the ottawa small press book fair : home edition #25 : Bywords.ca

Bywords.ca, established in 2003, publishes poetry online monthly by current and former Ottawa residents, students and workers. The site also includes a calendar of literary, spoken word, storytelling and nonfiction events taking place in the National Capital Region, news of book and chapbook publications, workshops, festivals, workshops, contests, calls for submission, a guide for organizers on accessible venues, and other guides for those who wish to do readings in Ottawa and those who wish to take creative writing classes and workshops.

Amanda Earl is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the fallen angel of AngelHousePress. She’s a writer, visual poet, editor and publisher. More information is available at AmandaEarl.com or connect with Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle.

Q: Tell me about your press. How long have you been publishing, and what got you started?

Bywords.ca began in 2003, after Bywords, the monthly magazine that had started in 1990 ceased publication in 2001. I had been a student in two of Seymour Mayne's creative writing poetry workshops in 2000 and 2001. Bywords had been a magazine run by a collective of Mayne, Heather Ferguson and Gwendolyn Guth. It was made up of poetry submitted in the mail from people all over. It also included a calendar of events. There were also a couple of anthologies. You could pick up Bywords around town in cafes, pubs and other places. I picked up several in the 90s, so I knew of it, and appreciated it. After it had to end because the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton didn't give them funding, and perhaps because, i imagine the hard word that the volunteer team did was starting to get to be too much after 11 years.

Professor Mayne wanted to continue Bywords, and several of my classmates and I got together to come up with a plan to do so. Charles, my husband, had tech skill from a long career in information technology. We purchased the domain, he designed the site, a number of people from the group volunteered as selectors.

We published monthly poems an a quarterly magazine (Bywords Quarterly Journal (BQJ) 2003-2013), held an award: The John Newlove Poetry Award (Newlove died in December 2003, we had a memorial online the following April and a print anthology chapbook, Moments, Not Monuments shortly after, which included some of his poems and the poems of others. The award, which began in 2004, offers those published on Bywords.ca to have a chapbook published with us.

Q: How many times have you exhibited at the ottawa small press fair? How do you find the experience?

Pre-Bywords.ca, possibly in 2002, not sure when exactly, we sold chapbooks for Friday Circle, the small press Professor Mayne had started for chapbooks by members of his creative writing class. We loved the fair, meeting the vendors, and in particular fell in love with the chapbook as an independent, creative way to publish small work and to engage with fellow chapbook makers. We also heard from people at the fair that they missed the Bywords monthly magazine, particularly the calendar. Going to that fair was a big reason why we decided to take on a role in bringing Bywords into the 21st century and publishing poetry, both online and in print.

Bywords.ca has had a table at the fair for both spring and autumn ever since, including when I was just released from hospital in 2009 on the day of the fair. Charles and I couldn't be there so some kind friends tabled for us. If my math is correct, this means we've had a table 32 times.

Q: Would you have made something specific for this spring’s fair? Are you still doing that? How does the lack of spring fair this year effect how or what you might be producing?

We ceased publication of the BQJ in 2013 and publish the John Newlove Poetry Award chapbook in the autumn, so we didn’t have to prepare anything for either the spring or fall small press fairs; however, we are hoping to be able to participate in the June, 2021 fair very much and will have copies of David Groulx’s chapbooks along with our additional titles from the Newlove Poetry Award Chapbook series. Often there are a few collectors who stop by to pick up issues of the BQJ that they’ve missed, so we try to have at least one full collection, all forty issues on hand.

Q: How are you, as a small publisher, approaching the myriad shut-downs? Is everything on hold, or are you pushing against the silences, whether in similar or alternate ways than you might have prior to the pandemic? How are you getting your publications out into the world?

Bywords.ca continues to publish the online issue. I am grateful to our selectors for continuing to read the poems every month, and to the poets who kindly entrust us with their work.

Q: Have you done anything in terms of online or virtual launches since the pandemic began? Have you attended or participated in others? How are you attempting to connect to the larger literary community?

Our sole reading is the John Newlove Poetry Award, which is held in October and hosted by the Ottawa International Writers Festival. This year the Festival held our event, and many others virtually through Zoom, with the technical help of the Ottawa Public Library. We had 7 participants, so our event was more complicated to co-ordinate than many of the Festival events. Alexine Marier and her team from the Library were wonderful. Our participants handled having to be in their own homes and presenting their work in front of a live but invisible audience very well. The Library hired a company to do the close captioning and provided a wonderful recording of the event. I am very grateful. You can see the video here:

I’m not attending a lot of live virtual events. The few that I have attended were lovely, and I’ve gone back to a few I’ve missed and enjoyed watching them, such as some of the VERSeFest events. I connect to the larger literary community quite well, mainly through social media, but also through an exchange of correspondence: snail or e-mail and by reading their work. Also by hosting many writers on the podcast I run through AngelHousePress, which as become very important to me as a way of supporting them and sharing their creative work.

Q: Has the pandemic forced you to rethink anything in terms of production? Are there supplies or printers you haven’t access to during these times that have forced a shift in what and how you produce?

We haven’t had any issues. We purchased our supplies for the Newlove Award (certificates, envelopes etc) online as opposed to going to our local office supplies company, and we had no trouble at all getting our most recent chapbook published. Every year we print the Newlove chapbook in September. Our printer, Elephant Print, is a local small printer. Naheed Davis, its owner, has been printing our chapbooks since the mid-aughts, even offering ideas on design. She's marvelous. If people are looking for a really great printer with experience printing chapbooks, I highly recommend Elephant Print.

Q: What are your most recent publications? How might people still be able to order copies?

Our most recent publication is What the Haruspex read in the Small hours of my Body by David Groulx, our 2019 John Newlove Poetry Award recipient. The chapbook is available for purchase, along with several other chapbooks from the series and copies of the Bywords Quarterly Journal (2003-2013), in the Bywords.ca store.

Q: What are you working on now?

Always working on the next issue of Bywords.ca. Charles and I also have to start working on the City of Ottawa 2021 Arts Funding Program proposal which is due on January 11, 2021. And at the end of January, Megan Misztal, who won the Newlove Award this year, will send her draft manuscript for our editors to begin working on. All being well, she will launch in next October in person at the Festival.

the ottawa small press book fair : home edition #1 : AngelHousePress,

AngelHousePress, established in 2007, is a feisty feminist press that publishes raw talent, ragged edges and rebels. From 2007 to 2019, it published chapbooks. From 2008 to current, it publishes NationalPoetryMonth.ca, an annual exploration of what poetry is or can be. From 2009 to current, it publishes Experiment-O, an annual celebration of art that risks. From 2009 to current, it publishes an online essay series. From 2016 to current, it publishes The Small Machine Talks, a monthly-ish podcast, co-hosted by Amanda Earl and a.m. kozak that explores the poetry scene of Central Canada and beyond. DevilHouse, an imprint of AngelHousePress, published prose chapbooks from 2014 to 2018.

http://angelhousepress.com/

http://devilhousepress.com/

http://nationalpoetrymonth.ca/

http://experiment-o.com/

http://smallmachinetalks.com/

Amanda Earl is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the fallen angel of AngelHousePress. She’s a writer, visual poet, editor and publisher. More information is available at AmandaEarl.com or connect with Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle.

Q: Tell me about your press. How long have you been publishing, and what got you started?

AngelHousePress began in 2007. I created it to self-publish my odd colourful work because I didn’t imagine publishers could afford to publish it and I also thought it would be too expensive to publish in large numbers of copies. I made 26 copies of Marauders of the Fold, Postcards from The Museum of Broken Glass, and Speaking in Tongues.

My poetry group was making some interesting poems, and we decided to publish a chapbook, so we made Whack of Clouds in 2008 and I published it through AngelHousePress. I wanted the press to be a place that published ragged edges, raw talent and rough edges because I saw a need for such.

Q: How many times have you exhibited at the ottawa small press fair? How do you find the experience?

Since 2008, twice a year, with the exception of the fall, 2009, we’ve been at the fair 21 times. I love it. I love chatting with people about chapbooks, meeting old friends and new, and bartering with other chapbook makers.

Q: Would you have made something specific for this spring’s fair? Are you still doing that? How does the lack of spring fair this year effect how or what you might be producing?

We ceased publication of chapbooks in 2019, and have moved to an entirely online format. See Amanda Earl: AngelHousePress: from ragged edges to advocacy in Periodicty: a journal of poetry and poetics, May, 2020.

For the next fair, we’ll be bringing chapbooks from our catalogue, including Hiromi Suzuki’s Adagio, Paddy Scott’s Fatal Errors (DevilHouse, 2018) and more. Our print publications were published in editions of 50. We’ll continue to bring them to the fair until we sell out.

Q: How are you, as a small publisher, approaching the myriad shut-downs? Is everything on hold, or are you pushing against the silences, whether in similar or alternate ways than you might have prior to the pandemic? How are you getting your publications out into the world?

In April we published NationalPoetryMonth.ca 2020 Ode to the Small with contributions with 30 poets and visual poets from all over the world. I had already been working on it since January and when effects of the pandemic began to be felt, first in Asia, then in Europe, we already had all the contributions, but there are some contributors I haven’t heard from. I hope everyone is ok. Other contributors have begun lovely e-mail correspondences with me. I think a lot of us are finding we need to reach out more. NationalPoetryMonth.ca is always read and commented on by numerous readers, but this year it feels like we had a higher vistor rate and I received more comments than usual from readers. All were kind!

We’ll be publishing Experiment-O Issue 13 in November online. I will invite 10-12 contributors who make visual art, poetry, visual poetry and prose from all over the world. I begin working on that in June.

And we continue to publish essays on our online essay series. In 2020 so far, we’ve published four essays on the site.

Our podcast, the Small Machine Talks, continues to have episodes. I was concerned that we wouldn’t be able to have interviews during this time. I’m not technologically inclined much. I thought about how we could still have episodes so that people would still be able to listen to our show, which is broadcast at least once a month. I did a couple of episodes alone, such as episode 56, which was my own engagement with the poetry of Adele Barclay, and episode 57 where I used Klara Du Plessis’ deep curation of readings idea to make a solo episode reading poems and prose that featured trees, gardening, wandering and spring, with the idea that since many people were unable to experience nature first-hand, being in isolation or living in spaces where they weren’t able to safely go outside, hearing about spring and wandering about would be a lovely thing.

Episode 58 featured pre-recorded audio of contributors from Experiment-O, and there will be another such episode soon. For the end of the season, my co-host and I will be doing an interview together but virtually using Zoom. Charles, my husband, who does our tech, has figured out how to record separate audio channels for each participant.

Q: Have you done anything in terms of online or virtual launches since the pandemic began? Have you attended or participated in others? How are you attempting to connect to the larger literary community?

These days all our activities are online. This seems prescient in some ways. I like the fact that readers can turn to Experiment-O to read previous issues, or to revisit this year’s NationalPoetryMonth.ca. And The Small Machine Talks offers the opportunity for quiet listening and moments of stillness, which I think is important at this time as well.

I have attended two Zoom events since the pandemic. I had previously attended one. I find it very uncomfortable in many ways, but I did enjoy the two I attended: The Iridescent Robot Storytelling Club, organized by Danielle K.L. Grégoire, and the SpokenWeb watch party for Episode 8. But I would have enjoyed them more as just audio with my listening anonymously without any need to register myself as an audience member. I mute my audio and turn off my video as an audience member. I prefer pre-recorded stuff to live when I’m at home.

I am always connected to the literary community. I continue to read magazines, books, chapbooks and let the writers know via social media about my engagement with their work or I write notes about their work. Recently I wrote notes on Canisia Lubrin’s new long poem, the Dyzgraphxst. The notes were published on Periodicty: a journal of poetry and poetics in April, 2020.

The best way for me to engage with the literary community is to read and respond to their work. It has always been so. Even before the pandemic, I had been attending fewer events in person. I’m too tired these days for nights out and my body doesn’t feel comfortable sitting in hard-backed chairs or shivering in cold pubs for hours at a time. I prefer one-on-one activities with friends, rather than awkward small talk at events. This is a huge change that has occurred in the last few years. I used to attend a lot of events, and I enjoyed them, but I think this current phase of not attending many readings, either online or in person, may last for a while.

Q: Has the pandemic forced you to rethink anything in terms of production? Are there supplies or printers you haven’t access to during these times that have forced a shift in what and how you produce?

As a solely online publisher, so far we haven’t had any effects in terms of production.

Q: What are your most recent publications? How might people still be able to order copies?

NationalPoetryMonth.ca 2020 Ode to the Small – free and online until February 28, 2021

http://nationalpoetrymonth.ca/

Experiment-O Issue 12, published on http://experiment-o.com/. free along with all issues.

Andante by Hiromi Suzuki (AngelHousePress, 2019) $10

We Traced The Shape of Our Loss to See Our Face by Hannah Rodabaugh $10 (AngelHousePress, 2019)

Fatal Errors by Paddy Scott (DevilHouse, 2018) $10, only a few copies remain

The Prejudgement Day Blues (DevilHouse, 2018) $10

AngelHousePress titles can be purchased from http://angelhousepress.com/ and DevilHouse titles can be purchased from http://devilhousepress.com/

Q: What are you working on now?

Episodes of the Small Machine Talks, episode 13 of Experiment-O and I’m always looking for more essays, rants, manifestos, reviews and interviews or hybrid combinations of such for our essay series. And I’m still looking for more people to participate in the DevilHouse Six, a series of questions which explores the concept of the transgressive in art and literature.

Talking Poetics #3 : Amanda Earl

From One Invisible Woman to Another 

I write mostly long poems and poem series. It’s not that I set out to write long poems, it’s just that the work seems unfinished to me. In some cases, an image remains sustained in my mind or I feel a persistence…an urge to continue to explore some aspect of the poem until it works itself out. The impetus for each new poem is rarely the same, but several have been inspired by intelligent women figures from history who have been forgotten. I feel a sense of injustice to see how often women have been/are being erased. My own role in bringing attention to their stories is small, also pretty much non-existent from one invisible woman to another, but I feel it creates a continuity and has at times started a conversation about these and other forgotten women. 

Eleanor, my first long poem published by above/ground press in 2007, was inspired by an Ottawa Citizen article about Eleanor of Aquitaine, a twelfth-century monarch of England and France, rode in the Crusades from France to Persia. Her British husband, King Henry, locked her in the tower. Knights loved her and she is credited with their adoption of courtly love.

In my chapbook, I brought Eleanor to 21^st Century Ottawa. I read the newspaper article in the nineties and it percolated for a long time. In 2000, I wrote a song entitled “Eleanor of Aquitatine” and eventually that song ended up being a poem. In my early online chatting days in 2000, I used the name “Eleanor Incognito” to engage with potential lovers. Sometimes it takes years before an inspiration becomes a work.

In the nineties, I watched a CBC documentary series about the Crazy Years, the Roaring Twenties in both the US and Europe. There was a show devoted to Alice Ernestine Prin or Kiki. I was captivated by this bawdy and creative free spirit and the Montparnasse artistic world she not only lived in, but also greatly influenced. My book, Kiki, was published by Chaudiere Books in 2014, more than a decade after I’d first heard about her.

Once upon a time, I got off a bus on Queen and Bank in Ottawa and noticed a woman lugging a buggy full of stuff across the street. She was likely one of the many homeless people of Ottawa. I thought about all the homeless women in Ottawa and the danger and discomfort having no shelter would be. I found myself looking up statistics for homelessness in Ottawa. For many years through Bywords, we held a reading to fundraise for the Cornerstone Women’s Shelter.

The image of this woman stuck with me as did a name: Ursula. At some point, maybe a few weeks later, I looked up the name Ursula and found out about Saint Ursula, the patron saint of schoolgirls who was, according to Catholic lore, travelling by boat to meet her Pagan groom when she was beheaded along with 11,000 virgins. I wondered about the Ursula I’d seen and imagined her as having delusions of being the saint. This was after my own health crisis in 2009 when I went through ICU psychosis on my death bed in ICU and experienced an onslaught of nightmarish delusions. The feeling of not knowing the difference between reality and these delusions made me particularly sympathetic to those who experience delusions on a daily basis.

I wrote a manuscript of several different parts entitled “The Commonplace Book of Saint Ursula,” imagining Ursula living in abandoned cabins in the woods when she could find them, and collecting quotes, flowers, detritus, writing in a journal in between wanders. I self-published the first section, Ursula via AngelHousePress in a limited edition of twenty-six copies. Another section, Book of Miracles, was published as a chapbook with Dusie Press, and a third, Book of Saints, was published by above/ground press. The other sections have yet to be published.

Another mostly unpublished manuscript with women as a theme is “All the Catharines,” which I wrote in 2010 and revisit to revise on occasion. It’s still mostly not ready, but a few pieces have been published in the anthology Release Any Words Stuck Inside of You (Applebeard Editions, 2018) and a few other places. This manuscript started because of my grapheme synaesthesia where numbers, days of the week, months of the year, pain and names evoke colour for me. Catharine evokes emerald green. I wrote one poem about her and she insisted on my continuing to write of her. I infused the manuscript with various greens: limes, ferns, tarnished pennies. She lives in Apartment 5b because 5 and b are both green for me. I ended up including various Catherines in history from Catherine the Great to Catherine of Aragon to Catherine Blake, wife of William, but mine was Catharine with an a. Catharine became a very defined character with specific personality traits. She was angry that anyone would try to write about her. I documented her moods and proclivities. 

Queen Christina, published by Ghost City Press in 2016 as an online chapbook, was inspired by the queen of Sweden, a well learned person who often dressed as a man and fled from the palace on horseback. 

I Owe St. Hildegarde the Light, a chapbook published by unarmed of Minnesota in 2016,  was inspired by the music of Hildegard von Bingen. I became fascinated by her life, her brilliance, her visions and creativity. 

Lady Lazarus Redux (above/ground press, 2018) was a deliberate attempt to engage with the writing of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Gwendolyn MacEwen because all three women’s poetry has haunted me for a long time. I came up with a method of cutting up words from their work and drawing them, like tarot cards, to create my own poetry. The work deals with issues of ageing, menopause, and invisibility.

Increasingly, I write to connect with kindred misfits, particularly women and gender nonconformers. I have begun a new series called “The Seven Fables of Desire,” inspired by the writing of Nathanaël, who has been working in the hybrid form of l’entregenre. I have gotten my hands on as much of Nathanaël’s writing as I can and intend to read and reread it. This project has started with nothing more than the idea of exploring desire, the concept of the fable and the work of a writer I admire. We’ll see where it goes.

Amanda Earl is a long-poem-maker, visual poet, fiction writer, editor, publisher and doodler who wanders incognito through the streets of Ottawa. She’s the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the fallen angel of AngelHousePress. Her chapbook, Aftermath or Scenes of a Woman Convalescing is forthcoming from above/ground press. Visit AmandaEarl.com or connect with Amanda on Twitter @KikiFolle.

Recent Reads: "Kiki" by Amanda Earl

Kiki by Amanda Earl (ChaudiereBooks, 2014)

The brave new world in Amanda Earl’s first trade book, Kiki, happened almost one hundred years ago. In the bohemian villages of Paris and between the wars, when surrealism, modernism and hedonism were surging, the belief in true art seemed impervious to irony, self-doubt or marketplace considerations. If that go-for-broke artistic freedom feels a tad futuristic, it’s because most utopias are. And although nostalgia plays its part in waxing the contours of a seemingly flawless community (see: Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris), Earl channels the era’s inventiveness by testing character studies of Alice Ernestine Prin, better known to history as Kiki, and Paris itself against the erosions of excess.

Earl expounds on each historical narrative in that order (the “Alice” sequence comes before “Tales of Montparnasse”) without trying to extricate the micro from the macro, or vice versa. That is, Kiki and Paris are interdependent, with neither capable of instilling the liberal freedoms of 1920s France without the other, and Earl’s commitment to that incidental partnership makes a titan of Kiki. It helps that Alice Prin was already an enormously brave and complex personality, asserting the independence of women well ahead of her time. But the “Alice” sequence makes a bid to explain that individuality, mapping a trajectory of honesty into empowerment that parallels Kiki’s unapologetic appetite for artistic and sexual expression alongside the creative approach taken up by modernist friends like Hemingway – in essence, a reaction to the traditionalism of previous generations in order to innovate (or, as Ezra Pound incited, “make it new”.) As a result, “Alice” captivates not because the title character is otherworldly, but because she is relatable, humanized.

These are the men between the wars that come to Paris and

expect to find… what? Life? This is too big a word. I sit in

their laps and they feed me, give me pearls. Shiny pure white

pearls. I devour these men and their brilliance. White pearls.

An Egyptian black cat. Stroke me. In these arms, salvation.

I’ll rock you to sleep, bebe. Mama will cradle you.

I tell all the boys: Tzara, Soupault, Aragon, Breton. They’re

nattering again to Man.  (“Alice”, pg. 24)

The above anecdote illustrates the ground rules for Kiki’s empowerment: that the pleasures of men should never come at the expense of her own. I shouldn’t feel compelled to explain that, nor pontificate on just how progressive such a mentality was, practiced openly in the 1920s, but alas, there is a fraction of men in the world — I will not venture how big or small that fraction is — that would no doubt share vitriol and condemnation based on the above passage. Some men remain intimidated by an empowered, sexualized femininity and it’s because of that population, often visible and yet anonymous in the comments section of articles about gender equality, rape culture or issues pertaining to the female body, that Kiki is a timely work of poetry. 

Beyond my own surface commentary, however, the above excerpt also hints at the strain of Kiki’s stature among mostly male artistes. She’s intelligent and passionate about Dadaist developments in her midst but often relegated to the role of Man Ray’s accessory — a cheerleader out of bounds.

This is Alice. This is fucked up. Cowboys and Indians square

off on the walls of le Jockey. Men with wild west dreams

spoil for a brawl. The tables are nailed down. Dark suits

rub against dancehall floozies while I belt out “Les Filles de

Camaret se disent toutes vierges.” Pimps and goons hunch

over banquettes, chatting up wallflowers, their future

whores. I pass hookers on cobblestones beneath streetlamp.

In Man’s bed he wants to know why I’m always so hungry. (“Alice”, pg. 32)

With Ray’s oblivious remark, the male gaze again flits into view, shrugging off a dimension to Kiki that Earl commits great attention to: the realities of being poor and perpetually in character. Chronicling a day-to-day survivor, “Alice”’s diary avoids the steady arc of a biography (burdened as those often are by hindsight) and instead swings between the subconscious perspectives of Kiki and Alice. Her duality is abridged in the opening sentences of many entries — “This is Alice. This is fucked up.” — with Kiki’s agency contrasting Alice’s passive bewilderment. In a glance, one could see these alternating personalities as a convenient turn of cheek, letting vivacious desire overrun a soft-spoken moral center. But with so many entries mired in the hardships of poverty — whether that’s having her tightly wound corset stuffed with cotton in order to sell more shallots, or numbing herself with cocaine in order to make money for her ailing mother — the dual synergy of Kiki and Alice forms a survival instinct. Eventually, Kiki’s moments of clarity accumulate to a startling realization:

I am tethered by ribbon and iron hooks.

The men of Montparnasse. A not so tender trap?

I am common glass.

I am the broken fragments.

I am ugly, a nightmare kaleidoscope.

I am mad. I am naked. I don’t know what I am. (“Alice”, pg. 46)

Although previous passages I’ve excerpted were intended to augment Earl’s character study, they are just as notable for relaying the frenetic pulse of a Parisian nightlife that will not subside into background imagery. “Tales of Montparnasse” serves to further populate the character of place that supported Kiki’s joie-de-vivre by stitching together thematically linked texts Earl has cut up and selected at random. The resulting piece, ripe with the mention of famous avant-garde artists, displays a cultural zeitgeist through cracked panes, whereby each dislocated stanza presents a scene of abstract busyness.

Champagne Dadaists pout

for Tristan Tzara and Philippe Soupault.

The Great Gatsby

tames cool bones

cracking to hurry.

The Saturday Evening Post

is serious as a death-mask.

Kisling and O’Keefe

rise like angels with horses. (“Tales of Montparnasse”, pg. 53)

Given Earl’s surrealist cues of construction, I trust that losing my coordinates in “Tales of Montparnasse” is at least partially by design. But without Kiki as my guide, or at least her degree of separation, I strain to uncover some hidden context here. (In a moment of panic, I even Googled unfamiliar names, hoping their art or biographies might unlock some subversive purpose to these experiments.) Ultimately a sensory re-read is more fulfilling and something Earl seems to encourage, signaling a gradual disassociation throughout the latter half of Kiki.

This downward spiral is engineered by tapping into the not-so-subtle drug-use that permeated the period’s devil-may-care spirit. Beyond its role in transcending logic and embracing surrealist ideas, ‘getting high’ provides a clever lens for Earl to forge ahead on, remaining true to Kiki’s challenges while linking two of the text’s most jarring transitions – “Opium” and “In which K meets B in a dream” – in a muddy state of consciousness. Utilizing source texts of Jean Cocteau alongside Earl’s own impressions, “Opium” wrestles self-assessment — a bed-ridden process of discovery, ecstasy and muted horror — through an hallucinatory lens.

I am the woman with the long black gloves. My eyes are dark.

I am the statue. I am the ox with harp and globe.

I am a smokestack. I am demolition. I collapse into rubble.

If a storm comes, Paris, the beautiful voyeur, will rub itself all over me.

I have written my name on a tree. Trees are better than marble because you

can see your name grow. (“Opium”, pg. 66-67)

“Opium” at first advances with the unerring slide of a bad trip: an early buzz of metamorphosis, that moment’s doubt, and then a cascade of self-destructive beliefs. Yet the tail-end, excerpted above, feels laced with resolution, at peace with the demise of identity in a way that “Alice”, with its confused and sober finale, couldn’t muster.

“In which K meets B in a dream”, another cut-up experiment (this one featuring text from William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch), formulates a conversation between Kiki and Burroughs. The pairing maintains Kiki’s theme of excess by comparing various drugs and, on an unspoken level, draws out the mindset that binds outsiders: coping with and trying to find their scene, their people, amidst the constraints of a square community.

These two domineering personalities play off each other as one might expect, with playful jabs and blunt opinions keeping the imaginary exchange sharp, but it would close the book as a curious diversion if not for our awareness of Earl as mediator. Throughout its four sections, Kiki’s experimental demeanour reaches further into Earl’s own subconscious. And with Kiki and Burroughs trading barbs as vapours of place and perspective, it’s the author who rises — a virtual stranger in these pages — to the station of torch-bearing innovator. Alice Prin’s life-story in Paris isn’t rewritten so much as relived through a variety of Dadaist and drug-fueled experiments. Much like the surrealist works of Dali or Ray, Kiki connects best when introducing the reader to his or her own confusion.

Given the close relationship that Earl has forged with the memory of Kiki over the years — visible through her website and Twitter handle — not to mention her own reputation as a self-proclaimed “writer of smut” and “pornographer”, it’s almost a shame that this appropriation of the avant-garde mantle doesn't include Earl’s own place and perspective in Ottawa. Maybe next time.

  

Writer's note: My thanks to Ted Nolan, who offered editorial advice on this essay in the fall of 2015. Due to a lapse in computer software, I was stuck with the program Pages and unable to see his Microsoft Word critiques for months. The opportunity to work together passed, but I credit several small clarifications in the overall readability of this review to him.