new from above/ground press: ON SYNTAX, by Derek Beaulieu

ON SYNXTAX
Derek Beaulieu
$6

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

Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent book, Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the 21st Century, was published by Assembly Press in the Spring of 2026. Beaulieu has received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for his dedication to Albertan literature and CCWWP Robert Kroetsch Award for excellence in innovative pedagogy and teaching practice. He is the only graduate from the University of Calgary’s Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts ‘Celebrated Alumni Award’ and the only graduate in creative writing to receive Roehampton University’s Chancellor’s Alumni Award. Beaulieu has served as Poet Laureate of both Calgary and Banff and is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He can be found online at www.derekbeaulieu.ca

ON SYNTAX was originally published by Malmo, Sweden’s TIMGLASET in February 2019; thanks to Joakim Norling for that edition.

This is Beaulieu’s thirteenth chapbook with above/ground press, after an issue of the long poem magazine STANZAS (“calcite gours 1-19,” issue no. 38), the interview chapbook ECONOMIES OF SCALE: rob mclennan interviews derek beaulieu on NO PRESS / derek beaulieu interviews rob mclennan on above/ground press (2012) and single-author chapbooks “A? any questions? (1998), [Dear Fred] (2004), HOW TO EDIT, Chapter A. (ALBERTA SERIES #8; 2008), transcend transcribe transfigure transform transgress (2014), a a novel: 1-20 (2017), tattered sails (after un coup de des) (2018), CABARET (2020), ONTARIO HYDRO (2023), tattered sails (after un coup de des) (second printing, 2023) and Sparky and Squire (2026).

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: Identities, by James K. Moran

Identities
James K. Moran
$6

Journeys in 22 pages

He grew a beard in the desert, 
crossed continents, 
fell into Zen trance, 
drifted in space, 
retreated to his heart

In a primary-coloured trail of penance, 
the hero’s soul bled word balloons, 
debated if killing was moral, 
decided to wear or shuck a mantle, 
to go on or back, or not

wanting you to walk alongside, 
come back to yourself, 
learning of and in change, 
a sixteen year-old’s loneliness 
in the smell of classroom chalk, 
spring mud, 
an empty evening

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

James K. Moran writes across the genres about grief, love, nomadic superheroes and drag-queen warlocks. His poetry and speculative fiction have appeared in Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, Burly Tales: Fairy Tales for the Hirsute and Hefty Gay Man, Bywords, Glitterwolf, On Spec, and elsewhere. Moran’s fiction collection Fear Itself and horror novel Town & Train were published by Lethe Press. His reviews appear in Arc Poetry Magazine, Plenitude and Strange Horizons. In 2012, Moran founded the Little Workshop of Horrors, an Ottawa writers’ group that carves speculative and literary work into the shape it is meant to be. He also runs Queer Speculations, which workshops LGBTQIA+ or queer-themed stories from far and wide. Findable at jameskmoran.blogspot.ca, jamestheballadeer.bsky.social on Bluesky and jamestheballadeer on Instagram. 

Moran lives in Ottawa, on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. 

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

Margaret Christakos wins the 2026 Latner Griffin Writers' Trust Poetry Prize!

congratulations to Toronto writer (and above/ground press author) Margaret Christakos, winner of the prestigious $60,000 Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize! brilliant! the prize is supported by The Albert and Temmy Latner Family Foundation and Scott Griffin. above/ground press produced Christakos' chapbook Retreat Diary 2019 in, as you might suspect, 2019.

new from above/ground press: IHRE KINDER: ekphrastic poems, by Jessica Smith

IHRE KINDER: ekphrastic poems
Jessica Smith
$6

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
November 2026
above/ground press item #1500
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Jessica Smith is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fever (Model Press 2021) and three full-length books of poetry, Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices 2006), Life-List (Chax Press 2015), and How to Know the Flowers (Veliz Books 2019). She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Communication & Information Sciences and a Full-Time Instructor of English at the University of Alabama.

This is Smith’s fifth chapbook with above/ground press, after Shifting Landscapes (2006), MNEMOTECHNICS (2013), The Lover is Absent (2017) and Lion’s Den, a chiasmus (2019). In 2023, above/ground press produced Report from the Smith Society, Vol. 1 No. 1.

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: Carr, Straumsvåg, Coulton, Eleftherion + Boyle,

; Video: Julie Carr and Eleni Sikelianos read as part of the William Corbett Poetry Series; Dag T. Straumsvåg has work in the Spotlight series; Valerie Coulton has new work in TCP Review; Melissa Eleftherion has a poem up at poem-a-day via Poets.org; and Frances Boyle is interviewed in the "Tuesday Author Interview" series.

 

new from above/ground press: What? by Lisa Fishman

What?
Lisa Fishman
$6

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

Lisa Fishman’s newest book is the novel, Write Back Now! (1366 Books, Guernica Editions, 2026). She’s also the author of the fiction collection, World Naked Bike Ride (Gaspereau Press, 2022) and eight books of poetry, most recently One Big Time (Wave Books, 2025). Several earlier chapbooks include Deer 1 (Oxeye Press, 2015, 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

Billy Mills reviews Jon Cone's No Vibrato Hard Transcendence (2026)

Irish poet Billy Mills was good enough to provide a first review of Jon Cone's No Vibrato Hard Transcendence (2026) as part of a group review over at his Elliptical Movements. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Mills writes:

No Vibrato Hard Transcendence, Jon Cone, above/ground press, 2026, $6.00

There’s a strand running through Jon Cone’s No Vibrato Hard Transcendence of engaging with other poets, with a tradition of his own making. These poets include Emily Dickinson, William Stafford, Jack Gilbert, James Wright and Jean Valentine, so it’s a specifically American lineage. His Dickinson poem, which has a title that’s too long to type out in full here, is the nearest thing he comes to direct imitation:

The strain- the pain
Of pale souls who wear
Winding sheets of rain –
Bent under the turning year –

Other poems are less directly acts of homage. ‘Throat Singing, for William Stafford’ takes Stafford’s ‘Traveling through the Dark’ and turns it into an account of Cone’s own encounter with a dead deer, one which, though it ends similarly to Stafford’s, represents a very different kind of moral dilemma to the older poet’s. But you need to read it yourself, I won’t spoil it for you.

Later in the pamphlet, we meet ‘MEMO: To Be Considered Later in the Cool of the Aleph Inn’, where the conversation with the poet it responds to is of a different order. The piece opens with a prose introduction that starts:

You utter maroon, you Billy Wordsworth! Not lonely as a cloud. No way. Clouds are pack animals.

The reference is clear enough, and the criticism to the point. The rest of the text consists of a list of potential alternative similes that Billy might have used, or maybe not. Here are a few:

Wander lonely as a process server
Wander lonely as the wildfire particulate
Wander lonely as the thick-headed levitator
Wander lonely as a receipt tossed by the curb
Wander lonely as the final horn

Any of which would have made the original poem more interesting and accurate.

But I don’t wish to give the impression that Cone only writes this kind of response poems. There are a range of more or less short pieces that deal with the poet’s direct experience of the world, often with pointed wit:

POEM

I visit the gun shop
to look at death poems

There are also a number of very fine prose poems, including the extraordinary ‘Father Gustav, S.J., Recalls Seeing the Jackson Pollock Exhibit for the First Time at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1967)’. Here’s an extract from around about the middle; ideally I’d give you the whole thing, but it would be better if you got the booklet and read it that way:

And thereby distractions were prevented from entering the cell of my consciousness as if I had shut a massive iron door. I saw a forest become a thick bank of cloud transform into the surface of a sea. I saw a strange bird with long beak and legs, wings outstretched, as if dancing. I saw snakes extended through thick clouds, and black creatures with bodies smudged and weird tongues where faces would be. I saw a large flatfish with the face of a woman, and a series of ghostly apparitions floating upon bandages stained red and green and yellow. Tall grasses marched toward me going this way and that. Eight tall black trunks seemed to lead a furious parade. The colors were feverish, dirty, dull. Gray and black, orange and yellow, and beige. I did not know how to calibrate the noise the sounds made as I looked at them with my eyes.

Cone is a fascinating writer who, in his own quiet way, is setting about the task of redefining what an individual poetic voice might be like. Go read him.