report: the above/ground press 33rd anniversary reading/launch/party!

Happy anniversary! The thirty-third anniversary reading/launch/party occurred over the weekend at Anina’s Café in Vanier (a space of which I am becoming increasingly fond). Thirty-three years! And nearly fifteen hundred publications-to-date, by the by [don't forget the current anniversary sale, happening for but a few more days]. Do you recall my report from last year's event? Or the year prior? With readings and launches of new above/ground press titles by Stephanie Bolster (Montreal), Mark Goldstein (Toronto), Cara Goodwin (Ottawa), Sonja Greckol (Toronto), Harold Hoefle (Ottawa), James Spyker (Toronto) and Grant Wilkins (Ottawa). The crowd for this event was impressive (with some notable absences, due to travel etc), with the occasional above/ground press author and editor sprinkled throughout, including Cameron Anstee, Frances Boyle, Ottawa's current English-language poet laureate, David O'Meara, and Tamara Fairchild (above/ground press produced a chapbook of hers back in 1997, don't forget), as well as artist and photographer Paul Elter, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth and visual artist Daniel Sharp, among others.

Armed with broken foot and accompanying boot, Montreal-based poet and editor Stephanie Bolster opened by launching the recent twentieth anniversary edition of her above/ground press title, BIODÔME, a title originally produced through the press way back in 2006. This new edition was actually prompted by Montreal poet Misha Solomon, who had worked his own chapbook-length response to Bolster's work, and his chapbook-response was produced simultaneously to Bolster's new edition, which also holds an introduction by Solomon [see his introduction to such here; see Bolster's afterword to the collection here]. In case you don't recall, above/ground press actually produced Bolster's solo debut, the chapbook Three Bloody Words, back in 1996, and it was rather terrifying to realize that it has now been ten years since we produced the twentieth anniversary edition of that particular title. 

The second reader was Ottawa-based poet Cara Goodwin, a poet barely a year or so older than the press itself, which does tend to make one feel ancient. After Bolster's reading, it was very exciting to counterpoint such an established writer against a chapbook debut, as Goodwin was launching her new chapbook, Map of What Was Taken, a title that had been in the works for some time. Clearly, Goodwin is a poet worth paying attention to.

The third reader was Toronto poet, editor and publisher Mark Goldstein, launching his own above/ground press debut, The Common Dark, a chapbook-length section of a poetry title he has forthcoming soon (hopefully later this year). How many years have I been soliciting Goldstein for a manuscript? Oh, too many to count (but the wait was completely worth it). I look forward to seeing how this particular title fits into the larger context of something book-length.

The next reader was Toronto poet and translator Sonja Greckol, who landed in town to launch a slightly older title, Dark Matter —Sonja Greckol translation, Materia Oscura—Rocío Céron, Dark Matter – Diverted—Sonja Greckol etranstranslation (2025), that appeared just around Christmas of last year [see the essay she wrote on translating such here] (a title that is soon to appear in a second printing). Part of what became remarkable about this event was that Greckol requested a Spanish speaker from the audience to read Céron's original text, and Goodwin's friend, Dan Josh, someone who claimed to have "no prior relationship to poetry," but read brilliantly! A remarkable blend of voices and considerations.

It was very good to hear Harold Hoefle, a (formerly Montreal-based) poet who recently retired from teaching at John Abbott College, especially given his recent relocation to Ottawa. Having a new chapbook, Leaning In, and him part of this launch felt a nice way to be able to welcome him to town, especially given the number of years he's been travelling in for the sake of multiple literary events, as well as social interactions with Ottawa writers (there's a poem in this new collection for the late Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, for example). Apparently Matthew Firth, back when he was a chapbook publisher, produced Hoefle's chapbook debut some twenty-plus years ago, which I didn't know. 

Toronto-based writer James Spyker and his work aren't the same locally-known quantity as they had been, back in the day, when he and I were part of running Ottawa's The TREE Reading Series in the mid-1990s (Spyker is also co-founder of the ottawa small press book fair, an event he recently started attending once more, as exhibitor). Given how long I've known him (I can't recall if we met five minutes prior to or following the creation of above/ground, which was less than a year prior to me joining TREE as one of the organizers/curators, back in June 1994), it was a bit surprising it took this long for his own above/ground press debut to appear, Bedtime stories for my imaginary friends, the thirty-fifth title produced as part of the press' ongoing prose/naut imprint. He purposefully read a single, slightly surreal prose-piece that hinted as an introduction for the final reader of the evening, Grant Wilkins. 

Ottawa writer, papermaker and quiet builder of complex sounds, shapes and phrases, Grant Wilkins launched what is his sixth above/ground press title produced over the past few years, provocations. Wilkins is another I've actually known since the earlier part of the 1990s, circa 1994, but has only moved into publishing his explorations through sound and text over the past few years, prompted in part through his participation in jwcurry's infamous Messagio Galore sound poetry choir. Wilkins' work [see a recent artist statement he wrote, here] blends the influence of the late American poet Jackson Mac Low with an engagement with sound, chance and play, merging texts and ideas with an unmatched ease and attention to detail.

Thanks so much to everyone to participated! And to Anina's for hosting us! There are already plans afoot, by the way, for some fall surprises (oh, and the 2027 subscriptions will be announcing soon, also; the same rates as this past year, methinks).

Scott Ferry reviews Lillian Nećakov's The World Is Beautiful (2025)

Seattle poet Scott Ferry was good enough to provide a first review of Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov's The World Is Beautiful (2025) via Heavy Feather Review. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

If you don’t know Lillian Nećakov she is a humble but stellar poet out of Toronto. It is hard to explain her work because it slips out of convention and time and space and identity all in the space of one line. Even though I count myself blessed to be her friend, I have never attempted to write a review of any of her books because they seem impossible to corral in words. I could explain them for you, but it would not be enough. I honestly feel her full length il virus which came out in 2021 is every bit as good as any of Diane Seuss’ work. And again I am not saying that because I am her friend. Her latest chapbook of prose poems The World Is Beautiful from rob mclennan’s above/ground press out of Ontario, is vital, dark, and hopeful as well as technically brilliant. It breathes a risk and a spark and a music which does not politely take one’s head off, as Dickinson would say, but tears it off with gorgeous teeth.

The book begins with the title poem which thrusts us into her jazz-fingered esthetic instantly:

Knowing that lungs {right 24 oz. left 21 oz.} are the colanders of time, cradling vestiges of scree from the mass of one breath {0.5-5 g} times a lifetime. Knowing that there are lakes drowning in the whimsical ether of a tourniquet-wielding junkie-planet, invisible and blue.

Something that Nećakov does well is mix science and math and music into a pliable plasma to work within. She breaks what poetry is “supposed to be” constantly and reinvents. Her improvisational and wormhole burrowing skills are strong as any poet writing today, but this does not mean her poems do not have emotional depth and weight. Later in the same poem she stuns us with a perfect distillation of the current zeitgeist: “knowing that the executioner never takes his finger off the trigger, not even when the kiss is slower than death.”

Yet, her darkness is balanced with a radiant hope: “David Hockney says the world is beautiful. I believe him, because I am an optimist.” And she is as she gets her hands greasy in the mechanics of light and its absence: “Light built my house and filled it with poems about monkey wrenches and whales and songs that I sang to myself while slipping between the folds in the balmoral of night.” And in a later poem: “Life is a glass mouth budding with teeth called June, July and August, go home, climb the larynx of disbelief, you will find dopamine, there, just past the body bags.” She acts as an alchemist in the transmutation of the dense to the ether, and this is what, especially in our present state as a fractured world, we need.

The personas and identities she speaks through give her voice a powerful swath: Hockney, O’Keeffe, Lurie, Milosz, Neruda, Plath, Simic, Snyder, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Watts, Leary, del Toro, Ferlinghetti. One of the highlights is a fictional conversation on Alan Watts’ houseboat between the Beats and Leary which she admits in her notes “None of the people in the poem actually said any of those things, I made it all up.” In the poem:

You have to dance, dance until your skull brakes, Snyder says. You have to drop America on its head, but quietly, before she makes a grave of us.

Ginsberg bows his head, there is a palace of holy smoke and that’s where I’m headed, a place where my bones will stretch into an opium bridge.

Drop your pants, say what hurts, Om Hare Rama Krishna Rama Hare Rama, break the skin, just a little with the morning’s light.

And Timothy Leary like a wrinkled forest of astronauts, a tired anti-god, black-eyed Susan, here I am, perched on the edge of his ejection seat.

The LSD-soaked voices are palpable and believable and their breaking through the oppressive thought of the times is frankly very applicable to our present political climate. She also speaks Spanish through del Toro, who arrives “carrying an egg. Un caballero nunca llega con las manos vacias.” Hearing her channel O’Keeffe is a revelation:

I was a photograph once, stirring up the devil in a man twice my age. I walked a tightrope of lilac clouds in my tunic made of tanglehead, buffalo grass and mesquite the ladder held for twenty years until my name was “widow”, until the seasons made a stone of me, until he was nothing more than a wind jewel.

I cannot think of a poet who blends danger, texture, synesthesia, and lightning in one expansive brush. She has her purposeful noise like a poetic Sonic Youth: “Call me marrow-orange, periosteum-yellow, fascia- blue, jack-in-the-pulpit, dreamwalker, Jimson weed.” She also has a softness and a highly tuned ear, as she listens to all the breakwater has to say: “Oh, the things you’ve seen, cloistered in the slope of a long light. Why I write to you with a chest-full of accidents. How you pull me out of harm’s way, time and time again.”  Lillian Nećakov is quietly redefining contemporary poetry. Let’s hope her calls will be more widely heard.

new from above/ground press: Elegies for the Fish Prince of Arkansas, by Lea Graham

Elegies for the Fish Prince of Arkansas
Lea Graham
$6

 

January 16, 2024

    your face in the evening schools of longing
            --Audre Lorde

These are not
“mornings of 
wish and ripen.”

I wake to dishes
undone. How to say
torpor, gray, try
in one thousand ways?

You are still
upstairs in 
imagination

your mind rowing 
along the shore of to-do,
checking the trotlines 
of here, now


Three hundred sixty-five
days you are gone:
Awe-filled, common

How the world courses 
without reason, 
its terrible
current

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

Lea Graham is a writer, editor and translator who lives in Hyde Park, New York with her wise little dog, Volta. She is the author of the recent chapbook The Swing at the Edge of the World (Finishing Line Press, 2025), Elegies to the Fish Prince of Arkansas (above/ground Press, 2026) and three poetry collections, The O.E.D. Odes (forthcoming from MadHat Press), From the Hotel Vernon (Salmon Press, 2019) and Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011). She is co-editor with Celia Bland of A Jar of Air: The Work of Maxine Chernoff (forthcoming, MadHat Press) and editor of From the Word to the Place: The Work of Michael Anania (MadHat Press, 2022). She is associate professor at Marist University in Poughkeepsie, NY.

This is Graham’s fourth above/ground press chapbook, after Spell to Spell (2018), Calendar Girls (2006) and metric : a collaboration (with rob mclennan, 2011).

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: Tierney, mclennan, Wah, Shafer, Skrabalak, Scroggins + Farina,

Orchid Tierney has new work at The Journal; rob mclennan has a poem for Fred Wah up at public reveries; Emily Shafer has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Ryan Skrabalak answers the "12 or 20 questions" interview; Mark Scroggins has an essay up at "my small press writing day"; and Laura Farina is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey.

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,