Touch the Donkey #15 gets a shout-out from Rusty Priske

Rusty Priske was good enough to give Touch the Donkey #15 a shout-out recently over at his blog, giving a highlight to the work of issue contributor Michael e. Casteels. Thanks much! Of course, copies of this issue (as well as all the other issues) remain available.

Rusty Priske's Reading List now includes Touch the Donkey #9 + #12

Ottawa poet and organizer Rusty Priske was good enough to mention two different issues of Touch the Donkey at his ongoing "Reading List 2017." Thanks so much! He discusses issue #12 here, and #9 here.

Touch The Donkey #11 reviewed in Broken Pencil

I just discovered that Joel W. Vaughan was good enough to review Touch the Donkey #11 in Broken Pencil .Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. Previous issues reviewed by Broken Pencil include #10 [see the review here], #5 [see the review here] and #1 [see the review here].

The eleventh incarnation of rob mclennan’s poetry journal presents a few writers familiar to those well-acquainted with above/ground press’s prolific output (including Buck Downs, lary timewell, and Kemeny Babineau). However—in addition, the little journal features double the number of fresh faces as well, balancing stylistic expectations with a little new blood. In all, there is nothing here which significantly differs from mclennan’s editorial approach in previous issues, but this is by no means to say that the poetry contained herein is not worth investigation.

A kind of ‘scratching out’ of form makes itself felt in a number of these poems, and one wonders whether mclennan’s grouping of them together was thematically intentioned. Buck Downs’s “full speed in partial paradise,” reading: “beaten gold | in hammered sheets | golden chain | I doubt I see” was composed using personal notes that were transcribed, cut out, and re-arranged, then pasted into little disordered monologues. Kemeny Babineau’s “The Log of Wonorata,” similarly, began as an erasure poem, and figures semi-significant couplets (ie. “V: Red Wolves of Poverty | Petroleum Mecca teat”), though it does not present itself as such when printed in short-line towers, just as Downs’s work cannot be made out as word-collage. An excerpt from The Pain Itself, by kevin martins mcpherson eckhoff brings this scratching out of form to new heights, figuring an entire page in prose, with text replaced by “Lorem ipsum…” garbled Latin.

above/ground’s “Touch the Donkey #11,” then, seems concerned with representing and mis-representing the form in which poetry is written, originates, or operates, and often to interesting effect. It is worth a look.

Touch The Donkey #10 reviewed in Broken Pencil

Touch the Donkey #10 is reviewed by Scott Bryson in Broken Pencil (issue #5 was reviewed here, and the first issue reviewed here). Thanks much! You can see the original review here. He writes:

This tenth issue of Touch the Donkey — editor rob mclennan’s ongoing attempt to “engage with more experimental and avant-garde poetry” — presents a noticeably diverse group, both in substance and style.

Meredith Quartermain recounts a painful breast exam. Renée Sarojini Saklikar contributes a number of enigmatic, bee-centric poems excerpted from thecanadaproject, her “life-long poem chronicle about place, identity, language.” Shane Rhodes supplies poems built from phrases found in the journals of nautical expeditions. Luke Kennard spits out cascading, verbose verses that often read like spoken-word rants: “The realization fell like trochees, like a burlap sack of tchotchkes.”

The most rewarding entries in this collection come from Mathew Timmons. His first submission is two and a half pages of text that reads like the transcript of a yoga instructor’s motivational speeches. His second is a poem that finds innumerable ways to describe sundresses being shopped for online: “Detect those charismatic despicable sundresses online… Gravy those indomitable pitiful sundresses online.” Each line of this poem is capped with a curious four-digit code, which may conceal some deeper meaning, should you care to try and crack it, for example: “fRhC; Zlzk; xHmr.”

Though there’s no particular mood or theme that ties this issue’s poems together, they consistently find a satisfying balance between modernity and mystery.

Touch the Donkey #5 reviewed in Broken Pencil #68

Touch the Donkey #5 is reviewed by Lyndsay Kirkham in Broken Pencil #68 (the first issue was reviewed in the issue prior). She writes:

Touch the Donkey’s fifth incarnation is a frenetic offering of eight poetic voices, dedicating white space to both emerging and established authors. Purposefully lacking in any cohesive themes, each poet impresses upon the reader a distinctively unique narrative, allowing one to dip in and out of this chapbook’s pages.

    With an unexpected hat tip to Alanis Morrisette’s time on the CanCon television classic, You Can’t Do That On Television and a painfully forced rhyming scheme, pieces like “Green Slime” stand in direct contrast to the philosophical specimen that is Elizabeth Robinson’s “Simplified Holy Passage.” It is in this tug between surreal humour and the profound that Touch the Donkey 5 leaves its mark on the reader, reminding us of the diverse complexity of a life lived.

    One could easily make use of this collection in a self-directed Introduction to Poetry course. A ragbag of poetic forms from found poetry, narrative and humour to free verse and experimental poems are showcased in the two dozen pages edited by rob mclennan.

    Perhaps the most noteworthy piece – one that has repeatedly pulled me back in – is ryan fizpatrick’s “What History?” After a seeming machine-powered rhythm, and a clear attention to sound throughout the entire poem, the final stanza of “Any glorious goal only mined iconography/pooling forward argument. You’re okay/as long as I assimilate my own battles.” exhibits fitzpatrick’s adroitness with language, meaning and enjambments. It’s rare that I finish a poem and immediately search for more of the author’s work, but the selection in Touch the Donkey left me wanting more of fitzpatrick.

    The punctuation-free stanzas of Rob Manery in “More and more” exemplifies the tight, concise and eloquent poetry that is currently elevating contemporary poetry. After “bringing together your most existential moments since 1950,” which is both thematically sluggish and lacking in readability, one’s imagination is employed most eagerly by the found poetry laid out by Christine McNair. Using news clippings to play with the notions of transcription, appropriation and journalism, these digestible chunks of text artfully paint a geography of Atlantic Canada during the 1800s.

    Touch the Donkey 5 is mostly a step of continued growth for the magazine; although one detects the obvious commitment to experimental and eccentric pieces, there is a new awareness in Touch the Donkey 5 of offering up a collection that can feed a wider audience hungry for new poetry.

Touch the Donkey #1 gets a shout-out from Rusty Priske

Rusty Priske was good enough to give Touch the Donkey #1 a shout-out today over at his blog, giving a highlight to the work of first issue contributor Hailey Higdon. Thanks much! Of course, every issue is still very much available.

Touch the Donkey #1 reviewed in Broken Pencil #67

Touch the Donkey #1 is reviewed by Scott Bryson in Broken Pencil #67. He writes:

[…]

The aforementioned sonnets aside – they’re expertly crafted by Camille Martin – several lucid and honest prose entries stand out, in this collection. Across two verses, Hailey Higdon discusses how she has “come to an agreement” with her dog regarding its need to be walked and her reluctance to participate, as she suffers through anxiety (or perhaps agoraphobia). In “Distraction,” Norma Cole examines a variety of memories that hint at the power of silence and absence, and the creativity born from incomplete knowledge.

There’s a consistently bleak – yet oddly gratifying – atmosphere surrounding the majority of these works. Pattie McCarthy sums it up in a way that’s both enigmatic and pitiable, in one of several poems titled “wifthing” (which deal with the history of the wife): “the shape of my midlife crisis is daniel radcliffe.”