Table for Fourby Eccentric Crops (Colin Smith, Jennifer Still, Steven Ross Smith, Ted Landrum)Published by JackPine PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$30.00 ISBN 9781927035405 JackPine Press has been challenging traditional ideas re: what constitutes a book since the press’s inception, and with Table for Four, written by the four-poet collaborative Eccentric Crops—Colin Smith, Jennifer Still, Steven Ross Smith, and Ted Landrum—JackPine once again reimagines “book” and gives us an imaginative, multi-media chapbook, about the size of a bread and butter plate. Fittingly, this tasteful chapbook features a red coaster on the front cover and comes with a large red and white checked napkin folded inside a back flap that’s held in place with sturdy toothpicks. Also included: concrete poems, drawings, and a mostly black image with white pinpoints, titled “napkin braille”. Different? Indeed! Welcome to JackPine Press. This collaborative project’s interesting on numerous levels. Firstly, contributor Jennifer Still, from Winnipeg, co-founded JackPine Press in 2002, and in her own work she “[explores] the intersections of language and material forms”. Both Still and Saskatoon’s Steven Ross Smith have worked with sound poetry, and both also publish with traditional publishers. Poet Colin Smith, in Winnipeg, was previously “strongly allied to the Kootenay school…

kireji: partial portraits & biofictionsby christian favreauPublished by JackPine PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$30.00 ISBN 9781927035436 I have a special interest in reviewing “first” books, in part because it’s been thirty-one years since my own first book was published, and though I’ve followed up with another dozen titles, I still meet folks who claim they liked my first book best. Today I read Montreal writer christian favreau’s first book. Kireji: partial portraits & biofictions is an attractive, hand-sewn chapbook with a cover image of a bird. The book contains nine free verse poems, a business card-sized note to “Please be gentle while handling,” and four actual leaves. Leaves? Now that’s a new one for me, but JackPine Press is all about originality, and favreau’s work definitely fits the press’s mandate to “publish chapbooks whose form and content are both artistically integrated and unique”. What did I find? Firstly, like fellow Canadian poet bpNichol—whom favreau quotes in the opening poem, which is comprised solely of three epigraphs—this new poet also sometimes eschews punctuation. In his second poem, “the finch,” he writes “Id dreamt/Id screamed/all the while unheard,” and he includes a measure of treble clef notes, perhaps to emulate the finch’s…

The Zombie Stance of the Technological Idiotby s. mintzPublished by JackPine PressReview by Elena Bentley$20.00 ISBN 9781927035412 I imagine you’re reading this review on your phone. You were likely scrolling through Twitter or Facebook, then you clicked the link, and now you’re here. Most of us spend hours staring down these days, existing in a state of “‘psychic rigor mortis’”—sluggish and numb from the “‘effects of new media.’” “Wavering between shock and stupor,” s. mintz’s debut poetry chapbook, The Zombie Stance of the Technological Idiot, “is a lyrical probe on media in the contemporary moment given the inextricability of media from the contemporary.” JackPine Press specializes in beautifully handmade chapbooks, and The Zombie Stance of the Technological Idiot is no exception. Accompanied by a bookmark that doubles as a pair of 3D glasses (the red and blue film kind), this chapbook invites participation with the interior images using a nostalgic piece of technology. A few poems also include web addresses, further compelling the reader to search the internet and participate in exactly the type of questions the chapbook considers: “how [do] we know what we know on the internet [and] [w]here does [that] authority come from?” Right from the opening…