Today's book of poetry would like to thank every poet and publisher who sent us books, that's what we live for.
It's been a curious year, our staff has increased in happy size and we would all like to wish you the very best for the holiday season.
Our readership has grown. Last month we had 20,000 readers. Our total readership recently surpassed 360,000. Today's book of poetry has now posted 645 blogs/reviews.
The winner of the Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize is invited to have dinner at the home offices of Today's book of poetry.
Past winners of the Prize:
2013 - Nora Gould, I See My Love More Clearly From A Distance (Brick Books) 2014 - Kayla Czaga, For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions) 2015 - Eva H.D., Rotten Perfect Mouth (Mansfield Press)
2016 - Stuart Ross, A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent. (A Buckrider Book/Wolsak & Wynn)
We will return in January fully rested and full of piss and vinegar.
645
DISCLAIMERS
Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"
and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies. Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.
Today's book of poetry: Blue Night Express. Bardia Sinaee. Anstruther Press. Toronto, Ontario. 2015.
Today's book of poetry is a big fan of full disclosure - I know Bardia Sinaee well enough that I can call him my friend. In our short acquaintance I have called him many things, to his face -- but usually when he is out of earshot. I probably talk about Bardia more that he would be comfortable with, I've been telling anyone who would listen that Bardia Sinaee is, in my mind, one of our very best young poets.
Blue Night Express only confirms what I've been jabbering about all along. Sinaee's poems are pools of crystal clear water in a world where muddying the proceedings is often the order of the day.
Man On Verandah
Awake in shadows lie
the cats, while armoured, copper-
coloured bugs scale
the wall behind
the laundromat to taste our blood.
So mannered is
the waxing moon
and sheperd-like above a bank
of clouds, I can
almost feel Colville
painting a revolver next to me
to lend the scene
a little tension. but
it's enough to be awake when
others aren't.
To think there is
a lake not far from here. Across
the street, profiled
in computer glare,
a woman sits so fixedly upright
you'd think she
swallowed a cane,
like Whistler's mother if Mrs. Whistler
ever took her
bonnet off. Raccoons
alight from eavestroughs with
their night scopes
on the trash.
A blackened elm with elm disease
dispatches shrunken,
blackened leaves.
A blunt, diffusive dark prevails until
police lights crest
the hill, searching
the side streets for trouble or
trouble's silhouette.
...
I could talk about the different poets I see dancing around in Bardia's brain, his lovely nod to Ezra, just because he knows. But instead I want to tell you how tickled I was when Blue Night Express came through the door, so tickled I barely noticed it's lovely Anstruther Press compatriot, Kayla Czaga's Enemy of the People. You will all remember that Czaga won the 2nd annual KITTY LEWIS HAZEL MILLER DENNIS TOURBIN POETRY PRIZE here at TBOP. Fine, fine company for Bardia and HEY!, Anstruther Press - great work on publishing these two. History will show how wise you are.
Sinaee's poetry always strikes just the right note between sarcasm and wisdom. Sincerity has become a dirty word, a saccharine insult, but when done right, like in the poetry of Bardia Sinaee, these poems rise above any cheap sentiment and truthfully, crisply, clearly, cut to the heart of matters.
Deposition
How harrowing the prospect
That there may be no clandestine agency after all,
Only our clamouring until we've built on spent faith
What we'd sooner take up arms for than name.
By now there ought to be some sort of saying for it:
To march all day through toppled statuary
And flags snapping in a trumped-up wind,
Surprised to find oneself inclined
Toward such hopefully destructive sentiments
As might find expression in a goose step chant.
I love my people, even you who have already yielded
To some private notion of the future,
One that alarms even you, that scales your fortitude
Then pleads for understanding.
...
Here's my memory of meeting Bardia. At 52 I went back to university full time and jumped into the deep end. Turns out I came in 2nd in a campus literary competition. I don't remember my poem at all, although at the time I thought it winning enough, but I certainly remember the 1st place poem. Meet Bardia Sinaee. As soon as I heard his poem, which I had been in a complete competitive slather over, I resolved two things - tell the man how fine I thought his poem was, become that man's friend.
Luckily I know the executives here at TBOP and have a free pass. Otherwise, how could I gush so?
When I read Bardia Sinaee's poems they give me hope. I can not reach any further for a compliment.
Fugue
Like the tide, silence asserts itself
Through a series of microaggressions, it's raining the same rain
On every station, doomsday theories infiltrate
The nations, profligate and free
In theory, we condemn silence in all its
Driftwood and spores, sleeper cells
Ensnare us from within
Like the Trojans, the nations disperse into new names
As silence is issued from clefts in the air
Like rain, I think we should sing
While we are together in danger, doomsday theories get stranger
With every station, a headlong grave
When the train pulls in
Like wreckage on the shore, I think we can be saved
...
Blue Night Express is everything you can ask from a chapbook. It is both beautiful to look at and filled with beautiful, bright and sophisticated poems. Sinaee always assumes his audience is as brilliant as he is.
Bardia Sinaee
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bardia Sinaee was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Toronto. He has poems forthcoming in
The Malahat Review and The Best Canadian Poetry 2015 (Tightrope Books).
Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything. We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"
and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies. Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.
Today's book of poetry: For Your Safety Please Hold On. Kayla Czaga. Nightwood Editions. Gibsons, British Columbia. 2014.
Winner of the 2nd annual Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize
I've never quite experienced the like. The first few poems of this collection had me dizzy with joy, a little like the first time you saw Wayne Gretzky, or the first time you saw Mikhail Baryshnikov fly.
You've never read family portraits like those in For Your Own Safety Please Hold On.
Kayla Czaga writes like she has 200 years of wisdom coursing through her veins. She uses language we are all familiar with but somehow escapes the bounds of previous gravity, these plain speaking poems soar.
In my corrupted opinion this is the best book of poetry I have read this year. No one in the office here at TODAY'S BOOK OF POETRY disagreed.
Another Poem About My Father
I don't get poetry either. Mostly I get cavities,
junk mail. Once, I got eleven hundred dollars
in small change from my father for Christmas.
He said, You've got to work for your money--
meaning you've got to haul it through six feet
of snow to the bank, Good luck, here's a bag.
My father is more like a poem than most poems
are. He once tucked a living loon into his coat
and brought it home to amuse my mother who
loves birds, especially surprised-sounding birds,
especially owls. My nostalgia receptors zigzag
wildly through me when I think of my father
pushing his metal detector across all the parks,
schoolyards and riverbanks of this great nation,
waving it back and forth--like some sort of yayhoo, my mother would say--until it beeps
solemnly above a nickel. With a butter knife
he cuts such slender metaphors from the earth.
...
Czaga in For Your Safety Please Hold On has a new intensity, you don't see it coming as much as feel it. These poems are universally personal, crowd-sourcing intimate.
Joyce Carol Oates is vastly under-rated if you ask me, and we here in the office at TODAY'S BOOK OF POETRY all agree on that point, her novels have always had a way of making me feel as though I were inhabiting a world of her design. What I mean is that her universe becomes yours. It is a familiar even though it is new terrain.
Kayla Czaga knows the same trick. When she is writing about family it sounds suspiciously like she is writing about your own. When she writes about herself she almost makes you think you are looking in a mirror.
23RD Birthday
In this city where all the shops stay open
the people close early. I closed. I told
another person, I cannot love you anymore, please mail my books back to me. Then I went bowling
and threw seven consecutive
balls into the gutter. Misery of the five-pin. I slept
in a bathtub. People keep buying me
clocks. Puddles keep collecting
sidewalks. Maybe I'll collect puddles
or clock out like so many people I've seen
on buses, that man who wept
violently into his scarf and the rest
of us trying to ignore him, turning up
our not-listening devices. Tonight
I am twenty-three and looking
for someone gentle enough to hold back
my hair--this could be you, stranger
with your three-point smile and hairdo.
Tonight I want to stop watching the clocks;
I fear I'll become them--spinning
in circles with hands covering my face.
...
I don't know how old Kayla Czaga is -- but I know she is young. I can't even imagine how fine her future poems will be. But I am certain I'll be anxious to read them, and after reading For Your Safety Please Hold On you will be too.
"Sometimes
it is the sound the Lord makes
snipping split ends off
my soul."
--from MANY METAPHORICAL BIRDS
So many books and so little time, but this is one I will read again, and then, a while later, again. Why? Like watching a magician on video with fast forward, slow motion, replay, I want to learn her tricks.
Temporary
At the Ash Wednesday service, waiting
for the priest to cross my forehead, I watched him
touch the faces of the people in front of me,
mishearing him say, Remember you are blessed.
I was horrified when I remembered it
was really, Remember you are dust, with ashes
thumbed into my forehead. Headlights spattered
through the intentionally broken glass
windows of that beautiful downtown church
tucked behind a mall, as I tried to understand and to dust you shall return. Traffic lights
flickered through Christ with arms nailed
open, Mary robed in blue, mourning into his feet.
After the service, I spilled out of the church
into wet February and public transit hauled me
back into my crumbling ordinary life. What
happens after this? When Jesus died,
it was temporary, the stone rolled away,
but where is he now, and can any of us hope
to go there, or is it all ashes and dust
covered bookshelves? Last week, Liz tried
to explain taxidermy to me, how she peeled
a rabbit, then rigged its pelt back into
rabbit-shape. She emptied a set of robin's wings
to sew onto its back--the flying rabbit.
It looked alive, a stitching trick, the way
my dead relatives look alive, resurrected
in photographs. It reminded me of colouring
Easter eggs with my mother. We blew the yolks
into a bowl before we dyed the shells
blue and yellow. How the eggs looked full
until we held them up to the light.
...
For Your Safety Please Hold On should be front page news for everyone who loves poetry, mandatory reading for everyone who doesn't.
Kayla Czaga
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kayla Czaga grew up in Kitimat and now lives in Vancouver, BC, where she recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Herpoetry, nonfiction and fiction has been published in The Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry 2013, Room Magazine, Event and The Antigonish Review, among others. For Your Safety Please Hold On is her first book.
BLURBS
"Funny, smart, sophisticated, guileless: reading Czaga is like drinking a glass of water in a desert. Every once in a while there arrives a young poet whose astonishing aptitude for the craft rises so clearly, so beautifully, the relief is palpable. For Your Safety Please Hold On is Czaga’s answer to Moure’s Domestic Fuel and Solie’s Short Haul Engine... and like Moure and Solie we don’t need to expect great things from her. Great things are already here."
--Elizabeth Bachinsky
"Kayla Czaga's For Your Safety Please Hold On recalls what was radical about Robert Lowell's Life Studies a half century ago. With wit and empathy, it moves beyond the confessional to reclaim the intimate and personal as an adventurous subject for poetry. Reading it is like being brought into someone's home and told all the family secrets--never an imposition, it feels rather like an initiation into the clan. I thoroughly enjoyed it."
THE KITTY LEWIS HAZEL MILLAR DENNIS TOURBIN POETRY PRIZEis awarded annually to the book of poetry that I, Michael Dennis, like the most. The award was named for Kitty Lewis and Hazel Millar who were instrumental to this blog during its' formative steps. It is also named for the late painter, poet and all around wonderfully generous Dennis Tourbin whom I loved. The award is virtually meaningless - except that the winner is entitled to a home cooked meal, with wine, if they ever come to Ottawa.
