Vallum Chapbook Series

All titles are available for sale in Vallum's online store

Through a blend of satire, wit and detachment, Jason Camlot’s Rules for Sadness refers to mourning and times of bereavement. Camlot takes the mundane, the innocent and imbues it with new meaning. He uses colloquialisms and surprising imagery to challenge and interpret contemporary notions of death and sadness. Anaphora reigns in this chapbook, and is perhaps even more powerful than Death. For Death personified often remains elusive: death “can’t sing...can’t paint...can’t play drums...can’t skateboard”. Loss is the topic here, and that which is lost is never made explicit. The use of non-referent pronouns says so little and yet so much, as do Camlot’s apostrophic letters to Death himself. And after all, through irony’s immortality, one finds that there is whimsy in death.

Recurring Awakening by Franz Wright

Recurring Awakening tilts precariously on the threshold of dream and waking reality, resting neither in physical, sensory experience nor bodiless spatial exploration. In this collection of poems and prose, Franz Wright traverses time and space, visiting the stars, childhood and the unexplored microcosm of the buds of a familiar peach tree. From a place of solitude, he urgently asks large and largely unanswerable questions directed at nobody, everybody and you. He comes to meet his own mortality and mutely inquires the validity of his existence altogether. As he draws back to observe present reality and painful memories, Wright’s words taste bitter and cold. Then, soon enough, he takes to the curious exploration of both the minutely detailed and infinitely expansive. Pages turn over like someone inspecting his own hands, asking, “I am still here. Aren’t I?”

little pink book

by Claire Huot and Robert Majzels

Though the cover pre-supposes a fun, maybe even cute, little pink book, Claire Huot and Robert Majzels’ collection of translated Chinese poetry is sudden and subtly challenging. Each poem is laid out in a dense series of boxes: rows of 17 and columns of 5, housing individual letters and ignoring spacing and punctuation. Do not expect a soft, gentle introduction, disclaimer or preface. Sit in the winter sunshine on a hardwood floor and let the words play out.

You will be immediately confronted by the work; the words “weight” and “death” two of the first to be quietly mouthed as you re-learn the shapes and sounds of once familiar words. This first poem might be read in a single breath, with little need to skip back. As you continue, though, you cannot avoid the misreading, re-calculating, starting again, starting again. “weal... no, we allk, no, we all know...”. You struggle through simply getting the words, then twenty seconds and 85 individually boxed letters later it’s over, and some form of meaning seeps in. The words feel impersonal, even when “my” and “i” are introduced, with a kind of objective, detached confidence rarely seen in western poetry. Though the weight and intensity of the poems varies, the restriction of time, breath and space for each piece is constant, creating a sort of framework for the experience.

The little pink book is part of the 85 Project by Claire Huot and Robert Majzels, which challenges and questions the ethics of translation through experiments and performances using various forms of media. Learn more the project at 85bawu.com

The Gospel of X by George Elliott Clarke

An excerpt from an "epic-in-progress" Canticles: Hymns of the African Baptist Association, The Gospel of X is a beautifully written long poem. Taking the point of view of Jesus, three time award winner Clarke employs dialect to tell the story of the crucifixion in an imaginative, contemporary manner. Punctuating elevated language with commonplace diction, The Gospel of X depicts Jesus' innermost thoughts/ponderings, from his suspect paternity and father's moodiness, to years of wandering the desert yearning to be with Mary Magdalene, to questioning his decision to "orate or else deteriorate" prior to his end.

George Elliott Clarke (1960-) was raised in the African United Baptist Church Association of Nova Scotia, founded in 1853. His Whylah Falls (1990) received the Archibald Lampmann Award for Poetry; his Excecution Poems (2000) took the Governor-General's Award for Poetry; and his Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke (2008), edited by Jon Paul Fiorentino, won the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry. His newest book is I & I (2009), a verse novel.

Points of Departure by Julian Gobert

A series of memorable short poems that revolve around modest moments made clever and curious. From the conundrum of falling in love with a reptile with a human heart to urbanized polar bears, Gobert offers insights on every day life through twisting average gestures into something more. While some poems read as exquisite inventories, others edify the reader. Gobert occupies various perspectives and offers sensory scenes set in public spaces(such as the metro, the market, the office and the cemetery). This collection accomplishes what all good writing should; it captures the ordinary and conveys it as extraordinary.

Julian Gobert is a writer, composer and filmaker originally from Mosse Jaw, SK and currently living in Toronto. He received a BMus from McGill University and an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in Oakland, California. His poetry has previously appearing in Prism International, CV2, dANDelion, The Nashwaak Review, and Prairie Fire.

Sandy Pool holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and is a doctoral condidate in English a the University of Calgary. Her writing has been published anthologies across Canada. Her first book of poetry, Exploding into Night, was published by Guernica Editions in 2009 and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry.

Blair Prentice is a Canadian artist living in New York City. Songs for the Pocket Anatomist is part of an ongoing series of collaborations he has completed with poet Sandy Pool. More of his artwork can be found online at blairprentice.blogspot.com

Described by the author as “an open formalism,” Poet in a Train follows the speaker’s journey through Australia on a long train ride. Initially grounded in the reality of the trip, Kinsella moves from images of smokers lighting up in the bathrooms of the train to considering the language outside of speech. The “intensely blue-bushed” surroundings cause the speaker to dissect language – “it’s a matter of vowels / and the language outside of speech.” Kinsella perfectly captures the way one’s mind meanders while travelling by train. As the stanzas progress, the “unmapped” topography of the Australian countryside sends the poet on a winding train of thought, where the landscape shapes the course of imagination.

John Kinsella is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose.  His most recent volumes of poetry include Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (W. W. Norton, 2003) and Divine Comedy: Journeys Through A Regional Geography (W.W. Norton, 2008).  He has taught at Kenyon College, is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, as weel as a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. 

Art Of Fugue by Jan Zwicky

In Art of Fugue, a focused offering from the Governor General Award winner, Jan Zwicky explores loneliness and death through the repetition of stark, striking images. Painful, but undeniably beautiful, Zwicky evokes powerful emotions through simple language and sparse details. Seemingly mundane images intimately connect readers to the speaker. Using brief sections, this long poem quietly sketches loss and anguish, rendering them at once both universal and terrifyingly personal.

Jan Zwicky - poet, essayist, philosopher, musician.  Her passions for music and philosophy are often the focus of her poetic work, and her theoretical essays call attention to these overlaps.  She won the Governor General's Award for Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (Brick Books).  She currently teaches philosophy at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and works as an editor for Brick Books.

Canadian talent, CJ Pellerin, freefalls into the psyche with short and urgent staccato verse, in his chapbook HOTEL DIEU: LETTERS TO MADAME LEE. The chapbook is driven by a desire to end illnesses like alcoholism. The sparse language and rhythmic character of the poems serve to immerse readers fully into this world. Peppered with glimpses of Montreal and the speaker’s life outside of the hospital, these poems, built through the use of carefully chosen details, resonate with emotion.

CJ Pellerin holds a B.A. and a B.Ed. from St. Mary’s University. He is a sailor, a carpenter and, due to life perpetuators, a muse-ician.

Franz Wright is the author of some 20 books of poetry and translations, including Walking to Martha's Vineyard, which received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His recent book, published by Knopf in 2006, is called God's Silence. He lives in Massachusetts.

LIBRARIES ONLY

INQUIRE

Helen Zisimatos is a co-founding editor of Vallum: contemporary poetry. She has been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards and the Santa Fe Writer's Project. She lives in Montréal.

Click here to purchase at Vallum's online store!

Forthcoming! 

Opportune by Joshua Auerbach