new from above/ground press: sex in sevens, by Pearl Pirie

sex in sevens
Pearl Pirie
$5

sex at 31.2: thigh pillars as profundo as Song of Solomon’s songs

no church has eclipsed my shadow in a decade,
but religious allegory splits each nail bud.
God says what you love, He will be jealous of
and will take, to test. (a messed up sense of love.)

lack of *ahem* data points. intervals sharp to graph. (& I do graph.
& belay gratification with gaffes.) like uuuh after figure skating show
in bed — I pulled a score card of 6. guess who laughed. no, really, guess.
   
*

I garden as he leaves, receive a wave. (zoom in on my face)
Love thy neighbour God says & I do.         Jim said once
your most sensual poems are of forests — write me about trees.
tell me about your fern groves. (meaning can be mean.)

look into my pupils; that’s me in there — teeth clipping
the roses as a tango tangle, minding my hedge, mind’s eye
behind a patch, arms make an espalier of all that I won’t say.

*

he passes, climbs into his Dodge Ram Tough, 4WD
he prides for going wherever he likes. mud-spattered.
I tuck into bucket seats of my eyelids, shake knuckles loose
from being his seatbelt buckles. really, body, really?

neighbour is more misshapen, rougher than a chopping block.
he can’t smell that good. whoops. we know this: to dismiss
as less, next encounter will cone-deafen that lie. what is, is.

*

dry throat swallows visions of rosebud lips of our
grandchildren, goats, kittens. dozens of kittens.
to chisel him to size, I’m left with a Greek youth torso
much like what I have back inside.

if you spent as much time romancing me, we’d
be in a better place. blue moon body forgets
the forest musk of your trunk, thrift of its curves.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2016
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Pearl Pirie does bookish and lookish things. She has made a bunch of chapbooks & you probably should too.  (Bio is Italian for speaker’s corner, right?) For those who answer no, Pirie has been published in 3 books, a few anthologies, many chapbooks and has a renewed love of canoes. www.pearlpirie.com has resources for templates.

btw, there’re a few guys who do the sex at tradition: http://www.ottawater.com/poetics/poetics04/04sexat31.html 

[Produced, in part, for the above/ground press 23rd anniversary reading/launch/party at Black Squirrel Books, Ottawa, September 10, 2016, and PHILALALIA, the three-day small press/art fair, September 15-17, 2016 in Philadelphia PA. Thanks much to Kevin Varrone for his help and support.]

This is Pearl Pirie's sixth above/ground press publication and fourth chapbook, after oath in the boathouse (2008), vertigoheel for the dilly (2014) and today’s woods (2014).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: dealingwithit.gif, by ryan fitzpatrick

dealingwithit.gif
ryan fitzpatrick
$4

Here’s To Shutting Up


I considered just standing here silently, but
isn’t that part of the problem too? Since I could
own your responses? Pat yourselves on the back.

Problem: my mic is on, so what do I do? Maybe
I’ll share my work with you. But it’s scary, you
wonder, how many people can I really open up to?

What modes of dissemination are appropriate?
If I photocopy The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
to hand out, is that like tweeting Gone with the Wind?

Free speech is all I have except everything. And
won’t gay weddings actively persecute me? Isn’t
crying censorship a live performance of 4’33?

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2015
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

ryan fitzpatrick is a poet and critic living in Vancouver. He is the author of two books of poetry: Fortified Castles (Talonbooks, 2014) and Fake Math (Snare, 2007). With Jonathan Ball, he co-edited Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry (Insomniac, 2014). With Deanna Fong and Janey Dodd, he works on the second iteration of the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca). He is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University, where he works on contemporary Canadian poetics after the spatial turn.

Produced, in part, as a handout for PHILALALIA, the three-day small press/art fair, September 17-19, 2015 in Philadelphia PA. Thanks much to Kevin Varrone for his help and support.

This is his third chapbook with above/ground press, after STANZAS #25 (“further revisions”; July 2001) and Adolesce (2005).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: THE MOTIONS, by Kate Schapira

THE MOTIONS
Kate Schapira
$4

What did I expect?
That things would rename.
I clambered and sank
in nature and in
houses, head of
the stairs pausing
me, suspended,
successful, in high dry
air. No fire anywhere.
Dispatcher warns of accident.
Demands an alternate route.
Ten-year-old kids duck,
dissolve and collapse,
face window after
window immersed
in their topography.
Brick and small-leafed
cluster, asphalt, ill-
traveled and steep: my
eye runs from creature to
dark burrow, runs
me into the ground.
Silences over the island.
Not island, peninsula.
Not surrounded, surrendered.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Produced, in part, as a handout for PHILALALIA, the three-day small press/art fair, September 25-27, 2014 in Philadelphia PA. Thanks much to Kevin Varrone for his help and support.

Kate Schapira is the author of four full-length books and nine other chapbooks of poetry. She lives in Providence, RI, USA, where she writes, teaches, and co-runs the Publicly Complex Reading Series. Learn more about her current project at climateanxietycounseling.wordpress.com.

This is her second above/ground press chapbook, after OVERHEARD WHILE HIDING FROM THE SUN (2014).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: How the alphabet was made, [an instructional], by rob mclennan

How the alphabet was made,
[an instructional]
rob mclennan
$4

A

Shocked, an appetite. A wispy mess of hair to cusp,

be master of. None,

            (apparent lack, the eldest people

,  Calcutta of key-strokes. Facts, unmentioned. Underneath

those tricky eyes,

bull by the horns, she said,

            sustaining evidence)

We, who are wondrously large

present no difficulty                to an empty room.

            Creation: made of facets, facts,

            an almanac, hill country, genitals,

Sidebar, notion; plants and seeds and trees from earth,

a suspect,                     carnage; a suspect vehicle,

            what you would wonder: we

            were not an end.

Pegasus, thy lusty Minotaur; some alphabets believe.

            A solitary air; this          lamb of dirt,

Let me tell you more about her,

about whom I know nothing.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
August 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014) and The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), as well as the forthcoming poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Originally published by Apostrophe Press as a handout for a reading and classroom talk (or two) at St. Jerome’s University, Waterloo ON, March 5, 2014. Thanks much to Tristanne Connolly and Claire Tacon. Produced, in part, as a handout for PHILALALIA, the three-day small press/art fair, September 25-27, 2014 in Philadelphia PA. Thanks much to Kevin Varrone for his help and support.

See Pearl Pirie's generous review of the first edition, here.

rob mclennan is the author of a slew of above/ground press chapbooks, most recently from Hark: a journal (2014), The creeks (2013), The Laurentian Book of Movement (with Christine McNair; 2013), Trace, (2013), Poem beginning with a line by Pinder (2012), Notes, on the subject of marriage: (2012), Prelude: selections from a collaboration (with Christine McNair; 2012), This, circular tower (2012), The underside of the line, (2011), First you know, and then so ordinary, (2010) and Some Forty, (2010) (a variety of which may or may not still be in print).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com