new from above/ground press: I found looking, by Emily Shafer

I found looking
Emily Shafer
$6

I found                                   looking outside
  found you there
  listening
  listing
  my nute

 

I found four swallows instead of three 

   found a blank party is all worth an email slice

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover artwork: Aoife McLennan

Emily Shafer is a poet and photographer. She is an incoming MFA candidate in Image Text at Cornell University, holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Brooklyn College, and teaches first-year writing at CUNY. She is the author of it’s too early for poetry from Proper Tales Press and publications in poets.org, The Brooklyn Review, periodicities, and more. Born and raised in Rochester, N.Y., she lives and works in New York City. @emilyshaferwrites / www.emilyshaferwrites.com

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

some author activity: Aube, Kemp, Kronovet, Earl, Wells + MacEachern,

Gwen Aube has new work up at Maisonneuve; Penn Kemp has a new poem up at Centred.ca, and there's an article on her work in the London Free Press and new work in The Typescript; Arlington poet laureate Jennifer Kronovet took part in a recent event in the county; Amanda Earl has a long poem up at Canto; Christina Wells offers reading recommendations via The Fiddlehead; and a poem by Jessi MacEachern lands on the Room Magazine 2026 Poetry Contest Longlist.

Publishing-in-Transit: Cole Swensen zoom-interviewed Jennifer Baker, rob mclennan + Misha Solomon on above/ground press for Brooklyn Rail: recording now online,

It was such a good conversation! Check out the full hour-plus conversation with myself, Misha Solomon and Jennifer Baker on and around above/ground press, conducted by the brilliant Cole Swensen and hosted by Brooklyn Rail, either here through their site or via their YouTube channel. We talked about VERSeFest, we talked a brief history of above/ground press, we talked about Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] (and hear the legend of how the donkey got its name) and even the “Tuesday poem” series. You can order Misha Solomon’s above/ground press titles here (and his new book over here), Jennifer Baker’s above/ground press titles here, and my above/ground press titles here (or the chapbook I read from, even). Cole Swensen even has an above/ground press title! But you know she has a new book as well, yes? Thanks to everyone who made this thing happen!

report: Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase : Abel, Marlatt, Wah, mclennan, Carpenter, fitzpatrick, etc

In case you hadn't heard, above/ground press was well represented this past week at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, as part of the University of Alberta's Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase, held near the end of a full week when a slew of us prior writers-in-residence got to spend time together at the Banff Centre, up in them mountains (there was a full two days of snowfall, if you can imagine).

Hosted by Jordan Abel [who currently runs the w-i-r program], Jason Purcell and Julianna Wager [above, who organized the entire week as well], the event had opening remarks on a (very) brief history of the University of Alberta writer-in-residence program [remember when I conducted all those interviews for the fortieth, with every still-living uAlberta writer-in-residence I could find?] by Thomas Wharton, and readings by Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Marilyn Dumont, Makda Mulatu, rob mclennan, Joshua Whitehead, January Rogers, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick, Cody Caetano, Jana Pruden, Kaitlyn Purcell and Hiromi Goto. There was a livestream that one can catch here, which unfortunately missed Wharton, picking up only mid-point through Marlatt's reading, but the full event was recorded, and should be up soon.

[J.R. Carpenter, above] With everyone reading roughly five minutes each, it truly was a remarkable event overall, including singing, staccato, lyric, chanting and prose, and even some tears. As you already know, the event was also a kind of launch for a handful of recent above/ground press titles specifically made for the event, by myself, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick and Derek Beaulieu (Director of the Literary Arts at Banff, but not actually reading, although in the audience), although Wah was the only one of the group that actually read from his new title (I mean, I didn't even do that, so I've no business throwing shade). There were a handful of copies of all of these titles on site for free distribution, both through the event specifically and across the whole week, with a mound of copies still available gratis through the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (just prod at Jordan Abel, if you are up that way), or just order direct from the press, of course. And did you hear I'm even back at the Banff Centre this November? I've already got a new slew of above/ground press publications in the works, just you wait.

[ryan fitzpatrick, above] It was good, also, to see various audience I hadn't been expecting (amid our packed house), including poet and former Tsunami Editions publisher Michael Barnholden, driving in from Edmonton with his wife, or poet Ryanne Kap, driving in from Calgary with a friend. Separately, Winnipeg poet Sharanpal Ruprai was actually at Banff as part of a playwriting retreat, and Vancouver poet Adèle Barclay was there as well, working a couple of weeks in one of the Leighton cabins, retreating. Edmonton writer Conor Kerr, who teaches at the University of Alberta, was also part of our group for most of the week. It still doesn't feel real, how good it all was.

Cole Swensen zoom-interviews rob mclennan, Misha Solomon + Jennifer Baker May 20th on above/ground press for Brooklyn Rail,

Publishing-in-Transit: above/ground
Featuring Jennifer Baker, rob mclennan, Misha Solomon

Wednesday, May 20, 2026
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

REGISTER HERE

Poets Jennifer Baker, rob mclennan, and Misha Solomon join Rail contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation on Zoom on above/ground press (which turns thirty-three years old this summer, by the way). 

Jennifer Baker is a poet and Teaching Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of four chapbooks: Abject Lessons (above/ground press, 2014), Groundling (Trainwreck Press, 2021/reissued by above/ground press, 2023), Memento Mishka (co-authored with David Currie, Apt. 9 Press, 2023), and Wee Walk (above/ground press, 2026). Her work has been featured in Groundwork: Best of above/ground press (2023), Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, The Journal of Canadian Poetry, Canadian Literature, Dusie, and the Delisted project. 

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 founded above/ground press, a publisher of chapbooks, journals and other ephemera, way back in July 1993. He also spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has appeared in journals across Canada and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, 2026, and 2027 (Biblioasis) and in On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House Books). He is the author of three chapbooks, including FLORALS and Misha Solomon's BIODÔME: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster (above/ground press), and one full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet (Brick Books). He has a BA from Columbia University, an MA from Concordia University, and he is currently a student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program.

Cole Swensen [see her above/ground press title here] is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.

some author activity: Tynes, O'Reilly + Robertson,

Jen Tynes was offering nearly-daily poems as part of National Poetry Month over at the Bloof Books blog; Nathanael O'Reilly has new work up at Cordite; and there is a new interview with Lisa Robertson up at minor literature[s], as conducted by Christina Politano.

some author activity: Armantrout, mclennan, fitzpatrick, Smith, Saklikar, Kemp-Gee, Bolster + Solomon,

Rae Armantrout has four poems up at Granta; rob mclennan is interviewed via Coach House for the On Occasion anthology; there's also a hefty interview with mclennan conducted by ryan fitzpatrick; Mahaila Smith is interviewed via the National Poetry Month "POETS RESIST" interview series at All Lit Up, as is Renée Sarojini Saklikar and Meghan Kemp-Gee, and Stephanie Bolster and Misha Solomon's recent chapbooks even get mentioned via the Wikipedia page for Montreal's Biodome, which is cool.