TRADITIONAL REVIEWS 001 — K.B. Thors reviews Takako Arai‘s Factory Girls (Action Books, 2019) 004 — John Nyman reviews Klara du Plessis‘ Hell Light Flesh (Palimpsest Press, 2020)007 — Manahil Bandukwala reviews Lily Wang’s Saturn Peach (Gordon Hill Press, 2020)010 — Sanchari Sur reviews Aditi Machado’s Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020)013 — Conyer Clayton reviews Nicole Haldoupis’ Tiny Ruins (Radiant Press, 2020)018 — Mark Laliberte reviews Sacha Archer’s Mother’s Milk (Timglaset Editions, 2020)019 — Julie McIsaac
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SANDY POOL Excerpt from The Ebbinghaus Illusion: A Book of Hybrid Non-Fiction The Ebbinghaus Illusion elegizes the death of my former partner who suffered from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. After a short battle, my partner chose to take his life, rather than suffer the debilitating effects of the disease. The Ebbinghaus Illusion is structured around a standardized Alzheimer’s memory test. Each piece is titled with a word from the Alzheimer’s word list, which is used to
CHELSEA COUPAL Rural Hangover I picture myself sometimes, slimas I was then, walking in, stripping down, lying down in that dirt-morninglight, hungover, and nausea tucked under my mind like an old note.I didn’t mind those mornings: click of dried contacts, tumbleweedstomach, and the sun pouring through bedroom windowsslowly. Before the farmhouse, you lived in a trailerwith walls so thin I swear you could see through them.Hardly a yard, just pasture, and cattle peering in, curious
Amy Ireland is an experimental poet and theorist, co-conspiring with arcane and esoteric vectors of poetic and theoretical thought. As a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Ireland’s work develops concepts embedded within the prefix xeno-, denoting that which is unfamiliar, strange and alien. Following this trajectory, Ireland is writing her thesis on xenopoetics, which engages various poetry projects that involve
FAN WU from Songs Heard on The River Styx Charon Before Breakfast Charon moves along his sloop, fern-heavy with morning sleep.He rubs his eyes then his wrists together.Standing sexless, two words — pistil, stamen — flash across his mind, illustrated like in the Grade 9 Biology textbook he once read for proof of nature’s perfect design, lovewise.An anchor tethers him to the limitless sea.Anther and pollen.Something Lacan once said occurs to him:“Love is giving something
“I wanted to be destroyed … and reborn.” Dash Shaw credits these words to a tattered old comic book, near the end of Cosplayers, a recent collection of his own comics about fan culture, cartooning history, creativity, and female friendship. Shaw’s teen girl protagonists have lucked into a stash of funnybooks by the legendary Jack ‘King’ Kirby (1917–1994), co-creator of the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and, in this instance, the 2001 comic book adaptation. Heedless
MICHAEL E. CASTEELS 4 Poems The Cattle Business I was rousting some steers that had taken up residence in the house. I gathered a coil of rope and slung it over the pommel of my saddle. Some of these old mossyhorns had grown up here and had no wish to leave. A brindle steer lurched through the breezeway, scraping the walls with his horns. A twisty creek trickled down the front steps and pooled among
Anders Nilsen is a notable American graphic novelist whose works include Big Questions, Dogs and Water, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, Rage of Poseidon, The End, and others. In Poetry is Useless, his latest book, Nilsen redefines the sketchbook format, intermingling elegant, densely detailed renderings of mythical animals, short comics drawn in ink, meditations on religion, and abstract shapes and patterns. This expansive ‘sketchbook-as-graphic-novel’ reveals seven years of Nilsen’s life and musings: it covers
MALLORY TATER The Last Nickel Geraldine’s black bather sticks to her chapped skin. Her thighs burn rogue with saltwater rashes. The water isn’t good to her but she loves it anyway. She walks her path to the seawall, one-at-a-times each stone step down to the shore. She feels a shifting in the land, but she isn’t afraid of it. Kelp and purple claw-weed accumulate in bundles, thick and dirty like doll’s hair. Geraldine wades until
Filmmaker Justin Stephenson took fifteen years to carefully create The Complete Works — a labour of love that creatively adapts the work of internationally acclaimed avant-garde poet bpNichol. From comic book detective stories & westerns to documentaries & magic realism, and from hand-drawn animation to computer-generated images, The Complete Works wrestles Nichol’s writing off the page and projects it onto the screen. It uses bpNichol’s poetic methods on Nichol himself to create a film that
Canadian ‘para-literary agent provocateur’ gustave morin has been working in the fields of composition & performance for the last twenty years. As a maker of concrete, found, collage, typewriter & sound poetry, his creative practice always manages to the blur the borders between poetry & visual art, offering up startling hybrid works that resist conventional reading. Clean Sails, a 164 page volume of visually complex, next-generation typewriter poems composed using dozens of different typewriters — the
“The paper has to be turned and re-turned, and twisted in a thousand different directions, and each character and letter must strike precisely in the right spot. Often, just as some particular sketch is on the point of completion, a trifling miscalculation, or the accidental depression of the wrong key, will totally ruin it, and the whole thing has to be done over again.” — Pitman’s Phonetic Journal, October 1898 The typewriter has long signified
Paul Dutton is a poet, novelist, essayist & oral sound artist, who, over the course of 5 decades, has uncompromisingly challenged the borders of literature & music. Internationally renowned for his solo sound performances, Dutton’s otherworldly voice works have helped redefine the potential of human utterance. CAROUSEL is pleased to present the first appearance in print of a selection of works from this innovative explorer of language in the following profile section — which includes
BEN LADOUCEUR 461 Margueretta Street There’s the house there’s the way into the house.Hot head blood a difficult decision being responded to.We are hurting men we house and cause great woe.The moss growing by one millimetre every warm year.Harder to tell when you’re away plus I care less too.Inert things proceed no regard for human assent.God will not fail to take such a martyrdom into account.You create a fluid place it inside me leave it
CHAD CAMPBELL At the Surabaya Zoo The last eyes retreat. A shiftworkof waiting for food until morning starts, when she’s led from the brickhutch to the pens. Nearby, a bear stares brokenly at some apples.She stretches out again. Day opens. White tigers are especially rare. Lookhow white she is, how fine her tail, how black the stripes that leapbrail for violent majestic force — the titillation of a hungry shadowloping for you through a field
DANIEL SCOTT TYSDAL Inside Job – Composed on the occasion of the release of the 9/11 conspiracy theory documentary Tight Resistance The doc shocks; its evidenceis as disturbing as its claim: 9/11was not an inside job. Bush could nothave known X. The CIA could nothave orchestrated Y. The “terrorists” were notactors working from a script by Z (a rumouredOscar winner) and doctored by otherHollywood A-listers. Tight Resistance mounts a new founding alphabetto articulate the tragedy,
CARA EVANS Fractal i.nothing disappearsevery action fracturesinto a million splinters of the sameaction happening over andover there is no erasureonly variation ii.the word or is nestledin word and eachword is a thresholdthe breath or the storythe sound or the sign the word more is truncatedand trapped withinmemory memorycannot exceed or replicatetwists vainly towarddoubling redoubling redoing all wholes are completed by lack Fractalappeared in CAROUSEL 35 (2015) — buy it here
EDUARDO C. CORRAL + JIM JOHNSTONE Alternating Landscapes (Sonoran Desert / High Park) I roll into a high shoulder stand, allknees and elbows —saguaro. • Forget the beautifulmoments: the theatre drenched with rain a fox swinging its cutlass between the sunand sun- glassed eyes • Dust devil, tattered sail. Stray tenderness stay. • My gaze is directedby counterweights that mount like a bruise: birch, hickory,basewood. • To escape the rain I leap into a book. Terra-cotta warriors, gunpowder, a buck: its antlers the Chinese character for deer. •
ROBIN RICHARDSON We’re Just Beasts with Big Brains Tipsy on the stoop beside a stone dog, faithful as the hurricane that claimed his face. It’s okay. The sidewalk’s arching orangetowards a chanting patch of shrubbery; it chants your name. Or does it state the ways of gods, or god, or something worse?I have misread myself for years: open as an infant crow below the worm. At my feet some German Shepherd, older than his owner, begsto
Certainly one of Canada’s most recognized artists, Michael Morris first came to prominence in the 1960s as a leading member of Vancouver’s burgeoning avant-garde. Inspired in part by the ideals of Fluxus and Pop Art, he became associated with a generation of artists who consciously rejected the national lyrical landscape tradition that had dominated the region’s art making, opting instead to work in a fully international idiom. As a creator, Morris has worked in a