David Dowker (May 20, 1955 – March 24, 2025)

Sad to hear that Toronto poet David Dowker has died, after an extended illness. He was always quietly generous with other writers, slipping into small press fairs to say hello, making his way from table to table. I first heard his name in the 1990s, through his online journal Alterran Poetry Assemblage, probably first through the SUNY-Buffalo list-serve, offering publication to a whole range of experimental poets and poetry, showcasing work that pushed at the boundaries of what might be possible. He was a champion for experimental writing, although never one to push his own work too hard, although that was there, also. Some of his publications over the years include Machine Language (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010), Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal (with Christine Stewart; BookThug, 2013) [see my review of such here], Mantis (Tuczon AZ: Chax Press, 2018) and Dissonance Engine (Book*hug, 2022) [see my review of such here]. I was fortunate enough to produce a chapbook of his, Chronotope (2021), through above/ground press, he guest-edited issue #23 of GUEST [a journal of guest editors] in 2022, and I interviewed him in 2019 for Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal]. He had been an above/ground press subscriber and supporter for more years than I can count, and always attempted to come through small press fairs to say hello if I was ever in Toronto. I shall miss his quiet dedication and attentiveness. He was a kind man.

some author activity: Sikkema, Robertson, Kolewe, Crosby, Shirley, Witek + mclennan,

Michael Sikkema has new work up at cul-de-sac of blood; did you know that Lisa Robertson has an occasional newsletter you can sign up for, as does R. Kolewe?; Gregory Crosby and Vik Shirley each have work up at talking about strawberries all of the time, as does forthcoming author Terri Witek; Chris Banks interviews rob mclennan for The Woodlot; and don't forget that above/ground press has that new substack you can sign up for, with extra-special other things to appear there.

Jay Miller reviews Mayan Godmaire's Yesterday’s Tigers (2021)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review for Mayan Godmaire's Yesterday’s Tigers (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Miller writes:

Published in 2021 through rob mclennan’s above/ground press, Mayan Godmaire is a former student of Sarah Burgoyne from Montreal’s Dawson College, where Godmaire also served as editor of several publications of. Additionally, they have an intriguing essay written as dialogue about decolonizing nature in the online Dawson English Journal, Ecocriticism and the Decolonisation of Nature: A Discussion.

I hesitate to write Dialoghi con Leucò as a potential allusion above, but then I open the chap and read the first word: Persephone. I redouble my too quickly abandoned assurance that there is a hint of Cesare Pavese in Godmaire here. But there is very much also a deliberately 21st-century ecopoetics edge whose ingrained spirituality reminds me fondly of the late speeches and works of Pier Giorgio di Cicco:

    When all the cars will have been taxed or tolled on their way to the cities, when bike paths and parks will have reconfigured our neighbourhoods, when safe and cleaner transportation has cut emissions, a fundamental question will remain. Is the safe city, the sanitized city, the sustainable city the same as the livable city? If all we want is clean and well-designed cities, it will likely come to pass. But in the long run, to save the environment means that we will want to save the environment not just for ourselves, but for each other. And to reverence each other means that we will have to discover each other.

There is something theatrical about this first page of text that I would not want to spoil by quoting directly, but it is an invocation not dissimilar to an epilogue as spoken by a chorus. We’re not in media res; we are part of the ritual that is audience-performance.

    In the here and now, in our ides of March, pestilence’s winter opened the cave for us all to crawl within, again and again.

    Is everybody in?
    Is everybody in?
    The ceremony is about to begin.

The very next page announces an onomatopoeia: BUZZ, SWIRL, SMOKERINGS, BUZZ BUDS BUZZ. There is a drama unfolding here, although maybe I am too TV-pilled to see anything but Euphoria in my head when I read it. Very much not a bad thing. This is story-telling done right. The neverending genderedness of the French language.

What follows next is a little hazy: biking through a hangover into the woods at Oka Beach. This work is more Montreal than Jason Freure’s City of Losers.

    “I once had a very strong feeling that this is my last life,” I tell Bermalva. The shaman’s expression does not change.
    “That’s possible,” she says.
    I can know myself. Je ne dois que m’unir au rhythm qui jetait leurs fleurs.

Franglais for: I mustn’t but become one with the rhythm throwing their flowers.

I hope I parsed that right.

Then, an ending that casts no aspersions:

    I am an empty chalice.
    The midnight whirl-pool, formless.

I won’t spoil any would-be readers with what I see on the next page over. I had to laugh at myself about it.

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

above/ground press author spotlight #1 : Amish Trivedi

The first author spotlight landed yesterday on the new above/ground press substack!

Amish Trivedi is the author of three books, most recently FuturePanic (Co•Im•Press, 2021) and four chapbooks from above/ground: The Destructions (2015), What We Remembered Before the Fire (2018), The Universe is an Earth-Shaped Urn (2021) and The Breakers (Expanded) (2021). In February 2023, above/ground press produced Report from the Trivedi Society Vol. 1 No. 1 (2023). Trivedi’s poems are in Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and are forthcoming in The Georgia Review. He has an MFA from Brown, a PhD from Illinois States, and is an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. Amish Trivedi reads on April 10, 2025 in Oneonta, New York as part of the Visiting Writers Series at Hartwick College.

some author activity: Browne, mclennan, Paty, Boyle + Saklikar,

forthcoming author Laynie Browne is one of a trio--along with Anselm Berrigan and Kate Colby--discussing Lewis Warsh's poem "Polar Night" as part of the most recent podcast episode of PoemTalk; rob mclennan is interviewed by Hollay Ghadery for the New Books Network podcast; Allyson Paty answers the "12 or 20 questions" interview; rob mclennan has a new poem up at Sumac Literary Review, as does Frances Boyle; and Renée Sarojini Saklikar is the second in the Canadian Poets series over at Peripety and/or Tronies.

Jay Miller reviews Sarah Burgoyne's The Tentaculum Sonnets (2020)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review for Sarah Burgoyne's The Tentaculum Sonnets (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.