June Notes
The latest news and notes from those inky fellows at Gaspereau Press, with sundry accounts of their authors’ exploits and their books’ reception out in the wide world.
Author News
Bren Simmers won The Malahat Review’s 2023 Long Poem Prize.
Susan Haldane has three new poems available to read online.
Sylvia D. Hamilton won the Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award.
Annick MacAskill was longlisted for the 2023 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J. M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award.
Katie Fewster-Yan was longlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
Cassidy McFadzean published a new short story in Joyland Magazine.
Annick MacAskill will be a faculty member at the Banff Centre this winter.
Michael Goodfellow has been awarded the inaugural William & Elizabeth Pope Residency from the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.
Sean Howard has new poems out in Jerry Jazz and North Oxford.
New Spring 2023 Releases
The Sad Truth by Karen Schindler. The Devil’s Whim Occasional Chapbook Series: No. 51.
Scorch by Natalie Rice. In Scorch, Natalie Rice situates our sense of individual disconnection and grief within a larger ecology of loss, where nature is an active force and change is a continuous, complex cycle encompassing both the wildfire and whatever beauty may still rise out of the scorched ground. Grappling with connection and disconnection, plenitude and emptiness, Rice’s poems “lean/into what cannot be explained,” listening for the music, voicing the contradictions—“how the unsayable/hung like a red berry in the back/of my throat.”
Kill Your Starlings by Tom Cull. Exploring ecology, art, activism and historiography, Tom Cull writes of his relationships with family and place, pursuing the imperfect program of recollecting and reconstructing the idea of “home” while resisting nostalgia’s dubious erasures. Frank, unabashed, the poems lean into these entanglements with humour and sincerity, chronicling the writer’s vulnerability as a hinge-point in time—between being a son to a father and a father to a son; between a history that can’t be changed and a future that might be.
No Place Like by Adam Beardsworth. No Place Like regards the crisis of the Anthropocene, the disorientation and grief arising from our inability to meaningfully stem the planet’s accelerating decline. Moving from the minute incidents of the everyday through to wider cultural narratives, Beardsworth’s account of the relationship between the self and the environment often strikes a note of loss and longing. Yet if the very nature of Enlightenment reason has been complicit in all this destitution and anxiety, might some other path to hope remain in things outlandish, miraculous and unexplained?
After the Harvest by Keagan Hawthorne. After the Harvest reimagines a clutch of family stories that are the poet’s main connection to a disappeared ancestral farm—a complex bucolic world slipping further into the realm of myth with every passing season. Soundful, ecclesiastical in cadence, Hawthorne’s poems form an elegy to a lost way of life and work while asserting the power that language holds to recreate.
Makeready: An interview with Gray Zeitz of Larkspur Press, with commentary by Andrew Steeves and two linocuts by Michael Hepher. Gray Zeitz is a celebrated letterpress printer and literary publisher based in rural Kentucky. This interview explores how the fine press book tradition and techniques he learned on an iron handpress influenced his work with more pragmatic jobbing presses. Includes extensive commentary by Andrew Steeves and two original reduction linocuts by Michael Hepher of Clawhammer Press. Specification: Typeset in Linotype Janson & Monotype Joanna. Printed in black, red and grey on dampened Saint Armand Old Masters handmade paper. Folded to 7.5 × 11 inches making 40+ pages. Includes two original reduction linocut prints by Michael Hepher. Handsewn on tapes, casebound (cloth over boards) and slipcased. Limited edition of 50 numbered copies.
Upcoming Spring Releases
Before Combustion by Nicholas Bradley and Ultramarine by Harry Thurston.
Upcoming Events
Matt Robinson, Alison Smith and other poets will read at the Broad Cove Community Hall in Broad Cove, Nova Scotia on Saturday June 10, at 2 p.m., host by Cory Lavender.
On June 22 at 5 p.m. PDT [9 p.m. Atlantic Time], the Alcuin Society will present a virtual conversation between Andrew Steeves and Amos Kennedy, titled “The Amos Kennedy School of Bad Printing.”
Tammy Armstrong, Alison Smith and Michael Goodfellow will read poems at The Whirligig Bookstore in Shelburne, Nova Scotia on Saturday, July 22, at 3 p.m.
Recent Press
CBC Saint John interviewed Margot Stafford.
Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen reviewed Sue Goyette’s Monoculture in the Winnipeg Free Press.
Jérôme Melançon reviewed Sylvia D. Hamilton’s Tender in The Temz Review.
Carousel reviewed Shadow Blight by Annick MacAskill and Naturalism, an Annotated Bibliography by Michael Goodfellow.
The latest issue of ARTiculate profiled Leesa Dean.
Lindsay Bird interviewed Sylvia D. Hamilton on CBC’s Atlantic Voice.
Janet Barkhouse interviewed Michael Goodfellow on Coastal Villages.