some author activity: mclennan, Ladouceur, McElroy, Maguire, Hancock + Massey,

rob mclennan has a new poem over at The Nervous Breakdown, and is the first to respond to Amish Trivedi's "Where Do You Write, My Lovely"?; writer Ben Ladouceur is interviewed about the OTHER MEN web series; Gil McElroy is interviewed over at the Touch the Donkey blog; Shannon Maguire is interviewed over at The Great Canadian Writer's Craft; Brecken Hancock answers the "12 or 20 questions" questionnaire; and Karen Massey has a new poem in a special Bloomsday issue of The Found Poetry Review.

"poem" broadside #328 : "jwcurry's Map Drawers," by Anita Dolman

Weight of papers presses

the warped floor, latticework of rotten

boards bend, threatening

to pop through the ceiling

of the driving school below

his greybird Chinatown walk-up,

metalweight of mapminder’s cabinets

piled heavy by years

of carefully registered ephemera

We’ll have to evacuate these words

to lower ground,

flee them to the suburbs

like so much paperwork

and furnishings before

From the carpeted guest room of our bungalow,

I hear other writers’ intentions

shift inside the dented columbarium;

there’s a party drifting sleeplessly in there

from drawer to drawer, whose guests and intimacies

I have accepted I will never comprehend entirely,

not the way I would want to,

no matter how often I sneak in to pull the handles

and watch them whisper their secrets

to each other.

jwcurry’s Map Drawers
by Anita Dolman
produced for the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair, June 2014
above/ground press broadside #328

This is Dolman's fourth above/ground press publication, after the previous "poem" broadsides "Shoes" (#175; summer 2003) and "From the Triptychs series (ongoing)" (#201; 2004) and the chapbook Scalpel, tea and shot glass (2004).

Anita Dolman’s poetry and flash fiction have appeared in journals and magazines throughout Canada and the United States, including, most recently, in Grain, Bywords.ca, The Antigonish Review, ottawater and The Peter F. Yacht Club. Her poetry appeared in the 2006 Chaudiere Books anthology Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets. Her short story “Happy Enough” is available as an e-book (Morning Rain Publishing, Burlington, 2014). You can follow her on Twitter @ajdolman.

some author activity: Schapira, Hancock, Abel, McFadden + Reed,

Kate Schapira has a new essay in the "On Writing" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; Brecken Hancock responds to Open Book: Ontario's "dirty dozen" questionnaire; there's a new interview with Jordan Abel at Weird Canada; David W. McFadden writes on being diagnosed with Alzheimer's for Toronto Life; and Marthe Reed reviews Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader over at Jacket2.

Susanne Dyckman at the Bay Area Poetry Marathon

above/ground press author Susanne Dyckman reads this weekend as part of the infamous Bay Area Poetry Marathon in San Francisco, alongside Christopher Daniels, John Sakkis, Anna Soteria Morrison, Denise Leto, Monica Regan, Eleni Stecopoulos, Alana Siegel and Claiborne McDonald. For more information, check out the link here.

some author activity: Schapira, Armantrout, dueck, Abel, Adams + Samuels,

Kate Schapira sets up a booth to offer 'climate anxiety counseling', and even has a new poem up at Sink Review; Rae Armantrout has a new poem up at Poets.org; nathan dueck has some new work up at The Winnipeg Review; Jordan Abel on the technicalities of performing poetry; Carrie Olivia Adams has a new poem in  TYPO #20; and Lisa Samuels has a poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series.

Robert Hogg reading in Kemptville, with Beth Follett + Stan Dragland

above/ground press author Robert Hogg, author of from Lamentations (above/ground press, 2012), will be doing a rare public reading with Newfoundland-based writers Beth Follett and Stan Dragland at the North Grenville Public Library (Norenberg Branch) on Saturday, June 21, 2014 at 12:30pm.

An event not to be missed!

The North Grenville Public Library is located at 1 Water Street, Kemptville, Ontario, a mere hour or so drive south-west-ish from Ottawa.

new from above/ground press: Many forms in water, by Rachel Moritz

Many forms in water
Rachel Moritz
$4

Many forms in water may also be found in clouds


In the turning season, your one clay divided from hers. Like swans, riding a tourniquet of wind. Winter’s aureole, cleft before a fallen oak whose breath is your only explanation. Whose path yields the cabin doorway, hard of hand on burnished leaves. And whose water gathers from the pump, the dark maker. Glued to a world your senses decided, as when millions of years earlier the silence of nature broke.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Rachel Moritz is the author of three chapbooks: Elementary Rituals (Albion Books, 2013) Night-Sea (New Michigan Press, 2008) and The Winchester Monologues (New Michigan Press, 2005). Her poems have been published in American Letters and Commentary, Aufgabe, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, 26, TYPO, dusie and VOLT. She lives in Minneapolis, where she edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review and publishes a chaplet series from WinteRed Press.

She also has work in the first issue of Touch the Donkey.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Waldrop, Robertson, Smith, Massey + Poe,

Rosmarie Waldrop's "Inalienable writes (PoemTalk #47)" was recently featured at Jacket2; Lisa Robertson writes on Peter Culley over at Lemonhound; and audio from Robertson's reading in Vancouver on March 19, 2014 at The Western Front is now online at The Capilano Review; Jessica Smith writes on Susan Howe over at Literary Mothers; Karen Massey's "fuse," an erasure poem based on Charles Bukowski’s poem "funhouse," is now online at Bukowski on Wry; and Deborah Poe reviews Meredith Stricker's Mistake over at Jacket2.

above/ground press at the ottawa small press book fair (and our new poetry journal!

Once again, above/ground press will be participating in the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which will be happening on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at the Jack Purcell Community Centre. If you've been following the blog, you know there have been a ton of new publications since the previous fair last fall, so why not come by and see what the press has been up to? You can even ask about our new poetry journal, Touch the Donkey, quietly invented a couple of weeks back (the second issue is scheduled for July).