some author activity: Burdick, Nećakov, Schmaltz + Henning,

Alice Burdick has a new essay up at The New Quarterly; Lillian Nećakov is interviewed alongside Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag for the podcast Meat for Teacast; Eric Schmaltz is interviewed by Myra Bloom at ASAP Review; and Barbara Henning has new work up at Long News.

new from above/ground press: NO VIBRATO HARD TRANSCENDENCE, by Jon Cone

NO VIBRATO HARD TRANSCENDENCE
Jon Cone
$6

AFTER MY TYPEWRTIER GOT STOLE
 
To be young
to have nothing nothing! 
to be drunk and in love 
kissing on a street corner
where light is derelict
laughing with the municipal workers 
waiting for the first bus 
as if for a new invention

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

Jon Cone is a Canadian writer who lives in Iowa City. He grew up in Richmond Hill, Ontario. He saw the Three Stooges perform live at the Canadian National Exhibition. He watched George Chuvalo fight Muhammad Ali on a black-and-white tv.  He saw the Toronto Maple Leafs play at Maple Leaf Gardens. He went to Seneca College in Toronto for one year before attending the University of Western Ontario in London. 

This is Cone’s third title through above/ground press, after Against Perfectionism & other poems (2025) and the collaborative AN ACCELERATION & A CALM / A SHEAF BY THE LATE P. M. SAMSON / COMMENTARY BY BARNARD SWALLOW (with K.Lipschutz, 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

Billy Mills reviews Jon Cone's Against Perfectionism & Other Poems and John Levy's Vast Spaces

Irish poet Billy Mills was good enough to provide first reviews of Jon Cone's Against Perfectionism & Other Poems (2025) and John Levy's Vast Spaces (2026) as part of an omnibus review (alongside Chris Turnbull's If/Then and Henry Gould's Mirror Lake) via Elliptical Movements. Thanks so much! Mills was even nice enough to review Levy's prior above/ground press title, which we also appreciate very much. You can see the full review here, or this excerpt, below:

Jon Cone is a Canadian poet living in Iowa and, if the work in Against Perfectionism & Other Poems is anything to go by, influenced by the New York School, a thought that came to me as I encountered poem titles like ‘The Stationary Engineer at Rest Ponders the World as an Inscrutable Theology of Material Influence’ and ‘The Exile Alive to the Etching of an Hour’, so I was pleased to encounter ‘A Poem for Frank O’Hara’ almost halfway in. To my surprise, it is the shortest poem in the pamphlet:

A Poem for Frank O’Hara

For I shall drink a warm Coke at noon
and trace lovingly
the cracked egg of the world.

Short as it is, this poem captures the humour and the sense of luminous triviality that suffuses much of the work gathered here. And that humour can be self-deprecating, as in ‘A Poem for Mother and Dather (after Tomaž Šalamun)’:

He’s ugly! His face is ugly! His body is ugly!
Ugly! Ugly! Ugly! Jonathan Cone is an awful poet
because he is an awful person and
when he goes for a sprightly march about
the compound of a summer’s dawn
mongrels will stand on hind legs to salute him
and feral cats will trail at acute angles behind.

This absurdist strain melds perfectly with what I called the luminous triviality at the heart of so much of the work here:

A Caffeinated Dream of Spring

The waitress brought us these beautiful white mugs.
They each had a single blue stripe just below the lip.
I mean the simplicity of that singular blue trail upon
that immaculate occasion of white. Then the waitress
poured lucidly from the coffee pot filling our mugs.
And the sound the coffee made was easy and so gentle.
Like the world was home and unsteady on our behalf.

This is one of the things poetry does; it takes the ordinary things and makes them extraordinary, if only the poet is willing to take a chance on seeming mundane. Cone takes that leap with gusto. The pamphlet’s title poem consists in the main of a recipe for a simple meal, salad and dessert. The poem then ends:

I don’t know if this would win any culinary awards. OK I admit
               I know it would not. But I don’t care. It tastes good to me,
& that is ultimately what matters because the world
might come crashing down any second now,
we don’t have time to be perfectionists in all we attempt or do.

Which strikes me as the perfect way to go about poetry in these insane times. Forget about the prizegivers, avoid the overly polished, make something that tastes good. And in these poems, Cone follows his own advice to perfect imperfection.

John Levy’s Vast Spaces is his second pamphlet from the prolific and always interesting Above/Ground Press. Like Cone, Levy has a fine eye for the everyday, but he is primarily a poet of community, and many of his poems are in the form of notes addressed to named friends and/or fellow poets, while others carry dedications. Here’s an example

Sky

for John Phillips

The turkey buzzard that circled above me twice this morning had
beautiful white on the underside of its black wings and a vividly red
beak and if it had been me up there I know I would have loved gliding
like that, not having to move my wings and not caring about the old
man below me looking up as if in the church without a roof that I’d
never enter.

Here, as so often in Levy’s work, close observation of the world opens out to a kind of social sense of what it is to live in that world, a set of interactions between the thing seen, the observing poet, the dedicatee and the reader that is redolent with a quiet sense of illumination. This is conversation raised to the level of art.

Some of the interactions are with strangers, others involve pets, and there’s a thread that runs through several of the poems concerning Levy’s learning to play the piano in his 70s, as in this note to another poet:

Note to Robyn Scheienz (August 9, 2025)

Bunny, our excitable little rescue terrier, barks
and barks, apparently furious at me
for stopping playing over and over
“Claire de Lune,” practicing

the sustain pedal, making mistakes and
correcting them, all of which maybe
he not only silently tolerated but
which intrigued him as much

as when he sits on one side of our French door
watching a lizard or, if he’s even luckier, a rabbit
or small bird, and yesterday that long black snake
like a living middle C elongated by a sustain pedal.

The almost casually conversational surface here serves to conceal the technical craft at work, the repetitions (barks and barks / over and over) enacting the practice, the forward propulsion created by line and stanza endings, the threads of assonance and alliteration that bind those same lines and stanzas together (read it aloud if you don’t believe me). All of which gently serves to convey the ‘meaning’, that to be human is to create, to make mistakes and learn from them, and create better, and that what we make well is as much a part of the world as a bird, rabbit or snake is.

This soft-spoken humanity is what Levy is about, in both senses of the word. His poetry is difficult to write about because the poems are so definitively what they are, complete and in no real need of comment. Read him.

new from above/ground press: I found looking, by Emily Shafer

I found looking
Emily Shafer
$6

I found                                   looking outside
  found you there
  listening
  listing
  my nute

 

I found four swallows instead of three 

   found a blank party is all worth an email slice

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

cover artwork: Aoife McLennan

Emily Shafer is a poet and photographer. She is an incoming MFA candidate in Image Text at Cornell University, holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Brooklyn College, and teaches first-year writing at CUNY. She is the author of it’s too early for poetry from Proper Tales Press and publications in poets.org, The Brooklyn Review, periodicities, and more. Born and raised in Rochester, N.Y., she lives and works in New York City. @emilyshaferwrites / www.emilyshaferwrites.com

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: Aube, Kemp, Kronovet, Earl, Wells + MacEachern,

Gwen Aube has new work up at Maisonneuve; Penn Kemp has a new poem up at Centred.ca, and there's an article on her work in the London Free Press and new work in The Typescript; Arlington poet laureate Jennifer Kronovet took part in a recent event in the county; Amanda Earl has a long poem up at Canto; Christina Wells offers reading recommendations via The Fiddlehead; and a poem by Jessi MacEachern lands on the Room Magazine 2026 Poetry Contest Longlist.

Publishing-in-Transit: Cole Swensen zoom-interviewed Jennifer Baker, rob mclennan + Misha Solomon on above/ground press for Brooklyn Rail: recording now online,

It was such a good conversation! Check out the full hour-plus conversation with myself, Misha Solomon and Jennifer Baker on and around above/ground press, conducted by the brilliant Cole Swensen and hosted by Brooklyn Rail, either here through their site or via their YouTube channel. We talked about VERSeFest, we talked a brief history of above/ground press, we talked about Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] (and hear the legend of how the donkey got its name) and even the “Tuesday poem” series. You can order Misha Solomon’s above/ground press titles here (and his new book over here), Jennifer Baker’s above/ground press titles here, and my above/ground press titles here (or the chapbook I read from, even). Cole Swensen even has an above/ground press title! But you know she has a new book as well, yes? Thanks to everyone who made this thing happen!

report: Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase : Abel, Marlatt, Wah, mclennan, Carpenter, fitzpatrick, etc

In case you hadn't heard, above/ground press was well represented this past week at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, as part of the University of Alberta's Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase, held near the end of a full week when a slew of us prior writers-in-residence got to spend time together at the Banff Centre, up in them mountains (there was a full two days of snowfall, if you can imagine).

Hosted by Jordan Abel [who currently runs the w-i-r program], Jason Purcell and Julianna Wager [above, who organized the entire week as well], the event had opening remarks on a (very) brief history of the University of Alberta writer-in-residence program [remember when I conducted all those interviews for the fortieth, with every still-living uAlberta writer-in-residence I could find?] by Thomas Wharton, and readings by Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Marilyn Dumont, Makda Mulatu, rob mclennan, Joshua Whitehead, January Rogers, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick, Cody Caetano, Jana Pruden, Kaitlyn Purcell and Hiromi Goto. There was a livestream that one can catch here, which unfortunately missed Wharton, picking up only mid-point through Marlatt's reading, but the full event was recorded, and should be up soon.

[J.R. Carpenter, above] With everyone reading roughly five minutes each, it truly was a remarkable event overall, including singing, staccato, lyric, chanting and prose, and even some tears. As you already know, the event was also a kind of launch for a handful of recent above/ground press titles specifically made for the event, by myself, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick and Derek Beaulieu (Director of the Literary Arts at Banff, but not actually reading, although in the audience), although Wah was the only one of the group that actually read from his new title (I mean, I didn't even do that, so I've no business throwing shade). There were a handful of copies of all of these titles on site for free distribution, both through the event specifically and across the whole week, with a mound of copies still available gratis through the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (just prod at Jordan Abel, if you are up that way), or just order direct from the press, of course. And did you hear I'm even back at the Banff Centre this November? I've already got a new slew of above/ground press publications in the works, just you wait.

[ryan fitzpatrick, above] It was good, also, to see various audience I hadn't been expecting (amid our packed house), including poet and former Tsunami Editions publisher Michael Barnholden, driving in from Edmonton with his wife, or poet Ryanne Kap, driving in from Calgary with a friend. Separately, Winnipeg poet Sharanpal Ruprai was actually at Banff as part of a playwriting retreat, and Vancouver poet Adèle Barclay was there as well, working a couple of weeks in one of the Leighton cabins, retreating. Edmonton writer Conor Kerr, who teaches at the University of Alberta, was also part of our group for most of the week. It still doesn't feel real, how good it all was.