November 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
shalan joudry was named artist-in-residence at the Canadian Museum of Immigration. 

Cassidy McFadzean’s Third State of Being was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Annick MacAskill’s poem “Pigeon” was a 2023 selection for the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s Poetry in Motion.

New Releases
Write, Print, Fold and Staple: On Poetry and Micropress in Canada by Jim Johnstone. In Write, Print, Fold and Staple Jim Johnstone details the enduring importance of chapbook micropresses to the ecology of Canadian literature, arguing that the chapbook is the ideal form for publishing poetry. Small and provisional, micropresses generally operate outside of the commercial anxieties of trade publishing, pursuing unmediated aesthetic, cultural and personal aims.“Can’t find the book you’re looking to read? Fold and distribute something new. Generate the change you want to see.” At the heart of Johnstone’s discussion is a useful survey of fifteen notable Canadian micropresses active during the past two decades, presses whose output ranges from lo-fi, zine-like, counter-cultural productions through to works whose editing and production values far exceed those of mainstream publishers, and everything in between.

I’mpossible collab by Klara du Plessis. I’mpossible collab asserts the collaborative nature of literary criticism, how as critics we “write, write with, write alongside, or rewrite” literary texts. In ten essays discussing works by contemporary Canadian poets such as Jordan Abel, Oana Avasilichioaei, Dionne Brand, Anne Carson, Kaie Kellough, Annick MacAskill, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Lisa Robertson, scholar and poet Klara du Plessis explores the critic’s interpretive agency and the valuable playfulness of pursuing our own insights, proposing a more fluid, organic, and open-ended approach to how we think and write about poetry.

Slipsheets: An incidental printing of Gerald Manley Hopkin’s “Pied Beauty” by Andrew Steeves and Christopher Patton. An incidental expression of “Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s influential poem, is captured in the waste of a letterpress printer’s fine edition. In this book, printer Andrew Steeves and poet Christopher Patton explore how the “graphic bycatch” of a printing process is in sympathy with the antiphonal form of Hopkins’s poetics, how “the formed world in all its mixedupedness is intelligible—you’ve just got to set your mind right.”

Recent Press
Ariel Bissett wrote about last month’s Wayzgoose.

Rob McLennan reviewed Write, Print, Fold and Staple by Jim Johnstone.

Rob McLennan reviewed No Place Like by Adam Beardsworth.

Marguerite Pigeon reviewed Before Combustion by Nicholas Bradley.

The Temz Review interviewed Tom Cull. 

Christina Barber reviewed Tender by Sylvia D. Hamilton.

Rob McLennan interviewed Tom Cull and reviewed Kill Your Starlings.

Jeremy Klaszus wrote about Smoke Proofs: Essays on Literary Publishing, Printing & Typography by Andrew Steeves.