Book of Annotations

Finalist for the Archibald Lampman Award
Finalist for the Nelson Ball Prize

The debut collection from small press editor and publisher Cameron Anstee, Book of Annotations
deploys a number of minimalist strategies-including erasure, found,
lyric, haiku, one-line, one-word, concrete/visual, cento, restricted
vocabularies, and lists-to question how small a poem can be made, and
how can a small poem be made expansive? Engaging with contemporary and
historical modes of minimalism, Book of Annotations is a dialogue in
shorthand with work by H. D., Nelson Ball, Lorine Niedecker, Aram
Saroyan, Phyllis Webb, Robert Lax, and dozens of others.

"Anstee's debut collection of poetry is definitely worthy of all acknowledgements and eligible accolades."--Arc Poetry Magazine

"Wise and playful, the epigrammatic poems in Book of Annotations push
past the limits of each word and into a space tense with imagination
and truth. Not a word is wasted as Cameron Anstee demonstrates supreme
control of space and minimalism."--Archibald Lampman Award jury citation

"Anstee's small poems, by virtue of their brevity, expose the
elisions and accidents of language as symbolically rich and
complicated."--Prairie Fire

"There's a palpable compression, and concretism, lurking within Anstee's minimalist exercises."--Canadian Literature

"Short but never slight, the poems in Book of Annotations are deeply engaged with poetic history."--Quill & Quire

"There
is fearlessness to explore the common while simultaneously considering
the sublime... The true enjoyment, however, comes from appreciation of
how the diversity of the structure ties into the diversity of the
subject matter; the structure reflects the theme in each different
narrative that Anstee takes the reader on--a trip well worth taking."--CV2

"Cameron Anstee's Book of Annotations collects
haiku-like short poems that manage to be painterly despite (or perhaps
because of) their minimalism: "now here light leafs small small lines."--Winnipeg Free Press

"Anstee's debut collection of poetry is definitely worthy of all acknowledgements and eligible accolades."--Arc Poetry Magazine

"Incredibly short and playful poems packed with enormous density."--rob mclennan

"Wise and playful, the epigrammatic poems in Book of Annotations push
past the limits of each word and into a space tense with imagination
and truth. Not a word is wasted as Cameron Anstee demonstrates supreme
control of space and minimalism. The pithiness of the poems reminds one
of coordinates of a constellation, or the tips of icebergs. To borrow
Anstee's words, 'the smallest unit of feeling' ... 'out of these a world.'
As delightful as it is challenging, Book of Annotations has a unique pulse of its own."--Archibald Lampman Award jury citation

"Book of Annotations
is a wonderful accrual of Cameron Anstee's minimalist gems. They are
rich and varied. Cameron's poems are short but not brief. Most are
subtle, some are perplexing, some humorous, and many are astonishingly
expansive. This book is a large treat!"--Nelson Ball

"In Book of Annotations,
Cameron Anstee brings us the ephemeral, the existential, the entropic,
and the elemental. Akin to koanlike maxims, this work presents an
exquisite perception of and reverence for the here-and-now, the before
and after, the timeless and the fleeting. Anstee disassembles and
reassembles the fundamental phenomenon of being. Sensuous, natural,
familiar, unexpected, elusive, vertiginous--this work brings us closer to
understanding ourselves."--Sandra Ridley

"[Book of Annotations]
is a slight collection that goes easy on his publisher's inkjets
(several poems have a word count in the single digits). It has been
enjoyable consuming the glassine craftsmanship of these kindred texts at
such different rates. I devour Anstee's book whole every time I pry it
open."--Ben Ladouceur