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Turret House is a micro-press in Montreal dedicated to new and experimental Canadian poetry.
Turret House was started by Montreal poet James Hawes in tribute to his late uncle Christopher Hawes, a playwright and novelist who shared his love of jazz, art and literature. The press is named after Christopher’s home in Youlgreaves UK. Rumour has it that William Blake stayed there, this is unproven, but James likes to think it’s true.
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Lunchbox Poems
Yoko’s Dogs
Yoko’s Dogs is a collaborative writing group formed in 2006 by poets Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis, and Jane Munro.
In their glimpses of the offbeat and absurd in the everyday, the poems in this marvellous chapbook give a nod in homage to Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (City Lights Books, 1964).
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Moonlight Recipe for Disaster
Cora Sire
Montreal poet and novelist Cora Siré takes us step by step through an introspective recipe of creativity, loss and a deep appreciation for Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. A sensitive and vivid series of nourishing prose poems that surprise, amuse and cut deep. A glorious feast!
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Opening Lines
Stephen Bett
Through 19 novels and metafictions, each poem in this collection riffs, literally, on its subject texts’ opening line(s).
An innovative, sassy, but deadly and pointedly serious tour through late 20th and early 21st centuries’ fiction from the Americas and from Western, Central and Eastern Europe. A mash-up of signifiers and signifieds, numerological flakiness, and PoWorld’s bland, Mega-church hegemonies—all encountering, in the midst of our present day cocktail-hour capitalism, some of the truly great novelists of our times.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Legendary Things (in which Phyllis Webb sings Motörhead to Basho)
Grant Wilkins
In writing his fifth chapbook, process poet Grant Wilkins wanted to explore his love/hate relationship with the haiku form. A fast-and-loose remixing of words and images from Phyllis Webb, Basho and the band Motörhead, “Legendary Things” was thus supposed to be a chance-driven exercise in creating rough-edged and spiky anti-haiku. Instead, the author accidentally came up with a series of striking little verse fragments which, while not exactly haiku, read like poetic notes that have been poured through the strings of a Rickenbacker bass guitar. Think Webb and Basho, with a little Jack Daniels, and the volume turned up.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Someone is Lying
Claudia Coutu Radmore
“this is the smell of Algebra and in this corner a whiff of latin…”
So begins Ottawa poet Claudia Coutu Radmore’s startling experiment of language, truth and the modern mind. These poems meander and bubble with great curiosity and a sense of play that carries the reader from idea to idea. Surprising and transformative, a unique collection from a literary explorer.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Playing Cello for a Dead Bird
Janice Colman
Janice Colman’s “playing cello for a dead bird” is a poetry collection shaped by the restless, everyday music of motherhood, neurodiversity, and memory. Poems move through kitchens and hospital corridors, across city streets and lake shores, gathering glints of family history, Yiddish phrases, and the small rituals that tether us to each other.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
This Inhabited Object
James Hawes
In his second chapbook for his press, James Hawes ponders everyday objects and the ways they are haunted and charged by the weight of experience and memory
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
A Narrow Road to the Northern Ocean and Back Again
Nicole Bauberger
In writing these poems, Nicole began at her home in the territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council, and drove through the overlapping territories of the Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation, then the Selkirk First Nation, then the Na-Cho Nyak Dun, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, then the Vuntut GwichinFirst Nation, then the Tetlin Gwichin, and overall the Gwichin Settlement Region, the Inuit Nunangat, and the Inuvialuit. She appreciated the signs along the road stating what nation had sovereignty over hunting rights.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
A Coffee Break
by Peter Van Toorn
An unpublished essay by the great departed Montreal Poet Peter Van Toorn (Mountain Tea) an irreverent exploration of the poetic form. In a voice both casual and baroque, Van Toorn meanders from a Valentine’s Day radio interview to Odysseus. A unique voice from the past come to rattle the cages once again!
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Eat Your Words
by Claire Sherwood
This poem is an interrogation of memory, a fluid autobiography. Swirling with intergenerational flavours and aromas. Stirring, blending, beating, scraping the sides of the bowl to find the right words. Struggling with separation, painful endings. Searching for home.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Vertebrata
by Monty Reid
Ottawa poet Monty Reid takes us on a tour of the human spine filled with personal reflection, memory, observations on aging and the fragility of those constructs meant to keep us upright.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Wilde Rozen
by Ilona Martonfi
This free-wheeling collection of memories, vignettes and stark images of nature, by Montreal poet Ilona Martonfi, dazzles in its vivid surrealism. A beautiful view into the past, sometimes joyous, sometimes melancholy, always in piercing detail.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
The Thinker
by Derek Webster
“An epic, physics-driver creation myth… Webster uncovers the universe’s capacity to ‘equiliberate’ without a modicum of sentimentality.”
—Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize of Poetry, 2022
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Hawking Comes Close to Finding God
by Simon Peter Eggersten
Through the lens of theoretical physics and inspired by the ideas and writings of Stephen Hawking, Eggertsen spins and vivid examination of time and history, both cosmic and deeply personal. A bold collection full of secrets and mystery.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Moon Over Thailand
by Ken Norris
Turret House is proud to present the newest collection from our favourite travellin’ poet Ken Norris. These poems bridge the gap between the real and the imagined, the concrete and the abstract. Told with a worldliness and wit acquired by time and experience.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
retreat journal
by rob mclennan
Ottawa poet and small press impresario rob mclennan comes to Turret House with this quiet and tender journey within in the wake of the pandemic. In turns reaching out and gazing inward, this exceptional series of prose poems showcase mclennan’s keen eye and empathetic depth.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
An Argument Against Jumping Off a Balcony
by Sheryl Halpern
In her stunning Turret House debut Montreal poet Sheryl Halpern throws everything at us from spare moments of gentle beauty, to vast explorations of our world and the characters that populate it. An infinitely rewarding and eclectic collection from a singular voice.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Twelve Cent Stars – Romantic Words 49-64
by George Bowering & Artie Gold
The second Turret House publication of the series of collaborations between George Bowering and the unpublished manuscripts of Montreal poet Artie Gold. Bowering approaches Gold’s work in a variety of ways; sometimes he responds, sometimes he rewrites and sometime he just comments and delights in these hidden gems of poetry.
Other sections of the Romantic Words series have been published by Proper Tales Press, Nose in Book Publishing, Laurel Reed Books, and Apt. 9 Press.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
a very little street
By Stuart Ross
In his new chapbook Stuart Ross writes about childhood, anti-semitism, wrestling, doughnuts, sweet-and-sour chicken balls, Bathurst Manor and much more. A beautiful 2 part long poem composed with Ross’s inimitable wit and beauty.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Offcuts
By Rose Maloukis
Longtime collaborator for Turret House, Rose Maloukis comes out swinging with her first chapbook for the press. A journey inward, into the artistic process, the poems within paint a vivid picture of what it means to create.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
I Imagine My Brother as an Island
By Morris Bailey
Morris Bailey’s startling first chapbook is unlike nothing you have read before. At once heartfelt and incisive, playful and tragic. Bailey plays with words and form to fascinating effect. A riveting collection from a unique voice.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Frog Pond Review for Fall 2023
Edited by Misha Solomon
Misha Solomon assembled ten Montreal poets and has them play a game, the result is this fine issue of Frog Pond Review!
With new work by Olive Andrews, André Babyn, Sarah Burgoyne, Malaea Ergina, James Hawes, Rose Maloukis, Sasha Manoli, Jade Palmer, Dustin Ariel Segura-Suarez, and Meryem Yildiz!
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
18 Sober Detours
by Noah Zacharin
Ontario poet and musician Noah Zacharin comes out swinging with his debut chapbook of poems. Spare and vivid, these poems inspired by the work of John Newlove are filled with ache and understated beauty.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Poems of Love and Faith
By Bálint Balassi
Translated from the Hungarian by Endre György Farkas
Endre Farkas brings renowned Hungarian Renaissance poet Bálint Balassi into the present while keeping his renaissance spirit and language intact. A fascinating look into the past, brought to life with care and reverence.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Jangle Straw
by Hugh Thomas
Montreal poet and mathematician Hugh Thomas presents a series of mistranslations of the work of Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge. From the beginning the deliberate confusion of language and vocabulary leads to some outlandish poems, all of which are infused with Thomas’s fascinating perspective. An adventure for the mind!
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
A Couple Sumerians
by Pearl Pirie
This series of spare poems Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie plucks moments out of time and presents them in a thought-provoking light. Sensuous and playful, empathetic and deeply human, this gem of a chapbook will dazzle and enchant!
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Virtual Lands
by Jay Miller
Montreal poet Jay Miller assembles a series of startling poems inspired by classic MS-DOS computer games. While the software might be out of date, the poems are vivid and completely modern, an intriguing collection using technology as a doorway to the inner life.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Mortal Taste
by Artie Gold & George Bowering
The second part of a three part series of chapbooks by Artie Gold & George Bowering. In the series George Bowering interacts, converses with, and responds to a series of unpublished poems by the great Montreal Poet Artie Gold. A unique collaboration that Turret House is thrilled to be a part of. These poems are not to be missed.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Rolling Like Apples
by Christopher Hawes
Chris Hawes was my uncle and one of my biggest influences when it came to literature, film and music, you know, those things that help bring magic and colour to one’s life. These poems were found among his papers as part of a larger manuscript called Rolling Like Apples, which is a marvellous collection of his poetry and song lyrics. I hand picked the poems that appear here and present them pretty much as they were written. My sister Rachel and I are proud to share a small glimpse into what it was like to have known him—like his poems he was full of joy, humour and humanity.
James Hawes – Publisher Turret House Press
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
The Spring edition of the Frog Pond Review is here! With great new work by Pearl Pirie, Stuart Ross, Sarah Burgoyne, Carolyne Van Der Meer, James Hawes, Jason Santerre, Stephen Bett, Teffer Adjemian, Ben Bisaillon and Will Vallières.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
a blurred wind swirls back for you
by Patrick Grace
Patrick Grace’s a blurred wind swirls back for you is an experimental queer elegy for the intimate ways we get to know one another, the red flags we see along the way but ignore, and the questions we must ask ourselves about the paths we follow.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Fear of Elevators
By Amanda Earl
In her new chapbook Amanda Earl brings the reader to experience the anxiety and alienation of the modern world and its machines through a dizzying series of poems, prose poems and concrete poems. Told with equal parts wry sense of humour and an indomitable resilience, this is a chapbook of dizzying heights.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Full Sentences
By Misha Solomon
In his newest chapbook Montreal poet Misha Solomon brings his keen eye and sharp sense of humour to this stellar collection of prose poems. Finding absurdity in the familiar and the everyday, these finely empathetic poems wrestle with the past and how it echoes in the present. At times beautiful and wistful, at times shocking and hilarious, but always presented through the lens of Solomon’s keen wit.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
The Park
By Daniel J. Rowe
In the early 19th century, there were no squirrels in parks. By the end of that century, they were everywhere. People have decided that it’s okay for them to live in parks. Most people have decided it’s not the same for people, we’re not supposed to live in parks. We can, however, visit for a bit and do various things. It’s a special privilege, and I hope you enjoy my poem. The format is what I call: the urban sonnet.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Hawaiian Sunset
By Ken Norris
Hawaiian Sunset is “the sequel” to Hawaiian Sunrise (above/ground press, 2021).
Norris is back in the islands again, engaging his love of the South Seas. Older, and possibly wiser now, he stares once again into the eternal and the infinite, while also taking the time to document he local flora and fauna. And he remembers those who preceded him in finding a refuge in the Pacific, the local flora and fauna. And he remembers those who preceded him in finding a refuge in the Pacific, among them Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville and Johnny Weismuller.
Hawaiian Sunset is a guaranteed cure for the Pandemic Blues.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
The second issue of our magazine Frog Pond Review!
Guest edited by Rose Maloukis.
Featuring exciting work by:
Linda Besner, Jason Heroux, Gillian Sze, Daniel J. Rowe, Stef Wisbech, Roxanna Bennett, Deanna Radford, Helette Gagnon, Laura McRae, Jake Bryne, Allison Fairhurst, Sébastien McLaughlin & Sarah Burgoyne
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Outlaw, Rainy Day
by Elizabeth Wood
In her dazzling debut collection Elizabeth Wood explores the malleability of language by transforming the prose poem to erasure poem and finally to haiku. Strange, provocative and unique in its language and execution, a chapbook of infinite delights!
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Double House
by Sarah Burgoyne
Sarah Burgoyne’s new chapbook takes the microcosm of the home during the pandemic and dynamites it into a bizarre and jarring new planet of creatures and alien emotions. An idiosyncratic journey within and without, touched by Burgoyne’s boundless imagination.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Very proud to launch the Frog Pond Review, it is included with every subscription! Featuring new poems by Nelson Ball, Barbara Caruso, Robert Hogg, Sarah Burgoyne, Misha Solomon, Rose Maloukis, Nancy Kangas, Daniel J Rowe and Sheryl Halpern.
Currently Unavailable
Featuring poems by Stuart Ross, Sarah Burgoyne, Misha Solomon, Sheryl Halpern, Morris Bailey, nina jane drystek, Lise Weil, Rose Maloukis, Rebecca Million, Elizabeth Wood, J. A. Shea, James Hawes, André Babyn, Vivian Lewin & Merrianne Couture
X-TRACTS by Studio 7
Inspired by Vi Khi Nao’s incredible Sheep Machine, a collection of poems which takes as inspiration Leslie Thornton’s video of the same name. Nao wrote a poem for every second (or half second) of Thornton’s video.
Each poem in our collection was written simultaneously as an experiment in Sarah Burgoyne’s Poetry Studio in under an hour. This was our prompt:
Experiment 6: Watch X-TRACTS by Leslie Thornton. Choose a time code of the film and pause it. Write an ekphrastic poem to that still image.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Under an Overpass, a Fox
by James Hawes
Written as a tribute to his friend Peter Van Toorn, this chapbook is an exploration of memory, loss and the things we leave behind.
Available with subscription, or on its own for 8$. Contact jhawes@videotron.ca for details.
Turret House Press 