Kindnesses by Lisa Pasold (Cactus Press chapbook series, 2025)

             Montreal poet and performance artist Lisa Pasold had flown under my erratic poetic radar until I was honoured to take part in one of her storytelling ghost walks at Edmonton's Fringe Fest in 2025. At the end of the epic and stirring stroll, she told me about her poetry books and we realized we knew many of the same people in the sprawling Canadian literary pool. Then she attended one of my Trobairitz events and just recently, back in Edmonton once more for the Fringe in 2026, she was the guest at my Impromptu series, where poets on the road pop by to read, field questions and offer a writing spur to small attentive coffee-drinking circles. 

    During that occasion, she gifted me with her captivatingly-designed chapbook called Kindnesses, already on its second printing of 25 copies from Cactus Press in Montreal. Pasold has traveled widely and lived for decades in Paris and New Orleans. Which may be part of the reason I hadn't heard of her work before. Even though her 2012 book Any Bright Horse was shortlisted for the GG? Ok, no excuse. At any rate, the sixteen poems in this chapbook are as long-limbed and richly dictioned as she is, each allusive piece a unique slip into a place, a character, an era. Her performance background is resonant in all these poems, the stanza and line breaks identifying recitative scores more overtly than formal visual cues. 

    In "Princess," Abi, the piano player, shows up on a bicycle in the first stanza and then the narration slides into the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale for the subsequent four, em dashes marking energy and temporality as Abi ends by circling back to gig culture, saying, "I've/gotta believe someone out there thinks we're worth the thorns." Titles are slangy like "We are a mess and also okay" and they are dramatic such as "Mistress of Midnight" or they are simple one word openings into poems like "Aviation" where there are cocktails and feather eyelashes, a line in French, Meryl Streep, hyphenated actions, filmic cuts. Simple rococo that is. Talking about the "come-hither hard swoop feel" of the word "cunt" while nomming on a Buttermilk drop kind of simple rococo. 

    Pasold writes like few other Canadian poets do, bringing the stage to the page, unafeard of arm-outflung-style lineations that gesture towards punctum moments, unforgettable interludes, quick aural glimpses into the "thrash-voiced convicts singing in tragic Russian" in Belarus or Michael with his "elegant origami" fingers living above the bar that stinks of "cat piss and dilapidated joy" or even the poet herself, in an instant of "mosquito-bit legs and splotched wooly/socks." Pasold's poems ask "Aren't we all like that, or at least, the best of us keep running,/stumbling wild with glee and with grief?" She can risk the overdoing it at times, the slight cliche, so exuberant she is with her scat-rampant singing.

    Kindnesses ends on the line "but here we are" from the only slim piece, "Big Red Arrow" and truly all these poems are testaments, testimonies of being fully present in the world.