natalie hanna is an Ottawa lawyer working with low income populations, and an alumna of carleton and ottawa u. her writing focusses on feminist, political, and personal relational themes. From April of 2016 to September of 2018, she served as the Administrative Director of the Sawdust Reading Series and on the board of Arc Poetry Magazine. Her poem “light conversation” received Honourable Mention in ARC Magazine’s 2019 – Diana Brebner Prize. After years of publishing but this is her first trade collection.

About the poet: natalie hanna I had the pleasure to publish in a Cocoa Cabin chapbook over 5 years ago. She published my chapbook, rob plunder gift (BattleAxe, 2018) which is an erasure of 25 years of poems of rob mclennan. She recently did a collaborative chapbook with Liam Burke. You can hear her interviewed at small machine talks in 2017. She is a poet who applies her deep intellect, her protective wings, and her bottomless tender heart into her poetry.

Book:
lisan al’asfour by Natalie Hanna (ARP Books, Winnipeg, Nov 2022).

Book description:

“Beginning and ending with moving invocations for softness and strength, Natalie Hanna’s lisan al’asfour (the bird’s tongue) introduces a personal concept of creation around loss, confirming identity, and matrilineal questions.

Hanna delves into her heritage as the child of a married woman (who later became a single mother in Canada), compelled to immigrate from Egypt in the 1970s. She narrativistically traces challenges including medicalization, childlessness in relation to ancestral lines, racism, loss of culture, and working in the field of law.

The book then brings the reader through poems of mourning, touching on Tahrir Square, Syrian bombings, the conflict in the Gaza Strip, the Beirut explosion, and gun/police violence to Black and Indigenous communities.

Finally, a series of poems that describe the schism between defining and maintaining identity, and the orientalised perceptions of what others have expected, invite intimate and vulnerable engagement. These are poems that speak to our efforts to make sense of the worlds we construct. Engagements with sometimes graphic incidents are offered in a respectful manner that confronts atrocity, refusing the impulse to avert. They, therefore, also have a unique multivalence, embracing an impassioned approach to literary practice as anti-oppression practice, through the perspective of the critical self-subject.”

Samples:
Some lines from ‘do not stand up as a witness against me’

again, let laughter testify in favour of our continued
existence as much as the dichotomy of mended seams
and fine silk, the stitched together syntax
of needlepoints so vast we could step inside
and run away forever from all sorrows, for
we speak in the meter of doubt. we speak fear
by question: what is the life of each of us worth?

stanzas from ‘the mountains we become while inhabiting the earth’

let us sing an elegy for embroidered galabeyas
handed down by our mothers
we imagined wearing in the gardens

so tender did we think our limbs would remain
every precious moment of light
illuminating our changeable faces

never knowing it is possible to accrete
stillness over lifetimes such that we bend
to the law of mountains

PP: What was your aim with the book?
NH: I wanted to put together a first full length collection that would have spoken to someone in my position when I was coming up as a writer in my twenties. I wanted to give a perspective on the development of identity, both forwards and backwards in time.

There were some sea-changes in my life in my thirties. They allowed me to gain new lenses through which to examine my experiences, while also challenging me. One day, it felt like there were finally enough pieces that worked together to create a narrative backbone.

One of the themes in the book is that of trying to retain diaphanous cultural connections as part of an Arab diaspora. The children of immigrants both lose and inherit much. It would have meant a lot to me early on to read poetry by other contemporary, Arab women who were also children of immigrants. Into this, I’ve also woven discussions of who we think is privileged to speak, be recognized, and succeed.

The title, ‘lisan al’asfour’ is a transliteration of the Arabic nickname for orzo pasta, which comes out to “the bird’s tongue.” It is the earliest source of Arabic/English childhood misunderstanding my mother can remember having with me, when she named the dish she was serving me and I became inconsolable with grief at the prospect of eating the tongues of birds. It’s become both a part of our family story and a significant symbol for the uses of speech. It is around this idea that the book has coalesced.

PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this book?
NH: There have been many good moments in this process. I guess it must be thrilling for everyone to sign their first book contract! I really enjoy organizing manuscripts, as well. I’ve been grateful to have solid advice and support from some amazing and generous authors, editors, and publishers without whom this would never have come to pass. I was delighted to find a progressive home for the manuscript with ARP Books. I’m also very much looking forward to putting a copy of the book into my mother’s hands.

Frances Boyle‘s most recent book is Seeking Shade, a collection of short stories (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020). Her novella, Tower, with Fish Gotta Swim Editions came out in June 2018. Her poetry collections, Light-carved Passages (Buschek Books, 2014), and This White Nest, (Quattro Books, 2019) will be joined by a third collection this fall.

About the poet: Her prose is tight and her poetry is not prosaic. For example, night water is described as “scattered peels of shine” and in a later poem in This White Nest, there’s the astute phrase “the way you hear voices in noises”. There’s a density paired with lyricism that tickles my various loves of language.

She sets up the admiral goal of trying to collect as many literary rejections in a year as possible and as a consequence of that, and writing excellently, reaps a lot of publication. Frances Boyle is a long-time friend. We workshopped together for a few years and attended the same literary events. Myth and magic, women, agency and forests tend to recur. Her word-control and love of nature seemed akin to haiku in their reach for multiple layers of depth in This White Nest.

Book:
Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House, November, 2022)

Book description:
“Openwork and Limestone is a finely-wrought and potent new poetry collection from one of Canada’s most compelling poets. In Frances Boyle’s powerful vision, the rituals of contemporary women are seen through the lens of Celtic warrior queens, and goddesses. The natural and created worlds—as they run, as Boyle says, “through the funnel / of my palms”—are a constant source of awe and woman’s strength. A reverie that allows in the brutality of history and prehistory, as well as the joys. “The unconscious / swimming upward. What won’t stay buried rises / through rocks, rough-ridden and rusty.” Boyle’s Openwork and Limestone turns inward and outward at the same time, telling our multifarious collective human story so that it feels like our own intimate family history.”

Sample:
This first published in the (now defunct) Þ (Thorn) Literary Magazine:

Mare

Can’t you name her? Froth of fear-
sweat rank on her neck. Spears of light
catch the whites of her wild
rolling eyes, that glint off her teeth,
lips pulled back
over the shaft
of a broken bit.

She has, you realize, a woman’s
arms, jewel-adorned
and impassive, yet—oh!
unyielding as climbing vine
they bind you.

Mare’s breath, the Hag’s hands upon your chest.

And, you, rigid among your ropes of sheet,
leave no impression
on the unperturbed
night, its petrified
and momentary membrane.

PP: How is it different from your last poetry collection?
FB: While the new book shares several common themes with my last collection, This White Nest – including women’s lives, nature, family and myth – Openwork and Limestone delves more deeply and deliberately into the ways in which we are affected both by recent familial history, and by ancient forces, the currents that flow beneath our surface lives. Stylistically, I am striving to become ever more conscious of image and cadence, and to play more with fragmented impressions, making intuitive rather than logical connections.
 
PP: What was your aim with the book?
FB: I wanted my project of exploration – of a life, of family, of relationships – to unfold in a variety of ways: through crawls though deep time and rock (limestone) and through engaging with the work of women’s hands (openwork), with the two linked by vibrant strands of myth, magic and ritual.
 
PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this book?
FB: I am still in the deep weeds of editing as I am writing this. I am finding it a difficult process this time, so it is hard to think of any favourite moments – apart from the time when the manuscript will be finalized and at the press. But, thinking back, among my favourite moments was in a wonderful mentorship working with Susan Gillis, where we met weekly to dig deep into the manuscript and the individual poems.

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with two wee girls. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. He is the winner of the John Newlove Poetry Award, the Ottawa Council for the Arts Mid-Career award, and he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour in 2014.

About the poet: He’s been called the hardest working poet in Canada by more than a few people. He promotes others’ work, does reviews and interviews, articles and journals and chapbooks for others and still makes his own careful work. An old mantra of his is: everything counts. With enough minutiae a pixelated record of pattern emerges. What is outside the subject is often as interesting as the designated subject. Let those details leach in to where they already are in life.

He used to say, there’s no need to make stories as poems as there’s a thing called stories already. Poetry can explore the fringes of what is possible for language to do. In his previous book, Life Sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and to a lesser degree in A Halt Which is Empty (Mansfield, 2019) his form shifts from scattered over the page towards compressed bricks that are chunked tighter in theme.

Book: the book of smaller by rob mclennan (University of Calgary, May 2022)

sample:

Ars poetica 

Endlessly precious. No foothold. The world spins at astonishing speed. A balance of sponge and sun and will. Gestations, alight. Inaudible. Genealogy: more of a question, and less of an inventory. Someone cheers. Pregnant pop stars announce. Who are you. Stardust, atoms, Barcalounger. Curious, still. I cringe at such blunder. Lies, laments, imprecision. These talking heads spin. I write it all down. 

Book description: rob mclennan presents a collection of sharp, challenging prose poetry that asks what can be achieved if we try a little smaller.

Each poem is a still moment, a memory, a burst of observation, suspended outside time and held up to the light as the world whirls around it. Some are intimate, some are public, all are grounded personal, domestic space. With trademark intelligence and daring, rob mclennan uses radical structures to express the concision and disorientation, jumps in sense and mood, the collapse of time and duration, the shattering joy and powerful fears, of full-person, full-time parenthood.

With an unparalleled knowledge of modern poetry and poetic evolution, mclennan breaks the sentence into its most vital pieces, then breaks it further, smashes punctuation out of the expected into spaces of risk and uncertainty, pushing conventions to the edge and then beyond to challenge what writing is, and what a reader can be.

Reviews:

rob mclennan’s accomplished, agile poems build rooms for tenderness, humility, and awe to accumulate. The illuminated paragraphs that make up the book of smaller collect into an intimate and animated series of atmospheres, infused with an awareness that “We are never at rest.” Here, we are invited to see feelingly as a self dissolves, rebuilds, and atomizes again and again, always in relation, always aware of how we hold and are held by one another’s utterances. Each diastolic pulse grounds itself in sound, then hovers momentarily in the space that emptiness articulates. As mclennan writes: “All my years hold their breath.” My breath has become bound to the rhythms of this book, and the grace of its iterations.
—Eric Baus, author of The Tranquilized Tongue

In the book of smaller, rob mclennan continues his sprawling, lifelong commitment to the everyday. In these poems, mclennan braids together the details of his domestic life with a measured attention to the form of the sentence. We meet his kids and his kitchen, his traffic and his drift. Syntax, weather. These looping, cyclical prose poems pool up paratactically. They piece slight movements into panoramas. They count the moments of the day to bleed them together. They wait, rumble. In this small book, mclennan lives.
—ryan fitzpatrick, author of Coast Mountain Foot

Questions:

PP: What was your aim with the book? 
rm: The idea of focusing on the prose poem had been slowly percolating at the back of my attention for nearly a decade, and finally presented itself as something that I was ready to approach in a full-length manuscript. This thought coincided with the onset of my time home full-time with both small children, after Christine’s second year-long maternity leave ended, so the possibility of writing short bursts of single-stanza prose poems fit perfectly with my limited attentions. My aim was to push the form for as long as possible, and I managed one hundred and five short, single-stanza self-contained prose poems as a book-length suite across the space of nearly a calendar year before the tank simply ran dry, which usually means a pause for a breath, before moving on to something else, something other. 

PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this book? 
rm: In hindsight, my ability to marry my limited attentions with form seem quite clever. But I suppose I also very much enjoyed those rare times I managed to catch up on sleep. I was home with two wee monsters, after all, both of whom had, until quite recently, still both been in diapers. 

PP: How do you see it in relation to your other books? 
rm: I see this book as part of an ongoing and continuous thread, but also the beginning of a particular structural shift: a stronger focus on the prose sentence. After the book of smaller sits the manuscript “Book of Magazine Verse,” with the side-project “snow day” (my 2019-2020 poetry manuscripts) which were both immediately followed by “book of the sentence” (my 2021 project). I’m already working on “Autobiography,” a furthering of that particular line, that particular sentence. 

Whereas bpNichol did work on other projects, for example, during the composition and publication of The Martyrology (including a four-volume thread), I see this particular grouping, structurally, akin to Erín Moure’s five-volume grouping of poetry titles around the notion of the “citizen,” something that wasn’t composed in-parallel, seemingly, with other elements of her work, but a thread of accumulating titles that simply pooled into a grouping in terms of structure, content and approach. What followed that grouping was far different than what came before. 

Jean Van Loon is an Ottawa-based writer of fiction and poetry, whose first poetry collection, Building on River, was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award.

About the poet: I have known the poet for closing in on twenty years. She is precise-minded, detail-minded and diligent so none of the poems will be sloppy and half-rendered. As I mentioned in the most anticipated book list her previous book was research of a local figure, lumber baron J.R. Booth. Most books require research and a little obsession, but with this book she turns her gaze nearer home. The risk in such a collection

Book: Nuclear family by Jean Van Loon (McGill-Queens University Press, April 2022) 

Green Depression glass glows under a black light due ​to the uranium oxide content in the glass. It’s a unique collectible. This sets an era and a tone.

Might I say this makes for the perfect cover for the book. The cup and saucer evokes domesticity and something not quite right and natural. And beyond that, is a striking image and ties directly to a poem and themes in the book.

Sample:

In the night her whitened toes
cold sole on his calf
between his palms he warms
a slender foot –
twig bones, taut skin.

Book description:

In Nuclear Family violent events, global and familial, permeate a girl’s coming of age in a story of cataclysm and, ultimately, recovery.

Jean Van Loon’s father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. The Geiger counter he brought home exposed her mother’s dinner plate as radioactive. Her childhood friend’s father sold cobalt bombs to the Soviet Union. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada’s Cold War intelligence service.

Rooted in memory and history, Nuclear Family carries the reader into the sense of impending nuclear doom and the explosions of material wealth that shaped Van Loon’s childhood. Poems come alive with image, sound, and texture, portraying the innocence of childhood games, the worldwide effects of prolonged nuclear testing, and the long-lasting legacy of her father’s suicide – a fallout of radioactive silences.

Questions:

PP: How did this book originate?
JVL: The troubled story at the root of this book, my father’s death by suicide, was in my mind for forty years before I tried to write it. My initial attempt was a short story for the first creative writing workshop I ever took, and the response was so devastating I set the story aside for another twenty years. By then I had completed my first poetry manuscript, in which poetry helped me inhabit the mind and heart of a historical character, lumberman J. R. Booth. I wondered if I might be able to get to know my father in the same manner. I started on this second work before the first was accepted for publication. Then, after months of distraction to edit, publish, and promote the first book, I came back to this project. But I kept setting it aside. My father was a tougher nut to crack than Booth, because no media had covered his quiet life, and over the years my mother had tossed most of his correspondence. The final version is cast in part as a search to know him, and part as a search for the world that, to all appearances, terrified him.

PP: Best moments in the writing?
JVL: Much was fascinating, including learning about the Manhattan Project itself, which may have been the most exciting science and technology project before the moon rocket, with top minds from different countries and disciplines working together with desperate urgency and few budgetary limits.

The most fun was probably revisiting childhood memories – playing jacks on the porch floor, bouncing an India Rubber ball, picnics disrupted by the tension between my mother’s fastidiousness and birds’ undisciplined toilet habits. These memories resulted in many poems which have not been included due to a desire for focus and balance in the whole.

The most satisfying – and initially terrifying – was to reveal a draft manuscript to my brothers. While I feared they might hate the idea of publishing this story, both responded very positively, and it opened up a conversation about our shared past that was long overdue and much appreciated by all three of us.

Asking for Trouble by Sandra Stephenson/Czandra (Yarrow Press, Spring 2022). 

Sandra Stephenson publishes poems under the pen name Czandra. Her chapbooks include This side uP  (sitting duck press, 2011), A Few Words  (Melinda Cochrane International, 2014) and radish ~ a singularity  (obvious epiphanies, 2014).

About the poet: Sometimes it’s hard to tell where one first comes across a poet, although it seems to me she could recall exactly. Long ago she related to me what I said and what I was wearing last time she was in town. (I still hadn’t remembered her face.) While living in Western Quebec she forayed into Ottawa for Tree, A B Series, VERSeFest, the small press fair as well as haiku events. A sharp mind and appreciative of poets her enthusiasm is contagious. She curates writers’ residences in Muskoka (Trickledown House in Gravenhurst, Ontario), and one on the Bay of Fundy at Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. 

Book: Asking for Trouble, tanka by Czandra (Shoreline Press/ Yarrow, Spring 2022)

Book description: It’s tanka and kyoka over a 5-year period, which Ann Beer says “show the wide range of things tanka can do”. 

Reviews:

Asking for Trouble is a kyoka and tanka-flavoured collection encompassing all facets of the human experience. The subject matter ranges from the interpersonal to the socio-political, and
the poet’s wry sense of humour is evident throughout as she navigates the “thickening furies” of life.
—Debbie Strange, author of The Language of Loss: Haiku & Tanka Conversations

This is an outstanding collection from a tanka poet writing at the top her game about the extraordinary in the ordinary. Here
are slice of life tanka served with generous helpings of honesty, humour, poignancy and powerful imagery.
—Joanne Morcom, author of Like Ocean Waves: Tanka Poems

It will be easy to lose yourself in these poems, lose your sense of time and place, lose your way in life’s maze, find yourself … like a child/mesmerized by dust/dancing in sunlight/[who] sees her own/vapour trail. Reader beware!
—Claudia Coutu Radmore, author of Fish Spine Picked Clean: Selected Tanka

Sample:
Here are a couple of poems:

long-horned beetle
without a name
dies in a bottle
waiting for me
to find out if it’s harmful

…. every year
the thistle blooms
the same colour

And a game: 

Czandra asks us, how would you fill in the last two lines of this one?

he says
it’s triathlon day bath,
book and bed –

PP: Favourite moment in making this book?
C: Looking back, was holing up on the second floor of an old house in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia on Queen Street. It had a turret, parquetry floors, and was coated in sticky nicotine. A mix of the fine and the fusty. There was no furniture and no electricity, and it was early spring. I had heat, though it came through ducts that fed two other flats housing heavy smokers, so it was rank. There was water. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag, and watched dawn filter in the window broken by some housebreaker back in the day, probably, when it was a women’s shelter, when a heavy bar was bolted to the inside of the entry door. 

I wrote by candlelight, slept, and then wrote by the window looking over a half-burned shed in the neighbouring yard. I memorized the parquetry pattern, built by ships’ carpenters, and later reproduced it with oak flooring I got from a friend in Ontario. That was a fine time for me – uncluttered, elemental, shoulder to shoulder with evidence of someone else’s trouble, past and present. 

That spirit is in the poems.  I don’t really ask for trouble, but when I find it, I explore it in the longer view.  The five lines of tanka allows for crystallization, and because it’s tanka, it’s down to earth, not cryptic; attached to seasons of life, tides and the year, to cardinal directions, revolving around a centre that was my song.  It also holds the patina of its lineage, hundreds of years old, written by women and men around the world.  It came so naturally in those 5 years.

PP: What was your aim with the book?
C: My aim with this book is to sing. Complete snatches of small songs in 5 lines, sung in my own frank voice. Tanka fits so well to my thoughts, especially in a time of headlines and tweets, PMs and reworkings of old songs. Steve Luxton calls them “sips”, and they’ve been congratulated on their humour and emotion, both personal and public. I think they accomplish what I hoped for.