happy thirty-third birthday sale, above/ground press!

Today is the thirty-third anniversary of above/ground press! And that first ever above/ground press event held at the (long gone) Stone Angel Institute on Lisgar Street (July 9, 1993), so I thought it might be worth offering a bit of a backlist sale. Why not look through the titles across the past three years of titles—2024 through 2026—and see what might interest? We’re currently working a couple of exciting upcoming plans, including the usual anniversary reading/launch/party for August (watch this space; see here for a report on last year’s event) as well as a hefty recording project, to celebrate the press’ 33 1/3 birthday later this fall. But for now, until September 1, 2026:

ANY FOUR TITLES FOR $25 (postage included)
ANY TEN TITLES FOR $40 + shipping / Canada add $20 / US add $28 / International add $34
ANY TWENTY-FOUR TITLES FOR $80 + shipping / Canada add $30 / US add $33 / International add $35
ANY FORTY-FIVE TITLES FOR $200 (postage included)
/ all prices in Canadian dollars ; “any” is subject to availability,

The press has produced nearly fifteen hundred items to date, if you can believe it, most of which are single-author poetry chapbooks. Although, if prose is more of your thing, be aware that this sale includes titles in the prose/naut series (which includes fiction, essays etc; see the full list here), with recent titles by rob mclennan, Susan Rudy, Ken Sparling, Jason Heroux, Stuart Ross, Leah Souffrant, R Kolewe, Meredith Quartermain, Susan Gevirtz, M.A.C. Farrant, Jacob Wren, Clint Burnham, Aaron Tucker and Evan Williams, etcetera. Perhaps a cluster of chapbooks by Amish Trivedi? Or Brook Houglum, Orchid Tierney, Jason Christie, Steph Gray, Monty Reid, Lydia Unsworth, Micah Ballard, Nathanael O’Reilly, Michael Sikkema, Kate Siklosi, Ken Norris, Lillian Nećakov, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Cary Fagan, Amanda Earl, Buck Downs, russell carisse, Pearl Pirie, Gary Barwin, N.W. Lea, Rose Maloukis, Guy Birchard, Misha Solomon, John Levy, Sarah Burgoyne, ryan fitzpatrick, J.R. Carpenter, Jon Cone, Jérôme Melançon, Travis Sharp, Gil McElroy, Jennifer Baker, Jason Heroux, Stephanie Bolster, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Jessica Smith, Derek Beaulieu or Lori Anderson Moseman? I mean, the possibilities are (mostly) endless. Or, heck, send me a note with a list of interests, and I can fill a box of surprises?

The past three years or so of activity also includes issues of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] and The Peter F. Yacht Club. Honestly, just go through the sidebar of names on the above/ground press blog. Each name clicks to the most recent above/ground press title by that particular author (if there are further titles by that author still available, links to such are within that particular post).

To order, send cheques 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 ; questions? shoot me an email,

some author activity: Zhang, Braun, Inniss, Berlatsky, Robinson + Koss,

Elena Zhang has a new piece up at Flash Flood and a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Jacob Braun has new work up at Another Chicago Magazine; Scott Inniss is interviewed via the Found You Magazine podcast; Noah Berlatsky has new poems in the latest issue of Heavy Crown; and Ben Robinson interviews Zane Koss for The Temz Review.

Misha Solomon and Stephanie Bolster chapbook launch in Montreal! July 9, 2026

Montreal poets Misha Solomon (Misha Solomon’s BIODÔME: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster) and Stephanie Bolster (BIODÔME: Twentieth Anniversary Edition) launch their most recent above/ground press chapbooks, accompanied by Alex Nierenhausen and hosted by and in conversation with Sarah Burgoyne, at Librairie Pulp Books & Cafe, July 9, 2026 at 7pm! Oh, you should very much go to this if you are able. See also the recent interview with Solomon on the chapbook here, or the more-recent zoom-conversation on above/ground press that Cole Swensen conducted with Misha Solomon, Jennifer Baker and rob mclennan.

Touch the Donkey at a Zine Fair in Sherbrooke QC + at Jarvis Square Books, Chicago

If you are around Sherbrooke, Quebec this Saturday, check out the ZinK (zine + ink) zine fair, where there will be a small mound of copies of the two latest issues of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] for free! While supplies last, certainly. Should you be looking to pick up other things at the fair? Oh, yes, certainly. If you pick up a free copy or two or three of Donkey, would I welcome a donation, possibly? Oh, very much so, although it isn’t required. And if you live in or near Chicago, there’s also a small handful of copies for free distribution at Jarvis Square Books! A purchase isn’t required for a copy (again, while supplies last), but you should completely be looking through their fine selection to see what else their store might offer. It is a very fine store! And of course, if you wish to see above/ground press in person, we’re still working on curating our summer anniversary event in Ottawa, but already have plans to appear at the Fisher Small + Fine Press Fair on September 19 (at the Fisher Rare Book Room at the University of Toronto) and this fall’s ottawa small press book fair (our thirty-second anniversary!) at Tom Brown Arena on November 14th. So much exciting small press!

new from above/ground press: TRAVELLER, by Ken Norris

TRAVELLER
Ken Norris
$6

Hello, and welcome
to obscurity.

I’m just the man
who sweeps the halls.

Mornings are dusted
by sunlight, and the nights

go crazy. I cannot
stop or start. I see

your world in flames.
Mine moves with ghosts

and shadows. If 
your whole life

is in your phone,
what are the chances?

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

Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an MA at Concordia University and a PhD in Canadian Literature at McGill University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. Norris is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maine, where he taught Canadian Literature and Creative Writing for thirty-three years. He currently resides in Toronto.

This is Ken Norris’ fourteenth above/ground press chapbook, after Windward – St. Lucia Poems (1995), The Commentaries (1999), Songs For Isabella (2000), Green Wind (2010), Looking Into It (2011), Hong Kong Blues (2019), Hawaiian Sunrise (2021), Stray Dog Café (2021), The Traveling Wilburys Collection (2021), False Narratives (2022), Echoes (2023), Broken River (2024) and What’s Left (2025). See his 2025 above/ground press substack interview 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: Shooky Session 1 John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s office, by Stuart Ross and Jason Camlot

Shooky Session 1 John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s office
Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross
$6

Toasted church knowledge
is a snapdragon donkey gift,
if you think about it.
You can find knowledge like that
flowin’ round the flowers.
In this poem, flowers
stand in for something else.
Flowers are code names
for wishes of different kinds.
For wishes of lava ears,
and for wishes of rabbits 
having outbursts of thumping
Sex Music. Sex Music
refers to sex music
itself, not to the whole other thing,
but to the event of sex music itself, 
and to the event of sex music 
flowin’, thumpin’ and flowin’ 
into itself.
All this must be as
familiar to you as a pancake person
who comes to your house
purportedly for brunch
but truly to blow dust 
off the drum of living, 
and then to drag your complete luggage set
all the way to the pacific
airport, so it can soar
across the earthworks puddle.


AUTHORS’ NOTE ON THE TEXT

December 6, 2022. Stuart Ross has driven from Cobourg, Ontario, to visit Jason Camlot in Montreal. They have a lot to catch up on, so they go to the university library to select a book. In the PS 3000s they find the books of John Ashbery, whose work is usefully rich in diction and vocabulary, and appropriately incomprehensible. They decide to go with As We Know. In Jason’s departmental office they sit and alternate between reading to each other from As We Know and writing while listening to the other read. They have each used listening as a method of writing poetry for years, but until now they had never before collaborated on listening poetry into existence together. 

Listening poetry is a creative audile technique, a method that works to transform a particular way of listening to something—usually an already published literary text (but it can be anything, really)—into poems. The poems, in this case, were composed in two notebooks with Shooky, the popular KPop character from BT21, on the covers. (In the BT21 universe, Shooky is a mischievous little cookie who loves to pull pranks on his friends.) One of the Shooky books was large and one was small. For each session of listening poetry, Jason and Stuart would read to each other and write poems in one notebook, then do the same in the other notebook. The size of the book informed the size and nature of the poems that were listened into existence. They borrowed as much or as little as they chose from the source texts.

This chapbook presents the poems written during the first of seven listening poetry sessions that Stuart and Jason held between December 5, 2022, and December 18, 2024. It is “Shooky Session 1: John Ashbery, As We Know, 5 December 2022, Jason’s Office” from the larger manuscript THE SHOOKY SESSIONS (A Litany).

This chapbook is set in Goudy Old Style because CRT Electra was too expensive.

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

Jason Camlot is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Animal Library (DC Books, 2000), What The World Said (Mansfield, 2013), and, most recently, Vlarf (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2021). His critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford, 2019) and the co-edited collections, Collection Thinking (Routledge, 2024), Unpacking the Personal Library (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2023), CanLit Across Media (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019), and a recent jumbo special issue of English Studies in Canada on “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” Jason is director of the SpokenWeb research network that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio. He is Professor of English at Concordia University and President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE).

Stuart Ross has published 23 books of fiction, poetry, and memoir/personal essays, most recently the poetry collection The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky (Coach House Books, 2024), the memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW Press, 2022), and the story collection I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub (Anvil Press, 2022). He has won the 2023 Trillium Book Award, the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize, the 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the 2010 Relit Award for Short Fiction. Stuart teaches poetry at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and has been writer at residence at Queen’s University and University of Ottawa. He runs the 1366 Books imprint for experimental fiction under Guernica Editions and the Feed Dog Books imprint for surrealist poetry under Anvil Press. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario.

This is Ross’ fifth chapbook with above/ground press, after ESPESANTES (2018), NINETY TINY POEMS (2019), BIRD SNOW ON HARD TRACKS (2023) and AND THEN THE GENTILE LIT THE CANDLES: Seven Stories (2025). above/ground press also produced the festschrift Report from the Ross Society, Vol. 1 No. 1 in 2022.

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: mclennan, MacEachern, Burgoyne, Macdonald + the ottawa small press book fair,

rob mclennan has a new poem up at Shadows and Sax; catch Jessi MacEachern and Sarah Burgoyne in conversation via Canthius; Dawn Macdonald has a new essay up at The Wood-Lot; and today is the ottawa small press book fair!