Fredericton - The City Series: Number Two (Frog Hollow Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Fredericton - The City Series: Number Two.
Rebecca Salazar, Editor.  Shane Neilson, Series Editor.  Frog Hollow Press.  Victoria, British Columbia. 2015.

Fredericton is from Frog Hollow Press and is the second volume of this very promising series.  You might remember that Today's book of poetry looked at Vancouver - The City Series: Number One back in November of 2015.  Michael Prior was the editor and Vancouver cooked.  

You can see Today's book of poetry's blog on Vancouver here:

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2015/11/vancouver-city-series-number-one.html 

The basic premise of this series is to take a quick look at new and emerging writers, ten from each city, each poet gets two pages to strut their stuff.  Shane Neilson is the Series Editor and he is making some smart choices.  Rebecca Salazar is the Editor for Fredericton and she clearly has her finger on the pulse of the place.  Fredericton punches way above its weight.  For such a small place, Salazar offers us up a championship menu, these poets are contenders.

Katie Fewster-Yan

A Moment On the Lips

My boyfriend holds me by my ex-lover's

genitals. The waistband of my leggings

makes my mother's nipples itch.

When I kissed its insides, curious,

the freezer split my lip, but I will bury

it with me one day in my grave.

Who needs tattoos? I'm hip-swathed

with chip packets and gum wrappers,

evangelical pamphlets and sandwhich

coupons. The liver spots that dotted

my late grandfather's IV-pierced hand

ink my midriff like a galaxy. On the subway,

the ladies I'm crammed next to look

less impressed than they should be,

dipping their hips in the Pacific I once

kissed so you might taste the sound

of whales when I returned. When I dance,

a skirt of plankton swirls around me

in a balm millennia sediment-packed

to keep my lips slick. Thanks to history,

to my best decisions cinched around me

like a child's leash. Thank you grandma

for that eight-shaped, candy-studded cake

with all those gilded chocolate dollars

on the top that I sucked clean. Now I am

spangled and frosted at the waistline.

I'm the nucleus in a probability storm

of all my charged encounters.

Go ahead. Just try to shower me.

~KATIE FEWSTER-YAN grew up in Toronto. She is currently living, writing and studying in Fredericton.

...

Katie Fewster-Yan gets the whole rollicking show started with a couple of very polished bitter-sweet narratives.  Fewster-Yan's second poem "This Little Piggy" is equally sharp, pretty much cut you open on contact.

Rebecca Salazar must have done some serious homework, scouring of Fredericton streets, hanging out in all the grottoes,   Fredericton is a small city of about 60,000 but these ten strong poets seem to defy the odds.  There really shouldn't be this many good young poets in such a small place.

Lisa Jodoin

Snowed In

It was a breakup full of pathetic fallacy.

Every fish belly up in the tank.

Even Halfred, my favourite frog,

was a grey spectre floating

in the speckled water.

The glow-in-the-dark Jesus

I bought him from St. Joseph's Oratory

stood in the centre of the tank

glowing like toxic waste.

The furnace seized. My teeth chattered

under four thick blankets and a

monstrous sweater with a beaver

knitted on the back.

To top it off, Mary, your dearly

beloved cat, was dying.

On the last night of my visit,

after two weeks of drinking and fighting,

I got hammered and hit on your

best friend. When we were passed out,

you suffocated Mary, to save her suffering

the same slow death of us all.

We cremated her in the backyard, and

I puked beside a tree in the burnt fur smoke.

Flames were leaping out of her open mouth.

5am and a bottle of Tia Maria.

Everything as still as her wasted teeth.

~LISA JODOIN's poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Matrix, Prarie Fire, and in a recently released anthology of Thunder Bay, Ontario writers called Fuel. She currently live in Fredericton with two very endearing Boston Terriers.

...

Our morning read here in the Today's book of poetry offices was an entirely solo effort this morning. Freezing rain has stopped everyone in their poetic tracks and I was in the office alone today.  Being alone in the office means I get to listen to music I like.  Right now I'm listening to Lee Fields, "Honey Dove." Today's book of poetry read Fredericton out loud and knew Lee Fields would have appreciated it. Today's book of poetry liked Fredericton enough that we may ask if we can just call her "Fred."

If you are a fan of the big narrative lead you're in high cotton here.  Maybe it is being so close to the ocean that brings out the story-teller, regardless, Salazar has rounded them up and let them loose here.

Noah Page

For Later Use

You've been collecting things for a long time:

exotic spices, herbs alien to your palate,

sinewy textures, savoury broths,

and you've been trying to build a contraption

to cook this damn recipe you haven't yet named.

You struggle to fit together the pieces,

the gears, pulleys, smothers of rope,

fuel lines, elements, and primitive spears topped with sulfur.

You thought you could work backwards from the prototype,

but now a puzzle litters your workshop floor,

and the recipe rots its constituents.

You find yourself waking up

far from where you thought you went to bed,

and if it's a room you've slept in before,

what's left at your feet seems nothing like what you gathered:

flower petals, loose bits of string, photographs of strangers,

and albums you never really understood the appeal of.

You dial a number you find amid the debris,

but the line's been disconnected.

Some days you escape your clutter,

and just wander around the neighbourhood,

determined not to hoard anything for later use,

but when you stop to make sure you're not lost,

you find your pockets full of receipts.

Maybe if you run fast enough

the world will become a gluey blob.

Maybe if you quit moving completely,

the grass won't grow either. 

On days when you can't help

but wander into the pawn shop,

you always seem to find yourself asking

what the cashier would look like without her glasses on.

~NOAH PAGE is an Honours English student at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. He has published with Calliope Magazine, was a featured reader at Odd Sundays at Molly's in Fredericton, and was the recipient of the W.S. Carter Memorial Prize in 2013.

...

Today's book of poetry has nothing but applause for the Frog Hollow Press City Series project.  We are hoping to see an unending list of Canadian communities included in this series over time.  It is apparent that there are poetic riches in every corner of the country, 

Jennifer Houle

Four O'Clock

In other news, my love, the car has started

making a sound. It has all the qualities of song.

A ticked crescendo keeps time with the crawl

of government and bank traffic, predicts a little

accident. The afternoon coagulates, dribbles

a circumference of poles. Overhead, a wedge of geese

glides south, their shadows slim kayaks on bleached cement.

No idling in the jam for them: their past is sloughed by

movements practiced as a vestal's sidelong glance.

At home, garlic from China sprouts green blades.

We can't bring ourselves to eat it: origins too remote.

Our roots are as, or more far-flung, for all we know.

Still, we got at each other like wolves.

~JENNIFER HOULE is originally from Shediac, N.B., she has published in journals including The Fiddlehead, Arc, Carousel, Dandelion, CV2, Prarie Fire, and Room. She has won the Writer's Federation of New Brunswick's 2011 Alfred G. Bailey award for best unpublished manuscript and The Antigonish Review's 2009 Great Blue Heron poetry prize.

...

As an aside Today's book of poetry wants to share a particular pleasure we had this past week.  From time to time I get called in to the Art Bank to work in the frame shop and that's where I found myself a couple of days ago.  One of the items I framed up was a letter from Poet/Saint Leonard Cohen that he had written from Hydra, Greece, many years ago.  Wouldn't you know it, he was broke.

Today's book of poetry is hoping to return to regularly scheduled service soon.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

REBECCA SALAZAR is a poetry editor for The Fiddlehead and managing editor of Qwerty Magazine. She was recently awarded The Malahat Review's Open Season poetry prize, and her writing also appears or is forthcoming in Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and CV2. She is orginally from Sudbury, Ontario.

Lady Crawford - Julie Cameron Gray (Palimpsest Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Lady Crawford.  Julie Cameron Gray.  Palimpsest Press.  Windsor, Ontario.  2016.

Julie Cameron Gray can burn with the best of them.  These wicked smart poems get to the edge of sophistication without Today's book of poetry feeling a plebeian kink in the neck.  Gray is a post-modern feminist to our way of thinking and determined to reveal some chinks in that old patriarchal order.  She has to open up her heart to do it.

Gray never allows Lady Crawford to become any sort of strident dialectic tract all weighed down with agenda.  These poems offer all the variety of subject, tone and result that you can ask for from a book of poetry.  Today's book of poetry sees that Gray has some serious chops and it's all tempered with a reasonable sense of humour.  Humourless poetry will be the death of us all.

A Classic Pack of Camel Cigarettes

Some days it feels like nothing

will ever change in this town,

other days it's a landscape

like the front of a classic pack

of camel cigarettes, exotic black

angles under a different sun.

We hunt for specifics, anything

overlooked in the ashed-out

twilight to claim our own:

bottle cap, earring, a piece

of blue glass worn opaque

by the beach, the novelty of egrets

mating in the green garden

your neighbour made after his wife

died in a five-car pileup.

Each spring as he turns the earth

he recalls the state trooper awkward

at his front door, describing

interstate constellations of car

parts scattered like satellites

that got lost on their way home.

...

Today's book of poetry has all sorts of reactions to poems but my lovely wife K is a little more direct and forthcoming.  Today's book of poetry usually reads Today's title the night before, in bed.  Today's book of poetry has always read the title at least once by this point in our process.  So last night, I tried a couple of Julie Cameron Gray recipes on K.

As it turns out K was reading Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland and she offered up a trade.  She'd listen to as much poetry as I wanted if I promised to read Plutocrats.  Well a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse.  Fair enough.  Of course K never knows what is coming.  In general I only read her the very best or the very worst of my nightly poetry feed.

I'm sure you can guess which I thought Gray had to offer - but in this case the guarantee comes from higher up the food chain, K loved it.

Lineage: Hugh and Margaret Crawford (1195 -1265)

This is what I know: The Chief of Clan Crawford was like every

other father. Ambition bred not in the bone but in the fervent dinner

conversations with his wife, suggesting that things would be better

if the Norse would bugger off already. He baited and led them until

October, when the fall shores gave way to storms and their ships were

no match for the rough seas of Scotland. To the confused Norsemen

dying on the shore, arrows were a kind of weather.

...

Julie Cameron Gray published her first volume of poetry, Tangle (Thightrope Books, 2013) a few years ago and Today's book of poetry has yet to see it but we are assured by our reading of Lady Crawford, this is fine poetry by any standard and all full of future.

Gray has that ability to make her intimacy and knowledge yours.  The reader can feel certain beats of Julie Cameron Gray's generous and challenging heart.

Fight or Flight

In some countries, a daughter

is fear made flesh.

Once there was movie about college girls

clad in bikinis and pink ski

masks, clutching berettas

in Florida's manic orange juice sun.

Soon, all the men are dead

and the girls, sexual as overkill,

drive off in a Lamborghini.

Not unlike the onna-bugeisha--

Samurai women wielding a naginata,

defending their homes and children

and honour from marauders

while their husbands were away at war.

Young girls taught

the loft of a sword so long

it pulled horsemen from the air

and thrashed them to roses.

...

As good as Today's book of poetry demands you believe Lady Crawford is we are convinced this meal is just beginning.  Julie Cameron Gray will burn down the house before she is through.

Julie Cameron Gray

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie Cameron Gray is originally from Sudbury, Ontario. She is the author of Tangle (Tightrope Books, 2013), and has previously published in The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Event, and in Best Canadian Poetry 2011(Tightrope Books, 2011). She currently lives in Toronto.

BLURB
"An impressive transformation has occurred from Tangle. Cameron Gray's debut, to Lady Crawford:
writing out the small familiar tragedy of we live, we sorrow, this wrecking ball of a book smashes myths of femininity. It is as if this poet woke from the slumber of a young woman's dreams and, seeing how all the dreams were broken, set about describing her experience of the broken castle as more than lies -- as cultural reconstruction. Among many other feats, this beautiful poetry of impassioned reason ironizes the lives of famous women as heart broken. Reading it, our hearts are broken as our hearts were, once, already.
     - Shane Neilson

Julie Cameron Gray

Lady Crawford - Performance Art

video: Julie Cameron Gray

palimpsestpress.ca 

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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.

Vancouver - The City Series: Number One - Michael Prior, Editor (Frog Hollow Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Vancouver - The City Series: Number One.  Michael Prior, Editor.  Shane Neilson, Series Editor.  Frog Hollow Press.  Victoria, British Columbia.  2015.

Today's book of poetry rarely looks at anthologies but there are exceptions to every rule and anything that comes through our door from the esteemed Frog Hollow Press is going to get a serious look. Good thing.

Vancouver - The City Series: Number One is the start of a very excellent idea.

Here's what Shane Neilson has to say:

     Frog Hollow Press aims to publish a series of chapbooks which are edited
     by an emerging poet from a Canadian city. This poet will curate 10 other
     poets from their hometown. Each of these poets are provided two pages of
     stage. The poets will not have been published in chapbook or trade book
     forms at the time of our selection process, and their poems are meant to
     reflect the city they live in.

Brauron   

The soles of my feet brown and hard from blisters
earned chasing sunlight patches under cedar cathedral

canopies. I squeezed loam and clutched seeds between
my toes to lay roots everywhere I walked and crowned

myself queen with vines and leaves. This was my
kingdom, promises tucked under lichen, my name pressed

into knotholes. Sun-baked blackberries crushed inside my
mouth. I was always careful to avoid thorns but

my fingers still stained red. My lips still stained red. I wore a
yellow dress so in the late afternoons, landscape turned to

gold. Uncle Jack could see me flickering between trees as
he sat on the patio, vanilla pipe smoke calling me back. "You're

lucky," he said, "There used to be bears here. Big ones. They
used to come right up to the house asking to come in. You're

lucky they're gone now. They're all gone." And when the cold air
curled against me I wrapped myself in quilts and cricket

lullabies, sat under a shimmering river, and drew pictures in
the pin-holed darkness. I don't remember going to sleep back

then, only waking up. No one recognized me when I returned
home. I had to relearn how to tie my shoelaces. The freckles on

my shoulders faded but I kept the yellow dress. It doesn't fit
anymore but sometimes I bring it to my face and it smells of smoke

and ivy. Sometimes I grab handfuls of soil, handfuls of sun. I still
catch myself putting clover behind my ears, humming old

songs from far away. Sometimes my reflection looks more bear
than woman and I think: Oh, so that's where they went.

EMILY CHOU

...

Now that is the way to announce your entry into Canadian letters with authority.  Emily Chou's "Brauron" is a delight.  It is vibrant, clever and full of immense promise.  Marian Engel will love this poem, I think.  We certainly did here at Today's book of poetry.

There are ten interesting reasons to like this chapbook and to feel very hopeful about future editions, Michael Prior has done good work in rounding up these young pros.

Take Megan Jones as another example.  "The Skydiver" is one sublime piece of work.

The Skydiver
              after "untitled" by Chad P Murray

In the unfinished painting,
a man in a red suit
floats above white
clouds, frayed bits
of cotton. The skydiver looks
down onto green-gold fields furrowed
in two by an indigo line.

A bright flame, his body licks
the divide. With arms outstretched
he meets the air--hard, brittle, one million
doors slamming
in a vortex--but the painter hides
in the lee of the easel, making it
look easy. And our bodies
become buoyant, too.

Half the painting is sky, after all.

We look to the diver
for how we should feel:
but his face is all beige
a brushstroke, a question mark.

Green-fields darken where
clouds hunch, still as stunned
rabbits. Will he pull
the cord, releasing the parachute?

The unfinished painting leans
against metal table legs.
The lines of the poem lean
away from the poet: how can language

trick itself out of the plane, and what plummets, there:
the flaming question mark;
the blank sky;
the painter
who pauses to take a photo.
Later, he'll text it to his mother; she will be at Costco.
She will be buying him a bike helmet.

MEGAN JONES

...
Vancouver - The City Series: Number One is a great start to what Today's book of poetry hopes will be a series with as many volumes as we have Canadian cities.  If Today's book of poetry has learned anything from this blog - it is that there is a lot more good poetry out there than anyone realizes. Shane Neilson and the good folks at Frog Hollow Press aim to tap from the source with this smart series and we couldn't be more pleased.

The Man Who Took Photos of Windows
           for Fred Herzog

In one, a life is laid out in the form of watches and fishing tackle, a dented trumpet,
a Coleman stove, a trio of medals from World War II. It was taken
in 1957, in a city that isn't there anymore, even if some of the windows are,
like the one where a woman stands in an open aperture of floral drapes,
the words "Bargain Shop" above her, and behind her nothing at all. It's easy to see
why he took them: the windows were already photos, frame and all,
though no one else noticed at the time. There's one

where a cedar box is being torn up for concrete forms, and another
where a fifty cent top has just begun to spin--it later became a Kodachrome tornado
that rolled down Granville Street, sucking up cigarette butts and bits
of bloody tissue paper. When he took a photo of his West End room, it showed
the window, toothbrush and safety razor on the sill, the same
razor as the man in the window of a Main Street diner, whose features
are blurred but whose fear is there as plain as the words on a menu.

SHAUN ROBINSON

...

That little ditty was one of two excellent poems Shaun Robinson has in this slim little monster. Michael Prior has done some good work in finding these ten unknown, unpublished poets.

Emily Chou  -  Emily Davidson

Ruth Daniell  -  Sugar Le Fae

Megan Jones  -  Darius Kinney

Alessandra Naccarato  -  Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Laura Ritland  -  Shaun Robinson

Sugar Le Fae's "West Coast Winter, a triptych" was a poem I simply adored - but Milo reminded me about our three poem ceiling.

Today's office reading was particularly spirited.  No guests today but the first snow of the season is upon us and I think it has unglued my staff.  I lashed them back to work with my pointed and soul-withering tongue.  They are all off in their corners mumbling mutiny.

I will ply them with sweets later.

Today's book of poetry can only look forward to Number Two, Number Three and so on, of this series.  Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Saint John, St. John's and so on.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Emily Chou is a second-generation Vancouverite who keeps her chin up but still has difficulty seeing over crowds. Her work has appeared in Ricepaper, Room and Lemon Hound. If she's not making comics, writing poems, or attempting a novel (isn't everyone?), she is probably watching dumb cartoons and blathering on about fairy tales.

Megan Jones grew up in small towns on Vancouver Island before moving to Vancouver, where she writes poetry and works in book publishing. Her work has appeared in Lemonhound and Poetry Is Dead Magazine. She is currently working on her first book of poems.

Shaun Robinson was born in 100 Mile House, British Columbia, and currently lives in Vancouver. His poems have appeared in Fugue, lichen and Versal. He will begin his MFA in Creative Writing at UBC this fall.

Michael Prior's poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in publications such as Canadian Notes and Queries, Carousel, DIAGRAM (USA), The Collagist (USA), Cv2, The Fiddlehead, Fjords Review (USA), Geist, Grain,Lemon Hound, Magma (UK), The Malahat Review, Moth Magazine (IRL), Prism International, Ricepaper Magazine, The New Quarterly, This Magazine, Tin House Online (USA) , Qwerty, Vallum, and The Walrus.

Michael was the recipient of Matrix Magazine‘s 2015 Lit POP Award for Poetry, The Walrus‘s 2014 Poetry Prize, Grain Magazine‘s 2014 Short Grain Prize, Vallum Magazine‘s 2013 Poetry Prize, and Magma Poetry‘s 2013 Editors’ Prize. He received runner-up in The Antigonish Review‘s 2014 Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize and The New Quarterly‘s 2014 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest.

Michael’s first chapbook, Swan Dive, was published by Frog Hollow Press in late 2014. His first full-length collection, Model Disciple, will be published by Véhicule Press’s Signal Editions in 2016. Michael holds an MA in English from the University of Toronto and will be starting an MFA in poetry at Cornell University in Fall 2015.

http://www.froghollowpress.com/gallery/vancouver-toc.html 

411

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.