Your Very Ownby John NymanPublished by JackPine PressReview by Elena Bentley$30.00 ISBN 9781927035443 As soon as I saw Your Very Own by John Nyman, I knew I had to read it. Because what 80s and 90s kid didn’t love reading the Choose Your Own Adventure series? I certainly did. Now, as an adult, I also love erasure poetry, and this chapbook published by JackPine Press is a delightful combination of both. Nyman, a visual poet and erasurist with a PhD in theory and criticism, calls himself “a theorist posing as an artist.” For those unfamiliar with erasure (sometimes called whiteout or blackout poetry), it’s a form of poetry where the poet or visual artist removes certain words from the original work; thus, producing a new poem. Your Very Own uses as its source text Choose Your Own Adventure #43: Grand Canyon Odyssey (1985) by Jay Leibold and Don Hedin. Divided into three sections “composed of three voices, or three ventures,” Your Very Own acts as “a kind of excavation.” “Much of what it excavates,” writes Nyman, “are products of a worldview that is cruel, ignorant, unjust, and violent.” Nyman trusts that we, as readers, not only “see this worldview as…

The Zombie Stance of the Technological Idiotby S. MintzPublished by JackPine PressReview by Toby A. Welch$20.00 ISBN 9781927035412 What a fascinating gem this book is! JackPine Press, the publisher, explains this book as “a lyrical probe into contemporary media, with focus on the inextricability of media from culture. Its playful, challenging, and satirizing verses throw comical punches, while the book’s analog zine design juxtaposes themes of the work with ideas about communication and alternative media in a pre-internet world.” Huh? I’ll be honest – I had no idea what any of that meant. That is until I got my hands on a copy of the 30 page book. More a piece of funky art in parts than a book, this soft cover read is short but awesome! When you crack into the book, the preface explains Mintz’s thinking behind this dive into post-internet art, lyrics in the technological age, internet authority, the post-internet self, and numerous other issues. Once through the preface, you are treated to an assortment of drawings, poetry, and lyrics. It’s a delight for all of your senses.  My favourite work in the book is News of Them. The poem shares the story of someone sitting in…

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…

The Sky Was 1950s Blue Written by Katherin Edwards, Design by Melissa Haney Published by Jackpine Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $30.00 ISBN 978-1-927035-22-1 Jackpine Press recently released The Sky Was 1950 Blue-a collaborative chapbook written by Katherin Edwards and designed by Melissa Haney-and I received #51 of a limited edition of 75 copies for review. Limited edition, handmade books are Jackpine’s foray, and each time I receive one I’m excited to see how the author and designer-often one and the same-have reconciled content and construct: concepts are such interesting animals. Edwards’ colourful title comes from an Ian Tyson lyric, and the 1950s are represented here not only in the saddle-stitched book’s hue and interior drawings, but also in the fact that each poem includes a year (between 1950 and 1959) in its title. I opened the chapbook to discover that it also possesses a subtitle, “Poems from the Clothesline,” and indeed a continuous drawn clothesline acts like a border, stretching across the top of each page and supporting simple drawings of the clothing and linens referenced in each of the thirteen poems. The books were printed via a three hundred year-old process called cyanotype, which involves both “sunning”…

homecoming Written by Zondra M. Roy Published by Jackpine Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $30 ISBN 978-1-927035-20-7 Sometimes the lines between genres blur. As I began reading Zondra M. Roy’s chapbook, homecoming, I thought: looks like poetry, feels like a first-person essay. This isn’t poetry filled with similes, metaphors, alliteration, and finely-crafted images, this is a straight-up story (with line breaks) that shouts This is how it’s been, I’ve made mistakes, and I’m grateful for the people and activities (like performing hip-hop) that’ve helped me along the way. The Dené/Cree/Métis writer left home at thirteen and she doesn’t hold back on her life’s gritty details as she writes of bouncing between various homes in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick (“for a few months”), and British Columbia. Actually, the word home is a misnomer here–no warm connotations of homemade bread and a family sitting around a fireplace exist when one’s stays include a juvenile detention centre in Saskatoon; jail; and that hardest of beds–the street. Roy begins her story with family history: “My parents were born into a society that was built to facilitate their failures.\well, fuck\they were native people in the northern prairies.” Strong language and a strong voice,…

Lost + Found: Signposts for Steering Through the World by Laura Lamont, Designed by Jess Dixon Published by Jackpine Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl ISBN 978-1-927035-18-4 $30.00 In 2015, Saskatoon’s Jackpine Press published Lost + Found: Signposts for Steering Through the World, and the good news for the press and the book’s creators is bad news for you, readers: each of the 75 copies of this limited-edition, hardcover (millboard wrapped in craft paper, bound with fabric tape and snapped together with Chicago bolts) has already found a home. Usually one reviews books that are new and available, but it’s also worthwhile to examine a success story, and introduce readers to the writer so they can watch for future works. Let’s begin with this book’s eclectic design. If it were a painting, I’d suggest it’s closet to collage. If it were music, it would be jazz. Inset location diagrams represent individual poems and appear as background to each poem’s text. Imprinted cotton paper; cascading, torn vellum; a post-it-style note (that protrudes outside the book’s neat and expected rectangle); apparent “scrap paper;” and pages that are coffee-cup ringed and wrinkled are all fair game for hosting poems in this little marvel…

Connectomics Written by Alison Calder Published by Jackpine Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $30 ISBN 978-1-927035-21-4 Into the laboratory we go: the fourteen poems in established writer and Winnipeger Alison Calder’s Connectomics are like little scientific explosions of light: things you didn’t know you’d want to know but are glad you know now. In her words, “The idea is\to render the brain\transparent enough to read through.” That’s heady stuff, but Calder takes this concept and renders it into thought-provoking poems that show she’s a master of metaphor, and prove that her literary experiments work. The brain as poetic fodder makes good sense. It’s complex, essential. Nerve central. And Calder, who teaches Canadian literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba, explores it from interesting angles. In “Clarity2” she imagines the mind of a mouse that’s had firefly genes spliced into for Alzheimer’s research. “Inside his skull\the past incinerates” she writes, “fragments\of a film that’s not replayed.” On the page opposite this short poem there’s a white image (on black) of a brain: it looks like a medical image and it resembles art. The subject of the next poem, “C Elegans3,” is “a small, soil-dwelling nematode.” (The accompanying drawing…

Conditional Written by Andrew McEwan Published by Jackpine Press Review by Shelley A. Leedahl $15.00 ISBN 978-1-927035-17-7 Vancouverite Andrew McEwan’s Conditional, a saddle-stitched chapbook, contains two alternately playful and serious poems, or meditations. The first, “Spreading Sheets,” takes inspiration from a quote about stratus clouds, derived from an 1803 text called Essay on the Modification of Clouds (by Luke Howard). In the resulting text-which alternatingly appears on symbolically transparent vellum pages in a free verse style and on gray cotton pages in prose poem blocks-the poet asks “what is this fog?” Fog, here, is up for interpretation. The author alludes to Vancouver’s “visibility issues,” and hovering mainland\mists,” to condensation from the bathroom mirror,” and perhaps also to the fog of human thought as we wait in queues, “cannot see the object of our mourning,” and listen to financial and real estate market forecasts. Or perhaps it is none of these. McEwan keeps us entertained and guessing with disparate thoughts. “Of the animals seen today only the blanket of crows migrating past reads as symbolic,” he writes. And in the next two lines: “A rezoning is in progress. Everything is on sale except for the waterproof outerwear.” This first poem registers…