new from above/ground press: Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology, by Grant Wilkins

Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology
Grant Wilkins
$5

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2022
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

This poem was created by a loose diastic reading-through of Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology (Coach House Press, 1982).

Grant Wilkins is a printer, papermaker and occasional poet from Ottawa who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he likes ink, metal, paper, letters, sounds and words, and combinations thereof. A second above/ground press title is forthcoming.

above/ground press reprinted bpNichol's KON 66 & 67 (for jiri valoch in January 2002 and THE TRUE EVENTUAL STORY OF BILLY THE KID, with an afterward by carl peters, in December 2005.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) 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

Susan Rukeyser's Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) reviewed by Alice Kaltman at Heavy Feather Review

Alice Kaltman was good enough to provide a review of Susan Rukeyser's Whatever Feels Like Home (2021) over at Heavy Feather Review. Thanks so much! This is actually the third review of Rukeyser's collection of short prose, after one posted to the Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library website, and a further posted by Al Kratz over at his blog. You can see Kaltman's original review here.

Susan Rukeyser’s new chapbook may be short in stature, a mere twenty pages, but there is nothing slim about the rich, emotionally resonant prose within. Whatever Feels Like Home reads like a songbook, each of the ten stories, melodic and masterful, ask that age-old query; What truly is home? With Rukeyser at the helm, the answer comes in fresh and alarming ways.

Here are tales of longing for belonging, of place and displacement, of family and estrangement. Each story is awash in wonder, regret, envy, and disappointments. Home is where the heart is? With Rukeyser’s sober and honest perspective, that’s not always the case.

This unusual collection showcases Rukeyser’s impressive range of narrative style. She’s as masterful in humorous first person as she is writing in a deeply mournful third. Some stories are no more than a paragraph long, lengthier ones barely brush past two pages. Still each story has heft.

Poetic lines are dropped in just the right places, always without pretense. At times I gasped at their potency and beauty. For example: “Everything shellacked with filmy silence” from “Stuck Shut,” a story about escape from disappointment and domestic claustrophobia. Or “Forgiving slacks were armor. Her smile, a shield,” from “Hers,” Mrs. Anderson’s brief but powerful story which sits in the very center of this marvelous book, across the page break from “His,” Mr. Anderson’s companion piece, as if on the opposite side of a bleak, marital divide.

There’s also a quiet humor threading its way throughout this book, even when a story is anything but funny. The first piece, “Yes, You Can Eat Your Goldfish,” starts with “Yes, you can eat your darling goldfish. He is most likely a form of ornamental carp, and he will taste as you expect: muddy and full of bones.” From there, Rukeyser leads us (in one brilliant page no less) from what appears to be a funny list of instructions but is ultimately a sobering tale about impossible romantic notions of love, of squashed expectations, and ultimate loss.

Really, every story in Whatever Feels Like Home is a winner. There’s the laugh out loud “FOR SALE: Galloping Horse (brass wall art)>>>Mint<<<,” where heavy wall art wreaks all sorts of violence and relational mayhem.

And then, the alarming “You Were the Girl Who,” chronicling gushing adoration in unrequited youthful friendship (you were the girl who made our town interesting), a cautionary tale which takes a surprising, devastating turn, setting the idea of the safety and comfort of ‘home’ completely awhirl.

Rukeyser writes in “Human/Nature”: “I want to be that rock, she thinks. I want to be yielded to … I want to be that rock, she thinks. I want to be pushed.” Read Whatever Feels Like Home. Yield to this book and guaranteed; you will be pushed along by the solid, sumptuous, powerful prose in this startling collection.

new from above/ground press: Natural Man, by N.W. Lea

Natural Man
N.W. Lea
$5

Poem to Genevieve

Midnight sun shines on your mother’s face,
a sweet supernal glow, a show of real force.
You’re getting caught up in aromatic thoughts,
in your humour’s sense; I can see you
with a cool Marian grin,
unperturbed by the bittersweet burden of earth
and her strange strained world

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2022
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

N.W. Lea lives with his family in Whitehorse, Yukon. Find his books at invisiblepublishing.com.

This is Lea’s sixth above/ground press chapbook, after light years (2006), Present! (2014), Nervous System (2018), Five Mothers (2019) and Less Dream (2021).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) 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: Niespodziany, Eleftherion, Deutch, Yeary + mclennan,

Benjamin Niespodziany has a new prose poem in elsewhere, as well as up at autofocus; Melissa Eleftherion has new work up at Dream Geographies; Amanda Deutch's Coney Island Poetry Map is written up in an article for the Brooklyn Paper; James Yeary has a poem up in the Tuesday poem series; and rob mclennan is interviewed by Andrew French for Page Fright: A Literary Podcast.

new from above/ground press: Silts, by Jed Munson

Silts
Jed Munson
$5

-


O eye
 of uprightness, the graphic presence
on my shoulder conceals
I’m wincer,
Grown of moonlegs—
I
umber. Suspicions are buildings, Sweetheart,
petals,
 imploding
into categories. Like when oil rainbows tell me
you’re leaving
for the lack
of town, how I split
    An apple
with
 A doe in the grove we never settled

on. How questions
pressure what moroseness
proudly presents:
Glance gone wrong:

long sequences of feeding
as these lines over-
pronate,
politely step down to part-
time
 copperstrippers.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2022
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover image/design: Kyuwon Kim.
The cover image nods to Park Seobo’s (박서보) Ecriture (‘묘법’) No. 21 (1974).

Jed Munson’s first chapbook, Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder, was published with Ugly Duckling Presse in 2021. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, P-QUEUE, Full Stop, and others.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) 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: Boughn, Manery, Graham, Earl, Clayton + Stallone,

Michael Boughn has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; Rob Manery is interviewed in the "Six Questions" series via Chaudiere Books; Lea Graham has four poems in The Fortnightly Review; Amanda Earl has some new work posted at Watch Your Head; as does Conyer Clayton; and finally, you guessed it: Frank Stallone.

some author activity: Niespodziany, Nilson, Saklikar, Wang + Robertson,

Benjamin Niespodziany is interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; Geoffrey Nilson has posted to Soundcloud the audio of a reading at the New Westminster Public Library in New Westminster BC on April 9, 2022 by "Five Contemporary BC Poets": Tolu Oloruntoba, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Isabella Wang, Claire Matthews and Kevin Spenst; and Lisa Robertson is interviewed by Louis Klee for the Sydney Review of Books.