Towards to the end of the year I’ll post my usual summary of my reading stats, how many Canadian vs, not, and indigenous reads or gender parity, by genre and all the etc. For the moment, I’m collecting up my fav reads. With caveat that I have in progress probably a dozen.

Here are my top 10% of I read so far in 2024. Maybe this will tip an idea to you of what to give for gifts. (Bolded are the ones released this year.)

Memoir:

• Notes to Myself: My struggle to become a person by Hugh Prather (Real People Press, 1970)
• And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir by Margaret Kimball (Harper, 2021)
• Summer of the Horse by Donna Kane (Harbour, 2018)
• James Wright: a Life in Poetry by Jonathan Blunk  (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2017) 
• Crooked Teeth by Danny Ramadan (Viking, 2024)

Short Stories:

• Buffalo is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel (Arsenal, 2022)

Plays:

• Faith Healer by Brian Friel (Faber & Faber, 1980)

Novels:

• Looking for Her by Carolyn Marie Souaid (Baraka Books, 2024)
• We Meant Well by Erum Shazia Hasan (ECW, 2023)
• Denial by Beverley McLachlin (Simon & Schuster, 2021)
• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Viking, 2020)
• Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (Corgi Books, 1990)

Fan Fiction:

• Bleating Hearts by HK Black (Archive of Our Own, 2023)
• Demonology and the Triphasic Model of Trauma: An Integrative Approach by Nnm (Archive of Our Own, 2019)
• By My Side series by DemonicPutto (Archive of Our Own, 2020-2022)
• Salinity (and other measurements of brackish water) by drawlight (AO3, 2019)
• Bonds of Blood by Dee_Morris (AO3, 2024)
• Public Relations by Cards_Slash (AO3, 2024)
• On the Same Page by Chekhov (Archive of Our Own, 2020)
• Every Damn Day by klikandtuna (AO3, 2024)

Poetry:

• The Unfolding: poems by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, [ARC] (Wildhouse, 2024)
• Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World, edited by Pádraig Ó Tuama (Canongate, 2022)
• Spøkjelse I Japanske Drosjar by Dag T. Straumvåg, translation of Michael Dennis (A+D, 2020)
• Get Well Soon by Jamie Sharpe (ECW, 2024)
• Your Therapist Says it’s Magical Thinking: poems by Sadie McCarney (ECW, 2023)
• Dancing with the Dead by Red Pine (Copper Canyon, 2023)
• Skirrid Hill by Owen Sheers (Seren Books, 2005, 2009)
• The flesh is not a prison by Graham Cwinn (Things in my Chest, 2023)
• Entre Rive and Shore by Dominique Bernier-Cormier (Icehouse, 2023)
• Like a Trophy from the Sun by Jason Heroux (Guernica, 2024)
• Love is a Place but you cannot Live There by Jade Wallace (Guernica, 2023)
• after that: poems by Lorna Crozier (M&S, 2023)
• Reckoning: a poem by Patrick Friesen (Anvil Press, 2023)
• Beyond the Flames by Louise Dupré, trans by Antonio D’Alfonso (Guernica Editions, 2014)
• Rose by Li-Young Lee (BOA, 1986)

Poetry chapbooks:

• A Pandemic Inventory: Spring-Summer 2020 Brooklyn NY by Zane Koss (above/ground, 2023)
• Apocryphal Girl by Rebecca Macijeski (Pinhole Poetry, 2024)
• Life Cycle of a Mayfly by Maya Clubine (Vallum Chapbook Series, No. 37, 2023)
• a very little street by Stuart Ross (Turret House, 2023)
• Blizzard of None by Jason Heroux (Puddles of Sky, 2024)

Haiku:

• Weather by Rob Taylor (Gaspereau Press, 2024)
• No Heroic Measure by Roland Packer (Red Moon Press, 2023)

Since 2012 I’ve done a complete list of books read in the year. I generally have add demographics of writers to make me conscious of who I read so I don’t read all old dead white American men but include in my view everyone else.That desire got a wrinkle when reading fan fiction since it is like old usenet days where people have handles not visible identities for gender or nation or any other marker. I think that’s good. It prevents me from getting fixated on ratios or quotas. I want to read not just current books but voices from the 1800s and before to balance my filters. I like to read works in translation to inform my perspectives. I want to read not only poetry that I default to, but memoirs, science, history, novels to inform that project that is Build Self. I want to include easy reads and hard stretch reads. 

About 10% of my reads were re-reads. About 15% of titles were read aloud, thus far. Knowing I will be listing all at Instagram causes some torque as I read, wanting to not read the last portion if I didn’t like it so I wouldn’t have to add it to my list. Loophole-mind is never healthy. I do not include children’s books read or often don’t include graphic novels or list a book again if I’m re-reading more than once within a year. I don’t include books that I quit, naturally, but i have added a spreadsheet page for abandoned books where I foundered or stalled. Not that you need to know, just saying.

That’s not so much creeping up but running full tilt. I’ll have the fabulous new Jamie Sharpe chapbook for sale and be browsing all the new wares. Cash or credit card.

Ottawa Small Press Fair, Fall Edition
Sat. Nov 16 12-5pm, Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Station Rd, 2nd floor (overlooking hockey arena).

The general arc of the book The Long Invisible: poems by Michael Dechane (Wildhouse Publishing, 2024) moves from break up to new relationship. From opening pages there is an ache. “Because I love Twice at Once” (p.10) within insomnia “I come to this window/naked, where winter pours in./Here is a tang my skin remembers.” The poem moves to the conclusion with a stunning ending which I hope might outlive author and book “my body remembers
how ardor is the thing with horns.”

This slope and rise of the book is the opposite of many collections where the arc is from happy to imploding relationship, or from only comprising the down cycle of relationship. That default trope makes a certain sense since people when entering trauma are inspired to process grief as poetry. The Long Invisible takes a more Happily Ever After bent, perhaps following from the adage, if it isn’t a happy ending, it isn’t the end yet. (It is a narrator’s call wherever you decide to call cut.)

The net effect of the poems are heartening. At the root of the poems is a person looking for beauty and meaning.

Admittedly I have been among the scoffers when poetry is described with the overused term “luminescent”, but this collection has a quality of light like Mary Pratt, rooted in the every day mundane miracle of being alive. It is undeniably gorgeous, fiercely present.

A yellow tomato comes apart at the seam
my knife makes. This skin: how can it hold
so well so much? I salt the weeping flesh
that reflects this morning light.

p.37 “The Gathered Made Ready.”

Despite this poem being an allegory for hope of heavenly healing of the broken, it is lovely, dwelling in the exquisite now. There can be a different world view and yet the poetry crosses the chasm.

Sometimes I want to see the prose memoir background that would anchor transports of ache, duede, joy. For example p 11’s “The Black Bear”
piques interest and shows such freshness of framing: the absence of someone refusing to come home as a bear is sumptuous in its extended metaphor. an absence as a danger or not a danger, but an awareness watched in the daffodils at dusk “like a greater darkness, claiming candles.”

It is beautiful in sound, concept, structure, imagery, metaphor. There is a holiness embedded and imbued that is painterly and admirable and suspect. What was left out? what would the bear say? In practical terms, what is omitted with this perfect beauty?

I don’t tend to hang about in the lyrical streams of poetry partly because of the plaintive and bald, explicit and uninsured, a reliance on expected but the predictable and oversimplified is not in abundance here.

There is not a self-satisfied air. The poet questions himself “Why Am I Kinder to Your Memory” p. 16 and muses “Why am I kinder to your memory
than I was to you?” and on p. 57 “Seventh- grade story” the concrete is recounted play-by-okay but finds a lesson after decades. A gilded, gentle humour of distance is extended to the more foolish past self. It is poetry by a mature mind. This poem leads to the self-examination and quiet eureka of insight: “how necessary it is/to wreck the sentimental. When it crumples, finally,/the real story, the hiding life, is free to emerge.”

In this poem the case was smelling poop & realizing it was coming from your own shoe on the school bus so [spoiler alert] chucking the one shoe out the window and walking home half-shod. That gently comic situation suggests an allegory anyone can apply to themselves of being the one at fault while blaming others.

The poet seems to be taking stock of the first phases of life. Ihe poet takes another long view, standing apart from the show in,

“I don’t hate them, but it’s as if I’m a co-producer
in the longest running show of human history.
I’m tired of watching us be so bad to one another,
making sure I hear nothing, keeping
my mouth shut to save a tip, save this job”

“Round After Round” (p. 59)

Even inside the tired jadedness here, there’s a sort of pleasure and acceptance, whether portraying drunken hookups develop, watching a terrible cook try to cook. The most romantic poem was indulging in a night swim when “The warm slicks of our bodies found each other.” (p.79).

Many writers don’t want to stray towards beauty, or only permitting it if paired one foot is securely on pathos. Is this collection using heart strings percussively? He is putting himself humbly & vulnerably out there, concreretely, openly.

If there were a summary it might be encapsulated in the idea of happiness as rebellion, as reveillon, as the best revenge as in this pasty of “Spring Dictation” (p. 96)

“Do not exhaust yourselves
in the grip of little things.

Be candent roving flames
who savor the darkening world.

May beauty confront you”

Just a reminder if you have a newsfeed of this, I’m also at Substack: https://pearlpirie.substack.com and at Patreon. Some people donate there for which I am grateful since I’m not working f/t at a job, not teaching nor doing government work. One can’t apply for most grants yearly. So income of my own, that’s sweet because I realllllly suck at gardening.