‘Low, humble, obscure’?* No longer.

Summoning
by Jacqueline Bell

Salt Spring Island: Raven Chapbooks, 2025
22.95 / 9781778160387

Modern Words for Beauty
by Mary Ann Moore

Nanaimo: House of Appleton, 2025
$25.00 / 9780978347499

Day Song
by Sharon Thesen

Vernon: Broke Press, 2024
$12.00 / 981738725380

Reviewed by Steven Ross Smith

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Chapbooks. Poets and ‘small’ publishers today are aware of the form, though these publications have an intriguing history that goes way back, possibly as far as the fifteenth century. (There’s got to be a better word for those publishers than “small”… perhaps local, or specialized, or book-object-maker.)

To clarify: a chapbook is a type of short, printed booklet that was a popular medium for literature somewhere between the fifteenth and seventeenth century. Short today means between 20 and 40ish pages. Early on, chapbooks were usually produced cheaply, sometimes illustrated with woodcuts, and printed on a single sheet folded into between 8 and 24 pages. Their production was rudimentary. 

Their popularity and ubiquity grew when they were sold door to door and at markets and fairs. The form or content of these publications embraced almanacs, ballads, nursery rhymes, poetry, and even political and religious tracts. In those early times—an era when paper was expensive—chapbooks were sometimes repurposed for wrapping, baking, or even as toilet paper. 

Loftier ambitions for the chapbook are often in practice today, as specialized literary publishers have often upped the ante in production quality, while keeping costs lower, relative to that of trade book publishing. Appearance and materials still command attention.

In Canada, in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, chapbook publishing was popular—notably in Toronto and Vancouver. In 1979 in Toronto, bp Nichol drew together eight writers and small publishers to form the collective Underwhich Editions, which published many chapbook titles by local and international authors, and even branched out into audiocassettes and other media. Other perpetrators there included poets like Crad Kilodny and Stuart Ross, whose self-made books appeared under their imprints—Charnel House and Proper Tales Press respectively. Both poets sold their publications on downtown streets. Out of Vancouver, bill bissett published chapbooks and magazines as blewointmentpress. Several other chapbook makers appeared in B.C.—including, in the ‘90s, Mona Fertig’s Mother Tongue Press on Salt Spring Island, and Nomados Literary Publishers in Vancouver, the venture of Meredith and Peter Quartermain, in the 2000s. 

Such publications emphasized, as well as literary text, the material construction of the book. Production aesthetics were often carefully considered and rendered. Those elements were: paper selection (high-quality specialty stock, or news-printy, or hand-made); binding (hand-sewn, stapled, or perfect-bound); font choice; standard or off-beat shape and size formats: printing method (xerox or letter press—and in the earliest days—mimeograph). Literary chapbook publishers shared the book-as-object space with ‘artist books’—publications generated by visual artists—often conceptual, sometimes with text, usually with visual content, and innovative in their form. Chapbooks offered attention to content balanced with the focus on construction and appearance. 

The writers and presses mentioned above are just representative citations, not meant to be comprehensive. Other entities have appeared, including the three publishers whose books are being reviewed here. 

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On Salt Spring Island, Raven Chapbooks has been publishing since the late 1990s when it began as Rainbow Publishers. The press has now turned its focus to poetry chapbooks featuring emerging and established poets. It runs an annual Chapbook Poetry contest. The 2025 winner is Victoria writer Jacqueline Bell, and her book Summoning.

In her poems, in careful free verse line, and stanzaic constructions, Bell speaks to those who matter to her. The title suggests Bell’s intention, though her callings-up are intertwined with passage, as in exit—an apt dichotomy, as in “Dark Sky, Full Moon”:

and I see now, by the way she’s painted your hair—
not smoky, but lustrous—silver
your leaving was never in question.
Starlight has already claimed you.

A few poems, including “A Tisket, a Tasket,” scatter words across the pages, opening white space to suggest hesitant, pause-y readings, as here, in “At Sea”:

but now it just tires you             trying to trap words
                                 slippery as fish

Blue is not an uncommon shade to turn up in poems. Bell renders lovely inventive freshness to such tones in the poem “Grief”:

and, of course, the sky; galloping-horse-blue, this-precious-air-blue

Or wish-I’d-said-goodbye blue

The book is tastefully produced on glossy and matte paper with an attractive painterly cover notably in shades of blue. Sprinkled among the poems is expressive art by Judy Critchley. The book, at 7 by 8.5 inches, holds 42 pages in perfect-bound format (glued at the spine and held in a wrap-around cover, like most magazines). It’s an attractive package.

***

Also with a pleasing design sensibility is Vancouver Island writer Mary Ann Moore’s Modern Words for Beauty, from House of Appleton. A 6 by 9 inch format with fold-over cover flaps, known as French flaps, shows a touch of design-class and ‘substance,’ and creates some extra strength. The flaps also provide space for a bite of quoted or promotional text.

Over the 22 pages, stapled at the centrefold, are Moore’s 18 poems in mostly free verse. The poems present well-rendered social observances, often in prosaic syntax and in verse that relies less on poetic tropes such as rhythm, line structure, and sonority, than on narrative in personal settings, set along with nature, colour, and memory. There’s a degree of nostalgia.

Some stretching of narrativity occurs, as in “Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear” and in “After a Poem by Robert Hass,” where Moore visualizes:

If I said, my ankle after the surgeon’s cut,
The plastic surgeon’s graft

Or a field of poppies and a bus load of women,
A red scarf over her blonde hair —

Nothing like a poem to inspire a poem. And Moore ventures further into poem-source in “Mourning You Is What I Do Best (a cento)”:

When each of us is born
The wind enters us and sings us through
A lifetime of remembering,

The words here are affective, as is the poem, though I am not sure the benefit of headlining that this is a cento, which in a sense destroys the mystery of the fluidity of the poem’s associations and disjunctions. Perhaps including such information in the book’s endnotes would allow the vibrations in the poem itself to resonate a bit longer. 

***

The third chapbook investigated, Day Song by Okanagan poet Sharon Thesen (Refabulations), presents a more modest rendering and smaller format—4.5 by 6.75 inches. A song of sorts, though it is a hard day to sing—it’s fire days… fire daze:

fire engines, police cars
screams and crying, explosions
vaporizations, huge trees lifted and crashing,

It’s evacuation time. Take what you can—the dog, the artwork, the computer. These appear in linked untitled poems—short, free verse, with leaps. We move from the burning trees to the poet’s angst: “I worry about my writing not being beautiful / but what is beauty.” We listen in on contemplations of art, via Degas, critic Peter Schjeldahl. We hear of physical abuse. Such concerns move the reader from the immediate current catastrophe to renderings of beauty with its implications of (im)morality, and to the existential—this citation appears in italics, so who is speaking? 

Everybody in their bed needs love. Body love. Bible love.
Blood love

We’re midway and notice the hand-sewn binding’s thread and sprigs from the knot. I always enjoy this feature, a reminder that someone’s hand—a human who, presumably, cares—has sewn this book together. Then we’re back, after the fire, in a marvellous poem leaping from the fire-fighter-saved grass, to “dialectical materialism,” moon-dwellers, wine with a friend, and the 

wink of the moon 
raising and lowering the oceans
of imagination and love

Thesen continues a weave of ballet, bleached teeth, fire-scars, her mother, “gun-mounted tanks invading Czechoslovakia.” It is a condensed eighteen pages of verse, in modest physical construction, without visual embellishment, but rendered with Thesen’s deft poetic hand, a hand that engages, and surprises; and, as with beauty, dazzles, and terrifies.

Indeed, chapbooks are objects of care and concision, and offer us, in the form of appetizers, intense experiences and/or provocations, earnest presences, or sublime reflections—contemplations that can engage or transcend their size and material. 

[*Editor’s note: The title quotes from a longer piece, a chapbook condemnation that dates from 1891: “No doubt, from a modern book-maker’s point of view, the chapbook is a squalid, degraded product of a rude, now happily by-gone time. Truly in itself it presents little or nothing to please either the eye or the taste; yet, considering it apart from such supersensitiveness, it is a question whether the study and analysis of this low, humble, obscure branch of literature might not reward the investigator with very considerable results, touching upon the manner of thought and intellectual pleasures of the great lower mass of humanity.” —from “What is a Poetry Chapbook?” in Poets House.]

Steven Ross Smith enjoys muddling around with words, ideas, and books in Victoria, BC. His decades-long migratory adventure from East to West through Canada’s many natural and made landscapes has implanted a continuing amazement and presented many poetic influences. His writing, influenced by experimenters in early Toronto days, often juxtaposes disparate threads, as in his seven-book poetic series fluttertongue. His fourteenth book is Glimmer: Short Fictions (Radiant Press, 2022). In 2024 The Green Rose, a chapbook collaboration with Phil Hall, appeared with above/ground press, and in 2025 with Lake’s End Press. Smith was Banff Poet Laureate, 2018-21. [Editor’s note: Steven recently reviewed Jeff Derksen, Stephen Collis, Harold Rhenisch, Kevin Spenst, Eimear Laffan, and Tim Lilburn for BCR. As BCR contributors, Mary Ann Moore recently reviewed Speech Dries Here on the Tongue; Sharon Thesen wrote about Molecular Cathedral: The Poetry of John Lent.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster