Penn Kemp & Sharon Thesen, P. S.
What does Gap Riot love more than two women in poetic conversation? It’s when those two women are absolute legends in the world of Canadian poetry, two hugely influential and long-invested contributors and caretakers of our field. In P.S., Kemp and Thesen spend a year writing to each other, once a month, and the result is 24 poems in conversation with each other that explore how poetic conversation works across months, across an ocean, across subjectivities, and across disparate ways of knowing. In the note that accompanies the text, the poets observe that their “ways of knowing are different but validated by one another.” This chapbook is page after page of reaching out, validating, hearing, and trying to understand and know each other. It’s a big ol’ hug of a chapbook, a fiercely feminine conversation we’re so grateful to be able to bring out to you.
Printed in a limited run of fifty copies at Product Photo in Toronto, this chapbook has a colour cover in just the right shade of mauve. Cover designed and chapbook typeset by Kate Siklosi.
Sample Poem:
THE OLD DAYS
for Penn
before there was fear
there was anxiety
and before that, confusion
and before that, the kneecapping of fortitude and truth
of strength and faith
of humour and wit
of words and language and phrases
of beauty, of breath
whether in the pub or on the skating rink
multitudes of words flew around and between
in the airwaves and in the communion
of friends on the street
or on the radio or in the receiver
of the telephone, or in any room
where dwelt a person or two or three
in the cinema, on the stage, in the cafe, the TV set, teasing and pranks,
misunderstandings, differences, insults, affections
men solemnly announcing the news
women poets perched on a stool
the voices of women were soft and lovely then
and their poems were full of ardour
and sins.