new from above/ground press: BOOKBOOK, by Mark Laliberte

BOOKBOOK
Mark Laliberte
$5

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Mark Laliberte is a Toronto-based artist-writer-designer-curator with an MFA from the University of Guelph. He has exhibited extensively in galleries across Canada and the USA, curates the online experimental comics site 4panel.ca, and edits the hybrid art/lit mag CAROUSEL. He has had pageworks, poems and other print experiments appear in publications big and small, including (PARENTHETICAL), Descant, Humber Literary Review, Ink Brick, Lantern, Other Cl/utter, Poetry, prairie fire, Prefix Photo, Rampike, subTerrain and Vallum. Recent publications include asemanticasymmetry (Anstruther Press, 2017) and Explosive Comic (Swimmers Group, 2017).

Laliberte is also a member of MA|DE, a collaborative writing partnership with works forthcoming in Poetry is Dead, Prism international and Rat’s Ass Review. 

More info at: marklaliberte.com + popnoir.bigcartel.com + ma-de.ca

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 at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

above/ground press (today!) at Word on the Street, Toronto

above/ground press will once again be represented at the Toronto editions of this year's Word on the Street! Thanks much to WOTS, as well as The League of Canadian Poets!

Head on over to The League of Canadian Poets booth, Writers Block Table 10, 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!

some author activity: Notley, Bowering, Dennis, Robinson + McElroy,

Gil McElroy, sporting his brand new above/ground press t-shirt

Alice Notley's lecture on Allen Ginsberg, presented as the keynote at the Allen Ginsberg Symposium this past May at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City, is now online; George Bowering has a new essay in the "On Writing" series, over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; Michael Dennis is being interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; and Elizabeth Robinson has a new craft essay up at Brevity.

new from above/ground press: Between Ocean and Land, by Lisa Rawn

Between Ocean and Land
Lisa Rawn
$5

Asleep in the Honey

Tupelo, a fancy dress from Wewahitchka

trolls its feet in lazy swampland

worker bees drown, dancing in high water.

Miel pura, a complex of divine sugars  

full of Dios, rolling in flowers,  Oh the varietals!

Avocado, Basswood, Sage, Sourwood.

McCormick, Cockshutt, Silver King, Hercules

since the first Klondikers sowed rows of canola

exhale summer heat, faithfully turning us under.

Mules sensed an early wrong with sensitive nostrils

but galloping spillways of pearls prepossessed

carnival grain slides in World’s Fair abundance.

Miserere!  Have mercy, as bees cannot find flowers

the brave ones lost in cattails and downed in silt

los vivos, hivebound without their vivid meals.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Lisa Rawn lives in the sage just west of Kamloops, British Columbia.  Her 2015 chapbook Ahead of Winter was published by Alfred Gustav Press. Poems have been selected by various magazines, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart prize.

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 at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: FACE PORTRAITS and AUTHOR COPS, by Sean Braune

Face Portraits and Author Cops
Sean Braune
$5

irreverse the throat
conduit

wipe the flighty
inverse

skirmish—obdurate and
faceless

the sample
tumult


is a
tulip

appropriate exposé
turn

up the

*

Face Portraits and Author Cops was the result of a lyrical conceptual practice of what I call “accelerated reading.” It is an attempt to regain some degree of agency—indeed authorial agency—in the 21st Century through the slightly underemphasized (in contemporary culture) practice of reading. It is the result of a frenetic engagement with all of the text that exists around me—text that I read, overhear, think, experience, imagine, erase, relocate, and reassemble. 

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Sean Braune’s first book of philosophy, Language Parasites: Of Phorontology, appeared in 2017 from Punctum Books. His poetry has appeared in The Puritan, Rampike, Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere.

This is Braune’s third above/ground press chapbook, after the vitamins of an alphabet (2016) and The Cosmos (2018).

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 at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: Elizabeth Robinson

This is the thirty-second in a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors and friends of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground. See links to the whole series here.

above/ground: an appreciation

Once, years ago, Rosmarie Waldrop wrote to me that a Canadian poet, rob mclennan, had responded favorably to some of my poems in a book called Under That Silky Roof.  I file this away with appreciation at a time when my life is full of flux, and my life continues full of flux. By then mr. mclennan contacts me again a few years later to say he likes some of my poems in New American Writing. Here begins a more engaged correspondence, but only because rob is extremely patient with persons such as me who are always running to catch up. The wonder of it is that he seems always available to correspond, always alert, always keen to the most interesting writing going on over the largeness of the continent.

My friend Susanne Dyckman and I discuss how we enjoy rob’s Facebook posts featuring his daughters Rose and Aoife (That’s Emperor Rose and Lady Aoife to you) and how rob seems to have inexhaustible time and pleasure in his interactions with his children—but, we wonder, does the man ever sleep? His Facebook posts alternate between trips out for ice cream with the young ladies, posts of newly published above/ground chapbooks, “(12 or 20) Questions” interviews with authors, posts from “My (small press) Writing Day,” news of his “Spotlight Series,” and announcements of new issues of his magazine, Touch the Donkey. Tracking rob’s own writing from book to book, to say nothing of reading all that he publishes, is itself a full time job.

Thanks to rob’s efforts, I have a much better sense of the richness that is contemporary Canadian poetry. He’s a veritable underground poetry railroad, transmitting poetry back and forth across the border and I would venture to say that there is no living person who has done as much to invigorate a truly North American conversation and community that encompasses as many kinds of poetry as there are poets.

rob is himself an ambitious writer, moving between poetry, criticism, and fiction. As with his work as a publisher, his resourcefulness and productivity appear infinite. But what I like best about his writing is what I like best about above/ground: the ambition is bighearted and openhanded. It is oriented toward the larger project of making a lively, responsive literature, not toward making an individual poet famous. The best writing is generous and endowed with curiosity: it is participative in the sense that it makes community, and that community makes more good writing possible. rob mclennan demonstrates that writing one’s own work and publishing the work of other writers are practices that are continuous with each other.

Thank you, rob. Thank you very much. One of these days, I’m going to get in the car, drive north, and buy ice cream cones for you and Rose and Aoife.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author, most recently of Rumor, from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, Pattern refuses to repeat itself (above/ground press), and Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing). With Jennifer Phelps, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming critical anthology Quo Anima, to be published by University of Akron Press in early 2019. Also forthcoming is Vulnerability Index from Ahsahta Press.

Robinson is the author of two above/ground press chapbooks, including Simplified Holy Passage (2015) and Pattern refuses to repeat itself = is divine (2017).

new from above/ground press: COMPARATIVE MORPHOLOGIES, by Michael Martin Shea

C O M P A R A T I V E   M O R P H O L O G I E S
Michael Martin Shea
$4

*

Nothing is dead until I say it’s dead and the revolution is super-dead.

The criminal world is another planet, the poet defends the state against such malfeasance but to no avail.

A revolutionary is a man who has been shot for his ideas. The poet is shot for thinking

he’s a revolutionary, thus fulfilling the prophecy.

The order doesn’t matter,

only the bees matter, and the bees are also dead:

grandfather spoke on their method, observed the azaleas,

it wasn’t a garden it was a yard.

You are dead but only because I say you are.

Your blue-eyes have another name now.

 

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Michael Martin Shea is the author of the chapbooks Soon (Garden-Door Press) and The Immanent Field (Essay Press). His poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Colorado Review, jubilat, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and his translation of Liliana Ponce’s Diary is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2018. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania and the managing editor of the Best American Experimental Writing anthology series.

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 at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com