Press

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT US:

REVIEW: Broken Pencil on Fond by Kate Eichhorn From Broken Pencil Issue 41; reviewed by Tara-Michelle Ziniuk

Excerpt:
“Carefully measuring syntax, Eichhorn whittles her verse down to the perfect pile of words, but does not delete her markings and scratches. Actualizing the editorial process as archivist, this innovative work takes inventory of the book itself, its contents as meaningful as it’s coming to be.”

If Track Changes were a poetic form, Kate Eichhorn would be its master. In her borderline book-art poetic debut (as an author, that is --- as a scholar Eichhorn is seasoned) Fond experiments with layout and format in extremes, distracting from its sometimes very literal poetry. Carefully measuring syntax, Eichhorn whittles her verse down to the perfect pile of words, but does not delete her markings and scratches. Actualizing the editorial process as archivist, this innovative work takes inventory of the book itself, its contents as meaningful as it’s coming to be. As the shared object of lovers, as a study in compulsion, Eichhorn proves that the, and this book is precious.

 

REVIEW: Broken Pencil Review’s BookThug Zine, B after C The following review appeared in Broken Pencil Issue 41 and was reviewed by Nathanial G. Moore

Excerpt:
“Make sure you pick up a copy of this fine litzine in any of its editions at your next small press sock hop.”

BookThug’s poetry always impresses. Think of B after C as a bootleg of works in progress culling innovative poetry in a handy litzine format. Sandra Alland has a great essay on poetic translation and there is some work by poets I’m not familiar with but should be, i.e., Kemeny Babineau, Adam Seelig and Laynie Brown who has some very elegant “daily sonnets”. Plus some new work about the weather and David Suzuki and other musings by a. rawlings, one of my favourite poets. So make sure you pick up a copy of this fine litzine in any of its editions at your next small press sock hop.

 

REVIEW: rob mclennan on At Alberta by Nathalie Stephens From rob mclennan’s blog on October 30th, 2008. Reviewed by rob mclennan

Excerpt:
 “Addressing the treatment of genre and gender (which occupy the same semantic space in French), of (un)translatability, desire and territorialisation, Stephens makes uncomfortable the fluctuations necessary to make the languages in our mouths and the places from which we speak, more elusive, and paradoxically more approachable.”

Nathalie Stephens (Nathanael) in Alberta

I come and fetch you at the arrivals’ gate and a week later I bring you back to the departure level. In between the space is filled with thoughts and talks and dialogue and mostly indigestible food and many rich moments, all of it public yet always private. A problem of performance: can we ever get away from the simulacra? (Anne Malena)

As I prepared my own return to Edmonton, I started reading Nathalie Stephens’ At Alberta (BookThug, 2008), a simultaneous series of departure and returns. As I packed my little bag heading west, it became difficult not to be aware of my previous year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, during the same period when the last of Stephens’ pieces were delivered, to be collected in this small graceful publication through Toronto’s BookThug. At Alberta is a series of talks and correspondences presented in and through Alberta during two visits to the University of Alberta, with one in 2006 and a second, two years later, with the latter visit resulting in an essay by University of Alberta professor Anne Malena, and a correspondence at the end of the collection between Stephens and poet and academic Christine Stewart, who was new faculty at the University of Alberta during the 2007-8 academic year.

In 1995, I spent an hour interviewing Quebecois author Nicole Brossard on the newly-published English translation of her novel Baroque d’aube (1995), published by McClelland & Stewart as Baroque at Dawn (1995). Being unilingual English, I wondered, how did she feel about me reading a text with her name attached that she had not actually written? Did she feel any ownership to works of hers translated into languages she could not in fact read? This seemed a strange thing for me to comprehend, as a unilingual English speaker and reader.

The tape has long been lost among my ex-wife’s possessions. I remember Brossard answering briefly in French, phrases out loud to herself, before able to self-translate for my benefit. I had wanted the French to appear in the transcription, since I considered it an essential part of the spoken text, and my ex-wife is fluently bilingual, but managed to lose track of such in her apartment. I do not remember too much about the interview anymore.

Quoting Derek Walcott in her piece in the small collection, Alberta critic Anne Malena writes:

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

An important part of understanding Nathalie Stephens is understanding the space her work holds between languages, between genders. But how can one even begin to comprehend knowing but one of these two languages? Do I come to her works already incomplete? There is an abstract here that English usually cannot abide. The language is forced to shift, to make itself.

And why does the back cover work to eschew geography, At Alberta, yet the front cover is nothing but, published by “BookThug Toronto,” doing very little than heavily placing the collection? As the back cover writes:

The talks assembled in At Alberta have as their ironic coincidence: place. Spatially concurrent (they were all, with one exception, delivered at the University of Alberta), they rigorously thwart systematization through reiterative displacement, subterfuge and irritation. Addressing the treatment of genre and gender (which occupy the same semantic space in French), of (un)translatability, desire and territorialisation, Stephens makes uncomfortable the fluctuations necessary to make the languages in our mouths and the places from which we speak, more elusive, and paradoxically more approachable.

Obviously, language is an ongoing process between what is fixed and what is fluid, with English being (it is said) the most mongrel of tongues, made up of bits picked up from whatever other language it happens to near, whether used correctly or incorrectly (think mush for marche in sled-dog Alaska, or “the lou” for the once-warning, “l’eau!”). Some words, ideas and concepts simply can’t be moved easily from one language to another. Take the problems of gender from French to English, or certain words with multiple meanings in French, having to reduce or even shift meanings by changing into English, something playwright Patrick Leroux has struggled with for years, the difficulty in getting his plays properly translated, for the amount of wordplay he engages in the original tongue. Is this a good or a bad thing that the tongues of our mothers might get close, but never meet? How does one word in that muddle between languages, impossible to be in a place without the same muddles of ideas, concepts, gender?

Lines will lose their definition in spite of being draw, translation will not be in spite of being. I asked why does translation have to end since it can be the undoing of stasis, the expression of unendings. I like the answer, the risk of confining oneself, de se contenter, to the artifice of an exercise. No, if language defines you, you can also define it as you wrote in the first person and I translate in the second. (Anna Malena)

I think about so many authors that self-translate. Is this process of translating, of talking, also one of storytelling? The stories you hear in your youth that you take your own turn to tell; slightly changed, even if every word is the same. Telling tales out of school. How your grandfather got his own way through the war, or how your family came, generations ago, to be part of this country.

But still, jokingly, he says, how do you bring philosophy to Alberta? To fix would reduce, make less, and make so much less fluid. Why is it French prefers the fluidity, while English, predominantly, prefers the fixed position? How does one work between a rock and the river itself?

In the passage of oneself from one language into another, in the expression of desire for further and more, the space that opens, that offers itself as here, the failure, the faille, is posed between murder and suicide; there is no natural death to speak of. I translate myself. We translate ourselves. That is, we carry ourselves, the part of us that remains at the moment of crossing, into the space of the other. (Nathalie Stephens)

Stephens deliberately misuses words and concepts to be able to fully get to the (fluid) heart of the matter; that more this is fixed, and the idea that it is or it could be, an illusion. Once that illusion is passed, only then, can real comprehension begin.

 

REVIEW: Agora Reviews Matter by Meredith Quartermain From The Agora Review on October 8th, 2008; Reviewed by Aaron Tucker

Excerpt:
“The world emerges out of Matter’s primordial soup of flippers, vowels, fins and consonants and Quartermain makes it fit together, letter to letter, arm to torso, word to classification.”

What Matters
From the first dawn of life
being resembled -
stars shaped themselves to horses, bears, crabs, fish
and breathed - eyes breathing eyes - eyes breathing ears
the astral flesh
the hand of a man formed for grasping that of a mole
the leg of a horse, the flipper of a porpoise, the wing of a bat.

As I was reading Matter I began to write down all the questions that rose up through my devouring of the book and the one I kept circling back around to was what exactly is "matter?" Even on a basic grammar level the answer is unclear: is matter a verb (does this matter?) or a noun (this is matter)? If we look at matter as anything gravity touches and makes mass (as echoed by "Gravity's Levity") then the things described in this book are forever changing with the pressure of gravity, morphing and finally conjoining together. Even more impressive, when we are able to look beyond the mere content of the poems, the things, we begin to see the letters and words taking on weight of their own, the gravity of semantic meaning doubled and tripled with repetition, until the words themselves are individual, textured, dense, are pieces of matter that exist in the same ways as beehives and marsupials. We are given words that are animals that are humans, then other animals, then simply objects, marks on pages, things – all the while, borders and definitions are rarely defined and we are presented not with stark images but with composite sketches, jumblings.

And so what is matter if it's everything? I think the book, like Roget, likes this challenge. Matter is structure or rather structuring. As we begin to look at Roget and his work, I'm not convinced he even needed actual content within his classifications but rather spaces that content could fit into, a skeleton without meat or muscle. It is the act then of constructing systems, to sort and organize that makes Matter hum. The book then becomes an exercise in this construction, a putting together of the world. This is where I saw the parallels with Genesis – this is a book that is obsessed with creating. It creates by naming, it creates by changing and ultimately it creates by structuring. The world emerges out of its primordial soup of flippers, vowels, fins and consonants and Quartermain makes it fit together, letter to letter, arm to torso, word to classification.

Note: This a response done within the context of Influency, a poetry salon run by the incomparable Margaret Christakos through the Continuing Ed. Section of U of Toronto. There is a new course every semester so be sure to sign up.

REVIEW: When Faces Come Out of the Rain: The Toronto Star likes the slipperiness of Meredith Quartermain’s Matter

“It's not hard to see that properties like density and elasticity can apply to language, and that one variety of "Unctuousness" is "slippery." (Quartermain has an especially good time goofing around with notions of fluidity.) The collection itself challenges the rigidity in how we view words and the reality they describe, defying the "grammar of pigeonholes" and the "law of arrangement" that nixes any connection between "gravity" and "levity.”

INTERVIEW: BookThug managing editor, Jenny Sampirisi interviewed by Nathanial G. Moore on Critical Crushes.