Manahil Bandukwala is writer and visual artist originally from Pakistan and now settled in Canada. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. She works as Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and is Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of Ottawa-based collaborative writing group VII. Her project Reth aur Reghistan is a multidisciplinary exploration of folklore from Pakistan interpreted through poetry and sculpture. She holds an MA in English from the University of Waterloo. MONUMENT is her first book.
What draws me to the writer: I have to say I’m a fan of hers, with her art on my office wall and her chapbooks on my shelves. I’ve been watching Manahil Bandukwala at open mic for years and catching each chapbook she produces. I once blind judged a contest and found out later the tie I wanted to give was not allowed and had to pick one. Alas I later found out, the other was hers. It could have gone either way.
The project of MONUMENT emerged from my interest in Mughal history, specifically the history of Mughal women. My research on Mumtaz Mahal yielded endless possibilities. She is most well known for her connection to the Taj Mahal, regarded as one of the greatest symbols of love in the world, but I was curious about her story beyond her connection to the monument. The book is an extended conversation with the spirit of Mumtaz Mahal as I imagine who she was and how she loved.
Sample:
Petrify
“And your first gift is making stone out of everything.I wake to a mausoleum, you are here, Ticking your fingers on the marble table” –Sylvia Plath, “The Rival”
Making stone out of everything: elephants, the flowers withered from their trampling; palms curled over into an arch under which you read; yourself, yourself, yourself. Your body did not decompose into dust but began a slow petrification. Waking in a mausoleum: soul squeezed out of the tips of your marble fingers, you were alone, the incorporeal part of you the texture of stone.
PP: Why, Mumtaz Mahal? Because she is so famous and so voiceless at the same time?
MB: I’ve known about Mumtaz Mahal my entire life, but I realized that everything I knew about her was linked to the Taj Mahal. Who was she beyond this monument? I had a mountain of questions I wanted to ask her, and my curiosities turned into poems.
PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this book? MB: The editorial process is one of the top contenders for favourite moments. Before I submitted the manuscript to Brick Books, I sent it around to my friends in VII. That was the first time I shared the entire work with anyone, and received great affirmations and great edits.
Working with my editor, Cecily Nicholson, was an incredible process in the book-making journey. And finally, my friend Sanna Wani had formative structural suggestions that brought the narrative arc to a more fulfilling conclusion. Overall, the manuscript I began with was very different from the book being published – for the better! There is a collaborative spirit in this work.
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published over a dozen books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics.
What draws me to the writer: A B Series brought her to (Ottawa) town. I can’t recall if that was my first meeting with the work, or only with the person. At any rate since that innovative series over a decade ago, I seem to be falling behind in my Armantrout reading, having read her previous books Conjure and Partly, Just Saying and Versed, and chapbooks. That said she remains one of my favourite U.S. poets with her plain language, curiosity, the humour in turns. Poems don’t rush but seem like they are the product of sitting and waiting for clarity and honouring the lack of answers. There’s a sense of ampleness and frankness and a world that is cosmically faintly comic.
What will we call the last generation before the looming end times? With Finalists Rae Armantrout suggests one option. Brilliant and irascible, playful and intense, Armantrout nails the current moment’s debris fields and super computers, its sizzling malaise and confusion, with an exemplary immensity of heart and a boundless capacity for humor. The poems in this book find (and create) beauty in midst of the ongoing crisis.
“What we share is distance: telephone poles / leaning this way and that, a wayward / crowd that staggers drunkenly / toward an empty, mauve horizon. // We can’t wait to see / who dies next.”
This is not a book of poetry. It’s a collection of daily meditations to see us through. To what? Exactly.
Reviews:
“I have great respect for the recalcitrance of Rae Armantrout’s poetry. Every line is a twist and every twist a glimpse into a world animated by thought’s incipient edges. Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph. Her social care creates a space in which life comes to life.”—Charles Bernstein, author of Topsy-Turvy
“For the record, Rae Armantrout is my favourite living poet.”—Nick Cave
“Rae thinks in poetry by now that must be it. That one can turn out book after perfect book and it turns out they are all made of poems but what are poems made of. Rae I think. What she is.”—Eileen Myles, author of For Now (Why I Write)
Sample:
SURPRISE, SURPRISE
It began with sensing difference,
but since mind is the gape of surprise propped open,
we can stop and think.
If comparisons are sketchy, what about contrasts?
*
Since mind is the gape of surprise propped open,
we get bored. What’s the good of that?
*
Since mind is the gape of surprise propped open,
a rollercoaster has been placed between those painted lips. * I keep rolling this lozenge around on my tongue.
Where’s the good in it?
Finalists, Rae Armantrout
PP: In your City Lights reading you mentioned the idea of foregrounding the eye over the I. Do you have ways of easing yourself into the quiet of reflecting and observing or do you jot continually and assemble later?
RA: Well, first I want to say that I don’t deliberately avoid the first-person pronoun. I picked up the book at random just now and opened to pages 138 and 139. The poem on 138 begins “What I want in a word…” and the one on 139 begins, “What I call this buzz….” Lyn was saying that there isn’t much overt autobiography in my poems. There’s some. I think it’s clear, for instance, that I’m occasionally interacting with children in this book. And in a poem called “Twinge” I even narrate one of my dreams! But she’s right that, compared with a lot of other poets, I’m not very autobiographical. It feels artificial to me to pretend to stand outside myself and tell an audience what I’ve done. The idea bores me. I write about what interests me at the moment and that is often something I’ve just noticed. It could be something I see on the street or in the sky, but I’m often also wondering how my mind works and what a mind is.
Now for the practical question. Before the pandemic, I would frequently jot as I went about my day. I’d assemble my notes later. Obviously, the pandemic curtailed my movements. Gone are the afternoons when I would sit on a coffee bar patio and pick up fragments of conversations, scraps of music, and the way the shadows moved on the flagstones. The fact that I’ve moved to a colder, wetter climate contributed to the change as well. I’ve been learning to write in longer, more continuous bursts. It’s for someone else to say whether my work seems to have changed. And, yes, to write I need to be able to quiet my mind. I can’t worry about doing my taxes while I’m writing! Writing and meditating have that in common. You have to be able to hold a space open for the poem to start coming in.
PP: What was my favourite moment while making the book?
RA: If only you knew how much I hate choices! I’m pretty sure I don’t have a favorite moment. I could answer this in two ways. First, I feel like in the second section of the book, Finalists, I was stretching to write longer poems than usual and longer lines too. I noticed this was happening and started willing it to happen more. And it worked, not all the time, but fairly often. That was exciting. My style has been pretty constant for decades really so to see a change happen is a pleasure for me.
Then, once in a while, my friend Ron Silliman, who knows my work very well, will say that a certain poem of mine is “my best poem ever” or one of my “best poems ever.” He was enthused like that about “How to Disappear,” “Surprise Surprise” and “Password” in this book, as I recall. I take it with a grain of salt but, still ,those were good moments.
PP: Does writing poetry remind you to keep perspective with humour or does humour remind you what you could share in a poem?
RA: The humor in the poems seems like an integral part of them–,or some of them anyway. I think you’re right to talk about perspective. Sometimes it’s a sudden change in perspective that seems comical—the way that, if you take the long view, the problems and issues of the day can seem ridiculous. Or the humor can be triggered by a change in who’s looking at something—what does it look like to another person or to a bird, for that matter. Surprise makes people laugh because it makes them a bit uncomfortable. My poems often have what gets called dark humor. I guess that just means I’m not joking. As every comedian knows, if you just come out and say what people know but don’t want to know, that’s “funny.”
Conyer Clayton (she/her) is a writer, musician, and editor living on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. Her debut collection, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020), won an Ottawa Book Award and was a Relit Award finalist. She’s released 2 albums and many chapbooks; recently, Holy Disorder of Being (forthcoming with Gap Riot Press, 2022) by VII, of which she is a member. On twitter and Instagram she’s at @conyerclayton
About the writer: ICYMI, she recently did an interview on prose poetry where she says, “I find prose poems enable my questions, more than any other poetic form.” I have impressed with her sharp vision for a long time. Yogs ago, I produced a flutterbook chapbook of hers with phafours press. The next chapbook of the collaborative group VII, Holy Disorder of Beingfrom GapRiot is out now.
Book:But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (A Feed Dog Book, Anvil Press, June 2022). (#4 on the Amazon list of Hot New CanLit poetry as I write.)
The book isn’t listed on Anvil’s website/available for purchase there yet, but it is available for pre-order via bookstores, indigo, amazon, etc. I have been using 49th shelf’s website as a go-to, as it contains links to many places you can purchase.
Book description: But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, Conyer Clayton’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, is a collection of prose poems that employs surrealism, humour, and body horror to cope with CPTSD, assault, loss, fear, and the memories of it all. The narrator weaves her way through largely aquatic landscapes-water parks, ponds, beast-filled lakes, vast oceans. She walks through time, reverting to childhood and back within a few lines, has the sureness of knowledge that exists only in dreamscapes, and foreshadows the inevitable with a calm derived from accepting the absurd. These poems, hallucinatory and unexpected, are threaded by repetition: Here is another car accident. Here is another man to flee from. Here is questioned memory. Here is the site of grief, revisited, and sometimes, within it, tentatively, hope. In these poems, Clayton explores how we question the validity of our own memories, especially those related to abuse and assault, and the way we forget-or obsess over potentially forgetting-memories of those who’ve died. These poems validate dreams, by proxy, and all internal experience as authentic and valid experience that carries wisdomeven when we don’t know it.
Sample:
This poem was part of the few that co-won the 2019 Robin Blaser Poetry Prize and was published in The Capilano Review in 2020, and in Release Any Words Stuck Inside of You II (Applebeard Books, 2021).
Love Interest
I am the protagonist here, so of course I look unlike myself. At school, they hand us a diagram with a blank space underneath to describe it. I see warfare—nondescript innocents, cut limbs, red puddles—and far away, one lone body fleeing on foot. She’s almost to the woods. No! screams Teacher. She slams her hands on my desk. The dead are the righteous. God smiles at those who lie down meekly and accept such beautiful pain. This one,though, jabbing at the lonely girl, so close to the treeline, is disgraced and lost to God. She cannot escape God’s justice. Write of how she will be found. Later, I’m caught with my earrings, yellow feathers that brush my shoulders, and Teacher sends me to the cliffs. Hundreds of people toss items into the waves below. Family photos and sentimental knickknacks and wedding rings and themselves. The edges are slanted, and the rock is loose from the constant weary footfall. Some fly with their treasures willingly. They are conspicuously quiet. Others crawl weeping to the edge, but as they back away, a rock crumbles, or an armed guard kicks them, or they forget how to fight for life, and these are the ones who fall screaming. As I near the edge, I am crying too. I don’t want to fall. I don’t want to lose my last colourful object. A guard walks up behind me, whispers, Pretend to throw them. Hand them to me. I will find you later. He must be the Mismatched Love Interest. I catch a glimpse of his face as I press the feathers into his hand. He leaves, and I mime losing everything. My hand is empty either way.
PP: How was making this collection different from your previous? CC: This collection’s inception and creation was different both in its time frame and in my drafting process. For my first book, I simply wrote poems as they came over a very long time frame (8 years) and later collected them into a manuscript. This book, however, was drafted in just a couple of years from start to finish, and relied on the constraint of being based (very loosely, with a lot of wiggling and changing during the editing process) around my (or other people’s) dreams.
PP: Best moments in writing: CC: I think probably the best moments are the ones I remember least — I would often wake up in the middle of the night and voice memo my dreams to myself, and when I listened back in the morning, I didn’t remember it at all. It was quite surreal to hear myself writing poems while asleep.
Michael Fraser is published in various national and international journals and anthologies. He is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 and 2018. He has won numerous awards, including Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, and the 2018 Gwendolyn Macewen Poetry Competition. The Day-Breakers is his third poetry collection.
Book description: Similar to The Greet Yourself Arriving (Tightrope, 2016) Fraser hops back in time into Black vision of past decades, in this case, to the U.S. civil war finding distinct cadences and individual perspectives.
Sample:
Soldier’s Camp
In the peek space between tent flaps, the dust dawn light shakes snowdrop flowers.
I draw a long face toting stones for the rock fence, see them hunched down in the alder crest, cannon men scarfing the scrub cattle with stone-sharpened cutters the shorthorns’ bloody innards slathering buckshot soil.
The sky smoke is hunger’s body language breathing, the flames gather in more space. We all watch hawk-eyed, waiting for the meat to be tuned up and fire-played.
“This magnificent concord of jawing and chat, of trill and clacking teeth, be as timely necessary as Liberation itself always be. Kudos to that MF, whose initials mark no euphemism, but identify the honest, ingenious bard.”—George Elliott Clarke, author of Execution Poems
“What a tremendous book of poems Michael Fraser has written with The Day-Breakers. His voice fills the eyes, so the meaning of the inventive words and narrative is sung deeper through his language. There is a tactile narrative force to the poems—history becomes the present in the immediacy of the lines. So many journeys: in language, in sorrow, in brutality, in beauty. Fraser’s The Day-Breakers is a unique lyric wonder.”—Alice Burdick, author of Deportment
“Michael Fraser’s The Day-Breakers is magnificent. Vigorous in language, sweeping in history, poignant and searing in detail, these poems about the African Canadian volunteers for the Union Army in the American Civil War change the contours of North American letters. There are poems that record history, but then there are poems like Fraser’s that transform historical visions. The startling vocabulary, the bold hammering of stresses, the tenderly elastic use of the pronoun I as the poet’s voice catapults into and seeks to embody the women and men—soldiers and witnesses, warriors in Lincoln’s army all—is a stirring, thrilling reader’s experience. The Day-Breakers is a distinguished book. And it will distinguish Canadian poetry.”—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems
PP: Your latest has some historical fiction, like your last book, To Greet Yourself Arriving. Do you see it as a furthering or a newproject?
MF: To Greet Yourself Arriving is an homage to various diasporic historical figures and personal heroes of African descent from the Americas. There’s clearly a historical nexus regarding the two collections since both honour people of African descent, however, The Day-Breakers’ historical figures are largely unknown. For example, Dr. Anderson Abbott, the first licensed Afro-Canadian doctor is included in To Greet Yourself Arriving, but not in The Day-Breakers partly because he’s a famous figure. He’s featured in Black History month posters, public service announcements, historical dramas, etc. He’s alluded to whenever I reference “sawbones” (Civil War slang for doctors and surgeons which originated with Charles Dickens). Most of the actual people named in The Day-Breakers are essentially unknown. I discovered these individuals in My Brother’s Keeper: African Canadians and the American Civil War by Bryan Prince and African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War by Richard M. Reid.
I think The Day-Breakers is both a furthering and a new project. This statement sounds contradictory, but it’s not. The Day-Breakers furthers my examination and sharing of African Canadian narratives, however, stylistically, it is a completely unique endeavour due to the lexicon employed. Language and Civil War slang is highly prominent in this collection. I essentially created my own dictionary to facilitate writing these poems. I had to amass a treasure trove of words and terminology which was ridiculously time-consuming. Yet, it was intensely pleasurable. I still remember when I learned the term “bumbershoot” for umbrella. I literally jumped out of my chair! The problem was organizing all these words into a useful format. Thus, I created my own dictionary which allowed me to utilize the terms as I penned the poems. The Day-Breakers is a stylistic departure from my previous work.
PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this book?
MF: My absolute favourite moment was winning the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize for the poem African Canadian in Union Blue. It was my fourth Civil War poem and I was pleasantly surprised since Grand Junction won Freefall’s 2014 Poetry Contest and The Union Dead placed third in Freefall’s 2015 Poetry Contest. I loved uncovering the Civil War era slang and terminology. The glee I felt when I discovered words such as the aforementioned “bumbershoot” is indescribable. Here are a few others: “boneyard” for cemetery, “coffin nail” for cigarettes, “play-pretty” for toy, “clackers” for teeth, “idea-pot” for head, “seed-folk” for ancestors, “tumbleset” for somersault, etc. There were hundreds of them! It was interesting to learn many terms are present-day regionalisms throughout the United States but especially in The South, Appalachia, and the mid- Atlantic states. Thankfully, I enjoyed immersing myself in all these words because it was a lengthy and insanely time-consuming endeavour! The process of creating my own dictionary was also interesting because it is one thing to collect and stockpile these words, but another to effectively access the appropriate words and utilize them in poems. This is when I arranged and categorized the words into a dictionary. The writing accelerated after this lengthy process.
Michael Caesar was born on Manitoulin Island and lives in Hull, Quebec. He has worked as a reporter, editor and speechwriter. This is his first chapbook.
About the poet: As I mentioned in my anticipation post, I have been waiting for a book/collection from this poet for a lot of years. He reads and listens more than her says, observes and contemplates carefully and speaks his considered poems with a cadence that is grounded in prosody.
Book:Perpetual Ideal (Anstruther Press, 2022. Out this week!)
Perpetual Ideal by Mike Caesar
Book description: 11 poems absent industrial application
Sample
from ‘A Chain with Star Pattern’
What’s the alternative to common ruin? Wishing for a counterpoise to instinct is totally inadequate. So is clairvoyance, the abolition of private property. Whatever can be stripped of its halo is. It’s a revolution, a chain with star pattern in glass. But you’re indoors, home, reading The Jests of Baggio.
PP: What was your aim with the chapbook?
MC: Simply to bring the flame nearer.
PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this?
MC: There were countless moments in making the poems themselves. In making the chapbook, without a doubt working with editor Jim Johnstone and designer Erica Smith on edits, arrangement and production. Seeing a Jan Van Eyck eyeball on the cover!
