Spending the year with new(ish) books by friends, locals, and other Canadian poets. Follow along daily on BlueSky and Instagram

Welcome to the first full week of the rest of the year! To start this season of slow reading poetry, I would like to share with you the first book-length collection from Edmonton’s Marco Melfi. “Routine Maintenance” was published in the spring of 2025 by Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press and they did their usual amazing job. It is a beautiful slim volume printed on heavy textured paper and their trademark clean, minimalist design. You may recall that I featured another one of their books last year, “The Work” by Bren Simmers

I love this book so much. As the cover image suggest, these are poems about things. And as the title suggests, these are poems are about how these things interact with our lives. Though turning that around and saying how they interact with us is more accurate given the personification of some of these poems. One of my favourites of these is ‘Plaza Sign Down’ in which an old-school strip mall sign has fallen over and is attempting to explain itself and why it is superior to modern, digital signs:

…I’ve watched others go
digital: their crowded screens scrolling.

ads every second second–unreadable.

Marco also addresses objects directly in some poems such as ‘Stardust Apartments’ and ‘Parking Stall Puddle.’ There is a poignancy to some of these poems that use objects to connect us to our shared existence at this moment on this earth. Poems like ‘Cobbler’ and ‘Next Door To The Funeral Home.’ These poems meditate on the mundane and place those things, those moments, those small acts we often ignore into their proper context. There are meditations. There are deep breaths. There are the small things that remind us there are no small things. There are quotidian artifacts of the profound that you can hold in your hands.

And there is humour. I will end this micro-review, heartily encouraging you to buy a copy of this book, with the opening lines of ‘The Sunday My Samsung Rang in the Basilica.’

This is what has been driving my creativity this week:

The techno vibe from my jeans
rattles the pew like I've passed gas.