Sukun (New and Selected Poems)
By Kazim Ali (icehouse poetry)
Reviewed by Keith Gerebian
Kazim Ali is a queer writer who was born in the UK to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian descent, a “constellation of identities” in the words of Anjali Vaidya. A prolific poet, editor, translator, and prose writer, Ali grew up in three countries (the UK, Canada, and America) and is a professor of poetry at the University of California (San Diego). His name, “Kazim,” means “patience,” and the title of his anthology is the Arabic word for “stillness” or “rest.” A reader needs to be patient with Ali’s poems because his ceaseless inquiry into the themes of identity, migration, home, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions allow little mental stillness or rest.
A selection from seven poetry collections, Sukun is a mixed bag of forms. Ali emerges as a pilgrim wandering in several countries and landscapes, literal and psychic, in an ongoing quest for a spiritual space of enlightenment. Evidently steeped in various poetic traditions (Anglo-Saxon, Eastern, Elizabethan, modernist, etc.) and modes (measured confessional, ghazal, abecedarian, quatrain, floating singlet, elegy, etc.), Ali deliberately twists and fractures syntax in spirited homophonic wordplay, as in the anthology’s opening ternary: “Always instead this dealer / Of done deals of what’s / Done after dun plain / Grass wanting then to lie” (from “Prayer For Chasm”). Musical and tender at best, Ali does suffer from extravagance when he adopts mannerisms or imitates Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm. In these instances, he sounds obsessively narcotized: “The soul not the spirit breathes through / Spirited wend or wend why true / Weave wove we’ve woven” (“Golden Boy”). I have sacrificed some of the cleverness by not copying the visual layout of the lines, but my point is that Ali’s wordplay often seems to be on steroids—as it is even in later works. Take these lines, for instance, from “Good Boy” in Crib and Cage (2022):
Good boy for know enow I no
I-land disappear in the aft oh brave
Noh whorl in the riven hand scriven
A ridge down which waves ruff
Aves spindle in the air spun the jour
A feast for devotees of Gertrude Stein or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and caviar to gluttonous academia.
Overall, the anthology is rife with tensions between the poet’s religiousness and apostasy. Ali’s first collection, The Far Mosque (2005), moves between biblical and Qur’anic stories, provoking questions of comparative faiths, though the poet is not free of echoes of Hopkins (“Wonder well foundry, well sunborn, sundered and sound here / Well you be found here, foundered and found”) or of Rumi and his devoted friend Shams-e Tabrizi (“One day in the marketplace, estranged and weeping, / you will understand the farthest mosque is the one within”). The painterly minimalism and open field of the poems, with homages to mystics, other poets, painters, and queer victims are interesting, but the selection from this collection is not as rich as expected, and I missed the sense of a great meditative fire.
In Bright Felon (2009), Scripture and hadith (traditions of the prophet) reveal a veil “between what you want to see and cannot see, what you wish to have heard but did not hear.” This collection is a fraught, self-censoring queer autobiography—one marked by internal struggle, as a counterpoint to the secular and political battles of others (e.g., Emily Dickinson, the Bush-Powell Iraq war): “What is my war? Not the one you think.” The dominant form is the prose poem, which allows Ali more space and elasticity by which to indulge in montage and epigrammatic insight. The poems move backwards in time and geography from Marble Hill, New York, to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, while also extending retrospectively to Cairo, Paris, and Home (his metaphorical or spiritual place), where he feels welcomed by God despite being unclean and where he can practise patience—the very meaning of his first name.
The Fortieth Day (2008) is epistemological, where admissions of ignorance justify the assumption that questions can be more important than answers. There are splendid short lyrics and tone poems (“Sleep Door,” for instance), and in “Ramadan” a sense of mystery pervades meditation: “You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting / and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—.” “Perish” exemplifies Ali’s skill with enfolding one line of inquiry into another, though ultimately even prayerful poems cannot decree definitive poetic or philosophic closure.
It would not be wrong to call Ali a formalist who knows his literary forms, but he also loves to experiment. Ali created the Hesperine form (mixing fluidity and breakage) for The Voice of Sheila Chandra (2020), just as in Silver Road (2018) he blurred genres by incorporating literary criticism, essay, memoir, and verse fragments. This collection constructs a complex narrative of the poet’s biography, while fusing historic voices with his own and stitching together recurring words, images, and concepts about identity and metaphysical truth. Here homophonic verse succeeds in transcending mere mannerism:
Kazim knot
what you told me
not what I claimed
not what stayed with me
naut what I was named
Ali shows how latent meanings can be embedded within words and sounds. In Sky Ward (2013), rhyme and homophone bridge gaps in meaning, while Ali expresses tensions between prayer and silence, void and profusion. On the one hand, there is express existential futility:
My time in the world
Was only a gesture
My body
a lonely stranger
an ache
I never knew
On the other, faith intervenes with significance: “Wisdom will not carry you skyward / Your own body is the only mosque you need.” This utterance provokes silent meditation not only about Ali’s spiritual conviction but also his literary versatility, which eschews narrative hierarchy in favour of an interrelation among musical sound, poetic rhythm, and contemplative silence.
The Boulevard
By Jerrod Edson (Galleon Books)
Reviewed by Margo LaPierre
God is coming in Jerrod Edson’s The Boulevard. When Satan’s office receives an email announcing that God is ending his absenteeism and coming down to visit, consternation ensues. Hell’s Boulevard, a work of beauty and defiance, covered in murals so vibrant they illuminate hell and make existence there bearable, must be renovated, every hopeful hue eradicated. Accompanied by his demons Mr. Gregory and Mr. Graves, Satan journeys plushily on his private train car traversing hell, seated near fellow travellers Ernest Hemingway and Jean Rhys (romantically involved post-death). Hemingway and Lucifer give Rhys the boot—Hemingway plans to meet up with her later. How I adore being a fly on the wall for the conversation between Edson’s Lucifer and Hemingway, gleaning insight from the latter’s musings, which inform the novel as a whole: “Writing and painting are the same once you peel away the gloss. When I write of a writer or a painter, they’re both the same character” (p. 55).
In the frame narrative of Edson’s fabulist historical novel, Satan tells Hemingway, while they travel to see Vincent Van Gogh in hell’s foothills, about how he and the demons were disfigured under God’s guillotine and ejected from heaven for smuggling flowers from earth. There are to be no flowers in heaven or hell. In lively, voice-y dialogue, Satan tells Hemingway of the project he led for several centuries to “commission” a human artist to beautify hell and bring light to the underworld with their brushstrokes. Satan’s power is possession: he can inhabit any living being to observe and influence those whose talent he seeks to corral for his purposes. Satan visits Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Monet (interestingly, too perceptive for Satan), and in the swirl of the 1886 Parisian arts scene, Van Gogh.
The Devil’s greatest flaw? He’s a coward, though dignified and well-meaning. And his new, fast-approaching future promises two of the most daunting confrontations since he lost his wings. The stress of it, it seems, might kill him. He’s sick and getting sicker, but at least he’s got his medicine.
The Boulevard closely examines artistic process and collaboration. Some of my favourite moments were the scenes in which the artists argue about whether to work from memory, how an artist should live and which art scene will best benefit the work, whose work is selling and whose isn’t, and how much and what colours to use. There’s so much camaraderie, rivalry, and passion in these pages. The social realities and individual quirks jump off the page as the painters rib Gauguin for abandoning his children and Seurat for living with his mother. Edson shows, in deft scene-work and inspired dialogue, one of the greatest truths about art making: creativity is ratcheted forward through collaboration and working within community, with peers who are unafraid to challenge us.
The challenges Satan sets for Van Gogh go beyond that. At risk of spoilers, I won’t say more. What I will say is that as a person who lives with the same illness as Van Gogh—bipolar disorder, then called la folie circulaire—I found Edson’s depiction of the disorder accurate and validating. Edson shows the way depression can literally dim the eyesight, leeching colour, and the way every mania, every “insanity,” holds to a truth that can’t be denied. Van Gogh dips into great frustration and psychosis while always maintaining the grumpy, buzzy undertone of la tristesse. Yet even at his least stable, he is respected, beloved, and cared for. Edson’s approach to suicidality on the page is profound, affectively true, and never sensationalized: “By the time he’d set up his easel the clouds had taken over the sky and a brisk summer wind swept across the field in gusts and made waves in the wheat. Vincent worked through this, changing his palette to match what he saw—more black, and darker blues” (p. 199).
I enjoyed the late-1800s Van Gogh story in Montmartre as much as I did the framing story in (presumably) present-day hell. Some scenes in hell (Bukowski getting kicked out of a bar) get a laugh, while others (a living dahlia difficultly sourced) make me grateful to be alive on earth with its sensory delights, take my dog for a walk, smell the flowers.
My only gripe with the novel is not with the author but the publisher; the copyediting is rather hairy, with a number of typos, misspellings, and punctuation and formatting issues. I recognize the budgetary and time constraints that limit independent presses, as well as Galleon Books’s print-on-demand model, without staff or government funding. My hope is that the novel will go into at least one subsequent printing and that Galleon will opt to hire a copy editor for another pass to match Edson’s care and artistry.
Above all, this is a novel about beauty and the risks that artists are willing to take to create it. The Boulevard is as smart, funny, and entertaining as the similarly themed film Midnight in Paris, and it comes without the Woody Allen stink.
Comrade Papa
By GauZ’ (Biblioasis)
Reviewed by Marcie McCauley
GauZ’ is a sliver of this author’s tribal name, “Gauzorro,” bestowed by his grandmother, the person who sparked his thinking about Africanness, language, and storytelling. GauZ’’s second novel, Comrade Papa, presents kaleidoscopic fragments that invite readers to query personal and political mythologies and understand the relationship between past and present.
His first novel, Standing Heavy (2014), was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, with Frank Wynne’s English translation winning the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Wynne translated this second novel as well, with Comrade Papa winning the 2018 Grand prix d’Afrique. Both novels present a broad cast of characters whose experiences are distinct but reverberate to highlight ideas about alienation and identity, exploitation and exploration.
The men standing in place, burdened by boredom and necessity, are Ivorian men working as security guards in France. GauZ’ spoke in an interview with Biblioasis about how his family members’ work in that sector differed from his because of the trade’s historical evolution. This sensitivity to micro- and macro-scale experiences ensures the author’s storytelling is layered, rich, and complex.
Comrade Papa also recognizes patterns, alignments and divergences across time and space. In the first dozen pages, readers receive a colonial history of Côte d’Ivoire, a vivid shoreline scene from 1893 wherein the French regime triumphs, and a portrait of a working-class boy in Amsterdam walking to school with Comrade Papa nearly a century later. Readers shift in time again in the next dozen pages, where the focus changes to an orphaned boy in Alsace who finds work on a ship travelling to Africa.
The cross-century narrators situate the reader in a colonial context, purposefully but precariously. Brief segments in a contrasting font display additional perspectives: some vivid and intense scenes showcasing the author’s screen-writing skills, with some pseudo-historical documents and records in elevated language. It’s perpetual motion, like travelling by train: “Outside, the countryside is still flashing past, inside Comrade Papa is still dashing forward.”
The novel’s structure reflects the process of assembling truth and the ever-shifting power struggles of colonialism: “One additional barrel of gunpowder and he would lower one flag and hoist another in its place.” But although GauZ’ presents a disorderly structure and disrupts characterization, his authorial voice roots readers in intelligence and humour.
Like North American writers Paul Beatty, Ishmael Reed, and Thomas King, and as in novels like Mateo Askaripour’s Black Buck and Percival Everett’s Erasure,
GauZ’ unites edification with entertainment in his storytelling. Readers, for instance, join one young narrator and Yolanda, who cares for him at home when Comrade Papa is preoccupied by revolutionary activities. A humorous, light-hearted scene, in which one of Yolanda’s “gentleman’s all-sorts” manages to “escape from her flowery blouse,” is followed by a tender moment, in the context of her storytelling about “Boni-Marron” ancestors, wherein each presses four fingers flat against their own heart and then the other’s.
One source of comedy is the examination of political allegiance from the perspective of a dutiful son—“a champion of class warfare” who faces off with the school bully. Where a ticket inspector is “a lackey Sick O’Phant of big capitalism,” Adolph runs with “his gang of swas-stickers,” and an obsession with tulips permanently affects the “stalk market.”
Also amusing are relationships between individuals with contrasting (sometimes conflicting) interests: “In a single day’s walk, you encounter various ethnic groups who understand each other about as well as a church-yard pigeon understands a priest.” Where secondary characters “regularly come close to fisticuffs” but modulate the underlying tension with their “shared loathing of the British.”
GauZ’ combines puns, humorous imagery, and whimsical word selection with other wordplay throughout. The chef is christened Cébon (“C’est bon” mirroring the response of his satisfied consumers). Another character whose layers unfold throughout the novel is revealed to be “Anouman” (a new man). Another is named Amédée (sounding like “aime” and “idée,” a quiet celebration of theories that are easier to adore than practice).
Simmering beneath all this playfulness, however, are critiques and queries, as when GauZ’ probes the concept of exploration—“You have discovered nothing; you have arrived uninvited”—or the underpinnings of empire—“Goods are enduring colonists.” Whether mythologizing a parent or a “nation,” narrative reflects belonging and selfhood, “home” and “away.” GauZ’ invites readers to shatter the glass, study the remains, and recreate a whole that tells another kind of story—about how people come into the world and coexist. And, most importantly, he reminds us that we learn to understand one another by sharing—not only ideas but also laughter.
Fraser MacPherson:
i don’t have to go anywhere – i’m already here
By Guy MacPherson (Cellar Music Group)
Reviewed by Andrew Scott
If jazz history stands alongside popular music’s tales of salaciousness in open strings as a lost history, then let’s call Canadian jazz history the double lost. Books exploring the rich but often underacknowledged tradition of jazz north are few and far between, and given the fact that the titular saxophonist was an understated individual who seemed to lack the self-promoting gene, the forgottenness of this important bit of Canadian musical history seems all but guaranteed. But, thanks to the efforts of Guy MacPherson, son of “Fras” (rhymes with jazz) as he was widely known, this is not the case. Released as the first book on Cory Weeds’s Cellar Music Group’s publishing arm (full disclosure: I record music for Cellar and consider Weeds a friend), I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere – I’m Already Here is a welcome addition to the canon of Canadian jazz research and would make an easy shelf mate with any of the contributions from Mark Miller, Jack Chambers, and Jack Litchfield.
Fras is an unlikely subject for a meticulously researched, nearly 400-page biography, not just because most Canadian jazz players lack a significant profile. Even among this country’s many accomplished but understated musicians, MacPherson was famously subdued, with his radio-ready baritone voice exuding none of the self-aggrandizing boastfulness that is de rigueur if one hopes for career success beyond the jazz cognoscenti. In one of the many quotable notables that pepper the book, we learn that for MacPherson, there was “no prize for being first.” Whether he was talking about his enviable laid-back eighth-note time feel or his approach to life hardly matters. There was a supreme congruence.
Born in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, but raised in the Fairfield neighbourhood of Victoria, British Columbia, MacPherson grew up during Canada’s prosperous interbellum years, playing music for dancers up and down Vancouver Island before studying commerce at university. If recordings and collegial jam sessions were what first stoked a teenaged MacPherson’s interest in jazz, a 1945 performance of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic—making its only Canadian stop in unlikely Victoria—sealed the deal. Arguably the lessons learned from hearing such American jazz royalty as Roy Eldridge, Lucky Thompson, Thelonious Monk, and, perhaps most meaningfully, fellow tenor-saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, would last a lifetime.
In many ways, this book is as valuable for what it captures about a nascent West Coast Canadian jazz scene—filled with such important figures as PJ Perry, Don Thompson, Chris Gage, Terry Clarke, and Phil Nimmons, and jazz haunts such as Mandarin Gardens, the Palomar, and the Cave Supper Club, where Fras led the house band—as for what it illuminates about MacPherson. His rise to prominence maps elegantly onto the establishment of one of Canada’s most vibrant jazz communities, ultimately producing some of this country’s best respected musicians. Further, MacPherson’s discography, punctuated by his most famous recording, 1976’s Fraser: Live at the Planetarium, offers a discussion in miniature of Canada’s then recording industry (or lack thereof). In telling the story of how the elder MacPherson raised the funds with the help of a behind-the-scenes bank manager, set up his own record label, and self-produced a seminal Canadian discographic contribution, the author rightfully writes his father into history as not just a great jazz improvisor and creative but as someone who “revolutionized independent recording” in Canada.
As the book makes clear, the recording, which was ultimately picked up for distribution by RCA Records, gave MacPherson’s career a much-needed shot in the arm. Despite the fact that by the late 1970s MacPherson ranked among Canada’s most accomplished jazz players, he had hardly played outside of the Lower Mainland (apart from a year and a half leave from Vancouver’s Cave Supper Club to move to New York City and study with Jimmy Abato and Henry Zlotnik). Enter George Zukerman, a classical bassoonist and music impresario who, in 1955, had founded Overture Concerts to bring world-class music to emerging rural markets. By decade’s close, MacPherson along with Oliver Gannon and Wyatt Ruther were working with Overture, bringing Canadian jazz east to Banff, Drumheller, and Sault Ste. Marie, and then, famously, even further east to the Soviet Union. Although MacPherson’s trio was not the first Canadian jazz ensemble to tour the Eastern Block (that distinction would go to Oscar Peterson’s group), they numbered as only a handful of musical ensembles from North America to go behind the Iron Curtain, bringing what the US State Department and Canada’s Department of External Affairs had hoped would be a type of democracy in sound to the communist state.
One thing that becomes imminently clear when reading this valuable book is that MacPherson was a sui generis musician who was anachronistic even by 1980s standards. Be it the repertoire he chose (American compositions of the 1940s), the way he played (emphasizing a tune’s melody rather than potential harmonic extemporizations), his look (more banker than jazz hipster), or his decision to tour such unlikely jazz hotspots as Salmon Arm, British Columbia, or the Soviet Union, where he concertized numerous times between 1978 and 1986, MacPherson, it seems, was one of one.
Thankfully the world, or at least Canada, caught up with this singular man. Before his premature death from cancer in 1993 at age 65, MacPherson had been feted with an Order of Canada, a JUNO Award for Best Jazz Recording, and, in 1989, the Prix Oscar-Peterson from the Montreal Jazz Festival. As for the younger MacPherson, he had been encouraged to write a book about his famous father many times in the ensuing twenty-five years between Fras’s passing and the COVID-19 lockdown, when he decided to finally claim the mantle and put pen to paper.
Sadly, this compelling book and valuable addition to Canadian jazz literature will be Guy MacPherson’s last. The author, only 61, died of pancreatic cancer in early 2024 during the final production stages of I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere – I’m Already Here, standing therefore as a double testament to the remarkable talents of MacPhersons young and old.
online exclusive:
Three-Way Renegade: Samuel Steward Without Apology
By Keith Garebian (Frontenac House)
REVIEWED BY RAYMOND HELKIO
Three-Way Renegade by Keith Garebian is a candid and untethered portrait of Samuel Steward, an early queer renegade whose legacy has largely faded from mainstream memory despite his significant contribution to our understanding of sexual history. A man of many identities—writer, tattoo artist, and chronicler of an astonishing 4,500 sexual encounters which later on helped to pioneer research on sexuality from the experiences of gay men.
This body of work uncovers Steward’s complex world, bringing to light the layered ideologies of a life lived on the fringes. Within the context of queer history Three-Way Renegade serves as an important commentary on Steward’s life offering insight into the risks faced by queers of that period in history.
Steward’s life was, in large part, a series of contradictions. Mingling with literary geniuses such as Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, and Alfred Kinsey, while also having secret, sexual encounters that included Hollywood stars Rudolph Valentino and Rock Hudson and (gulp!) his entire high-school basketball team. Steward would meticulously document these encounters using covert audio recordings which further demonstrates his dedication to his craft.
Beyond Steward's sexual exploits, Three-Way Renegade delves into the existential challenges of self-identity. Safe under the umbrella of assumed pseudonyms, Steward used names as a way to explore the nuances of queer masculinity through his various art outlets. Anxiety, ecstasy, cruelty, beauty, and narcissism are all aspects of Steward, creating what poet Allan Briesmaster describes as a “hyper-erotic odyssey.” Steward’s journey is not a glorification or vilification sex but instead an illumination of the risks that permeated queer culture of that time. After all, having sex, or even queer relations was against the law, so being queer carried with it an inherent danger to everything we do.
Considering Steward was raised Methodist, it’s understandable that the immense pressure to present as heterosexual underscored his need to keep his sexuality discreet–at least initially. Steward’s sexual encounters were more than physical acts, they were spiritual explorations that directly challenge the conventional morality of the time. Organized religion is a system based in part on control and so reconciling one’s own sexuality within this context just becomes all that much harder to navigate.
More than just a recounting of Steward’s life, Three-Way Renegade delves into the complexities of identity and sexuality, revealing Steward’s fascinating life. A profound commentary on the human condition, and an unflinchingly portrayal of Samuel Steward. A defiant work which should serve as a foundational reference for Samual Steward’s place in queer history.
As a complement to the text, Garebian includes some of his own drawings which are loose, fluid and evocative. Garebian’s work is a biography with a cultural commentary on the intersection of art, sexuality, and identity. An important intersection to consider when looking back at how our histories get captured and remembered in the common domain.
