The Globe and Mail

On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, Alberta poetry publisher Frontenac House has upped its annual output from four titles to 10. Having enlisted the services of judges Alice Major, bill bissett and George Elliott Clarke, the press held itself a little competition and arrived at 10 new books from a varied crop of underdogs and veterans. They include sports journalist Laurie MacFayden's debut collection, White Shirt, as well as a mid-career work from Edmonton's Jannie Edwards (Falling Blues). Both are competent titles, at home in the canon of Canadian lyricism.

Among the more ambitious efforts, Edmonton poet Jocko Benoit's Standoff Terrain is a book of cheeky love poems inspired by Sun Tzu's The Art of War, while William Nichols calls his mild dyslexia “his muse” in the notes to his Fallacies of Motion, thus giving a name to the wonky, occasionally sublime, poetics that trademark his civic-minded observations. Lori Cayer's Attenuations of Force does fun things with both typography and science.

Meanwhile, Adebe D.A.'s ex nihilo is a book dominated by poetic acts of self-identification (along generational, aesthetic and ethnographic lines). It's ironic, then, that ex nihilo's most memorable poem, I Am Not Cleopatra, is a mid-length piece that's less about the poet than it is about the folklore of femininity. Neighbouring ex nihilo is S. McDonald's transgendered coming-of-age narrative, Confessions of an Empty Purse. Breezy, casual and occasionally charming, McDonald's contribution to the project reads as a quirkier, light-verse version of ex nihilo. Both are essentially pieces of identification, the kind of idiosyncratic me-story that has become Canadian poetry's three-leaf clover: common, dismissible but often dramatic in their own strange ways.

This brings us to the central problem of the project. The Dektet is the love child of democracy and romanticism. It is contained in the idea that if a publisher were to throw as much at the wall as possible, then somewhere out there each book would find its spiritual completion in the arms of a perfect reader. The get-it-out-there ethic is the civil religion of every small press, every money-rupturing independent bookstore and every local reading series located in the backmost room of some bar.

Like most beautiful ideas, though, it falls upon the world and is immediately corroded. The Deket's corrosive agents include chain bookstores, with their preferential shelving and poetry sections the width of a child's play seat, though there are other factors beyond this. Put simply, there is not enough time to find a love for everything, and a reader must harvest his or her own favourites. Who knows if the cultural impact of Frontenac's Dektet is equal to its noble ambitions? Like any press, large or small, they succeed if they regularly publish notable books. These next three, to my ear, are their successes:

[sic] is the first book from Nikki Reimer, who might be best known to poetry fans as a sort of cub reporter for the popular poetry blog Lemon Hound. At its best, [sic] is a giddy, whimsical and expertly timed series of fake-outs and sucker punches. Corporatism, sexism and intellectual sloth all get brought out for questioning in a series of wild, gesticulating poems.

Reimer's scattershot style is haunted by a difficult problem. Officious begins by nodding to the book's musicality with “all these lines secretly want to be lyrics stick around” but loses its momentum when it settles on a specific target for its effusiveness with the somewhat awkward “abandon sexual politics its all scripted commercialism.” To put it another way, Reimer's wit is sometimes like a pestering mosquito. It may be unpredictable in the air, but when it settles on a place from which to draw its blood, it can more easily be flicked aside, or worse.