new from above/ground press: Misha Solomon’s BIODÔME: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster, by Misha Solomon

Misha Solomon’s BIODÔME: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster
Misha Solomon
$6

Southern Two-Toed Sloth

Everyone represents the self’s less attractive
features with words that seek to distract, to deflect,
to scapegoat. You may think me slow, they try to say,
or lazy, but I’m so much better than the sign
to which this sinful word now points. And here I am,
and yes I’m slow, but the effort that it takes me
to go about my selfsame days is of a scale,
a magnitude, that far exceeds the limits placed
by semantics. There is no animal called lust,
called pride, called wrath, called greed. And if there were a beast
called gluttony, I’d envy them their liberty.
Nature rewards profligacy, in the short term.
I know not what it rewards in the long—my pace
implies perdurance, but I live no more for it.

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

This title is literally a response to Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster's chapbook BIODÔME (above/ground press 2006). A twentieth anniversary edition of BIODÔME, with a new introduction by Misha Solomon (above/ground press), appeared earlier this week.

cover credit: Naomie Hadida

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has twice appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and in journals across Canada. He is a student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary PhD program. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, appeared with Brick Books in March 2026. Misha Solomon’s Biodôme: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster is his third chapbook.

This is Solomon’s second above/ground press title, after FLORALS (2020).

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: BIODÔME: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, by Stephanie Bolster

BIODÔME: Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Stephanie Bolster
with an introduction by Misha Solomon
and new afterword by the author
$6

HOUSING THE GREAT AUK

Masses of glass, rocks at the back,
craggy, like the outcroppings in illustrations.
To think they thought the last had snuffed it!
Water at the front, so its splash
will make the gawkers flinch.
Can’t take long or journalists will catch
the squawks and then our coup
will cool. Remember the coelacanth?
Give it eels, beetles, chocolate ices
if it wants. Keep each lost feather
for the shop – a transparent envelope,
ten pounds, twenty? At night when they go home
we can ask it about the nineteenth century.
The sea teeming with ships! We were a marvel.

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

Stephanie Bolster’s latest book of poetry, Long Exposure, appeared with Palimpsest Press in fall 2025. Excerpts from the book were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2019. Bolster’s first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award and was translated into French as Pierre Blanche. Her poems have also been translated into Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby, BC. She has been a professor of creative writing at Concordia University since 2000 and lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec, on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti.

Many of the poems from this chapbook were later incorporated into and published as part of Stephanie Bolster’s A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (London ON: Brick Books, 2011), a book shortlisted for the 2012 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Thanks to Brick Books for the permission to reprint this anniversary edition.

This is Stephanie Bolster’s fifth above/ground press chapbook, after Three Bloody Words (1996), BIODÔME (2006), Three Bloody Words: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2016) and GHOSTS (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 : Chang-Richardson, Zhang, fitzpatrick, Kelly, Rogal, mclennan + Niespodziany,

Ellen Chang-Richardson has a poem in Paul Vermeersch’s “In the Third Sleep” series; forthcoming author Elena Zhang has new work up at The Bulb Region; Cam Scott interviews ryan fitzpatrick over at his substack; J-T Kelly has new work up at JMWW; Sharon Berg interviews Stan Rogal over at The Temz Review; and rob mclennan has a new poem, with prompt, over at Benjamin Niespodziany's Sunday Poem and Prompt.

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.