Another small press fair has come and gone. Realized after how few photos I took. Was too busy talking.
The small press fair in Ottawa seemed to have a constant thru traffic. Late in the day the guitar passed around thru a few hands including Laurie Fuhr’s and various people were serenaded. Laurie Fuhr read in the pre-small press fair reading from her new pooka press chapbook night flying: cold lake poems from which this excerpt of Kinosoo teeth comes from,
not enough to do in this one-mall-town we imagine brain tumours til they happen.
it’s just that my boss’s wife at the foodcourt realbeef donkey sandwich palace did
and a week before she went coma and died, we told her
it was just the sympathetic humming of fridges in the early mall morning
Pooka Press pooka Warren Dean Fulton is looking at a chapbook with David McGimpsey who read Tuesday night. What were they looking at? Might have been the Mapping Shadows: Ottawa (3rd annual pooka pub crawl) chapbook which debuted at the Small Press Fair and at Pookapalooza the next day. In it is one instant poem haiku by me
ice to left
muddle puddle to right
barefoot track straight
In these shabby seconds, something gets done. Prevents overthinking this quick jot plan. Speaking of doing something to a quick deadline, there was the 3 day novel contest…
Over Labour day weekend, try to write the novel, like John Kupferschmidt with his Garden of Men seen here at the small press book fair, Ottawa, June 20
There were tables for people with books to get out of debt, record family history, comics, and a fellow who did an oil painting a day year round. Those could be bought. There were magazines and spine-bound books as well.
Steve Zytveld at the Dusty Owl booth has the newly released chapbook of Dragon Verses by Roland Prevost. You can see a glimpse of his turn of the western soil in node’s throw, which starts
moon glints off as wide mute
spurs eat a prairie cloud
cells in touch where
wheat waves speak
Melissa Hammell and her husband are reps from The New Quarterly and of The Otesha Project bike and performing tours, seated with small press fair organizer extraordinaire, rob mclennan after the small press fair. He had the above/ground and Chaudiere table, including the newest title, Marcus McCann’s Soft Where.
Marcus is also in AngelHouse Press‘ chapbook, Pent Up which was launched at the fair. Here’s an excerpt from scene when a neighbour tries to break into his own apartment to give you a flavor,
Dropped
like a typo, like an amped
epaulette, stiletto,
foot pal
in a placebo of place,
mid air,
meters
over fence slats
AngelHouse also had on hand broadsheets by Jamie Bradley and Sandra Ridley.
Cameron Anstee with his sister at the pre-press reading where he gave out his last chapbook (which Must Be Here Somewhere. My desk vortices ate it. Nope, here we go.) Releasing Symmetry
plaster wrapped & cut away
& then a mould
shipped to British Columbia
an understanding of my body more precise
than I’ll ever have
Katie Argyle was at the spring small press fair in Ottawa with her flutterbooks. She’ll be running Urban Art at Minto Park July 18. One of them was called Newspaper Haiku where she did cut ups of phrases and pasted from various sources and fonts into a kind of found poetry, such as
because life is full
Florists rose to occasion
gaining momentum
(Picture that with each line in a different font and size.) She and a friend did an exchange project of making one per week for a year.