From Issue 4.2 (Spring 2024): IT IS WHAT IT IS

If life is for loving around in a rove, then poetry is a nexus of occasions. A place not unlike a park. A spot for commotion in common, for a style of making that sees itself as correspondence with material as force.

Life is for Loving Around in a Rove is an experiment in collaborative tracing and transcription. Across several cold days in December 2023, the artist/poets Benjamin de Boer, Sara Maston, and Ami Xherro converged in Toronto’s Grange Park to collect plaster casts of animal tracks and other documentation of natural phenomena, later inscribing their reflections on waste paper napkins, dish towels, rolling paper, and food scraps. The resulting pages are an exploration of friendship and permeability, a “re-presencing of the present” through the concrete activity of mark-making in common.