Quick update, years later

Mainly to recommend a few books of poetry you should buy

Gee, what I have been up to? Well, I worked in publishing for two years and have many thoughts about that. I really learned a lot, not the least of which was that authors need to calm the fuck down about virtually everything. Me included. I hope to write about this some day, but for now please know that your small-press publisher is doing every damn thing they can for you, and probably a lot more than they should, and that bleeds into their daily lives and keeps them from doing things like pursuing their own goals and writing their newsletters.

News:

In 2022/23, I worked with emerging poet Maggie Burton on her debut book of poems, Chores (Breakwater, 2023) and damned if it didn’t win the Griffin Poetry Prize for first book. Maggie’s poems are brilliant investigations of generational exchanges of knowledge and power between blood-related women, as well as other edgy feminist subjects. You should buy.

Since last I wrote, I’ve had poems appear in a few magazines, including The London Magazine, Scoundrel Time, and Divagations.

Also, I recently finally finished my novel. I met with an agent about this last week and will finally have to let someone other than my wife read it. Egad.

Reads:

Craig Francis Power’s brilliant debut poetry book, Total Party Kill (Breakwater, 2024), is, I believe, finally available for purchase. You can’t even begin to know how original and affecting this book will be until you’ve started reading it. It’s essentially an addiction-recovery memoir in prose poetry / monologue grounded in the iconography and lore of the world’s most popular tabletop game, Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, you read that right. The best way to sell you on this book is to tell you to pick up a copy in store and read the first page. You’ve never read anything like it. And you don’t even have to be a nerd to follow.

A couple good reads to recommend for people looking to check in with senior/established poets in Canada: AF Moritz's Great Silent Ballad (House of Anansi) and Ricardo Sternberg's selected edition One River (Vehicule).

Sternberg is one of those poets’-poet poets, which I suspect means he often flies under the radar for people not actively reading widely. His work, though, is exquisite and precise and has a certain kinship with other poets’-poets, like Richard Outram and Samuel Menashe. The specificity and word-play, the sort of extended universe of the poet settings, but also the grace and economy of the well-placed word.

When I first started reading poetry, Moritz was similarly under-appreciated, but has since become one of the superheroes of Canadian poetry, with many accolades and a dedicated army of followers. His work is varied and copious, and my favourites have largely had an apostrophic, eschatological feel with urban decay and a sort of gothic industrialism that implies a knowledge beyond the polluted cityscape on the horizon. This books is gentler in tone, and unlike older work, I found my favourites to be shortest ones, where the narrative allows for the moment to be present and momentary while still providing the guiding metaphysical hand of the poet.

Watches:

Rings of Power season 2 is enjoyable, esp if you’re not a racisttoxiccfanboydink who thinkstheyknowcanon. And if anyone wants a lecture on why, feel free to buy me a beer.

Also watched that Cyberpunk Edgerunner anime and it was honestly very good. Not easy to stomach at times, and not something that will leave you feeling anything but the nihilism inherent in the genre, but very well-written and well-made.

Pete Davidson’s Bupkis was also great, I thought. Funny and upsetting, with genuinely good acting from Pesci and Falco and others.

Silo was surprisingly engaging, especially given that it comes from the dreaded realm of self-publishing. I haven’t looked at the books, but the show was fun to watch.

Okay, talk later.

G