some author activity: O'Reilly, Gurton-Wachter, Reid, Dardis, Boyle + Aube,

Nathanael O'Reilly has a poem included in Red Room Poetry's Phone-a-Poem project; Anna Gurton-Wachter has a poem in the debut issue of the newly-revived LONG NEWS; Monty Reid has a new poem suite up at IceFloe Press; Colin Dardis has three new poems up at The Pi Review; Frances Boyle has two new poems up at Obindo; and Gwen Aube launches their above/ground press chapbook this week in Montreal! oh, and did you see that above/ground press now has a substack?

new from above/ground press: I'll try this hour, by Sandra Doller

I’ll try this hour
Sandra Doller
$5

They say Credence is
the best American band and
I am in its pocket now
First of now a first of may I
Decembered poem in the pile
Movember may be better
than June for roasting huck
nuts but soon it’s a line like
that that will get you kicked
out of Johnny B’s in a hot
March may I make a
suggestion a pill is not
my name too bad she said
keep driving the car with
no hands and I will surfeit
something out of it serve
it up good I sung from the
back loud and clingy
hear my hymn

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

Cover art by Alphie Doller

Sandra Doller is the author of several books of poetry, prose, translation, and the in-between from the most valiant and precarious small presses—Les Figues, Ahsahta, Subito, and Sidebrow Books. Her newest book, Not Now Now, is forthcoming from Rescue Press. Doller is the founder of an international literary arts journal and independent press, 1913 a journal of forms/1913 Press, where she remains éditrice-in-chief, publishing poetry, poetics, prose, and all else by emerging and established writers. She lives in the USA, for now.

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

Catherine Marcotte reviews Micah Ballard's Busy Secret (2024)

Kingston, Ontario-based reader, editor and writer Catherine Marcotte was good enough to provide the first review for Micah Ballard's Busy Secret (2024) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Marcotte writes

Micah Ballard’s latest chapbook Busy Secret is a quippy, somewhat resigned meditation on the liminal spaces between life and death, and wealth and work. For Ballard’s narrators, these themes are central, presenting the questions that both create and disrupt the everyday textures of our lives. Through its repeated allusions to failed occupations, a distrust of wealth, and a meandering sense of self, the collection considers the relationship between our inner and outer lives and ultimately demonstrates the fragility of the relationship between the two.

In “Moscow on the Hudson,” the speaker treats poems like “diamonds cut for consignment,” gesturing to the modern devaluation of poetics. “Anything misleading count me in,” the speaker adds, as if to confirm that the life of the poet is not often what it appears to be. Indeed, the inner life of the dedicated poet does not always (or even often) translate to the successful outer life of an established one. “Whatever I had to become I became,” the speaker muses, gesturing to the necessity of adaptability in the arts. For Ballard’s narrator, and perhaps Ballard himself, a poet must be ready for a chameleon career, must be willing, as the speaker has been, to not only be a poet, but to be an aspiring poet, an artist cloaked under labels such as student, academic, or even, as in “Moscow on the Hudson,” unlicensed fortune teller.

In “Name Value,” the speaker similarly contemplates life in academia, commenting on the policing of poetry and subtly integrating a metanarrative into the text — a secondary narrative that breaks the so-called fourth wall between the reader and the poem. “Name Value” both acknowledges the supposedly dwindling state of the poetic genre and the fact that the text itself is a poem, beckoning readers to consider the seemingly endless possibilities of the poetic form. Here, Ballard is honest and reflective, imbuing his work with a compelling vulnerability and nuance. Although melancholic about the state and status of modern poetics, Ballard’s narrator is, in a way, also deeply hopeful. Despite his fears for the genre, he continues to write, affirming the writing form’s value in the face of its hardships. In a way, Busy Secret rejects binary organizations, presenting failure and success, as well as delight and disgust, not as opposing states but as conjoined ones. While a “rotting mansion” and a well-populated “Museum of Death” are central scenes, delightful images of mouth-watering “gumbo,” “jambalaya” and “crawfish etouffee” regularly compete for the reader’s (and the speaker’s) attention. The text’s dealings in both extremes are as compelling as they are off-putting, creating a unique blend of short, punchy narratives that spur reflection (and re-reading). A short, impactful read, Micah Ballard’s Busy Secret is a strange, almost enigmatic chapbook that considers the boundaries between our lives and our selves. It is just as sure to resonate as it is to disconcert.

new from above/ground press: The Peter F Yacht Club #35 : 2025 VERSeFest Special

The Peter F Yacht Club #35
2025 VERSeFest Special
lovingly hand-crafted, folded, stapled, edited and carried around in bags of envelopes by rob mclennan,
$6

With new writing by a host of Peter F Yacht Club regulars, irregulars and VERSeFest 2025 participants, including Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, Susan J. Atkinson, Frances Boyle, Jason Christie, Michelle Desbarats, Em Dial, AJ Dolman, Amanda Earl, Cara Goodwin, Phil Hall, Jessica Hiemstra, Rebecca Kempe, Laurie Koensgen, Margo LaPierre, Karen Massey, rob mclennan, Pamela Mosher, Salem Paige, Terese Mason Pierre, Pearl Pirie, Monty Reid, stephanie roberts + Grant Wilkins;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
[a small stack of copies will be distributed free as part of the fifteenth annual VERSeFest, March 25-29, 2025]
[see the prior issue here; see last year's VERSeFest issue here]

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

VERSeFest 2025 : Andy Weaver, Phil Hall + Eileen Myles

above/ground press authors Andy Weaver, Phil Hall and Eileen Myles read in Ottawa this week as part of VERSeFest 2025! Tickets are still available! And Myles even reads at Carleton on Friday at noon at a free event! Might we see you there?

some author activity: Robinson, Banks, Ross, Hall, mclennan, Weaver + Boyle,

Ben Robinson has some new poems up at the temz review; Chris Banks posts an essay over at The Woodlot, on how he still believes in National Poetry Month; Stuart Ross has a bunch of new poems up at Mercurius; Phil Hall is interviewed by rob mclennan for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, as is Andy Weaver; and Frances Boyle has a new poem up at Concision.

new from above/ground press: Teenage Whales, by Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles
Teenage Whales
$5

the birds
push
the diamonds
the reddish
weave
of my knee
Honey’s heh heh
that shakes
her belly &
her back
it catches
in the back
of her
throat
ma-ma
goes the child
we want
to go
what the fuck
are you
doing here
with your
children &
a black
duck dips
his head
behind
a wave
is gone
[...]

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as part of the author’s participation in VERSeFest
March 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover illustration by the author

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist and art journalist. Their latest books are a “Working Life” and Pathetic Literature. They are currently at it on a very long novel, out in ‘27, maybe. They live in NYC & Marfa TX.

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

new from above/ground press: Parallax Days, by Gregory Crosby

Parallax Days
poems
Gregory Crosby
$5

Apollonian

He looked at her the way Buzz Aldrin might glance at the moon while wheeling the trash to the curb.



Mourning, After

He woke up with moon breath, & the stink of cheap sunlight still clinging to his skin.

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

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System). He is currently the poetry editor for the online journal Bowery Gothic.

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

Pearl Pirie reviews Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025)

Quebec poet, editor, writer, reviewer, editor, publisher etcetera (and above/ground press author) Pearl Pirie was good enough to provide the first review for Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Pirie writes:

I Am So Calm by Alice Burdick (above/ground press, 2025) is the latest from a poet who has been putting  out surreal books since at least 2002. Her most recent full collection is Ox Lost, Snow Deep (A Feed Dog book/Anvil Press, 2024).  

From what I’ve read this chapbook seems consistent in style, although I won’t offer a title by title comparison. I Am So Calm sets mid-field in surreal. The poems feel like disorienting lists of non-sequiturs or axiomatic koans. That said, “non-sequitur” presumes one thing should follow from the previous when that sort of linkages is a construct and her objects and awarenesses are discrete and independent, explicitly “a tapas of small moments.” (p. 17). Line progressions outright refuse cis-het military industrial late-capitalist hierarchical culture of How Sense is Conveyed.  

Grounding phrases break in and flit away. Marginalia is welcomed into the body. What does it matter for, as she concludes with admission of ephemerality of both grief and grace, “Our bodies take everything in, then dispose/ of the everything, gradually.”  

Because the sentences and semantics in each line are simple, short and small it seems to instruct the reader to move quickly, but the collective run of sentences confound a quick reading. How does anything fit?  One needs to squint or look at middle distance to not see so literally a pattern or progression. We get permission to not have authorial authority over all we see, whether we read of speak. See the foci  captures chosen in the last fifth of “The Bed Book”, (p. 14-15)  

Floorboards creak, heels of a bouncing child  
smash down from above. That  
was a successful quesadilla.  
I like the idea of beginning  
in the middle. Then please,  
don’t worry about the fog.  
Aureola? Or corona?  
What is the light  
that carries us all?  
What is the light that embalms?  

It is the barely differentiated everything, the chaotic flourishing that carries us, illuminates us, not the still profundity of interstitial reflection. Rather than staid and proper it’s vivid and irreverent urging to live, live, live, “bounce meaty bellies off each other, dance.” (p. 20)  

In “A Real Success”, Burdick writes, “To not speak is to succeed” and continues,  

"Let concerts happen with more air  
about them. The audience  
a required entity."  

It echoes the absurdist play In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (Grove  Weldenfeld, 1967) when the Player said, “the single assumption that makes our existence viable—  that somebody is watching…every gesture and pose vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds.” What matters is the sharing, the joining of focus, not the  containing, elevating and perfecting on plinths a historically inaccurate construction of calm order.  If the poetry were to have a theme song it might be “Chicks Dig It”, (“pain hurts, but only for a  minute. All you’re left is with the memories you made. Life is short. Best live it.” I hope I’m nailing that and not paraphrasing).  

It may be a different form but as with artistic expression, it wrestles with how to live well. Towards the last 10% of “If you do this, honour will result” we have an index of values of sorts:

"...We’re all  
just doing the best we can. Graft a tree onto another tree,  
a wedge to reanimate flowers. Shelter your loved ones’ bodies  
and listen when they tell you who they are, what makes them  
feel safe, what they need, what they notice. Instruct destruction  
to fold its retractable blade. Hold me, my own arms.  
Upend honour and drain the rigid globules."  

Destruction as a switchblade, grafting to another as resurrection to blooms, flush the parts that clot your flow. Yet said fresh and to be confoundingly slow so it can’t be quickly glossed over. There is something toward a profound lesson and closure at the end of poems and something of a flotsam, jetsam swirl around a theme that prevents it from being random and more towards bastard ghazal. It is a hyperactive sort of mind but one that insists on kindness and accepting in what is and asks what could be if we think without the usual blinders, partitions, rules and boundaries?

new from above/ground press: Market Discipline, by Kevin Davies

Market Discipline
Kevin Davies
$5


This grim cart an ocean between us.
That’s what it feels like and that’s what it is.
This highfaluting gimcrack awaiting whistle of approval.
That’s what we talked about as the blimp plummeted.

This criminology a flawed paean, all.
That’s the verdict that emits City Hall.
This crimp in the wing of the suspect spaniel.
That’s what we’ve got saved instead of the throbbing dossier.

This the new puzzler from the pen of the abbot’s double cousin.
That’s just how it works in these misspelled parts.
This overproduction an all-too-padded shank of decimal innovation.
That’s what I’m trying to understand about what used to be the river.

This is all you’ve got and you’ve come all this way.
That’s the awesome deed itself in dungarees.
This pinion you speak of, Plato, can it measure levels of disorganization?
That’s what the contract is said to have said to have specified.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard the alto wail of what is lather.
That’s a project for another time and altered trapeze.
This cruciform range of options applies itself to plateau sage.
That’s I suppose what we get for trusting those who once lived on boats.

This is Mike, my old friend and new adjutant.
That’s my way of saying goodbye to a whole range of associations.
This sound familiar?
That’s the nightly cannon in Stanley Park reminding us to floss.

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

Kevin Davies was active in the Vancouver poetry scene in the 1980s and has lived in New York City since 1992, working as a copyeditor and writing instructor. His books include FPO (2020), The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (2008), and Comp. (2000), all from Edge Books in Washington, DC.

Market Discipline is a section of Salacious Dossier, forthcoming from Talonbooks in 2028. Also forthcoming: Transfer Portal (Edge, 2025) and Three Yards and a Cloud of Ducks (Roof, 2027).

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: fitzpatrick, Pakdel, Armantrout, Kemp + Boyle,

ryan fitzpatrick is the first in the Canadian Poets series over at Peripety and/or Tronies; Saba Pakdel has a poem up in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; Rae Armantrout has three new poems up at N+1, and two new poems up at The Fortnightly Review; Penn Kemp has two poems and two paintings over at The Typescript; and Frances Boyle has new work at Full House Literary and a further at Major 7th Magazine.

new from above/ground press: whittle gristle, by Lori Anderson Moseman

whittle gristle
Lori Anderson Moseman
$5

Kerf

Kerf, the space left by a saw blade,
lets grass blades thrive between
gang planks serving as tables
upturned to become raised beds.
Each surrogate coffin piled on top
of another is mortared together
with fertile soil blessed with seeds.
Combating sterile, reified space,
grass grows tall between table slats—
tall enough to bend like widows
keening with grief, grasping for light.
Doris Salcedo’s Plegaria Muda
is watered by testimony of mothers
of the disappeared in Columbia.
Victims of gang killings in LA
are harbored here, resting
like dry docked skiffs waiting
for a marsh to silt in, for meadow
to offer a softer landing.
Upended table legs are divining rods
hovering over those we won’t forget.
In an act of love, of weekly tending,
docents dutifully trim this grass respite.

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

For Lori Anderson Moseman’s recent work, see Quietly Between, a 2022 poetry/photography collaboration available from A Viewing Space. Her recent experimental poetry collections include Darn (Delete Press, 2021) and Y (Operating System, 2019). For her artist book collaboration with Karen Pava Randal, see Full Quiver (Propolis Press, 2015) and Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Her collaborations with Brazilian printmaker Sheila Goloborotko include “Jarring Bits” (Talon Review, 2019), “insistence, teeth” (Dusie.org, 2014), Creation (2012), um daqueles lugares sublimes (2008). See https://loriandersonmoseman.com

This is Moseman’s third title with above/ground press, following Okay (2023) and Too Few Words (2023).

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

Pearl Pirie reviews Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (2025)

Quebec poet, editor, writer, reviewer, editor, publisher etcetera (and above/ground press author) Pearl Pirie was good enough to provide the first review for Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (2025) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Pirie writes:

Andy Weaver teaches poetry and creative writing at York University and has published three books of poetry, most recently this (Chaudiere, 2015). I feel I’ve read Andy Weaver before, or maybe I only saw him perform. Or I’ve read so many reviews with excerpts by rob mclennan that I am familiar his work that way. From what I’ve seen his form of poetry makes use of the whole page, not as in scattered individual words but as metrical spacing of phrases.

I recently reread ligament/ ligature by Andy Weaver (Model Press, 2022). ligament/ligature, his previous and longer chapbook, used space and line breaks enact the physical space and the leaves in the mental tree turning, and controls pacing.

That chapbook is a poetry not much more of quotidian observations but meditating on our individual responsibility to create love and tenderness and connection. They don’t feel didactic so much as being let into a secret room of the head without social filters, some showmanship caper. The reader is given a chair as an equal, rather than a back seat in the lecture hall.

The Robert Duncan at Disney World has something of the same convention of adding space to the poem. The poems take up the amount of page it needs rather than be tidily obedient to the left margin. They are not built up as a prose argument of a stone house but more of a metal framed glass structure. The air in the poems signal the reader to slow down but the ideas being digested are heavier but on a comparable tack.

The poems are starting with a thesis of what-if to explore if Robert Duncan were dropped into the commercial epicentre of branding, what would he think and by extension, what might we if we paused long enough.

The precise word choices makes it akin to a haiku series. That aesthetic may be an influence given his references to other Japanese practices throughout the work. In section 4 of 10 (p.4) the imagist of “childhood snow/forts to escape/into blazing sunlight” with the volta that surprises, not to escape into snow forts, but what is built is escaped by returning to sunlight.

He floats interesting concepts, such as in the same section above, abundance as the blind spot with the continuity effect perhaps bridging gaps between negative content.

In a way, I’d like poetry to be transmitted like a Ted Lasso script hyperlinked to all embedded references so I could chase every tangent, to lazily help me unpack a phrase such as “a fordist/ assemblage of hope” but I guess I know what he means of the shallowness of modernist capitalism doing pre-fab assembly line work for identity, like Ford’s practice aimed at Manifest Destiny of patriotism. We are in a system we can’t control.

His criticism of the distraction/entertainment era, the rides (literal and figurative) that make for a collective screaming, “terror’s new grace note” has not so much cynicism as a call to do better as individuals and as a society, to dig deeper. He does so in lovely language and with a love for language “the ichor oozing from heel blisters/an anchor”. Who knew there was a word for that translucent stuff in blisters except water?

To chime it off anchor is rather sublime. Our pain is what can ground us to meaningfulness, to a sense of significance. If it is not a threat, or trauma, if it floats without repercussions, we can safely turn off our critical faculty. When amusement dominates, that evasion becomes a Trojan Horse, he seems to say earlier but by section 8 makes more explicit.

Overall the chapbook is thoughtful and considered and makes space for us to interrogate what a considered life of our own would look like, rather than let ourselves be railroaded by urgency of marketing and frenetic clickbait of news and the Muchness of Paying Attention to Everyone.

The poetry demonstrates a slowing down, a coming around to make the world we would choose to live in.

new from above/ground press: Passing Through: A Traveler’s Log(s) / Movements 1-23, by Thor Polukoshko

Passing Through: A Traveler’s Log(s)
Movements 1-23
Thor Polukoshko
$5

Movements 2-6: The British Museum, London

salty brow      
cotton
plastered    
to skin  
between
shoulder      
blades       
collar not
enough         
ventilation
deep     
breaths         
but     
breaths
within           
cloistered          
wooden prison

tandoori’s
revenge
strikes
in Ancient
Greece

haste back
through time
to proper
receptacle
fountain of
shit under fountain
of knowledge more
sweat more
waiting for other
visitors to use
electric hand-dryer
to hide
noisy shame

repeat: Ancient Egypt
repeat: Medieval Europe
repeat: before gift
shop exit

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

Thor Polukoshko was one of the founding editors of Memewar Magazine, and his work has been published in West Coast Line and The Incongruous Quarterly. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Langara College / snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓ in Vancouver, where he has organized and hosted the Strangers on a Train reading series for the past decade.

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: Manery, Markotić, Doller, Straumsvåg, Heroux, Fagan, Barwin, Reid + Solomon,

forthcoming author Sandra Doller is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Dag T. Straumsvåg and Jason Heroux's collaborative chapbook gets a nice mention by Cary Fagan over at his review blog; Gary Barwin has an archived poem up at The Walrus; Monty Reid is reviewed by Dawn Macdonald; and Misha Solomon has new work up in the Spotlight series.

new from above/ground press: Gag, by Lydia Unsworth

GAG
Lydia Unsworth
$5

And My Body and Your Body Were Shaking Gently With the Laughter That Does Not Stop

He’s fighting with me, trying to return to what it was. It can’t be done. The lid won’t go back on. He says tussle to make it okay, this subtle lack, this distant punching. He says cross. In his world, no one is angry. Life is set up to coil around the children. He can’t process his behaviour midweek. People let each other down. No one is awestruck, horny, devastated. Nothing salubrious in the way the dishes are laid on the table. There are excuses – practical matters get in the way. We don’t understand why we don’t have love, but on the other hand, looking at the calendar, it’s obvious. We work late through the night, feel fury like groundswell. Injustice rises like a trapped vein. There is slowness, which is presented differently to being afraid. There is no cowardice, this is merely convention. I am the wild one. I am the one who has gone wrong. I am the emotional terrorist. It is I who slipped out of the frame. You will ruin my entire life, he says.

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

cover image: Cay

Lydia Unsworth is a poet based in Greater Manchester, whose recent collections include Mortar (Osmosis), These Steady Bulbs (above / ground) and cement, terraces (Red Ceilings). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Oxford Poetry and Shearsman Magazine. She is currently undergoing a PhD exploring kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. Her latest book is called Arthropod and is published by Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers.

This is Unsworth’s fourth above/ground press poetry title, after I Have Not Led a Serious Life (2019), Residue (2022) and These Steady Bulbs (2024).

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

Larry Sawyer (1970 - February 28, 2025) : (plus fundraiser,

Sad to hear, through Mark Goldstein and Lea Graham simultaneously, that Toronto-based poet, editor and organizer Larry Sawyer died the other night in Toronto. An active and community-minded poet, publisher and reading series organizer, he authored a small mound of book and chapbook titles, founded and edited milk magazine and spent fifteen years running the Myopic Books Poetry Reading Series in Chicago before relocating to Toronto with his partner, the poet Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, during the first Tr*mp Presidency. If such might be possible, there's currently a fundraiser going on, to help raise funds to hold proper memorials for him in Chicago, Fairborn and Toronto.

above/ground press produced his small chapbook A Chaise Lounge in Hell (2003), and I originally connected to him and his work through his online poetry journal milk magazine (begun as a print journal back in 1998). It wasn't until they'd moved north that I had a chance to meet him, once he'd started the milk magazine reading series over at Type Books on Queen Street, and I read there at least twice, including in 2022 [see my note on such here]. According to his Facebook page, he signed a contract with Guernica Editions back in May, 2024 for The Blue Butterfly (2026). It would have been nice for him to have seen that publication through. Tony Trigilio posted a note on him here, with another tribute offered by Mark Lamoureaux here. Larry was a good fella, and huge supporter of poetry. He will be missed.

Alan Parry reviews Lydia Unsworth's Residue (2022)

Merseyside-based writer, editor and lecturer Alan Parry was good enough to provide the first review for Lydia Unsworth's Residue (2022) over at The Broken Spine. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Parry writes:

Lydia Unsworth’s Residue is not here to tuck you in with neat resolutions or let you bask in warm nostalgia. This is a book that drags you through the wreckage of past homes, past selves, and forces you to confront what’s left behind. It’s restless. It’s jagged. It doesn’t give a fuck about linearity or easy sentimentality. Instead, it builds a geography of dislocation: places that don’t fit, memories that won’t sit still, identities that keep shifting under your feet.

It reads like a poetic fever dream, a history of homes unravelled in snapshots, from childhood to now. Each poem is tethered to a location, but don’t expect stable ground. These spaces are in flux, warped by time, distorted by memory. Think of it less like a roadmap and more like a ghost tour – each stop marked by what is caught in liminal spaces, what stains, what refuses to be scrubbed away.

Place as a Wound, Memory as the Scar
Unsworth knows that home is never just bricks and mortar. No, it’s a psychological battlefield! Manchester Road (formative years) puts you right in the thick of it, in a house ‘up against a long main road’ – where privacy is a joke and exposure is constant. There’s a hole – literal or metaphorical – ‘like a hole through the middle of me’, an image so blunt it leaves a bruise. This is what Residue does best: it turns domestic space into something unstable, something that betrays and consumes.

Then there’s Castle Irwell (a messy escape), which captures the chaos of shared living, where bodies blur into each other and solitude is a luxury. ‘Eleven is a team but what I needed was confessional.’ That line alone is a gut punch. Because what’s lonelier than being surrounded by people and still feeling like a ghost?

The Poetry of Fragmentation: Syntax as Architecture
Unsworth doesn’t write neat, tidy verse. Her poetry is fractured, staccato, broken (like our spines) in all the right places. It mirrors the instability of memory, how it skips, erases, distorts. In Brook Drive (including the day that cherry tree was planted), she captures the fluidity of perception in clipped, surreal bursts:

‘spaces are ill-defined / corners become whatever you like / a scurry of ants in a decked-out butter tub.’

Objects lose their meaning. Boundaries shift. Reality is whatever your mind decides it is. And the form of the poem reflects that, refusing to sit still, refusing to behave.

Then there’s Furnesses (tiny fires), where short, rapid-fire lines create a breathless momentum. ‘A ceiling high above a hide of eyes / settle into complete knot of two and hi-fi.’ It’s claustrophobic, relentless, like trying to get comfortable in a room that keeps shrinking around you.

The Emotional Aftershock: What Residue Leaves Behind
The real power of Residue is how it lingers. These poems aren’t just recollections. They haunt! Riverbank (it ended badly) takes something as mundane as a pigeon and turns it into an omen:

‘a pigeon billows through the curtains / disorder of cloth and stifled wing.’

The weight of absence, the ache of something lost, it’s all there, stripped bare. And then it hits you with: ‘only so much can be held / only so much can be held in.’ That’s the punchline of life, right? We try to hold onto places, people, versions of ourselves, but in the end, most of it slips through.

Heald Place (I begin to show my age) lays it out in brutal clarity. The walls of the house are ‘smashed to bits on a Saturday night by drunken younghards.’ Decay isn’t poetic here. It’s inevitable, ugly, and unceremonious. The past doesn’t crumble beautifully. Rather it gets kicked in, pissed on, and left behind.

Final Verdict: Read This Before You Move Again
Without doubt, Lydia Unsworth has written something that refuses to settle. Residue is what happens when you put a stethoscope to the walls of every place you’ve ever lived and listen to what’s still breathing inside. It’s fragmented, disorienting, sometimes even messy. Here’s the kicker, that’s the point! Memory isn’t a straight line. Neither is belonging.

So, if you like your poetry neat and polished, this might not be for you. But if you want something raw, something that gets under your skin, something that reminds you what it feels like to stand in the doorway of an old home and realise you don’t quite fit there anymore… this is it!.

Unsworth doesn’t just write about places. She writes about what places do to us. And Residue makes damn sure you don’t forget it.

some author activity: Birchard, Earl, Norris, Armantrout + Pittella,

Guy Birchard's work is discussed by Yukon poet Dawn Macdonald, over at her recently-launched substack, where she also discussed Amanda Earl's work and Ken Norris' work; the full text of "Poetry Meets Physics: Poet Rae Armantrout Reading and in Conversation with Physicist Ben Buchler. Street Theatre, Canberra, Thursday 19 September 2024" is online as a pdf; the first four poems from Pittella's above/ground press chapbook have been translated into Italian by Gianluca Rizzo and published online at rossocorpolingua: and Pittella also has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series.