G U E S T

Thursday, March 23, 2023

issue twenty-six : guest-edited by Adam Katz

NOW AVAILABLE: G U E S T #26
edited by Adam Katz
published as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
see here for Adam Katz’ introduction

the new issue features new work by:

alex benedict
Marc E. Christmas
Adam Katz
Ron Silliman

author biographies:

alex benedict runs betweenthehighway press. alex is a Jōdo Shū Buddhist from Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley, currently tutoring at The University of North Carolina’s Writing Center.

Marc E. Christmas currently lives in Columbia, MD and is a high school teacher for Howard County Public School System, and the Director for holistic healing at the Niyah Center. His recent poetry is a written to inspire those healing from personal tragedy and/or depression. He is a recognized thought leader in transformative leadership development, business development, energy healing, and critical life skills training. He’s also a Certified Reiki Master Teacher and a Certified Life Coach.

Adam Katz is a poet-scholar, fiction writer, English instructor, and editor living on Gitxsan territory in northwest BC.

Ron Silliman lives currently about 20 miles outside of Philadelphia. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and his most recent book is an expanded edition of the collaboration Legend, written with Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, the late Ray Di Palma and Steve McCaffery. His last reading tours pre-Covid were of Oklahoma and Spain, more alike than one might imagine.

G U E S T #26 : Introduction : Adam Katz

I had the idea for Partial Zine thinking about Emerson’s aphorism “Thinking is a partial act,” which he does not mean as a compliment toward thinking. Partial as both biased and not whole.

I had been working on a theory of poetry’s basic formal unit as the unit of content, and thus poetic forms as “content-structures” (see the last piece in this collection for example https://www.academia.edu/44843635/_serves_them_) which we merely experience as sound structures.

So it seemed to me that thinking, even in Emerson’s own theory of poetry, was, as the process of content, therefore the process leading to poetic form, so its partiality was good, especially as it does not matter if the poet is wrong, such as in their metaphysics, if we define poetry’s end tautologically, to be poetry, rather than evaluating poetry on the basis of some other field’s value system, such as philosophical inquiry.

For Partial Zine I was interested in poems that foregrounded this thinking character of perhaps all poetry. I wanted to show poems whose only polish derived from their content, as well as pages from poets’ notebooks, and emails with poets, as the thing in its purest form.

This would make Partial Zine a sourcebook of the kinds of thinking that structure poetry, that its readers could use to keep the flame burning. I said that special consideration would be given to submissions based in some way on pieces in previous issues.

A number of factors eventually led me to put the project on hold, after I connected with, edited, and published many poets who I consider to be among the best working. rob kindly invited me to curate the material that was starting to be Partial Zine 4 for G U E S T. I hope it will be clear how at once self-evident and open ended the basic conception is.

Adam Katz is a poet-scholar, fiction writer, English instructor, and editor living on Gitxsan territory in northwest BC.

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

issue twenty-five : guest-edited by Laurie Anne Fuhr

NOW AVAILABLE: G U E S T #25
edited by Laurie Anne Fuhr
LIST POEMS TOWARDS ABUNDANCE
published as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
see here for Laurie Anne Fuhr’s introduction and biography
the new issue features new work by:
Emily Cargan
s.j. Shalgaire
Bob J. Canuel
Linda Hatfield
Moni Brar
Lillian Nećakov
allison calvern
Kerrie Penney
Kimberlee Jones
Allan B. Rosales
Sharon Christie
T.d. Santos
June Read
Laurie Anne Fuhr

author biographies:

s.j. Shalgaire (she/her) writes from Calgary, Treaty 7 territory. Poems published in chapbooks inward (bluemoonbooks, June 2015), and Erotic Mania (100 Tetes Press, Nov 2014). Sage Hill Writing alumna (2020). Active member of Canty Collective of Writerly Women & Alexandra Writers Centre Society. She navigates life with whimsy, post-concussion disabling impairments. Currently wound up in Tornadoes.

Linda Hatfield is a retired teacher for whom writing has always been a passion. She has been writing poetry since she was a teen and has begun penning a memoir. Her poems have been published in the Alberta Retired Teachers’ Association magazine, the YYC POP online exhibit, and the Wine Country Writers’ Festival Anthology in 2021. She is a member of the Espresso Poetry Collective, who self-published an anthology called Uncommon Grounds in the midst of the pandemic.

bob rj canuel has been writing poetry for a lifetime gaining inspiration from all sources. The past 3-4 years, he has been dormant due to illness and is now beginning to recover and is happy to still be here to share. Noted for his word play, he is pleased to introduce what he calls Rifflets (forthcoming from Prairie Soul Press), small poems inspired by music and artists. Bob moved to Calgary about 5 years ago and has enjoyed the active writing communities that thrive here.

Moni Brar was born in India and lives on the unceded territories of Treaty 7 and Metis Nation Region 3 (Calgary) and Syilx Okanagan Nation (Oliver). She has multiple nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, was the winner of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, and a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She has received writing awards and honours from PRISM, Room, Arc, Blood Orange Review, and Subnivean. Her work appears in Best Canadian Poetry, The Literary Review of Canada, Passages North, and Hobart.

Lillian Nećakov is the author of The Lake Contains an Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award) and the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Hooligan (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn). Her new book, duck eats yeast, quacks, explodes; man loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin is forthcoming in 2023 from Guernica Editions. She has also published in many print and online journals in Canada and the U.S. Lillian lives in Toronto.

allison calvern was born in Bermuda, grew up in New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Québec, British Columbia, Paris, and the Black Forest of Germany. She lives in Ottawa, where she is still growing up. She writes letters, poems, memoir, and unpublishable short stories. Though she has a vague affection for paragraphs, she feels the best writing hinges on beautiful sentences.

Kerrie Penney is a writer based in Calgary, Canada. Her work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Funny Pearls UK, the YYC Poet Laureate Project and Short Edition.

Kimberlee Jones is a writer and PR pro living in Calgary, Alberta, happily serving her grumpy grey cat yet another flavour of food. Her work appears in Uncommon Grounds: Anthology of the Espresso Poetry Collective (2021) and the Alexandra Writers Centre Society 40^th Anniversary Anthology WONDERSHIFT (AWCS Press 2021). She is also author of the chapbook The Night Sky Cries.

Allan B Rosales is a second generation Filipinx-Canadian multidisciplinary artist. Born and raised in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, Allan’s artist practice includes drawing, photography, illustration, murals, Art Therapy and poetry.

Sharon Christie wrote her first poem at 16 and was hooked. She is coming to the end of her first career in mental health and writing about health; joyfully able to spend more time with her first love. She has eclectic interests and believes that all knowledge has value.

Telmo dos Santos lives in Calgary with his partner and daughter. He is very slowly learning guitar.

June Read’s pastimes include writing poetry (haiku), travel, creating Ikebana and volunteering for the THIRD ACTion film festival. She has enjoyed an eclectic career path within transportation, engineering, publishing, recruitment services & educational foundations.

Laurie Anne Fuhr @multimodal_poet, Calgary-based base brat, is author of night flying (Frontenac House 2018), shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her poems also appear in Uncommon Grounds (epcpress 2021) available at www.espressopoetrycollective.ca. In 2022, a poem was shortlisted for the Magpie Award for Poetry. Book her for school visits with Poetry In Voice and take her poetry classes at www.alexandrawriters.org.

G U E S T #25 : Laurie Anne Fuhr : LIST OF INTROS

These people had nothing material to promise and offer one another. So they offered one another descriptions of the moon and pirates at sea. They offered one another jokes and snippets of poetry.

Heather O’Neill, from When We Lost Our Heads

a. This is not a Covid chapbook; this is not not a Covid chapbook. It may be enjoyed with homemade bread, but skip the sourdough already.

b. When the first pandemic lockdown was announced, I was initially skeptical. Without cable, I lacked the flat screen frame of reference others had. I thought: how can authorities, mainly privileged and rich themselves, decide for everyone that no one should work for an indefinite amount of time? Fear of starvation from Carleton days came back, when my air force family was posted (again) and I stayed behind. Deep gut fear. Won’t those who live paycheque to paycheque perish? Can poems feed us?

c. Shown Italy’s suffering, I knew due shame for doubting. Bodies piled higher than debt. I was officially laid off from two jobs. Stayed home, masked up, read poetry. Singing and dancing were outlawed; music, my other income, was illegal. But poetry teaching went online. In my prompts class, I asked for list poems. Poets wrote stacks of words they hadn’t known were inside them. Their abundance felt comforting against the fear of scarcity. I wanted to share it.

d. This chapbook was conceived for bluemoonbooks, my sporadic micropress since Ottawa ’97 that had started with blue moon cut n’ paste poetry journal; most recently, a broadside by Moni Brar was published. This list of lists was gathered. But work came back, then music; the world revved back into action as suddenly as it stopped. I felt dizzy. My calendar, perpetually overbooked as I combatted fear of homelessness with scheduling. I approached rob. He kindly followed up. Now, be our guest.

e. It’s the end of 2022. The government clawed back CERB, asked for payback. The price of gas, up. The cost of food, up and up. Rents raised higher than rooves. Credit cards maxed, and in Alberta, Enmaxed. Dear ones died alone in hospital. Poets write elegies. Many await hip replacements and other procedures, delayed by pandemic. Womb emptiness spreads throughout my body. I count blessings in lieu of toes. Count poems. Here are fourteen.

f. I read, again, this selection of poems as I prepare it for publication, and feel comforted by their abundance: of images, senses, ideas, emotions, words words words. Each poem invents its idea of a list poem form with one thing in common: affluent bounty. Delight in muchness.

g. Feel the true weight of this book: paper is light, but everything evoked in these lists fills them. We have the ability to give ourselves, and each other, so much, even in lean times. We should have known all along.

h. Receive it.

Laurie Anne Fuhr, GUEST guest editor

Laurie Anne Fuhr @multimodal_poet, Calgary-based base brat, former Ottawa poet and Peter F. Yacht Clubber, is author of night flying (Frontenac House 2018), shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her poems also appear in Uncommon Grounds (epcpress 2021) available at www.espressopoetrycollective.ca. In 2022, a poem was shortlisted for the Magpie Award for Poetry (judged by Renee Sarojini Saklikar). In 2021, a poem was shortlisted for the Freefall Magazine annual contest (judged by Gary Barwin). Her micropress bluemoonbooks, produced blue moon cut n' paste poetry journal from 1997-2001, and has since produced random ephemera by Fuhr and other poets, with two student chapbooks (and most recently an embellished broadside scroll by Moni Brar). When publishing postmodern works, the press goes by bloom oon. Book her for school visits with Poetry In Voice and take her poetry classes at www.alexandrawriters.org.