some author activity: Zhang, Braun, Inniss, Berlatsky, Robinson + Koss,

Elena Zhang has a new piece up at Flash Flood and a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Jacob Braun has new work up at Another Chicago Magazine; Scott Inniss is interviewed via the Found You Magazine podcast; Noah Berlatsky has new poems in the latest issue of Heavy Crown; and Ben Robinson interviews Zane Koss for The Temz Review.

some author activity: Robinson, Solomon, mclennan, Smith, Boyle + Adams,

Ben Robinson has a poem up at NewPoetry; Misha Solomon has a poem in carte blanche; rob mclennan has new poems up at jagged edge; Mahaila Smith has a new poem up at penumbric; Frances Boyle has a poem in Great Lakes Review; and Carrie Olivia Adams has new work in Tupelo Quarterly, not once but twice.

Peter Jaeger is on the 2025 Nelson Ball Prize long list! (along w Stebner, Robinson, Christakos etc

Congratulations to the entire 2025 Nelson Ball Prize long list! Naturally, it is very exciting to see an above/ground press title on the list, by Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, as well as titles by above/ground press authors Margaret Christakos (author of the 2019 title Retreat Diary 2019), Ben Robinson (author of three above/ground press titles, most recently the 2023 title Between the Lakes) and Kevin Stebner (author of the 2023 title AGALMA). In case you aren't aware:

The Nelson Ball Prize, worth $1,000, is awarded annually to a Canadian poet for a published work that features 'poetry of observation.' * The judges this year are James McDonald and Beverley Daurio. Stay tuned for the Short List, and then the announcement of the winning publication.

Here's the full list of longlisted titles:

Margaret Christakos, That Audible Slippage (University of Alberta Press)
Jeremy Clarke, Stone Hours (Rufus Books)
Peter Jaeger, Selected Memoirs (above/ground press)
Dawn Macdonald, Northerny (University of Alberta Press)
Michael Ondaatje, A Year of Last Things (McClelland & Stewart)
Ben Robinson, As Is (ARP Books)
Angeline Schellenberg, Mondegreen Riffs (At Bay Press)
Kevin Stebner, Inherent (Assembly Press)
Michael Trussler, 10:10 (Icehouse Poetry)
Matthew Walsh, Terrarium (Icehouse Poetry)

some author activity: Browne, Maloukis, Saklikar, Manery, Robinson, Boughn + Kemp,

a video conversation of Kate Colby and Al Filreas discussing a poem by Laynie Browne at Kelly Writers House is now online; Rose Maloukis had a poem longlisted for The 2025 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse contest, via The New Quarterly; Renée Sarojini Saklikar etc read in Vancouver on June 28th as part of Rob Manery's Some Reading; Ben Robinson has some new poems and book recommendations over at Etcetera, as does Michael Boughn; and Penn Kemp has four new poems up at The Typescript.

some author activity: benedict, Robinson, Pittella, Logan, Smallfield, Boughn + Trivedi,

alex benedict is zoom-interviewed on his periodicities essay, the poetics of Rilke, Celan, etc.; Ben Robinson is interviewed via All Lit Up; Carlos A. Pittella has a new poem on the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month; Nate Logan has new work up at Community Mausoleum; Edward Smallfield also has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog; the video of Michael Boughn's recent Toronto reading is now online at YouTube; and Amish Trivedi now has a substack.

some author activity: Boyle, Smith, Inniss, Robinson + Rogal,

Frances Boyle has new poems up at talking about strawberries all of the time; Mahaila Smith has new work in the Spotlight series; Scott Inniss has a new poem up at the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month; Ben Robinson has a poem up in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; and Stan Rogal is interviewed over at Pinhole Poetry.

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.

some author activity: Donato, Robinson, Ross, mclennan, Inniss + Boyle,

Joseph Donato has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Ben Robinson answers the '12 or 20 questions' interview; Stuart Ross has new poems in the new issue of Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, as does rob mclennan, who also has a piece up at Still Point; Scott Inniss had some work up at Still Point a while back, also; and Frances Boyle has a poem online at The New Quarterly,

three above/ground press titles--by Ben Robinson, Zane Koss + rob mclennan--longlisted for the 2024 Nelson Ball Prize!

Very cool to catch today's announcement of the longlist for this year's Nelson Ball Prize! Three above/ground press titles are on this year's longlist: A PANDEMIC INVENTORY, SPRING-SUMMER 2020, BROOKLYN NY by Zane Koss (2023), Between the Lakes by Ben Robinson (2023) and edgeless : letters, by rob mclennan (2023) (all three of which are still in print, by the by). And very cool to see above/ground press author Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi on there as well for their Pamenar title. Congrats to the whole list! Yay!

some author activity: Davis, Robinson, Eleftherion, Mohammadi, Earl + Boyle,

Jordan Davis has a new poem up at the arts fuse; Kevin Heslop interviews Ben Robinson over at The Miramichi Reader; Melissa Eleftherion has new work up at Barren Magazine; both Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi and Amanda Earl have new work in the ex-puritan; and Frances Boyle has a poem in the new issue of consilience.

Jaclyn Desforges reviews nina jane drystek's Missing Matrilineal (2023) and Sophia Magliocca's Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self-Portrait (2023) in Hamilton Review of Books

Hamilton writer Jaclyn Desforges offers first reviews for nina jane drystek's Missing Matrilineal (2023) and Sophia Magliocca's Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self-Portrait (2023) as part of a three-title review (alongside Ben Robinson's The Book of Benjamin), "The Presence of Absence," over at Hamilton Review of Books. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here, or excerpted below. As Desforges writes:

When I chose the collections to juxtapose for this review, I absolutely did not look for connections in advance. I chose two chapbooks that appealed to me: Missing Matrilineal by nina jane drystek and Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self Portrait by Sophia Magliocca, both published in 2023 by above/ground press. But I was immediately struck by the pervasive feeling of absence in drystek’s collection: The first poem, “i haven’t found the ladle yet,” begins with the image of an empty bowl. drystek creates a portrait of memory, loss and grief by focusing on what remains after a beloved person’s death: “the row of cedars he planted,” she writes. “the quilts she sewed.” drystek’s poems are spacious and vivid, dancing between English, Polish and French. We see wallpaper curls and cupboard-aged whiskey, imagine borscht on our tongues.

In the final and longest poem, “my second sister makes her apparition,” the speaker addresses her sister Isabelle who, as we learn later in the acknowledgements, “lived for the briefest of moments.” Still reeling from The Book of Benjamin, I was struck by the lines “a girl unborn / est une femme fantôme,” “surely there is dust that remembers,” “a body that wasn’t,” and “name that is.” This collection is intimate and tender – full of grief and bittersweetness. It’s about death, which is another way of saying it’s about love.  

While drystek’s chapbook is a collage of objects left behind, Magliocca’s is, as the title indicates, a self-portrait. In the first movement of the collection, the speaker lists details about herself – “I’m a fast talker slow walker average daughter,” Magliocca writes. “I’m a good swimmer for three strokes.” The first poem, “Note,” is made up of a single stanza, but as Magliocca goes on, the poems begin to break apart – the next three contain four quatrains, and as the speaker goes on, revealing increasingly vulnerable details, Magliocca adds white space and staggered line breaks. “I spend my evenings in the bathroom / staring at that face / stretched across the chrome drain,” she writes. By page 11 of the chapbook, the repeated word “memories” snakes across the page, and on page 17, the second movement of the collection begins with what the speaker is afraid to carry: “big boxes up / narrow staircases / rusty knives on flat trays.” Then, after a long gap, the word babies appears neatly in the centre of the page. The final poem begins, “I know nine months is 274 days.” It appears on the page like a series of waves, or the curves of a body, and goes on to explore the complex feelings surrounding the speaker’s abortion. “I know your would-be birthday,” Magliocca writes. “fire sign like your father / imagine soft curls / auburn.” And there again, the immovable presence of absence – that blank space of might-have-been.

some author activity: Mohammadi, Robinson, carisse, Campanello + Williams,

Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi is interviewed with Klara du Plessis in the latest issue of The Temz Review, where Ben Robinson is also interviewed, and russell carisse also has new work; Kimberly Campanello and Wayne A. Gilbert's 2023 conversation "Moving Nowhere Here" is up on YouTube; and Evan Williams has some new work up at Tyger Quarterly.

new from above/ground press: Between the Lakes, by Ben Robinson

Between the Lakes
Ben Robinson
$5

Between the Lakes Treaty – 1784 – revised 1792



– to ensure its boundary line was more



accurately laid down – nearest corner of the tract to



Hamilton – the creek that flows from a

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

“Between the Lakes” owes research debts to Darin Wybenga of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and Saman Goudarzi.

The italicized sections quote from the text of the Between the Lakes Treaty [1792] which can be viewed via the QR code.

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.

This is Robinson’s third above/ground press title, after Talking Gibberish to Strangers (2019) and Dept. of Continuous Improvement (2020).

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: Deutch, Arnott, Betts, mclennan, Christakos, Robinson, Jirgens + Smith,

Amanda Deutch has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Joanne Arnott has been named a "Life Member" of The League of Canadian Poets; Gregory Betts has new work and a short write-up on NFTs online at Rattle; rob mclennan has new work in horseshoe journal here and here, as well as a brand-new substack post from "Lecture for an Empty Room"; and Margaret Christakos and Ben Robinson both have new work in Hamilton Arts & Letters, which also includes a conversation between Karl Jirgens and Steven Ross Smith on their ongoing fictions.

some author activity: Varrone, Pakdel, O'Reilly, Tracy, Robinson + Earl,

Here's a video that New Jersey high school students Charlie Mawn and Jonathan Kane made of Kevin Varrone’s "Poem I Wrote Sitting Across the Table from You"; Saba Pakdel has a poem in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; Nathanael O'Reilly has new work up at Eastern Iowa Review; Dale Tracy is interviewed by Rob Taylor over at Read Local BC; Ben Robinson also has a poem in the "poetry pause" series; and so does Amanda Earl!

2023 #AWP (unofficial) offsite (virtual) readings : day one of five: Witek/Lopes, Robinson, Melançon, Unrau + Chernoff,

As part of the above/ground press thirtieth anniversary, I thought it would be both interesting and amusing to host a virtual (and unaffiliated) offsite reding as part of this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual Conference and Bookfair. While I’ve never actually attended myself (being unaffiliated with any organization that might assist with funds to attend such a thing), it does seem like a pretty cool destination. An Ottawa one would be cool; should they just host an Ottawa one? Until then, I suppose, something like this might have to suffice.

US poet Terri Witek (terriwitek.com) and Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) have collaborated since 2005--their works together include museum and gallery shows, performance and site-specific projects featured internationally in New York, Seoul, Miami, Crete, Manchester, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, and Valencia. Witek holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing at Stetson University in Florida, and Lopes is an art professor at CUNY John Jay in New York City. Together they teach Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson’s low-residency MFA of the Americas. Their collaborative projects are represented by the liminal (Valencia Spain).

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimeson Instagram, both at @lethejerome.

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent publication is Without Form from The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book. The Book of Benjamin is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.

Melanie Dennis Unrau is a poet of mixed European ancestry living on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg. A Research Affiliate and Visiting Fellow at the University of Manitoba, also a sessional instructor at the University of Winnipeg, Melanie studies oil poetry and the poetics of just transition. She is the author of the poetry collection Happiness Threads (Muses’ Company, 2013) and the poetry chapbook The Goose (above/ground, 2023), a co-editor of Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat (Palgrave, 2014), and a former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine. Her forthcoming book “The Rough Poets: Petropoetics and the Tradition of Canadian Oil-Worker Poetry” is on contract with McGill-Queen's University Press. She is working on a poetry collection, “The Goose,” a literary-critical reading of “father of the tar sands” S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails. She recently co-edited a forthcoming issue of Canadian Literature journal on “Poetics and Extraction.” Melanie was a long-time participant in the Artist Mothers’ Collective at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art in Winnipeg; she loves collaborating with visual artists and poets. This reading was first prepared for the Late Winter Writers Online Residency at the Banff Centre in February 2023.

MLA Chernoff is a poet, performance artist, meme enthusiast, and recovering academic. Their debut full-length poetry collection, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in Fall 2021. MLA is also the author of several chapbooks, including delet this, TERSE THIRSTY, SCRIED FUNDAMENTS, and I'M LIKE THE GREAT GRANDCHILD OF MARX & COCA-COLA (BUT NON-BINEY). They hope you are having a real nice day xo xo

some author activity: Hunter, Barbour, Robinson, Hajnoczky, hanna + Downs,

Carrie Hunter has some new work up at talking about strawberries all of the time; Douglas Barbour is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Ben Robinson has a new poem posted as part of National Poetry Month over at the Chaudiere Books blog, as do Helen Hajnoczky, natalie hanna and Buck Downs.

new from above/ground press: Dept. of Continuous Improvement, by Ben Robinson

Dept. of Continuous Improvement
Ben Robinson
$5

OPEN4BIZ

A single child’s handprint in the sidewalk
two dog pawprints in the mud

A kid tells his mother he found a long money
pulls a twenty from behind his own ear

The dog tied up outside the payday loan place
barks at anyone who gets close to the door

A For Sale sign
Mother Daughter Realty:
We sell homes for living life

Someone is delivering Domino’s
in a Mercedes Benz

Someone is driving
with an AYN RAND licence plate

Someone is ordering meat
from the drive-thru window

Someone is living
in the storefront across the street

The bars on the windows
all rusted through

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. In 2019 he published three chapbooks: Mumbles in Hollywood, California (Simulacrum Press), The Sims in Real Life (The Blasted Tree) and Talking Gibberish to Strangers (above/ground press). He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. He is @bengymen on Twitter.

This is Robinson’s second above/ground press title, after Talking Gibberish to Strangers (2019).

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

some author activity: Robinson, Maloukis, Campos + Hogg,

Ben Robinson has some new work up at The /tƐmz/ Review; forthcoming author Rose Maloukis has an essay in the my (small press) writing day series; Isabel Sobral Campos is interviewed in the "12 or 20 questions" interview series; and Robert Hogg has three new poems (text and audio) up on the Pamenar Press website.

some author activity: Kearney, Earl, Spinosa, Robinson + mclennan,

forthcoming author Rachel Kearney has a new essay in the "On Writing" series, via the ottawa poetry newsletter; Amanda Earl is interviewed at Train : a poetry journal; Dani Spinosa has a new essay celebrating 40-plus years of Stuart Ross' Proper Tales Press; Ben Robinson is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and rob mclennan's 'writing is hard' interview from 2016 is back online.