new from above/ground press: Map of What Was Taken, by Cara Goodwin

Map of What Was Taken
Poems by Cara Goodwin
$6

Little Fish

The river races down the mountain,
becomes a lake and washes your face.
You coo with delight, inflatable wings
on your baby arms. I have my eye on a hawk
circling the distant shore. Soon,
clouds will roll down the escarpment
and I will bundle you up and take us home,
but right now, the lake is singing.
I wonder how long the mountain will stay
in your lungs; how long you will carry me
in your heart. I want to tell you about
your grandmother, how she bathed me here,
too. Life is a wriggling, slippery thing:
vapor rises, rains down, again
and again, your little hands send ripples
across the water.

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

[Cara Goodwin launches Map of What Was Taken in Ottawa on August 22 as part of the above/ground press thirty-third anniversary reading/launch/party]

Cover art by TJ Bunz, you can follow them on Instagram at @tjb__art

Born in Cold Lake, Alberta, on a rainy day in April, 1992, Cara Goodwin is the daughter of a beautiful Cree mother and a doting military father. Her early years were shaped by movement across the plains: visits to her mother’s relations on reserve; months spent with her Kokum in British Columbia; a move to New Brunswick at age eight, where she developed an East Coast sense of humour; and a relocation to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, at 15, where she lived until high school graduation. 

After a year abroad in Australia, Cara moved to Ottawa, Ontario, at 19 for school, where she became roommates with her future best friend, and has built a chosen family of her own. Now 34, and a proud member of Fort McMurray 468 First Nation, she is focused on deepening her connection to her Cree heritage and considering how to leave the planet a better place for her nieces.

An Ottawa-based poet, Cara’s work has appeared in Bywords, flo. literary magazine, and Room. Over the past five years, she has received two Honourable Mentions for the John Newlove Award and was shortlisted for Room’s Annual Poetry Prize in 2023. In 2025, she read as a featured performer for the Riverbed Reading Series, where her poems traced her ancestral roots across what is now-Canada. Cara holds a BA (Hons.) in Social Communications from Saint Paul University and has completed numerous writing courses over the years. 

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: Bedtime stories for my imaginary friends, by James Spyker

Bedtime stories for my imaginary friends
James Spyker
$6

Day 1

I almost always first navigate to the home screen of Google TV before turning it off. And I mean I’m not actually turning it off.  I’m turning off the tv, which the Google TV thing will notice and then go into some sleep mode

I think

I can’t really tell what it is doing when the tv is off. In any case, I do that out of kindness. I don’t feel I need to be kind to my tv, or my Google TV. But kindness is a habit and a skill so practicing it is good.

I also take care when I lower myself into a chair, although that might be because I worry I am too fat, so let’s pretend I didn’t say that.

As to why it would be kind, to first navigate to the home screen, these unexpected state transitions are hard things to make work. I know that from my half century of writing software. Imagine if you were teaching a friend to cook dinner and at any point when a klaxon went off they would be required to immediately abandon that dinner and reset the kitchen to its “ready to start cooking dinner” state. That would be hard to do.  Should they drain the pasta before tossing it in the garbage?  Is the protein still frozen enough that it can just be put back into the freezer?  And so on.

Much easier if you let them finish making it and then just need to teach them how to safely store it for potential future consumption.

I could explain how that is a really good analogy to the Google TV thing, but that would turn this into a technical article. Analogies are so much less work than reality. I try to practice kindness towards myself too.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
August 2026
as the thirty-fifth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

[James Spyker launches Bedtime stories for my imaginary friends in Ottawa on August 22 as part of the above/ground press thirty-third anniversary reading/launch/party]

James Spyker is a book and paper artist based in Toronto. He lives in that building where you visited your great aunt when you were a kid. He occasionally returns to writing when blank pages become too much to bear.

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: Kemp, Wah, Bowering, Smith + Cohen,

Penn Kemp has poems for Fred Wah and George Bowering up at public reverie, and an awful lot of poetry/reading videos up at her YouTube channel; Steven Ross Smith is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Julia Cohen is interviewed via the Memoir Land Author Questionnaire; and don't forget to regularly check out the above/ground press substack, yes? there's lots of extra stuff on there,

new from above/ground press: provocations, by Grant Wilkins

provocations
short poems with long titles
Grant Wilkins
$6

In a quiet moment, Phil Hall reflects on the role of the proper noun in the metaphysics of literature, as revealed to him in Ursula K. Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao Te Ching.

 

The rain stopped after midnight
and we stared out at the Aegean
mindful of the little things
being, non-being
and choke-cherry jam

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

[Grant Wilkins launches provocations in Ottawa on August 22 as part of the above/ground press thirty-third anniversary reading/launch/party]

Grant Wilkins is an occasional poet, printer and papermaker who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he’s working on another one in Art History. He lives in Ottawa on the unceded and unsurrendered land of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people.

This is Wilkins’ sixth chapbook with above/ground press, after Reading The Great Classics Of Canlit through Book 5 of bpNichol’s The Martyrology (2022), In Which Archibald Lampman / Translates Arthur Rimbaud (2023), The Baroness and her Ex Read Orgasmic Toast: To Whom It May Concern (2023), Poetic Constructions: Poems written for the Enriched Bread Artists’ 2020 Open Studio (2023) and Towards A Poetry Of <something> Tentative / Notes from a stalled art project (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: The Common Dark, by Mark Goldstein

The Common Dark
Mark Goldstein
$6

EMET

to ward with one’s whole being
to make a question of this

self – across centuries   a passage
from need to entry   in the book –

in-sighting this opening – what resounds 
in an archivist’s home

–

an account in response   the archive

our doing – its aftermath
  elders no compromise

our progenitors’
  silence – an inability to speak

  to that point of exclusion –
forebears this   collapse

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

[Mark Goldstein launches The Common Dark in Ottawa on August 22 as part of the above/ground press thirty-third anniversary reading/launch/party]

Mark Goldstein is a writer, editor, translator, and graphic artist. His work includes the serial poem Endlossong (forthcoming), his book length translation of poems by Paul Celan, Thricelandium (2024), his transtranslation of Kafka’s novel, The Trial, as Her Process (2021), poems, essays and interviews published as Part Thief, Part Carpenter (2021), his long poem, Form of Forms (2012), which was a finalist for the International Stiftung Buchkunst 2014 competition in Leipzig, as well as his poem collection, Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (2010), and After Rilke (2008). Moreover, he co-edited AnyWord: A Festschrift for Phil Hall (2024), as well as the virtual anthology Paul Celan/100 (2020). He can be found online at markgoldstein.ca

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: Crosby, Barwin, Beaulieu, Solomon, Dyckman, Eleftherion + Coulton,

Gregory Crosby has new work in the Spotlight series; Gary Barwin has work up at NewPoetry.ca; Gary Barwin interviews Derek Beaulieu; Misha Solomon is featured in the Canadian Poets Series via Peripety and/or Tronies; and Susanne Dyckman has new work up at Antiphony, as does Melissa Eleftherion and Valerie Coulton.

new from above/ground press: Leaning In, by Harold Hoefle

Leaning In
Harold Hoefle
$6

Cleansing

Sweep the dust
scrub the sink
wipe the dirt 
from the sill 
weed the weeds
taproot out
rake and bag 
winter leaves
split the wood 
stack it snug
gather chips
finger bleed
water boil 
anthill gone
rock raccoons
garden fight
then sit down
lick the beer
pick up phone
view again
mounds of stone 
smoke and flame
single mouth  
open, close
scroll on past. 

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

[Harold Hoefle launches Leaning In in Ottawa on August 22 as part of the above/ground press thirty-third anniversary reading/launch/party]

cover photo: Karen Rhodes

Harold Hoefle’s poems have won the Bliss Carman Award, the Great Blue Heron Poetry Award (2014), and a National Magazine Awards silver medal. His debut collection of poems, The Night Chorus, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He has also published a collection of short-fiction called The Mountain Clinic (Oberon Press). Harold lives in Ottawa, teaches in Montreal.

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