some author activity: fitzpatrick, Smith, Mody, mclennan, Burdick, Aube + Solomon,

ryan fitzpatrick has work up at NewPoetry; Dale Martin Smith has a new piece up at Annulet; Monica Mody has two poems up at Art of the Commune; rob mclennan has some new work up at North of Oxford; Alice Burdick also has new work up at NewPoetry; Gwen Aube is interviewed in the "12 or 20 questions" series; and Misha Solomon has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series.

new from above/ground press: The Peter F Yacht Club #36; VERSeFest special!

The Peter F Yacht Club #36
2026 VERSeFest Special
lovingly hand-crafted, folded, stapled, edited and carried around in bags of envelopes by rob mclennan,
$6

With new writing by a host of Peter F Yacht Club regulars, irregulars and VERSeFest 2026 participants, including Gwen Aube, Frances Boyle, Melissa Powless Day, Michelle Desbarats, Amanda Earl, Lucia Farinon, Jen Jakob, Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Margo LaPierre, T Liem, D.A. Lockhart, Karen Massey, Emma McKenna, rob mclennan, Pearl Pirie, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Monty Reid, Declan Ryan, Robyn Sarah, Misha Solomon, Grant Wilkins, Lydia Unsworth + Jumoke Verissimo;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
[a small stack of copies will be distributed free as part of the sixteenth annual VERSeFest, March 24-30, 2026] [see last year's issue here]

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: Wee Walk, by Jennifer Baker

Wee Walk
Jennifer Baker
$6

In June of 2025 two poets
—and relatively inexperienced hikers—

decide on a whim 
to walk Scotland’s West Highland Way 
for their honeymoon 

154km from Glasgow to Fort William.
This is just the beginning of how it went.

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

[Jennifer Baker launches Wee Walk as part of a Common House event alongside Sneha Subramanian Kanta and Vera Hadzic on Friday, March 27, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026]

Jennifer Baker is a Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Ottawa, and the author of three chapbooks: Abject Lessons (above/ground press, 2014), Groundling (Trainwreck Press, 2021 & above/ground press, 2023), and Memento Mishka (with David Currie, Apt. 9 Press, 2023). She is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to experimental poetics, and her material poetics work will appear in the upcoming Delisted Project (Third Thing Press, 2026). She is the former Poetry Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine from 2023-2025, including a special Winter 2025 guest issue on The New Material Ecopoetics.

This is Baker's third chapbook with above/ground press.

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

Adrian Slatcher reviews an above/ground press launch: Tom Jenks, Lydia Unsworth + David Gaffney,

Adrian Slatcher was good enough to offer his thoughts on a recent above/ground press launch in Manchester, England by Tom Jenks (launching Chimneys), Lydia Unsworth (launching Gag) and David Gaffney (launching Lakes of Titan). Thanks so much! You can see his original post here, or excerpted, below:

The Scene that Celebrates Itself

In the post-Xmas quiet there isn’t much going on literature wise, which may explain the packed house for the above/ground press launch on Thursday. Most of the literary folks in Manchester that I know were at Saul Hay Gallery for David Gaffney, Tom Jenks and Lydia Unsworth. I arrived on time, yet was one of the last ones there, which prompted an early start.

above/ground is a Canadian press publishes small pamphlets, and via some transatlantic links, reminiscent of the old mail-art networks of the sixties and seventies, has found a home for a number of Manchester-adjacent writers. David Gaffney’s stories lean into his earlier “sawn-off tales” but began as explorations of the similarities/differences between prose poetry and flash fiction. If there’s a difference between these, and his earlier work, I think its that it is in the ever-more deadpan absurdity, and embracing of surrealism. In some ways, it was as much a Dada-esque happening as a reading, though without the silly hats. (Maybe, next time.) Despite the humour of the pieces, there’s always a nugget of dark truth in David’s work. The first story, about a next generation of Arts Council staff being grown as clones, was a perfect example. In David’s work the mundane, is never mundane - whether a train journey across a Lincolnshire landscape that looks as if its been “photocopied”, or the absurdity of office politics. The book “Lakes of Titan” is available here.

Tom Jenks can sometimes seem like a P.T. Barnum of contemporary writing, and all he needs is a big coat with his bric-a-brac for sale to complete the image. The “badge” he was flogging for those of us who spend too much time in pointless meetings, “i’m an artist and you’re lucky i’m even here” sold like hotcakes. Tom’s work veers between the minimal (the badges, his posters of famous literary works) and the durational (projects mapping everything he has done in a year around a particular theme.) Yet here he engages with a range of pithy word-pictures, poignant yet funny.

Lydia Unsworth has slightly different tone than the other two. She has four pamphlets from above/ground and a recent publication just out from Knives, Forks and Spoons. It is a free spirited observational poetry that is probably at its best in the longer piece where she lists all the mundane but beautiful things that she experiences with her children on the everyday walk to school. Her books can be bought here.

new from above/ground press: Origin stories, by rob mclennan

Origin stories
rob mclennan
$6

005 : “Origin Story”


My mother said very little. I came gift-wrapped, delivered. An empty chamber. By the waters of Babylon. They had to collect me. Entangled, form after form. From a stranger’s womb. I was nameless, swaddled. Between names. Frightened shoulders, a wish. They say, to descend from steps, from anything. To descend from the moon. I could not explain it. For eternity, my mentions were silence, what all they could offer. A wandering hand. Some tales remain, unfinished. A plot-line. I emerged from the ash, I came out of the ground. I was formless, formed. I was there, suddenly. After having not been.

Note: In January 2025, Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany begun a weekly substack, “Sunday Poem + Prompt,” in which he began to offer exactly that. I took it upon myself to respond to his weekly prompts as best as I could, as they came.

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

cover artwork: Aoife Lydia Judith McLennan, 
“family portrait,” February 2025

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 sixty-ninth above/ground press chapbook, following recent titles including 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

some author activity: Inniss, Carpenter, Lea, benedict, Solomon + Flemmer,

Scott Inniss has new work in the Spotlight series; J.R. Carpenter is featured in the Canadian Poets Series over at Peripety and/or Tronies; N.W. Lea is interviewed via the above/ground press substack; alex benedict has a new essay on d.a. levy over at Cleveland Review of Books; Misha Solomon is interviewed in the "12 or 20 questions" series; and Kyle Flemmer is interviewed over at the podcast On Creative Writing.

The Factory Reading Series @ VERSeFest: Nada Gordon + Lydia Unsworth, March 29, 2026!

The Factory Reading Series
as part of the sixteenth annual VERSeFest poetry festival presents: 
The Factory Reading Series Lecture Series; two talks/readings by:

Nada Gordon (Brooklyn NY)
+
Lydia Unsworth (Manchester UK)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Sunday, March 29, 2026
3-4pm, Arts Court Black Box Studio
A FREE EVENT / check link for info on tickets/passes: https://verseottawa.ca/en/versefest
as well as for the full schedule of readers and events!
March 24-30, 2026

Nada Gordon: [see a new interview here] I live in Brooklyn and work too hard and too much, teaching courses like “Tyranny and the Absurd” and “The Glamour of Language.” Actually, they are just comp, but isn’t that what all art is, actually? I have two Siberian cats. I make things besides poems: garments, baubles, toys. My Etsy shop is https://www.etsy.com/shop/ScentedRushes. I’ve published nine books and lots of chapbooks besides. My selected, The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985-2015 found its way into the world last year by way of SubPress. “The Sound Princess” is a literal translation from the Japanese of “Otohime,” the button you push in a toilet stall to make the sound of rushing water so that others don’t hear you pee. It does sound grand, doesn’t it? I was in the hysterico-transgressive poetry movement called Flarf in the 2000s. Before that, I lived in Japan for over a decade. Before Japan, I wrote a thesis on Bernadette Mayer’s work. I studied with Language Poets in Bay Area in the 80s. I was a hardcore punk after I was a flower child. As an actual child I sometimes wrote poems. I was born in Oakland in 1964.

Lydia Unsworth [see a new interview here] is a poet from Manchester, UK. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Place Writing in Manchester, looking at kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. She has 6 poetry collections and 4 above / ground chapbooks, and has two new poetry collections coming out in 2026, Stay Awhile (April, Knives Forks and Spoons Press) and This Now Extends to My Daughter (May, Blue Diode Press).