The winter 2020 issue of CAROUSEL is available to read for free at our website now! Fall 2020; released exclusively online Cover artwork by Chet Bell Design by Origin Obscure Art Portolio — Chet Bell Fiction — Anne Baldo— Timothy DeLizza— Síle Englert— Jennifer McAuley Poetry — Renee Agatep— Anne Barngrover— Despy Boutris— Amee Nassrene Broumand— Conyer Clayton— James Collier— Mikayla Fawcett— Layla Flowers— Sean Madden— Caroline Misner— Kevin Stebner— Sneha Subramanian Kanta— John Sibley
Hollay Ghadery both employs and subverts the expected repetitions of a pantoum to confront the shifting recurrent patterns that characterize humankind’s ambivalent responses to environmental disaster in this experimental review of Blaze Island (Goose Lane Editions, 2020), the fifth novel of Catherine Bush. In both content and form, Ghadery’s review at once affirms the concerns at the crux of Bush’s work while also grappling with the daunting reality that words are not action, that text
Amanda Earl transforms prose poetry into visual poetry in this experimental review of Bahar Orang’s debut collection Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty (Book*Hug Press, 2020). By cutting open the text and twisting it to a new shape, Earl brings forth a rush of stunning blood that calls attention to the crucial elements of Orang’s essays on aesthetics. ISBN 978-1-77166-569-8 | 114 pp | $20 CAD #CAROUSELreviews I chose an excerpt from a passage
The word emporium conventionally refers not only to a commercial centre, but also to the centre of the brain where nerves and sensations meet. These disparate connotations coalesce and transform in Sanchari Sur’s traditional review of Aditi Machado’s sophomore book of poetry Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020). Sur shows us how Machado envisions the poet as a radical barterer, plying her trade in the immaterial and invaluable realm of words and meaning. ISBN 978-1-64362-029-9 | 112
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
Viennese photographer Klaus Pichler’s intimate photo series, Just the Two of Us, aims to reveal the people beneath a variety of costumes without unmasking them. For adults, the act of dressing up in costume is most often associated with some form of social activity. It’s a spectacle, a transformative activity that grants us permission to temporarily play out a fantasy role in the everyday world. Costumes and disguises permit people to act in ways that
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,
LEAH JANE ESAU Letters to Your Brother Hour One: we aren’t sure what happens in the first hour he goes missing, because we aren’t there. Does it happen because we aren’t there? • Hour One for you: a phone call. You don’t answer because your shirt is on the floor of your boyfriend’s apartment. You let it ring three times and go to voicemail. A few seconds later, it rings again. Your boyfriend says, “Maybe you should see who
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. •
LUKE RAMSEY Pretty Problems Pretty Problems appeared in CAROUSEL 35 (2015) — buy it here