Saturday, March 7, 5pm EST on Zoom: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/461603228
see the facebook event page here
Featuring Friends Reading and Reminiscing by:
Vincent Katz : Paul Hoover : Sheila Murphy : Dale Smith : Tony Trigilio : rob mclennan
With Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Hosted by Jefrey Cyphers Wright
And the Lit Balm crew : Marc Vincenz, Cassandra Atherton, Jonathan Penton and Jon Wesick.
YUKI
for Angella KassubeThe Japanese word for snow, plus the name Angella gave her cat. When it snows in Minneapolis, the snow never completely fills the u in Yuki’s name. Nor the opening at the top of the Y. Both spaces are too vast, as is Yuki’s spirit, an immensity which animates her entire body and which Angella understands better than anyone when she looks into Yuki’s eyes.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
cover photo by the author: “Half Moon Bay”
John Levy lives in Tucson. He is married to the painter Leslie Buchanan. His collection of poems, 54 poems: selected & new, was published by Shearsman Books in 2023.
This is Levy’s second chapbook with above/ground press, after To Assemble an Absence (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
Spilling Suns
First, a ghostly trace of head,
then stomach, then paintbrush tail,
emerging from the Atlantic,
an image sharpening like a Polaroid.
My father hauling in a 50-pounder,
big mama, old and fat, fabled.
The charm of her freckles, scorched
smudges in the light, her lateral lines, silver
arrows pointing to the sun.
She can lay out more eggs
than 28 smaller ones just like her.
Longlines, draggers couldn't hold
her back. For a quarter-century
she skirted past gillnets, box-shaped
traps, sharks, the cannibals
of her own kind, surviving below
pinkish shale crevices, the dense
gelatin of the deep rushing her on.
Then, the quickness
of the act: his haul.
The gaff.
(Oh, that sharp hook.)
Slide over, belly fat glistening.
The cut.
(Oh, the ready knife.)
Sun beats its fire into her round eye
for the first time. The whole of her
belly rich, roe-distended.
Back at the dock, we children cheer, clamour.
Mother gets the camera, makes us pose
with father as he holds her up by the hook,
knot-tight, two thumbs up next to the split form,
eggs spilling
and spilling
and spilling,
orange pricks of light.
Two different dimensions of aging are explored in Monty Reid's Vertebrata (Turret House) and Hope Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land (above/ground press). In the former, the poet writes in the poem "CV5": "The long string of bones I hang from / was never right according to doctors / who looked at the scans." The series of poems takes us from the top of the vertebrae down, reflecting on the physiological construction of the body, the Latinate and Germanic naming of parts, and Reid's own history with spinal issues. The tone and divergent subject matter are stunning fluid and touching. Hinging less on physiology, Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land are poems of family lore and slipstream lullabies dedicated to the author's grandchildren and family written from his new home in "that town, hermetically / Known as Muffin Land" (known to the rest of us as Victoria, BC). What I love in this unique blend of myths and fables is how I'd often finish a poem with a sense that the last line rhymed, only to look back and see it didn't. (What is the secret to Hope's ghost rhymes?) My favourite poem in the collection, "The Rolling Calf", reads as a lullaby that simultaneously presents danger and the promise of safety to the poet's granddaughter Nadja.
In a photo taken in Victoria in 1984, Hope Anderson is in a group of poets that include Amiri Baraka, George Bowering and bpNichol. The event was organised by Hope Anderson and in a recent interview with Wayde Compton for the Capilano Review, Anderson explains the context of Sunfest and how "Poetry always comes back to us."
Go outside and record what happens or occurs to you for 15 minutes. Make it into a poem.
THE SOUND OF WATER RUNNING
The sound of water is running. It trickles over the balcony, across the alley, into another sound. A child’s voice through a downstairs shutter says, tell me now. Possibly, possibly, says Nana. The wind creates the ivy’s hair which dangles in the breeze. The next plant folds its hands to make a bird. A letter appears, containing a yes or no while closed. The downstairs voices sing beneath the sound of a plane. The plant’s bamboo crutch stabs into the sky. Finish your banana, nana. Child’s voice judders into song. It’s time for bed. Door creak. Am I in or outside of my head? The plane continues not to land. The child protests. The little table, stained under heat and duress, will last the winter. Pom-pom plant. Bird call: a long trilled note. Night’s morse code. Howling dog. Car honk. Trill, again, and bow-wow.
ADD WARRIORS : AN INTRODUCTION
I have been leading a little group called Poetry Studio, usually in the colder, lonelier months of Montréal winter, on and off for some years now. I had this idea that writing in real time (as opposed to bringing in pre-written work… sometimes already dead in the water) would help us to preserve the energy in a first draft that can be easily stamped out for fear of the poem being “too weird” or “not making sense.” The formula of our meetings is simple. We discuss poetry and poetics from something we read together that week, I provide a related prompt, we part and write for 45 minutes, we return and share what we wrote. (It is scary but people are kind.) Everything, no matter how raw or random, is taken as poetry. As Wittgenstein points out, “To say, ‘This combination of words makes no sense’ excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason.” Yes, let us ponder, enumerate and celebrate the reasons! I have encountered many stupendous, “non-sense” poems this way. When I was a youngsome poet, in Tim Lilburn’s workshop at the University of Victoria, he wrote “add warriors” on one of my submissions, and nothing else. I took this into my most haunted and blue insomniac hours. What could this mean. Many years later, I wonder if this was his attempt to preserve and foster a strangeness in my early work, what Shklovsky calls “defamiliarization.” What other comment was I expecting? What other comment, now that I think of it, is even possible? In this weird little chapbook, I thought to share some of the prompts behind the poems as a way of fostering some strangeness in your own poetry, if you so happen to write it. Maybe you have never written poetry before. The corresponding poems were written in the span of 30-45 minutes, and if there is any editing, it is very light. Of course, they reflect but one way forward in the infinite paths that branch from a writing prompt. As I tell participants in Poetry Studio, use the prompt as a starting off point, but go where the poem wants to go. And if the poem is too obedient, add warriors.
our pal Kevin Spenst was good enough to review Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024), as part of his regular column of chapbook reviews, in a round-up assemblage in subterrain #102! Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of Tracy's Gnomics, after Daniel Barbiero reviewed such via Arteidolia. As Spenst writes:
Dale Tracy's Gnomics (above/ground press) is astonishing in how much can be crafted within two- or three-line poems. Tracy's collection is replete with prophecies ("Those who drink the oil of ancient beasts / become the dragons who breathe fire"), persona poems ("Edging Stones // Since I am a garden, / I grow to a limit") and sylloisms ("Sounds bounce into distance. I hear sounds from a distance. Distance lives inside my ear.) This later poem strikes me in its compression of thought, touching as it does on a central argument in Tracy's 2017 book With the Witness: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience, where she theorizes poetry outside the cloying embrace of empathy as understanding another's experience. Instead, Tracy argues "literature helps one to know what it is to encounter another." I hear this nuanced argument again in "Distance lives inside my ear." We hear another person's story but that story only lives within us always at a certain remove.
Sitting On A Blue Curbpublished in Ottawa by above/ground press
Me and Kitty were sitting on the sofa trying to decide if this guy in the movie we were watching was hot or not. I paused the movie when Kitty started asking what I thought about this guy. Nowadays, whenever you paused a movie on Netflix, they had this thing where a static ad came onto the screen and stayed there till you unpaused your show. So there was this ad for an insurance company up there and we had to keep unpausing it to see if this guy in the movie was hot. Then we had to re-pause it while we continued our discussion based on what we had seen while the movie was unpaused. The character we were discussing wasn’t the star of the movie, but he had a pretty big role. We’d seen him in other movies, but he looked quite different in this one. His hair was a lot shorter, and he was dressed in period costume. To tell the truth, I thought he was pretty hot, and that is what I told Kitty, but she didn’t agree. “He’s sort of pretty,” she told me, “but I’d never say he was hot.” “What’s the difference between pretty and hot?” I asked her. She looked away from me, back at the tv. “I hate this new thing with the ads when you pause a show,” she said. “Unpause it for a second, would you. I need to look at the guy again.”
Selected Memoirs (above/ground press)
by Peter Jaeger
Peter Jaeger is the author of several books and has written on a wide variety of topics, from ecology to John Cage. His chapbook Selected Memoirs addresses six and a half decades of one life, in thirty passages varying in length from twenty-five words to a couple of pages. Some passages cover several years, some only one. Much is missing; most of the life under consideration; yet the book feels complete and open at the same time. Its observations are as much by omission as by what they state; there are great gaps of time and context between some sections, between years, between sentences within entries. The passages and the spaces between them combine to create a perfect broken mashed-together record of existence, implying that much is forgotten.
Jaeger touches on the intellectual, the mundane, sweetness and regret, the greater world, the inner world, worlds imagined. There is a tipping between the real, and memory. Jaeger touches on horror (2001), a puzzling comment by a colleague (1997-98), unique experiences in the real world, "Scuba drift in the Red Sea" (2002-03) and times of want: "That winter Frank and I wore our heavy coats inside the house and clutched empty whiskey bottles filled with hot water to keep our hands warm." (1983).
Listing topics and descrying polarities and their subtle tensions, however, does not do the book justice, because so much of its joy is contained in its delicate, startling details and striking, unexpected shifts. The entry for 1966 reads: "Meditating in Bellwoods Park on a sunny afternoon in Toronto, I saw myself and the world as a continuous field of subatomic particles. I still remained deeply interested in the alphabet."
Although written in seemingly straightforward prose, Selected Memoirs is replete with moments of incredible writing, and a participatory poetics, where gaps and leaps ask the reader to consider all that is not there and what is hidden. Jaeger creates a small world of serenity, by turns warm, winsome, vulnerable, and quietly profound.
Horsetail Familypublished in Ottawa by above/ground press
down she dug damp-hollow, found
underground terminal cones, frowned, sad.
for this may cause a sand-like deficiency
of animals, she said. I’ve read
that a veterinarian could tell. whatsoever
you’ll use for the scouring shall
well sink hollow, drain, black teeth out
the spore-case. take the stairs
at every chance. name
rootstock, flush
water-table, pass
from this table, salt, to be excused,
whorl, sheath, grace.
Meditations During my Hair Emergency
Every Wednesday
an hour of my day
is filled
like the bucket
right by my socks
The soap gradually
climbs further
into nailbeds,
the floor
washed in
a weekly
showering
And to make it
all better,
I’m wearing
a hair-mask from
Sephora, from
a kind of
buy-something
get-something-else
sort of deal,
And now this room
is stripped of bad air,
refilled from
all kinds of soap of
floor beneath me
Stripped of a dusting
to make room
as I prepare
to my sanity to roll out
like an overly commanding
carpet, waiting to
be stepped on
and kind of wanting it
to be that way
This kind of removal of
dust and crumbs
would be borderline
excessive anywhere else
but here
And an hour ago
I saw a man
unhoused,
washing somebody
else's car
A car holds
little-to-no
boundaries on where
it can move and
if you don’t believe
me, just look at
the commercials,
Look at the men
rolling through forestry,
framed by the evergreens,
the occasional bear
If I tried to clean off
that mans floors,
it would take a
million hours and a
million buckets and all
the borders
would collapse behind us
If you look behind
the car,
you’ll hear
more and more honking
until the driver
speeds through,
until the bubbles of soap
forfeit clinging onto wrists,
until seasons change
and the floor
turns into ice
including new poems in English (alongside French translation) and new poems in French (alongside English translation) by:published in Ottawa by above/ground press
Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm
Stephen Brockwell
Margaret Michèle Cook
Catherine Couture
Sonia-Sophie Courdeau
Leslie Roach
Bardia Sinaee
Michel Thérien
Introduction
We love the intersection of art practices and what is generated through dialogue. One expression of thought, when translated, via another medium, can transform into a third truth. In this way, overlap develops a further aura of meaning. Ekphrastic poetry—the written response to visual art—is one version of this vital collaboration. We asked eight Ottawa poets to look again at the rich, extraordinary permanent collection on display at the Ottawa Art Gallery to create a conversation of thought and feeling that the experience of art-viewing engenders. We hope you will join and enjoy it.
Introduction
Nous adorons les croisements entre les pratiques artistiques et ce que génèrent les dialogues. Une pensée exprimée, traduite dans une nouvelle discipline, peut se transformer en une troisième vérité. Ainsi, les recoupements font naître un nouvel horizon de significations. La poésie ekphrastique – une réponse écrite à l’art visuel – est une version de cette collaboration essentielle. Nous avons demandé à huit poètes d’Ottawa de jeter un nouveau regard sur la riche et extraordinaire collection permanente de la Galerie d’art d’Ottawa afin de créer une conversation entre les idées et les émotions que fait naître l’observation d’œuvres d’art. Nous espérons que vous vous joindrez à nous pour l’apprécier.
KINDERGARTEN MEMOIR
Sky, light, a ton of snow.
Time to get, time to go.
Father has his large coat on.
Mother has her plaid.
Orange Crush can
on a stool, spinning at the counter.
Milkman Anchorman Linebackerman.
Hold my hand, but only till the corner.
(-_-)
Fire drill, fire plug, fire escape.
Where’d you put the dog?
My truck, not your truck.
Barking in the fog.
My friend, not your friend.
The flag halloos the wind.
Flags fly in place.
Is a flag a hummingbird?
(-_-)
Pie-eyed May Day in the deep dish bath.
“Pie-face! Pie-face!” down the garden path.
Easter picnic eggshells know
how dumb it is to have a sister.
Father flies to Houston. Armadillo
sounds like Old Man Karl’s goiter feels.
Grace, a neighbor. Grace, before.
Corned beef hash for dinner.
░ ░ ░
COMMENTARY
A child of the North plays pick-up sticks with the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of his inception. The particulars do not shock, yet the reader is by subtle means advised to buckle up in the backseat and take in the passage of time. That chestnut of Creeley’s containing the rare line in a poem that leant itself to the name to a movie comes to mind. Ultimately, the specificity of the main course evokes a nostalgia infiltrating the sequence as it shifts into gear.
Sometimes we expect a window, and find a mirror. Is that supposed to be the pond? And where’s the maple? Equally bewildering is when we expect a mirror but are looking out a window. What a leafy face I have.published in Ottawa by above/ground press
dark music
scrawled on wood
In each body a thick line
rides across the middle
separates their upper
and lower, a division or
a strength of opposites
and I wonder why
two arrived
Lightpublished in Ottawa by above/ground press
The light of the Moon clear and familiar
mystical dogma double-edged Cross
faithful commitment expression in circles
Romantic conviction written as loss
language opacity held in communion
historical origins of Infinite Man
memorably moonlit leitmotif paintings
performed in an epoch where Art failed to stand
jargon and cant the theories inferred
circling the horns Cornucopia’s right
language and history damned as a mystery
on religion’s poetics the corpses alight
Jason Heroux & Dag T. Straumsvag
A Further Introduction to Bingo
Jason Heroux and Dag T. Straumsvag’s above/ground chapbook is a collection of apparently randomly numbered, semi-surreal, semi-elegaic prose poems/vignettes about a bingo parlor, a mathematician, and some numbers seeking meaning, or maybe just sequence. As in Lewis Caroll, it’s not just reality but logic itself that breaks down as our sort of heroes, sort of abstractions wander from elevator to parking lot to funeral parlor asking questions like, “Did numbers have parents?” and “Why can’t your letter be delivered?” Russel Edson and James Tate are maybe touchstones, but Heroux and Straumsvag attain a loopy, giggling sense of missed prizes that is all their own. Heroux’s 2nd above/ground chapbook of the year, My Life As a Notebook, is almost as wonderful.
