new from above/ground press: from the green notebook, by rob mclennan

from the green notebook :
, a writing vigil,
rob mclennan
$6

I’m rereading notes sketched out last November, responding to the death of Prince George, British Columbia poet Barry McKinnon. Christine and I, along with our young ladies and mother-in-law, headed to Florida for the sake of finally taking the children to Disney, a trip delayed due to the onset of the Covid era. Apparently the goal was to catch the trip before Rose turned ten, which would then have her charged as an adult. I carried my Red Deer College Press reissue of McKinnon’s I wanted to say something (1990) across Universal Studios, suburban Orlando and Walt Disney World, capturing photos of his book from our hotel deck, in the Cantina, by the Millennial Falcon, a Tie-Fighter, by a fire-breathing dragon in Harry Potter’s Hogsmeade. I amused myself by carrying a book by my late friend across a ridiculous series of outings, mere days after he’d died.

Working through my many pages of rough drafts, I’m realizing my poem-sketches are closer in tone and structure to the late John Newlove’s 1964 poem “Ride Off Any Horizon,” a poem that first appeared in book-form in his Black Night Window (1968); how I utilize variations of the phrase “I wanted to say something” as a repetition, from which poem-fragments might return to leap from. As Newlove once said of his own poem, originally using his phrase as a compositional tool that he’d remove from later drafts, which he ended up being unable to strike out. “Ride off any horizon / and let the measure fall / where it may— [.]”

In his Paris Review interview (1968), Robert Creeley responds: “I’m really speaking of my own sense of place.” This is the sensibility that Barry McKinnon brought to Prince George when they moved there, what I also absorbed across my twenties and into my thirties from those British Columbia poets. The very notion of Robert Creeley invited up north to read, into McKinnon’s local. What might that have sounded like.

*

The earth moves, through parts of New England. A rare New York earthquake. Come Monday, the solar eclipse. Some say we’re in end-times. Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival (2024) speaks to wildfires, the British Columbia interior, the coast. Matt Rader’s FINE (2024). The poetry, that makes nothing happen.

I spend half an hour tweaking three short stories at RedBird, a music venue in Old Ottawa South, as Aoife attends her weekly ukulele lessons. She couldn’t find her pink ukulele, so she has borrowed my lime green model, the one Sharon Harris gifted me during their move from apartment to house, back in 2010. I am working on stories.

There is a certain point of the editing/copy editing process that is less improving upon and is simply changing. This story isn’t any better, but it sure is shorter, or longer. Or different. The idea of spending thirty years working a self-portrait in oil to keep up with the changes. It might never be finished.

There were tales of the late Steven Heighton (1961-2022), attending revisions and reworks of his prose to the point of checking in with the printers of his books, which his publishers and editors were not necessarily happy about. At some point, one has to let go. Or pull it back.

I had hoped also to look at poems this morning, but naturally, they remain in my office, freshly printed. And I am here, instead.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2026
as the thirty-fourth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
produced in part for activity at Banff Centre, May 11-18, 
2026, as part of the 50th anniversary of the University of 
Alberta Writer-in-Residence program
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

This is mclennan’s seventieth above/ground press chapbook, following recent titles including Origin stories (2026), the collaborative river / estuaries (with Julie Carr; 2023), edgeless : letters, (2023), The Alta Vista Improvements (2023), Autobiography (2022), the collaborative SOME LEAVES (with Gary Barwin; 2020), Twenty-one stories, (2020), Poems for Lunch Poems for SFU (2020), Somewhere in-between / cloud (2019), Study of a fox (2018), snow day (2018) and It’s still winter (2017).

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: Consequences, by Susan Rudy

Consequences
Susan Rudy
$6

Telling the truth about my own experiences as a body

That kiss in Mrs Dalloway.

That life is complicated is a fact of great analytical importance. 

That sickening moment when I realise, sitting across the table and listening to her story, that I feel scorn for conventional women. 

That’s great, he said, how wonderful.

That’s the fiction of memoir, that you can actually remember.

The ‘wife’ he refers to in the Cabaret video, while singing ‘Fancy Free’, the wife who was me, where is she now?

The abandonment of a prescribed way of living for the abyss of self-determination.

The ache of desire, pushed away.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the thirty-third title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
April 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover Artwork by Alisa Ochoa

Susan Rudy is a London-based academic and writer whose work creates space for voices that are often silenced or split—especially those navigating complex relationships to gender, care, and creativity. 

She works with language as archive and medium, drawing on decades of journal entries and academic research to assemble texts that challenge conventional memoir and academic prose. 

Professor Emerita at the University of Calgary, she has been based in London, England since 2011 where she is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. 

Recent publications include a conversation about queer parenting (2026) with writer Hannah Silva, a creative piece at London’s Something Other (2025), and interviews with writer Caroline Bergvall (2023) and feminist theorist Clare Hemmings (2019). 

Work in progress includes Hand Over, a poetic and experimental book of creative nonfiction which emerged during a six-week Leighton Artists’ Studio Residency at Canada’s Banff Centre for the Arts in 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

new from above/ground press: 310 Consecutive Life Sentences, by Ken Sparling

310 Consecutive Life Sentences
Ken Sparling
$6

Sitting On A Blue Curb

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.”

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the thirty-second title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
February 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover image by Mary Sparling

More Ken Sparling
- Not Anywhere, Just Not (Coach House, 2023)
- the girl arrived (above/ground, 2021)
- This Poem is a House (Coach House, 2016)

Available from the author at dadsayshesawyou@gmail.com:
- Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall
- [untitled novel]
- For Those Whom God Has Blessed With Fingers
- Book
- Intention, Implication, Wind

Online:
kensparling.github.io
instagram: @kensparling 
kensparling.ca

This is Sparling's second title with above/ground press, after the girl arrived (2021).

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: AND THEN THE GENTILE LIT THE CANDLES: Seven Stories, by Stuart Ross

AND THEN THE GENTILE LIT THE CANDLES: Seven Stories
Stuart Ross
$6

     Everyone watched from all over the world as Meredith and Craig sat in their kitchen, night after night after week after month playing songs by Harold Arlen and Irving Berlin and Fats Waller and Jimmie Rogers. People from Russia and Japan and Denmark and the Netherlands and Israel and Canada and Argentina watched them, and of course people from all over the United States, and meanwhile, Meredith and Craig sat in their kitchen in San Francisco and played their guitars and zithers and ukuleles and banjos and xylophones, and sometimes Meredith played her lips like she was playing a trombone.
     You’d have thought it was a real trombone, I’m telling you.
     There was also this: You could be sure that while you were watching them play and sing, you were not also getting the plague. In fact, you were having fun. You were part of a family, every night for hundreds of nights for about forty minutes every night.
     (“MEREDITH AND CRAIG SIT IN THEIR KITCHEN AND PLAY STRINGED INSTRUMENTS”)

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the thirtieth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
August 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover design by Stuart Ross

Cover art by Laurie Siblock

Stuart Ross has published three book-length story collections, Henry Kafka and Other Stories (The Mercury Press, 1997), Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009), and I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub (Anvil Press, 2022), as well as a bunch of poetry, novels, memoirs, and rants. He has won the Harbourfront Festival Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, across the lake from Rochester, New York.

This is Ross’ fourth chapbook with above/ground press, after ESPESANTES (2018), NINETY TINY POEMS (2019) and BIRD SNOW ON HARD TRACKS (2023). above/ground press also produced the festschrift Report from the Ross Society, Vol. 1 No. 1 in 2022.

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: BIBLIOMANCY, by Leah Souffrant

BIBLIOMANCY
Leah Souffrant
$6

cold, point, numbers

cold in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; point in Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine; numbers in MLA Handbook 7th Edition.

Numbers often seem cold. The stiff meaning of them. One cannot be two. But the romance of knowing! And then the cold devastation! Twelve is very specific. I’ve preferred “a dozen” or even “some.” I’ve preferred to make what is precise become vague, soft, imprecise. Even numbers can point us towards different things, different scales of measure, different amounts. Two miles is rather different than two apples. But this is the point of numbers, to point us to a shared point, to agree and understand something about how we take in the world, what it is to us in common. Is this cold? I ate two apples. He slept for two hours. She fell in love with two people. The numbers warm up. I see the apples begin to take shape, the shadow of one leaning across the other, the two cores tossed together in a trash bin. The numbers line up on a graph, the x axis and the y axis, but here the finger points to the place where something intersects, the point on the graph where cold becomes warm, where you show me what you’ve discovered and I see it.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the twenty-ninth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
June 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Leah Souffrant is a writer and artist and the author of Entanglements: Threads woven from history, memory, and the body (Unbound Edition Press 2023) and Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable (Collection Clinamen, PULG Liège 2017). She teaches writing at New York University.

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: Tierra del Fuego (excerpts from a fiction), by R. Kolewe

Tierra del Fuego (excerpts from a fiction)
R. Kolewe
$5

He stayed off expressways and stuck to secondary roads when he could, sometimes in forest, sometimes with wide vistas: though the mountains there are not the spectacular peaks farther north they are softly sublime. He saw the small blue sign marking the access road for the Institute among the aspens, a place he’d read about wondering if he’d ever wind up there himself, given his work it wasn’t impossible and in a way it would be closing an open loop in his life. He had no idea Sil would be there a few years later; he had just discovered Tear had a sister, my genius sister Tear said, we’re twins but she’s five years older. Later he found his journals didn’t mention that sign though he recalled it clearly, of course illuminated by Sil’s tenure there and everything that transpired afterwards: it was one of those things that gained significance only in retrospect. And exactly what significance did it have, if any, anyway? It was like realizing that you and the green-eyed stranger at the bar beside you were both at the same event, a concert or gallery opening or conference, a decade or more ago. She doesn’t know who Rilke was but at least you have that in common, the same place at the same time; an entanglement, yes, but not something that tells you much about anything. Simultaneity isn’t information.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the twenty-eighth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
May 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

R. Kolewe has published four books of poetry, and several chapbooks. He lives in Toronto.

This is Kolewe’s second title with above/ground press, following Like the noises alive people wear (2019).

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: Things Musing, by Meredith Quartermain

Things Musing
Meredith Quartermain
$5

A Miraculous Platter

A giant china leaf – flamboyant green with bold ribs and veins. Scalloped edges. Eight leaflet side-plates to match. Guests oohed and aahed at its whole buttery salmon. I, the hostess, basked – at last I had style. But damn, my husband, drunk, barely vertical, insisted on washing up after the guests left. He chipped the flamboyant green against the sink, leaving a white patch along one edge. How could he not take care! Of this gift that had come with a scarlet candelabra from Robin Blaser. He of tuxedos, heavy rings, Italian loafers.
     I put away my flamboyant leaf, no longer good enough for dinner parties. But maybe I could find china-paint, colour the chip green, make my leaf good enough again. It needed research, phone calls, visiting stores, matching colour, buying paint and brush, setting up a place to work. Half a day or more to love my leaf.
     Our objects hail us, they hurl themselves against us. They are Latin ob -stacles + jacere to throw. Stop, we say. We are the subjects! You are mere objects. But they pull us out of their hats and throw us jacere-sub under their wheels. We bite the wheels. Such delicious rotae. We knit our own long woollen top-hats and pull them down over the rotae. We give these wheels panache.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the twenty-seventh title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
April 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Meredith Quartermain’s most recent book is Lullabies in the Real World (shortlisted for an Alberta Book Publishers’ award). Vancouver Walking won a BC Book Award for Poetry, and Nightmarker was a finalist for a Vancouver Book Award. She is also the author of two novels and two books of short fiction: Recipes from the Red Planet (BC fiction award finalist) and I, Bartleby. From 2014-2016, she served as Poetry Mentor in the SFU Writer’s Studio program. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Prism International, The Dalhousie Review, Event Magazine, The Capilano Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, and many other magazines.

This is Quartermain’s fourth publication but first chapbook through above/ground press, following the broadsides “December 4” (#168, April 2003) and “Geography” (#225, 2005), and “Highway 99,” produced as issue #35 of STANZAS magazine (October 2003).

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: DOCTOR SHAMAN, by Susan Gevirtz

DOCTOR SHAMAN
Susan Gevirtz
$5

Origin is a practice of revision

Diagnosis a practice of reception, a social event a place of encounter

You are changed by attendance
The event changed by your presence         


The commentators say the relation with the text is NATAN, a palindrome  

It changes while you read it     You are read while you read it

The text needs us
–you don’t just take from it

You give to it  -- It takes from us

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the twenty-sixth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
November 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Susan Gevirtz is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Burns (Pamenar 2022), Hotel abc (Nightboat, 2016) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street, 2010). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat, 2013), and Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang, 1996). She was associate editor of HOW(ever), a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s poetry and scholarship, and served on the advisory board for its successor, the online journal HOW2. In 2004, with poet and restorer of maritime antiquities, Siarita Kouka, she founded the Paros Symposium, an annual meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. Gevirtz was Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University, California, for ten years, and subsequently taught in the Visual and Critical Studies and MFA programs at California College of the Arts, as well as in undergrad Writing and Visual Studies. She is currently a writing mentor through Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration. She is based in San Francisco.

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

new from above/ground press: The Literary Cow Festival, by M.A.C. Farrant

The Literary Cow Festival
M.A.C. Farrant
$5

1.    Cow Satori

We believe cows experience eternity by living in a perpetual now.  Doing so, they achieve a kind of grace, an unintended cow satori.  
           And they are so unlike ourselves today, driving through rain to get the weekly eggs while worrying about Barbara.  Will she invite us to her annual party, which is catered and includes live music and clowns on stilts?  Or will we, once again, be left off the list?  
           We know it is remiss of us to dwell on Barbara and allow our well being to be tied to her in this way. We know there is the whole of life to inhabit, one that includes people who are not Barbara, and also the “myriad things” that are rumoured to be out there—blades of grass, tree bark, small bugs, worms, clouds, and the like.
           But if by some miracle we are invited to Barbara’s party, I will wear my sequined dress and matching neon red lipstick.  You, your pink and yellow dancing shoes.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the twenty-fifth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
July 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

M.A.C. Farrant is the author of over twenty books (fiction, non-fiction, prose miniatures, memoirs), chapbooks and plays. She has published nine books with Talon; the tenth, the Expanded 20th Anniversary Edition of her memoir, My Turquoise Years, will appear in the late summer of 2024. She lives on Vancouver Island.

https://talonbooks.com/authors/mac-farrant

This is Farrant's second title with above/ground press, after SOME OF THE PUZZLES (2021).

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

new from above/ground press: From Desire Without Expectation, by Jacob Wren

From Desire Without Expectation
Jacob Wren
$5

Writing comes easily to me, while I find most other things in life exceedingly difficult. This is often a problem with writers. The truth of what they write is deeply shaded by a writerly distance from life which is also often connected to various forms of loneliness. Writers are often not the best people when it comes to understanding either community or solidarity. Maybe I should only speak for myself. Certain kinds of religious conversions bring one directly into community with others who are similarly converted. As you might have already guessed, I lean rather heavily into not wanting to be part of any club that might have me as a member. Religion has always been one of the places people look to for community. As has often been noted, in our current world, community can be rather hard to come by and even harder to maintain. One of the many reasons religion hasn’t disappeared, as was not so long ago predicted, is it allows its adherents to mainline a sense of community. This is the reason I find easiest to understand.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2024
as the twenty-fourth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Jacob Wren makes literature, collaborative performances and exhibitions. His books include: Polyamorous Love Song, Rich and Poor, Authenticity is a Feeling and Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim. As artistic codirector of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created performances such as: Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information, Every Song I’ve Ever Written and Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition. Most recently PME-ART presented the online conference Vulnerable Paradoxes and the related free PDF publication In response to Vulnerable Paradoxes. International collaborations include: a stage adaptation of the Wolfgang Koeppen novel Der Tod in Rom (Sophiensaele, Berlin), An Anthology of Optimism (co-created with Pieter De Buysser/Campo, Ghent) and No Double Life For The Wicked (co-created with Tori Kudo/The Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan.) His internet presence is often defined by a fondness for quotations.

This is Jacob Wren’s second chapbook with above/ground press, following Tributes To The Subtlety Of Matter (1996).

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

new from above/ground press: The Old Man: new stories, by Clint Burnham

The Old Man: new stories
Clint Burnham
$5
 

1. How was the conference, I asked him by text. It was 5 in the morning my time, an hour later where he was. Pretty good. Some interesting stuff. Some eye roll stuff. The usual.

2. Her friend sent her some photographs of ikebana she had done. Their stark minimalism made her think of death - her mother had just died, it was on her mind I suppose. She looked it up and sure enough, under “ikebana” she read “A flower arrangement made to mark a death is typically constructed of white flowers, with some dead leaves and branches, arranged to express peace.” In her mind she dropped out the “is,” and thought ikebana was just about death, not one of the options.

3. She mourned her mother who had died two months earlier, a mother who moved out when she was 8 years old, and now they - she and her sister - had to, had to sort all of her stuff, she’s given them nothing but bothering in life - okay, she gave birth to us but that was a bit of a settler’s gift, she thought, a smallpox blanket. She had given them nothing in life. And now they, her sister and she, had to sort their mother’s shit. Including some actual shit, because towards the end of her life she was using Depends and there were a few in the garbage can in her room. It was a white plastic bucket made to resemble an aluminum can, with chrome clamps on either side to keep the lid on tight so smells wouldn’t leak out.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2024
as the twenty-third title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Clint Burnham teaches in Burnaby and lives in Vancouver. He was born in Comox, British Columbia, which is on the unceded traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sahtloot) First Nation, centred historically on kwaniwsam.

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

new from above/ground press: The Last Horse: Prologue, by Aaron Tucker

The Last Horse
Prologue
Aaron Tucker
$5

    Plague.
    By the time scientists pulled all the global data together, publishing a breathless set of papers in Nature that then crept into the mainstream media, nearly eighty percent of the world’s horse population was infected.
    Footage: a camera man walks through a barn, hay bales and farming equipment, and people in all-white decontamination suits look into the different stalls; each horse that comes into frame is listless, their manes flaccid and paling, their nostrils filled and noisy with heavy breath, the lustre of their coats lost to the ribs showing through. A suited person runs their hand down the long neck of one, the horse’s head turning towards the affection despite its obvious weakness, patting it while explaining to the audience that the animal has only a day more to live, that whatever had infected it had also sterilized it. That any horse found to be infected had roughly one week, a death sentence that no one could identify the cause of, let alone a cure.
    Cattlemen gathered and drew the obvious parallels to hoof-and-mouth disease and recalled stories, their own or the generations before’s, of having to quarantine then slaughter cows, healthy or not, who had come into contact with those infected. A coffee steams in a man’s hand, a diner with three others around the table, and he describes his father, rifle in hand, walking towards the field at the far end of their pastureland, the swish of bright green grass through his cowboy boots, grass that was perfect for grazing but now to left grow ankle-, knee-length, wild and weeds. The man’s father and his neighbours had cornered the cattle along one stretch of fence, where they clustered and bawled and tried to move forward, met each time they advanced with a rifle shot into the air to frighten them back. Seated on a tractor fixed with a giant earth-moving scoop at the front, the man watched the men march with their guns dutifully on their shoulders, to the herd, and, after a brief countdown, killed every single animal. The man helped his father and the others dig the grave, a deep long ditch that the cattle were rolled into, one after another, one on top of another, a heaping mass, steaming with fresh blood, hides, eyes, teeth, hooves, cattlebrands, then the dirt over top, afterwards packed tightly by the tromp of boots. The sun came over the mountains the next day, lighting the valley floor. “We never entered that field again. We left it and eventually God took it back and you couldn’t see the fenceposts, and it was like nothing had happened, that no life had ever been there. I dream about it, you know, often, when I come to remember my dreams in the morning.”

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
November 2023
as the twenty-second title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Aaron Tucker is the author of two novels, three books of poetry and two film studies monographs. His latest novel, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys (Coach House Books) was named one of the best books of 2023 so far by The Toronto Star. His doctoral dissertation “The Flexible Face: Uniting the Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies” (March 2023), and was nominated for the York University Dissertation Prize; his graduate work at York’s Cinema and Media Arts department won the Governor General's Gold Medal. In addition, he is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto where he is recreating the history of AI in Canada as a technonational project. He grew up on the Sylix Territory in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, and currently lives and works in Tkaronto on the lands covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant.

This is Aaron Tucker’s fourth chapbook with above/ground press, following apartments (2010), punchlines (2013) and Catalogue d’Oiseaux: Toronto — Mainz-Kastel (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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: An Extremely Well-Funded Study of Doors, by Evan Williams

An Extremely Well-Funded Study of Doors
Evan Williams
$5

My door is kicked in. It is splintered and sputtering. I stand in its shards, mixed with window glass. It is a structure which resembles a structure only insofar as I still can turn the knob. I turn the knob, and the door does not work. The knob works, the door does not. It is splintered and sputtering.

The intruder jumps from the window upon seeing my doorway stance. I take in hand the knob as a consolation weapon. In the glass of his exit window is a note and pile of money. There is so much money, $800,000. A tricky amount of cash to carry when hoping to be lithe. It is, however, not as large a bill bundle as expected. It is both overwhelming and underwhelming as a feat of agility. Only underwhelming after it is overwhelming, like the beautifully unkempt outside of an abandoned house.

The note says only: Go out and buy the best door.

                                                               *

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2023
as the twenty-first title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover illustration/design: Angelo Maneage

Evan Williams lives behind a white door in Chicago. It has, in its upper third, a peephole partially painted over. Evan is looking through it right now. Someone is knocking.

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

new from above/ground press: {NANCY}, by Jamie Hilder

{NANCY}
[an essay on Nancy Shaw]
Jamie Hilder
$5

I don’t know where to place Nancy Shaw in my mind. I’ve admired her writing for a long time, and I know we shared spaces and people. I knew she spent time in and wrote about Vancouver art and artist spaces, and I knew that she was a poet among poets that I knew and learned from. But I didn’t know she died in 2007. Before that I had heard her name and seen her books and articles, had read some of her poetry and criticism, and had a postcard invitation from an exhibition she co-curated as the only thing on the door of my office when I was a teaching assistant. And somewhere in that blur of becoming, I was in a used bookstore and thought I heard somebody I recognized from readings address an employee, who was also somebody I recognized from readings, as “Nancy.” That person looked like a poet, and I assumed it was Nancy Shaw (how many poets named Nancy could there be in a student’s imagined city?). For years, even after I had learned through posthumous author bios that Nancy had died, and had seen the woman I assumed was Nancy after that understanding, some part of me still thought this other woman was Nancy Shaw. When I finally, recently met the woman from the bookstore, who is—I was correct—a poet, something shifted in my understanding. As I took her hand to shake it and heard her say her name, my image of a writer who helped me understand where and when I lived became dislocated, became gone in a way that other, less proximate writers always already are. And I felt something close to “Now I miss her.”

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2023
as the twentieth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Jamie Hilder is an interdisciplinary artist and critic who gratefully resides on the unceded and traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. His book Designed Words for a Designed World (McGill UP, 2016) examines the International Concrete Poetry Movement alongside the emergence of various globalizing technologies in the mid-20th century. An Associate Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University, he has exhibited work internationally, and actively maintains a dormant research collaboration with sound artist Brady Cranfield.

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

new from above/ground press: Bits and Bobs, by Ryan Stearne

Bits and Bobs
two stories by Ryan Stearne
$5

     The kitchen is not a large kitchen, but neither is it a small one. Margaret, or Midge as Harold calls her, always thought it was the perfect size. She thinks this is especially so considering it’s just the two of them, as it has been for the thirty years they’ve owned the house. They bought 4515 Coronation Drive from a couple of elderly empty-nesters who after watching their children fly away had also decided it time to move south. Immediately, Margaret and Harold decided to make the home their own, wallpapering the upper kitchen cupboard doors with a corn print paper that screamed ‘corn is eaten here!’ Then, they painted the lower cupboard doors, all the cupboard frames, walls, and ceiling a periwinkle blue. The shade clashes horrendously with the print, but Margaret likes it and Harold doesn’t mind. In the center of the room is a small steel-edged laminate table that has no opinion of corn, one way or the other.
          ("Vienna Sausage")

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2023
as the nineteenth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Ryan Stearne is a PhD student in English Literature with a focus on prose fiction at the University of Calgary. “Attachments” and “Vienna Sausage” are a part of a cycle of short stories centered on how we connect or disconnect with our bodies and situated in Alberta. Ryan can be reached at RyanStearneWrites@gmail.com.

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

new from above/ground press: Teeth, by Douglas Glover

Teeth
Douglas Glover
$5

I went to see Hackenfeller, my dentist, on Thursday, not to see Hackenfeller himself, although I have nothing against him — he has been my dentist for half-a-dozen years without incident — but to have my teeth cleaned by Clara, his dental hygienist, a large, voluptuous, melancholy, white-blond woman of thirty-four whose husband left her eight months ago after an undiagnosed case of Lyme disease developed into an auto-immune disorder that causes her debilitating pain — she told me that at night, when she tries to sleep, it is as if her blood had turned to acid. She can barely keep her job as a dental hygienist let alone have a relationship with a man or any kind of social life and thinks constantly of suicide, has daily suicidal thoughts even when the pain abates and she can dream of happiness again. Of course, Hackenfeller won't dismiss her because of what happened that one time when his marriage was on the rocks, despite her inability to work regular hours, her tendency to leave the chair in the midst of a gum examination, her brown studies, and general inattentiveness (patients have complained) and her habit of turning normal dental hygienist chit-chat into a litany of existential woes and complaints, all in code, of course, nothing overt, when she says "my cat Nigel," she means her husband Brad, as in "My cat Nigel was overly sensitive to my condition, and when the pains became unbearable, he fled one night after I inadvertently left the back door open taking the trash out."

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the eighteenth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
November 2022
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Douglas Glover is the author of five story collections, four novels, four books of literary nonfiction. In 2007, he was given the Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award for an author in mid-career. His novel Elle won the 2003 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Elle was adapted for the stage by the actress Severn Thompson and premiered at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille in 2016. Glover’s story collection A Guide to Animal Behaviour was a finalist for the 1991 Governor-General’s Award. His stories have been frequently anthologized, notably in The Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and The New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories. He was the subject of a TV documentary in a series called The Writing Life and a collection of critical essays, The Art of Desire, The Fiction of Douglas Glover, edited by Bruce Stone. Glover was the publisher and editor of the monthly magazine Numéro Cinq from 2010 to 2017.  He edited the annual Best Canadian Stories from 1996 to 2006. His most recent book was The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form (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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: AN ENVELOPE FOR SILENCE: Some Short Fiction 1977-1989, by David Miller

AN ENVELOPE FOR SILENCE: Some Short Fiction 1977-1989
David Miller
$5

My sister and I were amongst several children invited by the older girls who lived in the house opposite ours to come by for a puppet show one afternoon. I think I was more impressed by coming inside this otherwise unavailable domain itself than by the shadow-world created by the girls' puppetry; those girls would not ordinarily have spoken to us at all: and this was thorough-going: we were invited, at the end of the little show, to come for another performance if and when we could bring entrance-money. We never saw that interior again.

Twenty-one years of age, walking by water's side; river flowing, dirty, past industrial slums, grimy walls of factories; debris and mud everywhere. I had just been to an interview for a job I didn't want, and despite all my attempts at not getting accepted, it looked like I had been anyway: what a disappointment. Actually, I wasn't just disappointed, I felt sick. Some gulls flew over; and I thought of the young woman at the labour exchange who had sent me to the interview. Her face came into focus: an attractive woman; stylish; probably a nice person. Maybe she'd go far in her job. I was going to leave the country.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2022
as the seventeenth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

David Miller was born in Melbourne, Australia, but has lived in the UK for many years. His recent publications include Black, Grey and White: A Book of Visual Sonnets (Veer Books, 2011), Reassembling Still: Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2014), Spiritual Letters (Contraband Books, 2017), Towards a Menagerie (Chax Press, 2019), Matrix I & II (Guillemot Press, 2020), Vitruvian Shadows  (The Red Ceilings Press, 2020) and Some Other Days and Nights (above/ground press, 2021). He has compiled British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’ (with Richard Price, The British Library / Oak Knoll Press, 2006) and edited The Lariat and Other Writings by Jaime de Angulo (Counterpoint, 2009) and The Alchemist’s Mind: a book of narrative prose by poets (Reality Street, 2012). He is also a musician and a member of the Frog Peak Music collective.

This is Miller’s second above/ground press title, after SOME OTHER DAYS AND NIGHTS (2021).

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

new from above/ground press: Visions of Bolaño, by Wade Bell

Visions of Bolaño
Wade Bell
$5

     It probably was not him.
     On the slow, local train returning to my Catalan village after a weekend in Barcelona I take a moment from reading Henry Miller and jotting down observations in my journal to glance across the aisle and a row ahead where a man frantically writes in a large red notebook.
     I wonder what he’s writing. Something powered by intense emotion, I would guess from the speed with which he wields his pen.  
     It is spring, wet, the countryside green. The train’s windows are opaque sheets of emerald rainwater.
     He senses me staring and glances over. He is gaunt, in his forties. His sculpted features are ragged, more Giacometti than Leonardo. Behind wire rim glasses are eyes of a fanatic, or addict.
     After the seaside town of Arenys de Mar, the sun appears. To catch its warmth, I take my sandwich from my packsack and scrunch against the window.
     In front of village houses potted geraniums gleam red or white. Mimosa bushes sport the identical green and gold of the University of Alberta Golden Bears basketball team uniforms. Almond trees are robed in bridal white.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2022
as the sixteenth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Wade Bell: Born in 1941 in Stettler, Alberta, and at the age of one week was moved by my mother to an Edmonton tenement where we lived in  wartime food rationed poverty. Joining the RCAF my father had left her pregnant. I went to Carleton University, wrote my first book in Ottawa and stayed in the city to work for the CRTC.
     Following a devastating marriage breakup, I quit the safe government job and went travelling.
     Back in Ottawa in need of money I drove taxi, the lone Anglo in a French crew stationed at the bus depot. I saved some money and I left to travel again.
    Through a series of fortuitous connection made in Ireland I was invited to spend three months in Spain. I went and stayed five years.
    Many of the stories in my three subsequent books are set in Barcelona or the Catalan countryside.
    With a Spanish bride and needing money I came back to Alberta to work in the oilfields, mostly in the wilds of the boreal forest.  
    I am now 81 and living in Calgary. In addition to my four books, I have published over 50 stories and poems in literary magazines, anthologies and text books in Canada, the US, Japan, Denmark and Italy.

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

new from above/ground press: ECO BLUES: A tale in 3 parts, by Karl Jirgens

ECO BLUES:
A tale in 3 parts
Karl Jirgens
$5

So, you’re working at the coffee shop at the corner of University and somewhere, and you’re thinking you should’ve stayed in school. There’s an unkempt hairy person trying to make small talk from across the counter, and you know they’re trying weasel you into a date. You’re desperate for an intrusion, and as luck would have it, the androgynous advertisement flyer person bursts in. Black lipstick. Strategically zippered, ripped black clothing, augmented discretely with fine-link silver chains, strategically disheveled black hair half-covering various piercings. They plunk the weekly flyers on the counter. You notice the flyers have a prominent “Green” notice saying, “Printed on 70 lb. uncoated, 100% recycled paper.” To avoid the teetotaler, you grab a flyer and begin reading;

You can change your life! Count Alessandro di Cagliostro has discovered a profound secret. Yes! For three easy-to-manage payments of only 19.99, learn how you can re-write the script of your own life! Transform your humdrum existence into a dizzying buzz of delight! How? Simply apply the rhetorical techniques of great fiction to your daily activities! Count Cagliostro will show you how. Just by reading this, your transformative journey has begun!

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the fifteenth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
February 2022
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Karl Jirgens, is the former English Department Head, and former Chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Windsor. He is the author of two short story collections (Coach House, and Mercury Presses), and two scholarly books (ECW Press). He edited two books (one on painter Jack Bush (Coach House), and another on poet Christopher Dewdney (Wilfrid Laurier UP), plus, an issue of Open Letter magazine (with Beatriz Hausner). His scholarly and creative works are published globally. Jirgens edited and published Rampike, an international journal of art, writing, and theory (1979-2016). Rampike is now digitally archived (free) through the portal at U Windsor’s Leddy Library. WEB: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/rampike/about.html (Non-profit). All copyrights remain with the contributors.

Karl Jirgens’ next short-fiction collection, The Razor’s Edge is due spring of 2022 (Porcupine’s Quill)

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

new from above/ground press: Fire and Flood: Enacting Rehearsal as Performance, by Sarah Rosenthal

Fire and Flood: Enacting Rehearsal as Performance
Sarah Rosenthal
$5

Author’s Note

This essay is from the collection One Thing Follows Another: Engaging the Art of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, a collaboration with poet Valerie Witte. In this project, we explore the work of dancer-choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti—both at various inflection points throughout their careers and in this particular moment. Through a combination of chance operations and intentional artistic choices that push us to unexpected places, and via innovative forms and techniques—including collage, erasure, and our own inventions—we deconstruct the essay form to examine what we as poets, each with our own highly charged relationships to dance, can contribute to the conversation about these pivotal figures in postmodern art.

I am grateful to the many people and organizations who have supported and continue to support this project. I look forward to acknowledging them all in the book.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the fourteenth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
December 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover art: Amy Fung-yi Lee

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, forthcoming), The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 2019; collaboration with Valerie Witte), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her short film We Agree on the Sun has received numerous accolades on the film festival circuit, including Best Experimental Short at the 2021 Berlin Independent Film Festival. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and writing residencies at Cel del Nord, This Will Take Time, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, and New York Mills. She lives in San Francisco where she manages projects for the Center for the Collaborative Classroom, works as a Life & Professional Coach, and serves on the California Book Awards poetry jury. More at sarahrosenthal.net.

This is Rosenthal’s second above/ground press title, after Estelle Meaning Star (2014).

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