a notch with his trenchant pen include perennial favourites Don MacKay (“His poems are fun, smart, easy to like. But like a stranger you meet on a train, I don’t think much about them afterwards”), Anne Simpson (“a tourist in the realms of human misery and suffering”), and Patrick Lane (“singing the sadsack song of his self-image”). But in all cases, he does indicate strengths of said poets, although I think his assessment of Simpson could have been more balanced. Lengthy essays that take up the cause of unjustly neglected poets like Peter Van Toorn and Peter Sanger, as well as an award-winning piece on Bruce Taylor, are standouts. The poets’ work is quoted fully enough that we gain direct experience of what these poets are like.

Free Range Reading on Career Limiting Moves

Ultimately, I think Zach will continue to be a controversial figure in Canadian criticism, if for no other reason than he holds up the dual torches of cogency and honest appraisal, which makes him a target for those who value neither. Zach’s largest critics tend to be those who not only fail to match his chops on the great Scrabble board of book reviewing, but who have a vested interest in incoherent criticism itself. Indeed, some have built entire careers around it. But for the rest of us, a book like Career Limiting Moves reminds us about the strengths – and the dangers – of standing behind one’s opinions. Of being honest. Of being clear. And of loving a good fight.

A partial snapshot of Mark Sampson's excellent review highlighting the many virtues of  Zach Wells's book of selected reviews and essays, Career Limiting Moves. Among other things, Sampson focuses on Wells's essay on 2014 Trillium finalist Souvankham Thammavongsa, which he calls "a tour de force of critical writing – combining biography, close reading and interview quotation to create not only a panoramic view into Thammavongsa’s art, but to forge a work of art in his own right." Go Zach! 

Montreal Recital of Waypoints

We are very pleased to announce that composer Erik Ross's Waypoints Cycle, sung by Canadian baritone Phillip Addis, will be performed by Addis and pianist Emily Hamper at the Montreal Conservatory of Music on Sunday, May 11th.  The cycle, which is based on four poems by our very own Zachariah Wells, had the honour of being performed at the Opéra National in Paris in January 2014.  For more information see the poster below, or visit ArtVocal's website. 

Biblioasis Author Interviews and Reviews

I'm happy to bring you more great news for Bibliosis authors.

Alexandra Oliver appears on rob maclennan's blog for an interview regarding the Pat Lowther-shortlisted collection Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway.

The Underground Book Club posted a glowing review of Zachariah Wells' Career Limiting Moves: Interviews, Rejoinders, Essays, Reviews. Michael Bryson calls it "Playful, snarky, sharp-witted, intelligent and polemical ... his debate skills (formidable) leave his opponents flattened."

EVENT Magazine reviewed Jessica Hiemstra's Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle, describing it as follows: “The poems themselves-free-verse stanzas whose titles are almost always composed of subject and verb, and whose sentences often overlap with the first lines of subsequent sections—dart in and out [of] narratives … [and] are strongest when the narrative stakes are highest … tender and convincing.”

System Crashing Fidelity Upholder

In his thoughtful personal-reminiscence-cum-review for Underground Book Club, Michael Bryson praises Zachariah Wells's new essay collection Career Limiting Moves all the while clarifying certain misconceptions about its author: 

I have heard him called an asshole. I've heard him called right wing. I've heard him called a misogynist. In the book he notes he's been claimed and rejected by both the populists and the elites. In truth, he has always been what his letter to TDR in 2002 perhaps should have made clear: a jury of one. An iconoclast. One who rejects systems. One who seeks a genuine, unpredictable deep connection with the wildness that is existence and also, therefore, literature [...] He praises poems that press against the outer boundaries. He praises poems that pressure language until it reveals its limit. Then he asks it to go further.

For an example of Zach at his thought-provoking, counter-intuitive, and polemical best, we recommend checking out this week's #BITSblog post, in which he grapples with Goran Simić's From Sarajevo With Sorrow and the importance of journalistic fidelity when translating the poetry of witness. 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry: A Preview

What We Talk About (if you don't have anything nice to say)

"What is obvious to the music nerds in one scene of High Fidelity—that latter-day Stevie Wonder is laughable—isn't always so obvious to readers when faced with the wobbly wonders of the poetry world. The subculture simply hasn't evolved, as pop music has, a collective taste that can be counted on to parse the truly cool from the humorously bland. Only a few scattered critics stubbornly insist on holding court, which is to say putting their own careers on trial with every opinion they hand down. Is this foolishness?"

 When We Talk About (say it)

"I believe a review should offer some indication of what it was like to be at the author's mercy for however many pages the experience lasted. But more often than I expected, I found myself trying to extract a confession. What did the reviewer really feel about the book? Would he or she recommend it if asked? If our contributor remained coy, we were left with a noncommittal description of poems that "evoke," "provoke," "reflect," or "interlace" this with that—to what effect we were left to guess—the kind of report that gives credit neither to the book's author nor its potential readers; prose as boring to read as it must have been to write."

Poetry (anyway)

"While I’ve been decried as snarky by a few who’d prefer us all to sing Kumbaya and save the sniping for privates convos, and while I’ve had everything from my psychological well-being to my motives to my manly bits questioned, my actual motivation comes from nothing so much as a yen for a good scrum. I’m with Angela Carter, who said that a day without an argument is like an egg without salt. (I prefer pepper, myself.)"

Roll Call: 

Montreal
March 19 at 7:30 p.m. at The Word Bookstore, 469 Milton St.

Toronto
March 20 at 6:30 p.m. at Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay St.

Hamilton
March 21 at 6:30 p.m. at McMaster University, Council Chambers, Gilmour Hall, Room 111

Windsor
March 22 at 4:30 p.m. at Biblioasis, 1520 Wyandotte St. East

Bring tha ruckus. 

"Like animated shorts, comedy, beer commercials and maple syrup."

Still on the fence about going to "What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry," the series of discussions we (and Palimpsest and the PQL) are hosting in Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, and Windsor? Here's why you should go. Courtesy of Carmine Starnino, who is among many many other things one of our wonderful moderators, and The Montreal Gazette.

“The critical essay is a form Canadians excel in, like animated shorts, comedy, beer commercials and maple syrup,” poet and critic Carmine Starnino told me last week. It’s a view borne out by the recent publication of no less than three acclaimed essay collections, by Zach Wells, Anita Lahey and Jason Guriel. There’s no time like now, then, for a Starnino-hosted panel discussion/joint book launch in which four of our finest poetry reviewers can hash out the critical issues of the day. 

“In my mind, the event is a kind of outreach,” Starnino said. “There’s been a fierce counter-reaction against critical writing in the last couple of years, as bad as I’ve ever seen it. Social media — which has helped make the literary culture more deferential — has played a part in this. Any contrarian attitude is immediately dismissed as snark, as neo-conservative, or worse. So the event is a way to connect with audiences, to help them understand a healthy review culture is not a zero-sum game.”

Panel Dates and Times

Montreal
March 19 at 7:30 p.m. at The Word Bookstore, 469 Milton St.

Toronto
March 20 at 6:30 p.m. at Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay St.

Hamilton
March 21 at 6:30 p.m. at McMaster University, Council Chambers, Gilmour Hall, Room 111

Windsor
March 33 at 4:30 p.m. at Biblioasis, 1520 Wyandotte St. East
(And by March 33, we mean 33-11. The 22nd. Yes, the 22nd. Thank you, Zach.)

Idle Hands are the Devil's Playthings

Mike Landry tackles Zach Wells's Career Limiting Moves in The Telegraph Journal and finds much to admire:

A Poet's Debut at L'Opéra National

The Grand Salle at L'Opéra Bastille,
one of the homes of the Opéra National. Designed
by a Canadian architect, by the way.

As many of you know, Biblioasis poet and sometimes-editor Zachariah Wells has successfully raised $2321 in a “Francs for France” indiegogo campaign to get himself (and his mother) to Paris. The occasion? He’ll be visiting the Opéra National, where his poetry will be performed in song settings by Canadian composer Erik Ross. These three pieces, as sung by baritone Phillip Addis with piano accompaniment by Emily Hamper, premiered in Toronto on December 19th. For more information see the story in Quill & Quire  or watch an interview with Zach on Global Halifax’s Morning News.

Early Morning Landing

The past few days when I've pulled up at the Bibliomanse there's a scent of water coming off the lake--and so a fourteen-line salute. To the April pull of beach and bay.


EARLY MORNING LANDING

by Charles Bruce

from Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets (2008).

Edited by Zachariah Wells.

In daylight, there is life and living speech;
The constant grumble, the resilient splash
Of slow tide lifting on a slanted beach;
And blowing sunlight. And the measured flash
Of the sea marching … But the beach and bay
Are vague as midnight now; in midnight thinned
At the sky’s edge by the first hint of grey.
And calm as sleep before the morning wind.

Calmer than sleep. But the eyes lift to find
In the veiled night the faint recurring spark
Of a known beacon. And the listening mind
Wakes in the stillness; and the veil is stirred
By a dim ghost of sound—a far-off word
And the soft thump of rowlocks in the dark.

Gastrapoda Poems

It was with considerable delight that I discovered, several years ago, a previously unheard-of genre of poem. I suppose it's the Victorian precursor to the SPCA/PETA verse-plea ("The Eyes of a Dolphin," "Baby Seal Brains," etc.). They were popular in anthologies and periodicals of the period.

And the theme?

Why stepping on worms is bad.

Yes. That's right. A slew of poems I found in the British Library circa 2008, a veritable slew, and I wish to heaven I'd written some of them down. They were moral pieces about the necessity of being kind to the least of God's creatures. I have a distinct memory of one, wherein the speaker avowed (passionately!) that he could ne'er befriend a man who cruelly stepped ... etc. Poor worms. Poor man!

Anyhow. In ransacking the Bibliovault for this month's verse treasures, I was delighted to find the beginnings of a second genre, related not by family or phylum, but--ahem--by presence of slime. If I find any more to add to the collection I shall. Seems the gastropod poem, with themes of death, sex, the passage of time, is more ambitious than annelid verse. Is the snail the more ambitious animal? The slug? It's yours to discover.

Time as Escargot

Eric Ormsby
from Time's Covenant (2007)
originally published in Daybreak at the Straits (2004)

Suppose time were not spirally and filigreed
but rather went
ambling more randomly. Imagine
time as escargot, as succulence
with all remembrance curved
concentrically inside a patterned shell,
thick toward the middle then more tenuous
as newer chambers belly out above;
that is, not cyclical but
diatoming inward on itself, a
pulsing palimpsest of the ever old
configured as the new:
O Snail,
the sexual residue you leave on dials,
on watch-crystals and on grandfather clocks,
your glistening viscosities of time,
your sweet slime,
patina instants, all
heirloomed in a chiton’s curl.

Slugs

Zachariah Wells
from Track & Trace (2009)

Leaning into the trash box out back—
all those garbage days forgotten
or passed over due to sloth—
I hauled up moldered slabs of rotten
boxes, reeking wrack
of plastic sacks and scraps of cloth,
and unwrapped
twelve monstrous spotted slugs.
Some pardic cross
of cunts and cocks,
they slimed there in the sludge;
stretched out long,
then squished compact,
they scudged around the box’s bottom,
crossed paths in an erotic splay
(no earthly act
so slow and solemn
as slug-on-slug foreplay)
while others humped
motherly their spineless shlong
bodies across
glister-lumped
clusters of eggs—and one
began a sluggish crawl
up the box’s wooden wall,
trailing after a glistening track,
till halfway up it poked
its head-end through the gap
between two slats
and paused there—
seemed to soak
the world in through its feelers,
wriggling in the air—
then out it squeezed
like the bored striptease
of roadside tavern peelers.
It spent a steep minute in the sun—
and turned back,
back through the crack,
back with its fellows in the wet warm vault.
It stiffened with that lot
in a shower of salt.

Audio: Hickey, Trotter & Wells in Windsor

The first of three readings went off in Windsor last night at Phog lounge and, in addition to reading, Zach Wells recorded the whole of it. You can listen to it here.

If you find yourselves near the Central Branch of the London Public Library this evening (7 PM) you could catch them at it again; and they will be doing a swan song at the Dora Keogh on Wednesday in Toronto at 7:30 as well. We will hopefully see you there!

Track & Trace

Over at PMT, Kerry Clare offers up some thoughts on Zach Wells's Track & Trace:

The one problem with having defined tastes and a bookish reputation is that nobody ever gives you books (and when they do, you usually don’t like them). So it was a wonderful surprise to receive Zachariah Wells’ collection Track & Trace as a gift from my mother, since it’s a book I’ve had my eye on for quite awhile. Just to receive such a thing was a kind of gift, but then the book itself was also an incredible package– small and beautiful, its cover embossed with footprints, with the “decorations” by Seth (which are plain and wonderful landscapes, horizons as broad as Wells’ poetry).

Reading this collection was a series of such unpackings. The poems themselves in general are about man’s relationship to the natural environment, the marks he leaves upon it, but each poem is also very distinct in how it relates to these ideas. Within each poem, the words fit together in surprising ways, with subtle rhyme, rhythm and alliteration. Within each word, the syllables, the vowels and consonants on and around my tongue. I read these poems aloud, lying on the carpet while my daughter threw blocks in the mornings, and the poems were a pleasure to put my mouth around, the starts and stops and open spaces.

For the rest, please go here.

Track & Trace shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize

Though it has taken me far too long to post notice, Zach Wells's Track & Trace has been shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize. It's a well deserving nod, and T&T can stand in as Biblioasis representative for the two other poetry collections by Atlantic Canadians we published last year: Wayne Clifford's Jane Again, and Shane Neilson's Meniscus. The fact that Zach brought both to the press only ties them together in my mind all-the-tighter.

Congratulations Zach on some much deserved acknowledgment. Congrats also to the other nominees, Anne Compton for Asking Questions Indoors and Out and Tonja Gunvaldsen Klassen for Lean-to.

Atlantic Poetry Prize

Asking Questions Indoors and Out
Anne Compton
Fitzhenry and Whiteside

Anne Compton's first two collections marked the arrival of a major voice in Canadian literature. In this, her third book of poetry, she brings her crafted, narrative lines into focus on the mysterious metaphysical nature of everyday life. Spirit-haunted yet critical, and meticulous in her observations, Compton opens the immediate world by asking it questions, searching for answer to the way in which we live.

A native of Prince Edward Island, Anne Compton is Writer-in-Residence at UNB Saint John, where she also teaches English literature and creative writing courses and is the director of the Lorenzo Reading Series and the Backtalk Series. She has contributed to critical discussions on 19th-century and early 20th-century aesthetics; 17th-century metaphysical poetry; Canadian literature and Maritime literature. Her poetry is published nationally and internationally, and her reviews appear in Canadian Literature, Fiddlehead, and other journals. She won the Atlantic Poetry Prize in 2003 for Opening the Island and in 2006 for Processional, which also received the 2005 Governor General's Award for poetry. In 2008 she was honoured by the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in the Literary Arts.

Lean-To
Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen
Gaspereau Press

In her third book of poetry, Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen writes of places made home, navigating between fixed points of origin and the flotsam that encloses, between the longevity of marriage and parenthood, and the temporary of camping trips, renovations and hospital stays. Across the collection, the poet's lyricism finds a lilt and repetition that firmly pegs while leaving one side open to the unlikely and unexpected.

Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, and now lives on a hill in Halifax with her husband James and their three boys. Her first collection, Clay Birds, won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry in 1996. Her second collection, Ör, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award in 2004. Her series "August: An Anniversary Suite" won a CBC Literary Award for poetry in 2005 and was published as a chapbook by Gaspereau Press. She's read in collaboration with Norman Adams on cello and has exhibited her work in the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax.

Track & Trace
Zachariah Wells
Biblioasis

The poems in Zachariah Wells's second collection range from childhood to dimly foreseen events in the future; they idle on all three of Canada's coasts, travel the open road, take walks in the city and pause on the banks of country streams and ponds. Both elegiac and celebratory, Track & Trace considers how we love, how we shape our lives and how we are eroded and drifted by time and circumstance.

Zachariah Wells is also the author of Unsettled, a poetry collection about his experiences in the Canadian Arctic. He is co-author of the children's book Anything But Hank! and editor of Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets. Originally from PEI, Wells has travelled and lived all over Canada, working a variety of jobs in the transportation sector. He presently lives in Halifax, where he works as a freelance writer and editor and serves the travelling public aboard Via Rail's Ocean Ltd.

Montreal Reading Tuesday March 9th: Sarah, Sibum & Wells

Hosted by Carmine Starnino. Mark it down and spread the word. The event serves as the Canadian launch for Norm Sibum's Smoke & Lilacs, the first reading since Zach Wells was shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize earlier this week (more on this later) for Track & Trace, and the first Montreal reading since Robyn Sarah's wonderful launch at the Word for Pause for Breath back in October.

The Seth Non-Canadians Don't See

An interesting post over a tthe Comics Comics blog on the work Seth has been doing as a designer. Several of the entries focus on the design work he's done for Biblioasis. This might also be the time to announce that he is completely redesigning CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries, hopefully in time for issue 79 (May, 2010). More on this to follow.

From the Comics Comics article:

Seth’s commitment to Canada also extends to the publishers he works with. Drawn and Quarterly is a Montreal firm, although of course one with an international reach. What non-Canadian readers might not know, however, is that Seth is also closely involved with several other Canadian imprints and magazines, often in his capacity as a book designer but sometimes as a writer. This work is often done for quite small presses, such as the Porcupine’s Quill and Biblioasis (in my opinion two of the best publishers not just in Canada but in the world).

Since Seth has fans all over the world, I thought it might be a useful service to call attention to some of the work he’s done that non-Canadians wouldn’t necessarily know about. If you care at all about Seth’s work, all these items are worth tracking down. Even when working with small specialty presses, he lavishes on each task the same care and attention that he gives to projects for The New Yorker and Penguin Books.

For the entire article, please go here.

His latest design project, Zach Wells's Track & Trace, also comes up for some praise of the Freefall Magazine blog:

Opening a small package in the FreeFall mail I was immediately enchanted by the little book that came out. The cover a textured white stock with embossed shoe prints wandering around the grey title plate, literally tracks in a snowy white background, how wonderful. I ran my fingertips over the textured surface embracing the promise of an absorbing experience with the enclosed poetry. The decoration continued inside with a single snowflake dangling at the end of a dotted white line on a black page, how elegant. The decoration continues throughout the volume with wintery scenes that say so much in their sparse nakedness. Seth has decorated this volume beautifully, I can’t wait to discover the poetry enclosed. It is everything that my tactile sense wants in a book. I’m now off to explore the contents.

Another publisher and book design teacher told me a few weeks back, upon seeing this volume, that no one has done design work like this on a trade poetry book in Canada since the 1940s. It remains to be seen if the extra details will help to sell any more copies: it is painfully hard to even get many independents to stock poetry these days, let alone at Chapters or Indigo. But it seems to be helping in getting people to pick it up. That, at least, is a small victory.