Spring News

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.

Upcoming Events

Clare Goulet will launch her debut collection of poems at Trident Booksellers & Cafe in Halifax on May 13 at 7 p.m., in partnership with the King’s Co-op Bookstore.

Rob Taylor will launch his latest collection of poems on May 24 at 7 p.m. at the Old Mill Boathouse in Port Moody, BC.

The press’s annual Wayzgoose will take place on Saturday, Oct. 26 in Kentville, Nova Scotia with special guests John Shoesmith, Stephanie Wolff, and Dan Wood.

New Releases

Weather by Rob Taylor. Living with his wife and young children in a small apartment during the pandemic lockdown, Rob Taylor developed a habit of retreating to the wooded fringes of a nearby walking trail with a camping chair to do his work. “I needed that space in order to edit the writing of others,” writes Taylor, “but when time allowed I waited in that quiet, that wind and birdsong, for haiku.” A companion to his poetry collection The News, Taylor’s Weather was written over the first three years of his daughter’s life, chronicling the accumulative effect of intimacy and contemplation and revelling in the “small moments out of which we assemble our lives.”

Graphis scripta / writing lichen by Clare Goulet. Clare Goulet considers how things are and also are not what they seem, grounding her poems in the natural history of lichen, metaphor’s biological analogue. Though presented as a sort of field guide—to lichen, but also to metaphor—this collection is delightfully animated, buoyed by Goulet’s sense of mischief, rhythm, and sound. By nimbly shifting our attention from the supposed subject matter to the slippery matter of attention itself, Goulet daylights language’s symbiotic relationship with the world and the way in which it nurtures hope and love.

Herménégilde Chiasson: In Acadie by Ray Cronin. Over his long and multi-faceted career, Herménégilde Chiasson has emerged as one of New Brunswick’s most recognizable artists, producing work in an astonishing range of media—painting, printmaking, drawing, filmmaking, theatre, performance art and writing. His path intertwines with that of the Acadian community itself—his art both an intimate commentary on the history, culture and traditions of Acadie and the embodiment of the forward thrust of modernism and postmodernism that has fueled the Acadian cultural renaissance.

The Work by Bren Simmers. The poems in The Work engage with the work of love and loss and the hope that we might somehow learn to carry our portion of grief. Simmers writes of churning in an accumulation of losses—the sudden death of her father, the descent of her mother into dementia, her sister-in-law’s terminal illness—and of the work of slowly making wholeness out of brokenness. Her writing fosters a vulnerability and wit that sidestep easier tropes, a reminder that healing often comes through saying “Hello” and “Yes”; a realization that “all this noticing / was love.”

Folklore of Lunenburg County by Michael Goodfellow. The poems in Folklore of Lunenburg County are rooted in the ethnography of Helen Creighton and the otherworldly stories of supernatural encounters that she collected on the south shore of Nova Scotia in the mid-twentieth century. For Goodfellow, these accounts evoke much more than quaint records of a primitive time and place. Ghost stories become a lens on human relationships; supernatural experiences become analogs for loss, longing, and disappearance, and for the way in which these experiences are mediated by landscape, nature, and community ritual.

Author News & Recent Press

Rob McLennan reviewed Before Combustion by Nicholas Bradley.

Jami Macarty reviewed Scorch by Natalie Rice.

Annick MacAskill published a new short story in Plenitude.

Rob McLennan interviewed Klara du Plessis and reviewed I’mpossible Collab.

Bren Simmers published a new poem in Juniper.

Literary Hub reviewed Folklore of Lunenburg County by Michael Goodfellow.

Natalie Rice published a new poem in Columba.

Rob McLennan reviewed Slipsheets by Andrew Steeves and Christopher Patton.