Local Publishers Launch Their Fall Lineups

Ron Silliman capped off the night with a crackling rendition of his work.I am a self-proclaimed bibliophile, as are probably most of the Puritan’s staff. October's launches, however, demonstrated that even when we spend most of our time with our noses tucked in the spines of our favourite books, we also know how to kick back and enjoy a great night out. Over the last two weeks, I attended the launches of two of Toronto’s favourite presses, and discovered that hidden beneath the sophisticated facade of our literary sensibilities lurks a ferociously festive spirit.October 1st saw the launch of BookThug’s Fall 2013 releases at Supermarket in Kensington, which has proven to be a favourite venue for a diverse range of publishing houses, including Guernica Editions, to tout their wares. Jay MillAr and Hazel Miller hosted the event and celebrated BookThug as representative of a “kickass literary adventure;” and the audience was ready for just that kind of night. The back room was packed with huddles of fans crowded into every possible inch of space and the vibe was electric, to say the least.The first reader of the night was Colin Fulton who read from his debut collection Life Experience Coolant comprised of four long poems. He described the collection as something that “does the body good” in our “frenzied world” and joked that although it may sound like a health-food supplement, it most certainly is not. The excerpt that he read was an attempt to search for “moments of affect” of the internet “troll.” Fulton remarked that his poem was comprised of four frames on each page, a structure that supports the somewhat scattered manner in which he read the piece, with stanzas breaking off in jarring caesuras, leaving some thoughts or themes “unfinished.” Whether or not one could follow his words in a linear fashion, the piece was certainly funny and thought-provoking as it attempted to pry apart the reasons behind our fastidious attention to our internet identities. Fulton asked, “why should I subscribe again?” and sardonically lamented the fact that “there is no totally new kind of game” and that it “doesn’t mean much anymore to die a lot.” Fulton certainly embraced the role of the internet troll, and lines such as, “If you think I’m wrong about any of this, you’re wrong” received quite a few laughs from the audience; reminding us that, despite the vitriol of online opinion, it’s necessary to laugh about it once in a while.David Goldstein is both a poet and Associate Professor at York University. He read from his latest collection Laws of Rest, which he described as a collection of poetical “boxes” and sonnets that perhaps Shakespeare would not have approved of. The first piece he read, “What Lucy Used to Be,” belongs to a section dedicated to a love affair between the narrator of the collection and Lucy. Throughout the rest of his reading, Goldstein displayed his keen interest in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, a field which will appeal to many graduate students hoping to draw a link between that rich literary era and contemporary poetry. Do not, however, be led into believing that Goldstein’s poetry is as starchy and lifeless as Richardson’s Pamela. On the contrary, his second piece, “D’ou Vien Donc Le Grand Assembly” was both gruesome and titillating, melding seventeenth-century recipe books with horrific images of bodies in pieces, preserving someone’s son in gooseberries, and soaking guts in rosewater. Perhaps what I most appreciated about Goldstein’s poetry was the delicate complexity of his diction. Several lines stood out for me, such as, “I blossomed like cellophane under your tutelage” and “cupping hands into parentheses” (both from “Lean Year”), which combined modern and archaic vocabulary into acoustically beautiful combinations.Julie Joosten was the next reader and appeared to have quite a large and loud fan base there to support her. She read from her collection Light Light, which she described as having developed from a new-found interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botany. She began by informing us that the scientific field shaped many discourses of knowledge, colonialism, industrialism, and concepts of “humanness” during that era. The first piece Joosten read, “Ghost Species,” provides fruitful commentary on our current concerns about climate change as it traces the potential of certain species of plants to survive depending on their sensitivity to increases and decreases in temperature. While Joosten aptly transforms scientific philosophy into poetry, it was somewhat disappointing to hear that she listed the names of flowers in large chunks rather than dispersing such a rich collection of unique-sounding words throughout her stanzas. Yet, if you are interested in poetry that concerns itself more with the physical world than with the “personality” of a narrator, Light Light may be for you.Following Joosten we had BookThug’s first fiction offering, namely, André Alexis’s new novella A. The book traces the story of Alexander Baddeley, a Toronto book reviewer obsessed with meeting his literary idol Avery Andrews. Alexis gave the audience a lot of good laughs during his reading. His main character provided an exemplary model through which to lambast the current climate of reviewing and the ubiquitous need to write corrosively in order to be effective and popular. Alexis’s topical intrigues do not end there, however, since towards the end of his reading he introduced a character named Gilbert Davidoff that functions as a parody of David Gilmour. In case you’ve been on a remote island for the past few weeks, Gilmour has been making headlines lately for his controversial remarks about only teaching “serious heterosexual guys” in his classes. Alexis described Davidoff as a “compulsive womanizer and mediocre novelist” right before his five-minute alarm went off and he left quite a cliff-hanger for the audience to drool over.Sandra Ridley was the second and last female author of the night and read from her poetry collection, The Counting House. The book is a series of thirty poems that comprise one longer one. Her reading intimated that her collection deals with female desire and the ways in which those urges have been scripted and re-scripted with the help of Michel Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir. My favourite line was “take back with your hands what you make with your mouth” and gives an indication of Ridley’s authorial interest in examining exchanges, both romantic and verbal. Puritan contributor Jenny Samprisi provides a nice description of the book and writes on BookThug’s website that, “The Counting House is a book that lives fiercely in the complex in-between of love and punishment, pleasure and pain, coo and cry.”The penultimate reader of the evening was Puritan contributor Michael Blouin who read from his new novel I Don’t Know How to Behave. As the book’s title suggests, Blouin certainly steers clear of the predictable and tame, and the heroes of his novel are Bruce McDonald and Canadian daredevil Ken Carter, who built a rocket car to fly over the St. Lawrence. In the novel, McDonald is making a film about Ken Carter, with Gillian Sze in charge of storyboards. In the excerpt that Blouin read, McDonald is in a bar talking to the server about a woman who doesn’t love him anymore. Although Blouin’s reading didn’t say a lot about the novel’s plot, it certainly demonstrated his talent for dialogue and dramatic speech. He read with the vibrancy and clarity of a stage actor, making McDonald’s character (and pain) come alive. Blouin’s fictionalized McDonald struggles to find the right words to describe his heartbreak and obsession, repeating “when she wakes up in the morning she greets the day, like the light wants to be on her” only to curse himself for the derivative cheesiness of his romantic descriptions.The final reader of the night was the legendary Ron Silliman who read from his latest collection Revelator, which is merely the opening poem of a longer work called Universe. Sound ambitious? It certainly is. I find his poetry a bit difficult to describe but the hosts did a good job in saying Silliman is a “literary and political cartographer” with a knack for showing off the relations between dissimilar things. The poem began in a domestic scene, moved into the streets of a subdivision, out to the soulless mega-corporation Walmart, and ended up describing the point of view of a glorious osprey. Silliman read with such ecstatic energy that it felt as though the microphone was crackling, his poetry creating whirling images like a camera spinning on its axis. The reader’s perception can only take in fragments at a time but the images coalesce into a kaleidoscopic whole, not unlike Michael Snow’s film Back and Forth but with a much larger scope and a much more colourful palette to work from. If you’ve never heard of Silliman before, then check out Revelator and indulge in his adventurous verbal enterprise.Stay tuned for Part Two of Tracy Kyncl’s feature on Book Launches later this week with her coverage of Coach House’s Fall Launch.