DALE MARTIN SMITH THE SIZE OF PARADISE US/INTL: ASTERISM BOOKS CANADA: knife | fork | book
Category: poetry
Legendary nights are called into being. What reading elicits is, on neurological imaging, difficult to distinguish from experience itself. We read the word lilac or chai and the olfactory cortex flares. The phrase I pulled the cloth strip through the wire fence will spur the reader’s motor cortex as if it were the movement. Or, […]
ALICE NOTLEY 1945-2025 …and read, she did. 14 March 2020. The evening before the “lockdown.” All of her other readings for the launch of For The Ride (Penguin, 2020) had been cancelled. Her appearance here sold out (about twenty, twenty-five came that night). Alice took the stage and. It was fire. This ended up being […]
I couldn’t tell you exactly why I associate this pretty pop song, “The Sweetest Thing” by Camera Obscura every time I think of Dale. Then again, it’s obvious… my life so much sweeter with him then without, the loving care and abiding friendship between us (along with his partner, Hoa Nguyen), our mutual affection for […]
Have you ever fallen in love with a place? Of course you have. A second visit to this visionary gem—my first [when I fell in love], reading with Don Pyle & Stevie Manning—I knew I wanted [had] to return to Niagara Artists Centre when she came out. Little did I know I’d have the grand […]
Fertil3 at The Printed Word Bookshop Dundas ON 25 August 2024
“Let’s do it for the poets.” “There is no better way to describe the chapbook, broadside, and zine publishers scattered across Canada than transient. The stop/start nature of the micropress “industry” is a solid reality. Presses come and go partially due to the lack of financial incentive—mostly micropresses are self-funded labours of love—and, more impactfully, […]
Readable. Clean. Meticulous. Striking. Pretty.* I don’t know exactly just how I lucked into this. By this, I mean a very special kinship shared/shaped by the love of good work. And food, and drink and plenty of laughs between us. I knew from reading Ralph’s work, his meticulous eye, and ear, he knows what belongs […]
To keep going, you need to feel you are making good work—or moving in the direction of making good work, or interesting work, or are interested in the work you are making—and see that as the thing you are aiming to do. Anything good that happens beyond is a bonus…” Cameron Anstee, Some Silences: Notes […]
Knife Fork Book 