The Alfred Gustav Press, Series Nineteen

Reviewed by Carl Watts

John Wall Barger: Dying in Dharamsala
Claudia Coutu Radmore: On Fogo
Russell Thornton: Aftermath
Michael Trussler: Light's Alibi

The Alfred Gustav Press, June 2018

My first magazine subscription was Nintendo Power; the most recent was Poetry. But this doesn’t count the several poetry-related publications I’m receiving at any given time in return for writing or as a consolation prize after entering a contest (or the ones I sporadically look through in the library’s current-periodicals section). Contemporary poetry has a strange relationship with subscriptions; with most of its readership seeming to consist of those also plying their trade in the not-exactly-lucrative poetry universe, the circulation of its publications may not reflect readership as much as the number of people submitting their work. Sure, the arrangement is more participatory than The New Yorker’s business model, or even more of a game—maybe I haven’t come so far from my Nintendo Power days—but it’s also something of a closed system.
 
Alfred Gustav Press has managed to find a unique place for itself in this ecosystem. Founded by poet David Zieroth, every year it publishes two series, each consisting of three chapbooks and a holm—a brief offering (or “small island in the river,” according to its colophon) by a poet who has previously published with the press. Each series must be ordered in advance, and the press prints as many copies as there are subscribers. The four-title packages invoke sameness and difference, the beige of each cover adorned only with the author’s signature and a small, consistently idiosyncratic two-colour “icon” drawn by Zieroth.
 
Series Nineteen features John Wall Barger’s Dying in Dharamsala, Claudia Coutu Radmore’s On Fogo, and Michael Trussler’s Light’s Alibi, accompanied by the eight-page holm Aftermath, by Russel Thornton (whose Stopping the Waves appeared in the previous series). Each of the three chapbooks engages with experiences of travel, with Barger in India’s Himachal Pradesh, Radmore having travelled to the island of Fogo, off Newfoundland, and Trussler reflecting on journeys to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the site of Mauthausen, a Nazi concentration camp.
 
Dying in Dharamsala purports to show us the poet, “rattled and heartsick” and “attempting not to look away.” Barger has a way with line breaks, which here add a formal element to his visual conceit. The eponymous poem that opens the chapbook tweaks the familiar line-as-single-breath poetics to construct a delusion in which “Luiz lies upon his many mats”:

to invite us into a realm
where he is not sick
where he has cured himself
with tinctures.
And we believe it
how could we not believe it?

“Cryptoscopophilia” twists things still a bit tighter in this respect, multiplying its line breaks to capture the experience of peripheral vision, complete with hues of voyeurism and shame:

it is our business
look away
white dude.
The boy teeters
water’s edge
his light dim
fluttering. I look
I can’t help it
through the mist window
and the goblins
spot me
they scramble out
in every
direction.

Barger tends to write either travelogue-style works or else extended treatments of the truly bizarre, such as the baffling The Book of Festus (2015) or The Vnfortunate Report & Tragicall Tidings of Leslie Barger (2016), a chapbook that manages the unlikely feat of revitalizing and further deconstructing historiographically-inclined poetry. In reducing travel narrative into a series of perception-obsessed vignettes, Dying in Dharamsala reads like a formally tight synthesis of Barger’s work to date. 
 
Radmore’s On Fogo takes a step away from her Language-inflected work with the haiku and other Japanese forms in favour of more directly rendering a particular setting. In the opener “Sea Oyster Leaf, Sea Olive: Fogo,” proper nouns and other specificities are scattered throughout descriptions: “no fanfare, but the bulletin board poster, hand- // lettered on card, says The Ace is coming to Fogo / on the 30th, and everyone is invited[.]”
 
Several of the poems consist of long lines divided into two-, three-, or four-line stanzas. On the surface, this format is very different from the exacting concision of much of Radmore’s work. Still, many of the formal flourishes seem ready to burst in their compactness, like when “Berry Grounds” sketches outcroppings and patches of colour via brief swaths of repetition:

and you dream at night of more berries and dottings
of butter-and-eggs in the grass and berries and butter-
and-eggs tucked in from the wind and there’s your patch
 
and her patch and his patch, you’re not done till you’ve
scoured all the green you can see, till the wind knocks
you back toward small ponds stocked with clouds[.]

Despite their prosaic nature, it’s difficult to excerpt an entire grammatical sentence from many of these poems—their length and sprawling enjambment get at a sort of raggedness of experience and perception.
 
Radmore’s notes about the reading tour that brought her to Fogo recall the tactility in many of the poems. “The landscape invited touch,” she writes; “It required attention, wanted to be heard.” She then describes her desire to “record every single thing,” including her conversations with “other travellers as they shared experiences not accessible to me, like the Beau’s Beer crew that was trying to get a ‘taste’ of Fogo Island into one of their ‘150’ series of brewings.” It’s a relatable instance of trying to relate to people trying to relate to something authentic; that the poems the trip produced have appeared on the subscription-based Alfred Gustav itself keeps Radmore’s fragments of Fogo just a little safer from whatever authenticity-thirsty poetry-tourists may be out there.
 
Trussler, too, works around the edges of established formats. His short fiction and poetry frequently delve into those on the margins of aspiring, middle-class society, even if they do so from the perspective of the writer-professor. Trussler’s snapshots of this universe also have a multimedia element: his conventional writing frequently engages with the medium of photography, while A Homemade Life (2009) consists of actual photographs as well as poems written on a series of similarly sized postcards.
 
Parts of Light’s Alibi engage directly with specific paintings, and all the poems train Trussler’s keen eye for photographic nuance on the complexities of light and colour. “They’ve Never Smelled Jet Fuel” does both, describing a green that is “in only one place, stays inside a room in Vienna,” and which

we can at least gape at underneath this rizzened
green that scores cuts in a pond’s ice
made by skaters and how bark feels unlike
snow in the hands.

Trussler’s note identifies the painting as Hunters in the Snow, adding that “‘rizzened’ is of my own invention: Bruegel’s unusual green seems to call for a new word.” The poem is steeped in high art without seeming abstruse; subsequent comparisons, including “like finding / Japanese green tea picked in the springtime and within this bounty,” carry the reader’s eye away from the implied object and deep into formally resonant associations.  
 
The chapbook’s unique formatting lets Trussler weave space and pace into his exploration of perception. Each poem is printed sideways, prompting readers to tilt the book ninety degrees clockwise and turn the pages from bottom to top rather than right to left. This layout is used to particular advantage in “Jet Fuel,” which slows down already-long lines with abundant white space, and “To My First Love,” which describes sporadic communications with the addressee and gradually becomes more long-winded, its lines lengthening well past what the other chapbooks’ layout would accommodate: “But jealousy I knew, that unimaginable addiction, that blindfold pressed closer / than waking up tomorrow, before you took it with you, jealousy I mean[.]”
 
In comparison with Trussler’s sweeping entry, Thornton’s brief Aftermath seems especially packed-in, its smaller dimensions and typeface accommodating three long-ish poems and one eight-part prose piece. In contrast with the series’ focus on travel, Thornton stays close to his (and Alfred Gustav’s) home of North Vancouver. Proper nouns frequently locate the poems here, but it’s perhaps “The Water and the Stone Trap”—the most unmarked of the quartet—in which Thornton’s hypnotic, subtly changing repetitions invoke the expected unexpectedness of home:

The work of the rocks is to gather all the water
the way the people here once gathered fish after silver-scaled fish.
The rocks collect the water, and the water collects the rocks— 
there is nothing else for either the water or the rocks. 

Thornton’s identifiable style both increases the thematic resonances of the series and reflects the longer-term continuity the holm feature lends to Alfred Gustav. And yet one of the things that makes the press so unique also undercuts this kind of consistency. In being subscription-based, there’s no way, at least officially, to go back and purchase a title you missed. This is a strange reversal of sorts, given that most of the remaining print literary journals—however niche—make back issues available at a discounted price. The press is ensconced in the boutique market we’ve come to associate with poetry, and yet it manages to create scarcity and exclusivity in an industry already working on such a small scale that presses, micro- and otherwise, often offer complete annual subscriptions. (Try to imagine similar packages being offered by “major” record labels, or even mid-sized publishers of fiction.)
 
Zieroth writes on the press’s website that he thinks of Alfred Gustav’s readership as “small but intense,” and that the press is “an effort of guild-like pleasure keen to bring poetry to readers.” Both statements indicate that the publisher exists firmly within the ever-retrenching universe of poetry publishing. But it also succeeds in carving out a space within that environment and giving its poets room to breathe and to generate rarities, even if the idea of a poetry-related curio at this point verges on redundancy. It’s conscious of its limitations to the extent that it uses them as strengths; in the process, perhaps it can help expand that universe by inviting those on its edges just a little further inside.

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Carl Watts holds a PhD in English from Queen’s University. His research interests have included whiteness and constructions of mainstream and experimental poetry. He has published poems in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, The Cortland Review, and The Manchester Review, and in a chapbook, REISSUE (Frog Hollow Press, 2016). He is on Twitter @carl_a_watts.