Friday, December 5, 2008

The Peter F. Yacht Club regatta/reading/christmas party

lovingly hosted by Amanda Earl;

The Peter F. Yacht Club annual regatta/christmas party;

233 Armstrong Avenue (at Parkdale Market)
Sunday, December 28, 2008
doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm

with readings from issue contributors as well as yacht club irregulars;

info: rob mclennan at 613 239 0337 or az421@freenet.carleton.ca

Friday, October 17, 2008

DAMN YOU, FITZPATRICK by Amanda Earl, rob mclennan, Christine McNair, Max Middle, and Pearl Pirie (above/ground press, 2008)

I’m not going to lie to you. This chapbook is more than the ephemeral wank that it appears to be. Coming out of a pseudo-disgust for a friend who ditched them in favour of a more glamorous urban setting, the idea that someone might choose Montréal over Ottawa is a palpable irritation felt through these five poems. DAMN YOU, FITZPATRICK slams the impersonal, nomadic impulse that comes with much travel. These five writers explore the notion that travel should be less about places (and the perception of places) than about the people you meet there.

Fitzpatrick” is a figure that haunts the five poems in this collection, acting as a connection point for these five diverse writers. All five poems share an elegiac tone, even if employed jokingly. The writing here evokes a sense of death; even as Christine McNair opens her poem by evoking a resurrection (“You’ve come back from the dead”), she turns the resurrected figure into a war machine. The poem has an apocalyptic air, creating an account of what Jean Baudrillard calls “the gray imminence”:

"First follow people you meet in the street, at random, for an hour, two
hours, brief sequences, disorganized – with the idea that people’s lives are
arbitrary trajectories, directionless, going nowhere, and that for this very
reason they are fascinating. The network of the other is used as a means of
absenting yourself from yourself. You exist only in the other’s trace, but
without his knowledge; in fact you follow your own trace almost without
knowing it yourself." (Fatal Strategies, p. 161)

Like the scene in McNair’s poem, the gray immanence is an act of erasing the other and in that act leaving a trail of yourself simultaneously reading and eliminating the other. McNair’s poem is in a double bind here as it both evokes the erasing force of the subject (the war machine of the poem) even as she erases that subject with her own subjectivity, thereby spectralizing the same figure she resurrects through language at the beginning of her poem – McNair’s poem acts as a war machine across “Fitzpatrick” leaving his “real” trip through Ottawa as unreadable outside of these poems, which make up a kind of “official account” of his trip.

The rest of the writers in this collection follow “Fitzpatrick,” erasing and writing over him palimpsestically. Amanda Earl transposes a foggy stupor over what “Fitzpatrick” might mean (“but i’m not exactly sure what the prairies are,” “these creatures known as calgaRYiANs / are they all named ryan?”) at the same time as suggesting that to “Fitzpatrick” all eastern cities look alike (“getting so drunk / in sturgeon falls / they think ottawa / is montreal”). East and West are both confused here with regard to the other as each overwrites what the other represents. Even as Max Middle’s short poem (“damn you fitzpatrick / you said we would meet”) wishes for a meeting – between “Middle” and “Fitzpatrick,” between Ottawa and Calgary, between East and West – these two sides seem cursed to moving through one another spectrally.

And while rob mclennan’s poem aims to evoke connections despite distance – it’s important to notice the “strand of hair” mclennan references as a type of haunting even as the ghost of the other moves further from view as you approach it, like a baseball in space – there is some hope left in this narrative of perceptions and misconceptions. The last of the five poems, Pearl Pirie’s poem finds similarity in difference. Pirie’s poem is an attempt to understand what makes Calgary tick, even if only on the level of the food you might eat at 4:00 am. Pirie acknowledges that though we run the risk when travelling of imposing our narratives on the other, we can sometimes find comfort in our differences, falling “thru a portal / to tall tables, huge milk glasses / home mom pigeons coo,” and reappearing comfortably in the narratives of others as a bit player able to participate without erasing and rewriting them.
DAMN YOU, FITZPATRICK (2008)
free to above/ground press subscribers
anyone else, query rob at az421@freenet.carleton.ca for a copy;

Sunday, September 28, 2008

2009 subscriptions now available;

I'm now offering my usual annual $40 above/ground press subscription for 2009 (& check out our group on facebook).

YES! I WANT EVERYTHING ABOVE/GROUND PRESS HAS TO OFFER! GIVE ME A 2009 SUBSCRIPTION (STARTING TODAY, THANK GOD) FOR ONLY FORTY (40) DOLLARS (IN THE US, $40 US).


give $40 to rob mclennan, or mail:
c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7

regular notices are also sent out through an email list of Ottawa-area literary events. to get on the list, email me at az421@freenet.carleton.ca

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Ottawa: A Field Guide by rob mclennan

publisht in Ottawa by above/ground press for a reading at the Ottawa Art Gallery, September 25, 2008, as part of the exhibit Evidence: The Ottawa City Project, curated by Emily
Falvey.

$4

some of these pieces have appeared previously online as a Leaf Press "Monday Poem," as part of a feature on Anny Ballardini's Poet's Corner ― Fieralingue website, and on the author's own blog.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of over a dozen trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles
are the novella white (2007), the travel book Ottawa: The Unknown City (2008), the non-fiction titles subverting the lyric: essays (2008) and Alberta dispatch: interviews & writing from Edmonton (2008). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), Poetics.ca (with Stephen Brockwell) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He recently spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.com/

publisht in Ottawa by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, September 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, send $4 + $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Jeanette Lynes, Stephen Brockwell + Christine McNair reading!

three poets hosted by above/ground press & the small press action network - ottawa (span-o);

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan

Friday, October 17, 2008
doors 7pm, readings 7:30
at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs)
233 Armstrong (at Parkdale, right by the Parkdale Market)

readings by

Jeanette Lynes (Antigonish NS)
Stephen Brockwell (Ottawa ON)
+ Christine McNair (Ottawa ON)


Jeanette Lynes' fourth collection of poetry, It's Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield poems, has just been published by Freehand Books (2008); one poem from this collection can be heard live on you tube. Her fifth collection of poems, The New Blue Distance, will be published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2009 . Her fourth book of poems, The New Blue Distance, will be published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2008. A co-authored chapbook with Alison Calder will appear under the Jack Pine Books imprint in December, 2007. Jeanette has been a writer in residence at Saskatoon Public Library (2005-2006) and Northern Lights College (July, 2005). She is co-editor of The Antigonish Review, Poet Laureate of the Nova Scotia NDP (New Democratic Party), and an Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at St. Francis Xavier University.


Stephen Brockwell lives in Ottawa. He is the author of The Wire in Fences, The Cometology (ECW Press, 2001), Fruit Fly Geographic (ECW Press, 2004) and The Real Made Up (ECW Press, 2007). He has written reviews and articles for The Danforth Review, Rubicon and Books in Canada. Recent work has appeared in Arc, Prairie Fire, the Fiddlehead, the Antigonish Review, and Queen St Quarterly.


Christine McNair's work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, fireweed and Misunderstandings, as well as a recent above/ground press broadside. She won an honourable mention in the Eden Mills Literary Competition and second prize (poetry) in the 27th Atlantic Writing Competition. Her first publication was in a ninth grade English textbook. She apologises profusely to any students traumatised by her story or by the inane English class questions which were appended. She tries to pay the bills working as a book conservator in Ottawa.


info: rob mclennan at 613 239 0337 or az421 (at) freenet (dot) carleton (dot) ca

Thursday, August 21, 2008

upcoming reading: three poets with non-above/ground press items!

three poets & three new publications, hosted by above/ground press & the small press action network - ottawa (span-o);

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan

Saturday, September 13, 2008; 7:00pm (readings at 7:30) - 10:00pm
The Carleton Tavern (upstairs), 223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale), Ottawa, ON


readings & launches by
Marcus McCann (Ottawa)
Sandra Ridley (Ottawa)
+ Sachiko Murakami (Vancouver)

Marcus McCann was born in Hamilton and grew up in Southern Ontario. He's the editor of Capital Xtra, Ottawa's gay and lesbian news magazine. He was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award (2008) and won both the Rubicon Press Midwinter Chapbook contest (2008) and the University of Ottawa 48 Hour Novella Writing Contest (2006). Matrix Magazine included him in their The New Underground issue in 2008. His chapbooks include The tech/tonic suite (Rubicon Press, Edmonton, fall 2008), Force quit (Emergency Response Unit, Toronto, fall 208), petty illness leaflet (Onion Union, Ottawa, 2008), Heteroskeptical (above/ground, Ottawa, 2007) & So Long, Derrida (UESA, Ottawa, 2006). His first trade poetry collection is due in spring 2009 with Chaudiere Books.
http://marcusmccann.blogspot.com/2008/06/petty-illness-leaflet-marcus-mccann.html

Sandra Ridley is a Saskatchewan-born poet who lives in Ottawa. Lift: ghazals for C. (JackPine Press) is part of her first collection of poetry, entitled Downwinders, which won the 2008 Alfred G. Bailey Prize. Ridley was a Fringe Reader at the 2006 Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, and her work can be found in various Canadian journals including Arc, Grain, Prairie Fire, and Taddle Creek.
http://www.jackpinepress.com/

Sachiko Murakami received her MA in English Literature from Concordia in 2006. Her first collection of poems is The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks 2008). She lives in Vancouver where she is a member of the KootenaySchool of Writing collective and the managing editor of The Capilano Review.
http://www.talonbooks.com/index.cfm?event=titleDetails&ISBN=0889225796

info: rob mclennan at 613 239 0337 or az421 (at) freenet (dot) carleton (dot) ca

Sunday, June 22, 2008

DEPARTURES

fiction by:

Amanda Earl
Emily Falvey
Spencer Gordon
Kate Heartfield
rob mclennan
Wes Smiderle
+ Steve Zytveld
Departures comes out of a monthly fiction writer's workshop in Ottawa started in 2006 by Tina-Frances Trineer, with its first meeting December 6, 2006 at Cuppedia on Main Street, with early participants Tina, rob mclennan, Amanda Earl, Kate Heartfield and Josh Massey. Other members Emily Falvey, Steve Zytveld and Wes Smiderle were added in April, 2007, around the time Tina moved to Wakefield. Spencer Gordon joined in September, 2007.

Amanda Earl's sexually explicit fiction appears in anthologies by Cleis Press, Alyson Books, Thunder's Mouth Press, Carroll and Graf and in local magazines, The Puritan and Front & Centre. On line you can find her recent smut at Thaneros.com, Lucrezia Magazine (lucreziamagazine.com) and Lies With Occasional Truth (lwot.net). Her stories and musings on sex & sexuality can also be found at amanderotica.blogspot.com.

Emily Falvey is a writer, curator, and art critic currently living in Ottawa. Her fiction recently appeared in decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Chaudiere Books, 2007), and her essays and art criticism have been published by galleries and museums across Canada.

Spencer Gordon was born in 1984 in Thompson, Manitoba. Although he currently resides in Ottawa, Ontario, he will be attending the University of Toronto in the fall of 2008, taking an MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing. Recently, his fiction has appeared in zaum (previously Mandala). He is the co-editor and co-founder of The Puritan: Ottawa's Literary Prose Journal. Find his interviews with authors such as Robert Kroetsch and Guy Vanderhaeghe online at puritan-magazine.com. He can be reached at spencerkjgordon@gmail.com.

Kate Heartfield rode the OC Transpo beast for 11 years, before giving in and buying a car and a house in the country last year. When she isn't writing fiction, she writes editorials and columns for the Ottawa Citizen. Last year, she was a student in the Humber School for Writers correspondence program, where her mentor was Paul Quarrington.

rob mclennan recently returned to Ottawa after his tenure of writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. The author of over a dozen titles of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the novella white (The Mercury Press), the travel book Ottawa: The Unknown City (Arsenal Pulp Press) and subverting the lyric: essays (ECW Press). A writer, editor, publisher and organizer of the small press action network - ottawa (span-o), he regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Wes Smiderle is an Ottawa writer. He’s napped on buses, slept around on trains, snoozed at sea and drifted off at the wheel but he’s never been able to fall asleep on an airplane.

Steve Zytveld was born in Kamloops, BC, but has spent most of his life in Ottawa, where he currently lives with his wife Catherine in a cramped downtown apartment with their guinea pigs and thousands of books. He has been a writer of prose and verse, a peace activist, a labour activist, a performance artist, a Parliament Hill reporter, an editor, a publisher, a poster artist, an actor, and a scholar of mediaeval literature. He learned to ride a horse before he learned to drive a car. Nowadays he hosts the Dusty Owl Reading Series when he isn’t working on any of a number of writing projects, including a novel, The Passing of Arthur King, and a nonfiction work tentatively titled No Simple Highway: A History of The Prescott Highway. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including this one.

$6 / +$2 for postage/shipping
above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy;
mail all your money to:
rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

new from above/ground press: Peter F. Yacht Club #11

Edited & compiled & typeset & paid for by rob mclennan
May 2008 (Edmonton issue, part two)


With new work by various Yacht Club regulars & irregulars:

Douglas Barbour;
Jenna Butler;
Amanda Earl;
Jesse Patrick Ferguson;
Laurie Fuhr;
Lea Graham;
William Hawkins;
Karen Massey;
Marcus McCann;
rob mclennan;
Max Middle;
Sean Moreland;
Jennifer Mulligan;
Catherine Owen;
Pearl Pirie;
Roland Prevost;
Wes Smiderle;
Janice Tokar;

$5 / +$2 for postage/shipping
above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy; mail all your money to:
rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario Canada K1R 6R7

related links: information on issue #10 ; information on issue #9 ; information on issue #8 (Edmonton issue, part one); photos/report of the Ottawa launch of #8 ; information on issue #7 ; photos/report of the reading/regatta for issue #5 ; Amanda Earl's review of Laurie Fuhr's issue #5/6 (mis-numbered Calgary special) ; information on that issue ; 2008 subscription info w/ some backlist ;

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

new from above/ground press;

HOW TO EDIT
Chapter A.
by derek beaulieu
ALBERTA SERIES #8
8 pages, 8 1/2 x 11

produced in an edition of 200 numbered copies in Edmonton, Alberta by above/ground press as the final installment of above/ground press’ ALBERTA SERIES, April 2008.
designed by mdesnoyers

derek beaulieu [see his 12 or 20 questions here] lives in Calgary. he is the author of several books of poetry, the most recent being Chains by Paper Kite Press.

Mail all your money (payable to rob mclennan) to (before May 31):
rob mclennan, writer in residence
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
3-5 Humanities Centre
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5

(after June 1st)
858 Somerset Street West, main floor
Ottawa Ontario K1R 6R7

$4 (+ $2 for postage; outside Canada, $6+2$ US)
(while supplies last; produced in a numbered run of 200 copies)

above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy;

Friday, March 28, 2008

new from above/ground press: Peter F. Yacht Club #10

Edited & compiled & typeset & paid for by rob mclennan, in Edmonton AB
March 2008; “in by one, out by four”
$5 / +$2 for postage/shipping
above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy

with new writing by:

Jeff Carpenter

Trisia Eddy

Lainna Lane

+ rob mclennan
This issue comes out of an informal writing/social group that the four of us (all, but for myself + Lainna, completely unaware of each other previously) started within weeks of my arrival in Edmonton, coming together slowly from mid-September, 2007. The title makes reference to a previous publication of four poets in roughly the same format, in by one, out by four (suggesting just how quickly the little publication was put together) [see my note on such here] in Edmonton in 1980, featuring the poetry of then-Edmonton poets Douglas Barbour (the only one still here), George Melnyk (now in Calgary), Monty Reid (now in Ottawa) and Stephen Scobie (now in Victoria, BC). This little publication is dedicated to them—rob mclennan, March 08, Edmonton AB..

Jeff Carpenter is currently acting as Acting Director of the Alberta Research Group. National Anther is a sequence of acrostics using ten lines from Michael Palmer’s First Figure (1984). Several other constraints were built in to play off the book/folio form whilst riffing off some unlikely couplings from Canadian literature (and beyond). Reading aloud exercises tongues and lungs and minds’ Is. Fast as you can. ☺ Trisia Eddy lives and writes in and around Edmonton, Alberta. Her work has been broadcast on radio, and has appeared both online and in print, most recently with ditchpoetry.com, Perspectives Magazine, Existere, and fait accomplit. She is the founding editor of red nettle press, which released her chapbook, what if there's no weather, in 2007. An upcoming series of red nettle poets is set to be released in 2008. ☺ Lainna Lane has lived in Ottawa, Vancouver, and most recently Edmonton where she is very slowly completing her English and Comparative Literature degree at the University of Alberta. She finances this by working in an office tower guarded by peregrines. When not in office or school she enjoys traveling, working at Other Voices literary magazine, playing dodgeball, and mixing a mean mint julep. She has one publication in this year's student edition of the Olive Reading Series chapbook.☺ rob mclennan is the beginning and the end (or something); the author of thirteen trade poetry titles, he is the author of a novel (white, The Mercury Press) and two non-fiction titles (Ottawa: The Unknown City, Arsenal Pulp; subverting the lyric: essays, ECW Press), and will be launching another on the University of Alberta Bookstore’s espresso book machine in late May. He is (and was) the 2007-8 writer in residence at the University of Alberta in Edmonton☺

coming in May; The Peter F. Yacht Club #11, "Edmonton issue" part two!

Monday, March 10, 2008

new from above/ground press:

WEDNESDAYS'
by Douglas Barbour
ALBERTA SERIES #7
42 pages, 8 1/2 x 11

produced in an edition of 200 numbered copies in Edmonton, Alberta by above/ground press a part of above/ground press’ ALBERTA SERIES, March 2008.
designed by mdesnoyers

Douglas Barbour [see his 12 or 20 questions here], poet, critic, and reviewer, is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Alberta, where he has taught creative writing, poetry, Canadian literature, twentieth century poetry and poetics, and science fiction and fantasy. Books of poetry include Visible Visions: The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour (NeWest Press 1984), which won Alberta's Stephan Stephannson Award for poetry, and Story for a Saskatchewan Night (rdc press 1989). More recently, Fragmenting Body etc. (NeWest Press 2000), Breath Takes (Wolsak & Wynn 2002), A Flame on the Spanish Stairs (greenboathouse books 2003), and Continuations, with Sheila E. Murphy (University of Alberta Press 2006). Critical works include Daphne Marlatt and Her Works, John Newlove and His Works, bpNichol and His Works (ECW Press 1992), and Michael Ondaatje (Twayne Publishers 1993). Lyric/Anti-lyric: essays on contemporary poetry appeared from NeWest Press in 2001. Transformations of Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English appeared from Adam Marszalek in Poland in 2005. Essays have appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada, the United States, Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, Denmark. He has delivered papers at conferences on Canadian Studies and modern poetry, in Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, Scotland, and, of course, Canada. He was inaugurated into the City of Edmonton Cultural Hall of Fame in 2003.

Mail all your money (payable to rob mclennan) to:
rob mclennan, writer in residence
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta3-5 Humanities Centre
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5

$6 (+ $2 for postage; outside Canada, $6+2$ US)
(while supplies last; produced in a numbered run of 200 copies)

above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy;
2008 subscriptions still available

Sunday, March 9, 2008

new from above/ground press:

STRUM OF UNSEEN
by Pete Smith (Kamloops BC)
$4

[after Fred Douglas’ book Menu For Sunset: An Apparent Story Illustrated With Pictures and his photo/text exhibition Menu For Sunset.]

publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

Pete Smith: Unlettered & unfettered. Migrated from England to Kamloops in 1974. Is a retired psychiatric nurse. Chapbooks include 20/20 Vision and cross of green hollow (Wild Honey Press, Eire), Harm's Length (Cambridge, UK). Long poem sequences, Mother Tongue: Father Silence (Tinfish, Hawaii); CLIV (Alterran Poetry Assemblage); Evacuation Procedures & Second Horace (Great Works). Poems in W, The Gig, The Capilano Review (forthcoming). Essays & reviews in Agenda (London, UK); The Gig (Toronto); The Paper (Sheffield, UK); at jacket #9; & forthcoming in Crayon (USA), The Gig 19 (improvisations on the works of Deanna Ferguson) & a chapter in The Salt Companion to John James (Cambridge, UK).

Saturday, March 8, 2008

new from above/ground press:

The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman
by Amanda Earl
$4

"a response to The Sad Phoenician by Robert Kroetsch, Completed Field Notes, The University of Alberta Press, 2000

italicized phrases are taken directly from the above long poem, which i loved and the rest is written in the spirit of the poem in the voice of a woman who developed a thing for adverbs"

also still available:
E l e a n o r (2007)
by Amanda Earl
$4

publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

Amanda Earl's poetry is forthcoming in Rampike, The New Chief Tongue and Van Gogh's Ear. above/ground press published her second chapbook Eleanor in 2007. Her poetry has also been recently featured in ottawater.com, Ditchpoetry.com and Unlikelystories.org and published by Vancouver's pooka press, Ottawa's Peter F. Yacht Club and in Calgary's Holy Beep! Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal. You can read about Ottawa's literary shenanigans on her blog: amandaearl.blogspot.com.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

new from above/ground press:

Samuel Hearne 1745-1792

Even at this hour I cannot
reflect on the transactions
of that horrid day
Without shedding tears

curse of canada
by Gregory Betts (St. Catharines ON)

$4

also still available:
The Cult of David Thompson (2005)
by Gregory Betts
$4

publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

Gregory Betts [see his 12 or 20 questions here] is the author of If Language (2005), and Haikube (2006). He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he edits PRECIPICe magazine, curates The Grey Borders Reading Series, and teaches Canadian and Avant-Garde Literature at Brock University.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

new from above/ground press:

map of edmonton (rossdale flats)

1.


a thin blue line, eight thousand
itinerant turns

of the sun featured earth

spark, a long heat of fiction

its not a discovery
if they knew

drunk, cross
the high level bridge

festooned in air

vacant lot between building
& dance club

we dance, & we dance

just cause we have to

more than we want

map of edmonton (rossdale flats)
by rob mclennan (Ottawa)
$2

publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, even though he was born there, once. The author of over a dozen books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, most recently Ottawa: The Unknown City (Arsenal Pulp Press), subverting the lyric: essays (ECW Press) and white (The Mercury Press), he is currently spending the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. He regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other bits of nonsense on his increasingly clever blog: robmclennan.blogspot.com

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

new from above/ground press:

sink in, your oath in the boathouse

to attend, float
a Kootenay-protection

blue sticker glint
connote blue o sh

unenergy is in set
of shoulders

loss is: the sighs up
and down the situ

float where you loathe
in a personal verboten

be the ignored goatherd
wolf spines are every bough

fine. at the promontory of speech
the shifty-footed lengthening line

the cash
sheers

do a task
to a table, pardon –

mean the counter
gruel-cruel the inkless pen

hotel mortifica
shun panic

oath in the boathouse
by Pearl Pirie (Ottawa)
$4


publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

Pearl Pirie has been published in Womb, 1cent, ottawater 4.0, Best of MiPo Cafe Cafe, by Pooka Press and at culturalshifts.com. Her poetry is generally forthcoming, except when it isn't.
She blogs. This is her 6th chapbook, the 1st not self-published.

Friday, February 22, 2008

new from above/ground press

Forcing Bloom
Jenna Butler
ALBERTA SERIES #6
24 pages, 8 1/2 x 11

produced in an edition of 200 numbered copies in Edmonton, Alberta by above/ground press a part of above/ground press’ ALBERTA SERIES, February 2008.

designed by mdesnoyers

Jenna Butler [see her 12 or 20 questions here] was born in Norwich, England in 1980, but has spent most of her life on the prairies of western Canada. The landscapes of the prairies and mountains – their severity and incredible richness – feature prominently in her poetry and fiction.

Butler’s work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, journals and anthologies in Canada and abroad. Her poetry has garnered, among others, the James Patrick Folinsbee Prize, and has been produced by the CBC. She is the editor of more than twenty collections of poetry in Canada and Europe, and is the founding editor of Rubicon Press.

She currently makes her home in Edmonton, Alberta, where she lives with her husband, and works as a teacher, editor, and book reviewer.

Mail all your money (payable to rob mclennan) to:

rob mclennan, writer in residence
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta3-5 Humanities Centre
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5

$6 (+ $2 for postage; outside Canada, $6+2$ US)
(while supplies last; produced in a numbered run of 200 copies)

above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy;

Monday, January 28, 2008

new from above/ground press

FYRE
Catherine Owen

ALBERTA SERIES #5
42 pages, 8 1/2 x 11

produced in an edition of 200 numbered copies in Edmonton, Alberta by above/ground press a part of above/ground press’ ALBERTA SERIES, January 2008.

designed by mdesnoyers

Catherine Owen [see her 12 or 20 questions here] has been publishing and performing poetry since 1993. Her work has appeared in periodicals such as The Dalhousie Review and Poetry Salzburg. Titles include: Somatic – The Life and Work of Egon Schiele (Exile Editions 1998), nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award, The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak and Wynn, 02), shortlisted for the BC Book Prize, and her new collections, Shall: ghazals (Wolsak and Wynn, 06) and Cusp/detritus (Anvil Press, 06), both longlisted for the Relit Prize, while the latter made the shortlist for the George Ryga award for socially conscious literature. A selection from Seeing Lessons, on the pioneer photographer, Mattie Gunterman was recently nominated for the CBC Literary Awards. Her poems have been translated into Italian (Caneide with Joe Rosenblatt, 05) and Korean. She has a Masters degree in English (Simon Fraser University, 01), collaborates with painters/dancers, practices photography, and plays bass/sings in the blackmetal band, INHUMAN.

Mail all your money (payable to rob mclennan) to:

rob mclennan, writer in residence
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
3-5 Humanities Centre
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5

$6 (+ $2 for postage; outside Canada, $6+2$ US)
(while supplies last; produced in a numbered run of 200 copies)

above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy; 2008 subscriptions still available

Sunday, January 20, 2008

new from above/ground press

Dirty Work
Natalie Simpson
ALBERTA SERIES #4
42 pages, 8 1/2 x 11


produced in an edition of 200 numbered copies in Edmonton, Alberta by above/ground press a part of above/ground press’ ALBERTA SERIES, December 2007.

designed by mdesnoyers

Natalie Simpson’s first collection of poetry, accrete or crumble, was published by LINEbooks in 2006. She has also published chapbooks through housepress, MODL press, aboveground press, NO press, and edits all over. More of her poetry can be found in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press) and Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry (Talonbooks). Natalie [see her 12 or 20 questions here] is a former managing editor of filling Station magazine, and she lives in Calgary.

An earlier version of Dirty Work appeared as a limited edition chapbook with No Press (#14), Calgary, in 2005.

Mail all your money (payable to rob mclennan) to:
rob mclennan, writer in residence
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
3-5 Humanities Centre
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5

$6 (+ $2 for postage; outside Canada, $6+2$ US)
(while supplies last; produced in a numbered run of 200 copies)

above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy; 2008 subscriptions still available

Thursday, January 3, 2008