Pearl Pirie’s lists, reviews, interviews, etc. since 2005

Poems: Rod Pederson

Rod Pederson's chapbook
This now exists, with copies still being folded and cut. To come out fully at the phafours table at the Ottawa Small Press Fair, upstairs at Jack Purcell by Elgin St. June 7th.
The 6 wonderful little potent poems by Rod Pederson includes this one:

bent into untimely sorrow
knowing
someday he’ll die and I will
bitter the Montreal winter and keen
and memory’s aching issue will twist
some small channelled bit
of comparable elegance
maybe
Leonard was a victim you could be
sure of

Poems: Catherine Brunet

Change in their Pockets
New chapbook by Catherine Brunet at the reading tonight. 7:30pm, Pressed Café. I’ll bring 20 copies so get it while you can.
Here’s a sample poem from it:

John Coltrane Redux
Avant-guard jazz on my ride home:
saxophone incursions deep into
John Deere clang and guitar twang
of country-western territory.
Coltrane would get punched in the face at the
tavern with his strange hue, sound concepts,
Carolina drawl – looking at folks funny,
ordering a daiquiri.
His split lip of un-belonging would
swell and buzz for days like diatonic
scales on broken AM frequencies
somewhere down a gravel sideroad.

I’m also reading with career-long poet from out west, John Pass. Here are some of his poems at Terrain.

RailRoad … a pop up-up poetry series

This Thursday: John Pass, Pearl Pirie & Catherine Brunet.
Thursday, May 15th 7:30 PM, May
Pressed Café, 750 Gladstone Avenue, Ottawa
Catherine Brunet was born and raised in Ottawa, but now calls Renfrew County home. Over the last two years, her poems and short stories have been accepted for publication by Arc Poetry Magazine, The Literary Review of Canada, Grain, Prairie Fire, Vallum, Queen’s Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review and the Nashwaak Review. She currently teaches high school and is working towards her first poetry collection. She’ll have on hand her mini-chapbook from phafours press.
Pearl Pirie has two poetry collections, and a third forthcoming with BookThug in 2015. She has a few chapbooks, the newest vertigoheel for the dilly (above/round, 2014), a micro press seeking submissions, several blogs, a gig as literary radio host at CKCU Literary Landscape and irregular gigs to teach poetry. http://www.pearlpirie.com.
train track pic
She’ll be launching a chapbook of train poems: Quebec Passages (Noun Trivet Press, 2014). Bring your train whistles if you’ve got them.
John Pass’s poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US, the UK, Ireland and the Czech Republic. Eighteen books and chapbooks of his work have been published, most significantly the quartet, AT LARGE: The Hour’s Acropolis (Harbour Publishing, 1991), Radical Innocence (Harbour, 1994), Water Stair (Oolichan Books, 2000) and Stumbling In The Bloom (Oolichan, 2005). The Hour’s Acropolis and Water Stair were short-listed for The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes). Water Stair was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Stumbling In The Bloom won the Governor General’s Award in 2006. His most recent book, crawlspace (Harbour, 2011) won the Dorothy Livesay Award in 2012.

95 Books for 2014, List 4

It’s like this. I was thinking little photo shoots with clusters of books and stuffed animals. (And making it more complicated than necessary. What fun complications can be.) I was keeping all the read books in a read-it stack. As weeks passed, the stack got buried, toppled, raided, mixed up with new or partly read things. Now I’m not sure what I mentioned.
After 6 weeks of that all bets are off of reconstructing the reading order or making sure I got them all. But que sera.
Here are some and something about some of them:

  1. Uncertainty Principle by rob mclennan (Chaudiere, 2014)
    My favourite of any of rob’s books to date. Little flash fictions, some quirky, some funny, some touching. A fun read. Some stories are expanded and deepened since I last heard them in an open mic. One I was there when it happened, in the sense of being on the same bus to St. Catherines and hearing a first draft.
    Hubby & I read the whole book aloud to one another over an evening. Cute size, lovely design.

  2. Fidelity by Grace Paley
    We’d seen her at Dodge Poetry Fest several years ago. She looked what some might call sprightly then but that’s a target that drifts outwards away from my age. I hadn’t realized she’d be in her 90s now.
    Grace Paley, Fidelity
    Many of the poems in it are untitled. One such starts

    I had thought the tumours
    on my spine would kill me but
    the tumours on my head seem to be
    extraordinarily competitive this week.

    Her light touch is towards verse when the subjects aren’t heavy. When the subject is heavy as cancer, the leavening is towards strength and resilience rather than facile.
    Grace Paley, Fidelity
    I can relate quite strongly to the infinitely far distance, the Zeno’s Paradox of arthritis or exhaustion. Yet somehow in her hands it is tender and comic, accepting rather than melancholic, just exaggerated as it really is.
    Grace Paley, Fidelity
    Let the day go is lovely sort of prayer to the day.

  3. radish ~ a singulaity by Czandra (obvious epiphanies, 2014)
    radish - a singularity
    radish ~ a singularity by Czandra (obvious epiphanies press, 2014)
    Meditations around pronouns and how we define ourselves and other things as it. It seems a more visibly eco-poetics than most things billed as such. It roves around the themes of human role in the world, how we came to make or be made to co-evolve with 130 plant and 8 animal species as our primary foods.
    Here’s a sample:
    Czandra