new from above/ground press: [OKAY], by Buck Downs

[OKAY]
Buck Downs
$6

[okay] 


this is 
    the last time
I’m doing this
        again

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Buck Downs divides his time between Washington, D.C., and Ellisville, Miss. His latest full-length is Exit Style, available at buckdowns.com

This is Buck Downs's fifth above/ground chapbook, after Shiftless [Harvester] (2016), The Hack of Heaven (2017), Another Tricky Day (2020) and BURNTORANGE (2025).

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell reviews Penn Kemp's Lives of Dead Poets (2025) via The League of Canadian Poets

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell provides a review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) via The League of Canadian Poets. Thanks so much! This is actually the fourth review of Kemp's title, after Jennifer Wenn's review over at The Miramichi Reader, Karl Jirgens at The Typescript and Gordon Phinn at The Seaboard Review. Thanks much! You can see Fretwell's original review here.

In the golden age of Toronto’s explosive poetry scene in the early 70s, Penn Kemp met many vital poets who have since passed away. Her longstanding connections to these revered poets inspired her to write the chapbook Lives of the Dead Poets. As host of A Space Reading Series (this reviewer exhibited on the Members Wall), publishing with venerable Coach House and living on Toronto Island, Penn made soon-to-be-lifelong friends: Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, P.K. Page (P.K. Irwin as artist), Robert Creeley, Allan Ginsberg, and letter-friend Diane di Prima.

Kemp’s elegies respond to the styles of the poets whom she memorializes in verse: “A lament for those who have left/ the present, the planet and possibility/ behind, left us bewildered by/ no more/ words” (“Lives of Dead Poets”). For Gwendolyn MacEwan, Penn praises: “Your fingers/ semaphore a complex code/ we cannot read.// A ring of hands/ ready to catch or pull you up” (“Not Waving But Drowning”). This reviewer also mourned a cancelled reading by MacEwan up north.

In “Gone Fishing”, Kemp elegizes Robert Creeley in the manner of the famous Kempian wordplay: “Reel back the real, back/ to the little wicker// basket carrying trout,/ Creeley.”

For Ontario poet Ellen Jaffe, Penn includes a poignant event: “Ellen   dying in hospice     listens in on/ Zoom     as Voices Israel read    her poems.// How wonderful   to be read to at last.” (“Homage for Ellen S. Jaffe, Poet”).

Kemp honours bp nichol, one of the Four Horsemen, with a high compliment: “our// Rumi, born in all/ their holy,/ poetic fecundity” (“For bp nichol”), the words lovingly dancing across the page. Phyllis Webb, champion of the anti-ghazal, leaves us in a sense of Kempian whimsy: “How can we forget you?   You left/ a whiff of unicorn   in your wake.” (“The Poet in Charge”). Also magical, John Ashbery, the Rowan Bard, is commemorated thus: “‘Rowan is the tree of power, causing/ life and magic to flower. (“Alphabet for Ashbery”).

A lively anecdote revivifies P.K. Page: “P.K. Page was dressed   to the nines … // At the stove’s first growl,   she leapt up and alighted/ for the evening … closest to the door.// An oil stove had exploded on her ….// But she made that perch [couch arm] hers, crossing elegant legs,/ gallantly …” (“The Girl from Sao Paulo”).

For an elegiac taste of the other poets that Penn wistfully sets in stone, read this marvellous paean to influential Canadian [except Creeley and Ashbery] poets, with a nod to William Wordsworth’s “Ode to Intimations of Immortality”: “Only their poetry can still convey/ intimations of immortality ….// Only their poems can transcribe/ mysterium tremendum …// For me.   For you.” (“One by One, They Depart, the Great Ones”).

For Kemp’s essay sourcing her inspiration, see 
https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/03/penn-kemp-one-by-one-they-depart-great.html.

new from above/ground press: Lakes of Titan, by David Gaffney

Lakes of Titan
David Gaffney
$6

Colony

Row upon row of small people in pods lay perfectly still as if they were asleep. They were small, about the size of ventriloquist dolls, but I was assured that they would grow to become full-sized members of staff. They all looked a little like Melvyn Bragg, even the female ones, with thick ruffled hair and an expression on their faces that suggested they had thought of something droll and would tell you later. Soon the entire company would be run by the creatures they were growing here. Small fans stirred the air about the staff member’s faces to help them get used to adversity, which they may meet in the real world. Lights were low, yet now and again, bursts of colour and fragments of film flashed across the walls and ceiling. Music and podcasts played to ensure that the subjects were equipped with good humour and imagination so they wouldn’t sound robotic like some of the earlier versions. I was told this was top secret. What was even more top secret was which previous members of staff had been computer-powered hybrids of machine and flesh, who had since been decommissioned while we waited for this new batch. Maybe this was something we already knew, but weren’t aware that we knew, like the way the Chuckle Brothers entered our consciousness long before they appeared on our screens. Mahler’s fifth was playing quietly out of the speakers and it reminded me that Mahler’s wife once worked as a lab assistant over-seeing a colony of praying mantis.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover artwork by Gary Fisher

David Gaffney is the author of the novels Never Never (2008), All The Places I’ve Ever Lived (2017) and Out Of The Dark (2021), and the flash fiction and short story collections Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), The Half-Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). He has published two graphic novels with Dan Berry – The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head (2018) and Rivers (2021) – and is working on a third. His short story collection Concrete Fields (Salt Publishing 2023) was long listed for the Edgehill Short Story Prize and his latest collection, Whale, was published by Osmosis in 2024. He is Senior Manager for literature at Arts Council England.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Smith, Browne, Carr, Ebbitt, Armantrout, Barwin + McEwan,

Mahaila Smith has new work up at Strange Horizons; the recent "Writing as Alchemy" event, featuring readings by Laynie Browne, Julie Carr and Chloe Garcia Roberts, is now on YouTube via the HDS Center for the Study of World Religions; Katie Ebbitt has new work in the Spotlight series; Rae Armantrout has new work in Plume; and both Gary Barwin and Drew McEwen have new work up at The Ex-Puritan.

new from above/ground press: Grotto, by Frances Cannon

Grotto
Frances Cannon
$6

Sympoetics
After Donna Haraway and the Faerie Queen

Trouble in the knots of fertility.
Human fictions, entangled and ongoing,
dying in the muddy compost.
Human beings in interspecies intimacies,
string figures connect seed bags of stories,
overgrown with archetypes and myths. 
I will affirm the fluidity of bodily boundaries, 
together with figures physical and nonphysical.
I want to take the mud, fertile slime, animals, 
plants, fungi, and form new organisms. 
The art of living as a multigender, androgynous symbiont;
seductive forms, a persistent unworking of power.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Frances Cannon is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland and Burlington, Vermont. She is the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, an editorial reader for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellowship. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press, 2019), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press, 2017), Tropicalia (Vagabond Press, 2016), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press, 2024), Willow and the Storm (Green Writers Press, 2025), and Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga (forthcoming with Valiz Press in 2026). 

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

De Villo Sloan reviews Johannes S.H. Bjerg and Charlotte Jung's collaborative eyesore (2025) at Asemic Front 2

De Villo Sloan was good enough to provide a first review of Johannes S.H. Bjerg and Charlotte Jung's collaborative eyesore (2025) over at Asemic Front 2. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As they write:

AF2 Review - "eyesore" by Johannes S.H. Bjerg & Charlotte Jung (above/ground press, Canada)

Stockholm-based poet and playwright Charlotte Jung and Danish writer and artist Johannes S.H. Bjerg have collaborated to produce what might easily prove to be this year’s best collection of visual poetry: Jung’s minimalist concrete poetry and Bjerg’s calligraphic, asemic neoglyphs. 

rob mclennan – above/ground press editor – again displays his talent for locating and publishing the best postavant art and lit in his burgeoning chapbook series.  eyesore is eminently collectible, and the thoughtful reader will want to revisit the book many times to explore its possibilities for interpretation.

Johannes S.H. Bjerg is known in the visual poetry community primarily for his calligraphy-based asemic texts. He eschews the faux abstract expressionist approach taken by many of his contemporaries in favor of a stark, black and white textuality that complements Charlotte Jung’s poetry perfectly. Bjerg's vision of asemics is similar to the vision of Jim Leftwich and Tim Gaze (1993).

Bjerg’s compositions in eyesore are imbued with complexity not fitting a strict minimalist definition. His cursive streams weave in, above, and below the boundaries of our shared language.

Yet each piece is a single entity, drawing from the concept of the neoglyph (a term coined by John R. McConnochie). In the context of eyesore, each of Bjerg’s pieces can be read as a single asemic poem in a dialog with Jung’s work. His asemic pieces, for me, are similar to the approach taken by John M. Bennett and Henry Michaux.

In my review of Charlotte Jung’s Collected (Timglaset 2023), I praised her concrete poetry, which I see sharing many traits with the work of Aram Saroyan. She works within the constraints of concrete poetry rooted in Modernity.

Jung also has a unique ability to present fluidity and subtle expression in a way that surpasses the work of previous generations. eyesore is another valuable addition to the growing body of Jung’s work.

rob mclennan has made an important contribution to vispo with the publication of this chapbook. The audience is presented with a unique opportunity to explore “new poetries” in the form of asemic writing and minimalist poetry in a lyric sequence. In eyesore, we see a glimpse of poetry’s future.

some author activity: Davis, Norris, Ladouceur, Doller, Maloukis, Trivedi + Boyle,

Jordan Davis has some new poems up at A Poet in Mexico; part five of Ken Norris' Confessions is now online; Ben Ladouceur has a poem up at NewPoetry; Sandra Doller writes on Fanny Howe's "The Witness" for Poetry Daily; Rose Maloukis has a poem in print and online at The New Quarterly; Amish Trivedi has a piece on C.D. Wright as part of a curated "cluster" on her work at Post45; and Frances Boyle has new work up at Public Reverie.