above/ground press at Word on the Street, Toronto + Vancouver; September 24,

above/ground press will be represented at both the Toronto and Vancouver editions of this year's Word on the Street! Thanks much to WOTS, as well as The League of Canadian Poets, for their continued support:

Toronto: Head on over to The League of Canadian Poets booth, Writers Block Table 12, and pick up a copy of an above/ground press broadside! I really dug through the archives for this one, pulling out poems published throughout the past fifteen years, and there will be a whole mound of poems and authors to choose from, including poems old and new by derek beaulieu, Sandra Ridley, rob mclennan, Eric Schmaltz, Fred Wah, Gwendolyn Guth and a slew of others. Get them while supplies last!

Vancouver: Stephen Collis will be reading as part of the Vancouver launch of his chapbook FIRST SKETCH OF A POEM I WILL NOT HAVE WRITTEN! He, of course, will have copies of the chapbook on-hand for anyone interested.

some author activity: Abel, McCann, Morton, mclennan + Archer,

Jordan Abel is part of a new editorial board at Wolsak and Wynn; Marcus McCann has a poem, "Sex at thirty-one," over at Lemonhound; Colin Morton and rob mclennan participate in "my (small press) writing day"; and Sacha Archer has a new visual poem up at h&.

above/ground press: 2018 subscriptions now available!

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS! How the hell did I manage to get to a quarter century? And with nearly eight hundred and fifty titles produced so far, there's been a ton of above/ground press activity over the past year, including some thirty chapbooks (so far) produced in 2017 alone (including titles by rob mclennan, Amanda Earl, Kristina Drake, Stephanie Bolster, Adele Graf, Buck Downs, Sarah Dowling, nathan dueck, Sarah Cook, Jessica Smith, Ian Whistle, Faizal Deen, Marilyn Irwin, Lisa Robertson, Jordan Abel, Stephen Collis, Sandra Moussempès (trans. Eléna Rivera), Sarah Fox, Brenda Iijima, Jake Syersak, Helen Hajnoczky, Derek Beaulieu, Kyle Flemmer, philip miletic, Geoffrey Young, Jason Christie, Carrie Hunter and Sarah Swan, all of which are still in print), to The Factory Reading Series and the poetry journal Touch the Donkey (included as part of the above/ground press subscription!). Just what else might happen? Current and forthcoming items include works by natalie hanna, Katy Lederer, Valerie Coulton, Sacha Archer, Joe Blades, N.W. Lea, Matthew Johnstone, Eric Schmaltz, Geoffrey Nilson, Andrew Cantrell, Alyssa Bridgman and Anna Gurton-Wachter as well as a whole slew of publications that haven't even been decided on yet. 

And 20th anniversary reissues of titles by Gil McElroy and John Newlove are already scheduled for 2019! Gah!

2018 annual subscriptions (and resubscriptions) are now available: $65 (CAN; American subscribers, $65 US; $90 international) for everything above/ground press makes from the moment you subscribe through to the end of 2018, including chapbooks, broadsheets, The Peter F. Yacht Club and Touch the Donkey (have you been keeping track of the dozens of interviews posted to the Touch the Donkey site?).

Anyone who subscribes on or by November 1st will also receive the last above/ground press package (or two) of 2017, including those exciting new titles by all of those folk listed above, plus whatever else the press happens to produce before the turn of the new year, as well as Touch the Donkey #15 (scheduled to release on October 15)!

Why wait? You can either send a cheque (payable to rob mclennan) to 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K1H 7M9, or send money via paypal to rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com

some author activity: Baus, Trivedi, Armantrout + beaulieu,

Eric Baus has a new poem up at Poets.org; Amish Trivedi has a new essay up at my (small press) writing day; Rae Armantrout wrote on John Ashbery for The New York Times and derek beaulieu is interviewed by Nancy Ellen Miller.

some author activity: Armantrout, Moure, Barton + beaulieu,

Rae Armantrout has a new poem in The New Yorker; Erín Moure is interviewed over at Ploughshares on translation; John Barton has a new poem in the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; and derek beaulieu is interviewed by Entropy on No Press.

Joel W. Vaughan reviews Christian Bök's 10 Poems (2016) in Broken Pencil #76

Joel W. Vaughan was good enough to provide a generous (as well as the first) review of Christian Bök's 10 Poems (2016) in Broken Pencil. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. The review reads:

Christian Bök has become, since the popularity and critical success of his 2001 Eunoia, something of a (divisive) house-hold name in Canadian poetry. It is likely that anyone already familiar with his work has a strong opinion on it, and it is equally likely that 10 Poems will further entrench that opinion, whether it be positive or negative. I happen to really enjoy Eunoia, Bök, and — no surprise — 10 Poems.

These poems extend Bök’s method of linguistic play into a few new interesting corners. In “The Doomsday Song,” he for-mats comic-book style onomatopoeia (think “KROOM! KROOM! KRAKOOM! / KRAKA-DOOM! KA-DOOM!”) into a kind of table of contents, bridging the gap between his deconstruction of English and his tension between language-heard and language-read. In his “Phonological Key”, printed as a poem in itself, he deliberately guides the reader through missteps, so that the pronunciation of subsequent poems is always off-kilter. If “u = ‘oo’ as in lute” for instance, then the “blubbering / rubber gut” in the following poem must be pronounced “bloobering roober goot.”

Bök’s work here then is as opaque as you ask it to be. He places pointed stress on the English language in an effort to decentre it, and the result is a series of poems that are as familiar as they are foreign. I have encountered many who find this frustrating, but just as many who appreciate the game being played. I find myself in the latter category, and recommend above/ground press’s print-ing of Bök just as heartily as I would Coach House’s or Northwestern University’s.

new from above/ground press: It's still winter, by rob mclennan

It's still winter
rob mclennan
$5

My daughter is in New York City

I awake myself to sentences: common, and unmoved. A way of remembering. Outside is eleven below. A dusty sweep of snow crosses our icy driveway. My daughter is in New York City, celebrating. The baby is asleep. The poem is the distance between early morning rustlings: the toddler, cat. This is the last day of the year.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
August 2017
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection A perimeter (New Star Books, 2016). He has two poetry collections forthcoming: Life Sentence (Flat Singles Press, 2018) and Household items (Salmon Poetry, 2018). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Christine McNair), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He is “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, a regular contributor to the Ploughshares blog, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

This is mclennan's millionth chapbook with above/ground press [see his prior one here; see a longer list here]. There are too many to list.

[Produced for the above/ground press 24th anniversary reading/launch/party! Thursday, August 31, 2017]

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com