above/ground press in Toronto : a report,

[Braydon Beaulieu, reading] above/ground press recently celebrated twenty-three years via an event in Toronto [don't forget the Ottawa event for same next week!] with readings and launches by above/ground press authors Braydon Beaulieu, Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Sean Braune, Stephen Brockwell, Sharon Harris, Hugh Thomas and Aaron Tucker at The Steady Bar and Cafe. Thanks so much to all who participated!

[the crowd] The crowd was good, with a variety of Toronto writers (and non-writers, most of whom I didn't know) attending, including Ken Sparling, Dale Smith, Natalie Zina Walschots, Kateri Lanthier, Richard Greene, Stan Rogal, Hazel Millar, Shannon Bramer, Jay MillAr, Teresa Yang, m erskine, as well as poet Doyali Islam, who generously donated her time and energy to work both door and book table. The venue, of course, worked perfectly, with thanks to them, as well as to Aaron Tucker, who secured it for me.

[Stephen Brockwell] Stephen, of course, was good enough to speak briefly to the volume and enthusiasm of the press over the years, especially given how close the press is to eight hundred publications (a dozen or so, I'd say, and still counting). Sometimes I'm even baffled by the amount of material I've produced through the press, although to me, the first decade is somehow the most impressive (that's when the struggle was far more than it has been since).

[Sean Braune] I was thinking back across the years, and this might have actually been the third above/ground press event I've organized in Toronto, and not the second. My records show an event from November, 1997 with myself,  Natalee Caple and Stephen Cain (both of whom were reading from recently-released above/ground press titles) along with Ottawa poet Jim Larwill, and my recollections suggest another event around the same period, with Una McDonnell and Stan Rogal (both of whom were reading from recently-released above/ground press titles; see his listed here) and Ottawa poet b stephen harding. Both of those events were held at the Imperial Library Pub on Dundas Street.

[Hugh Thomas] It almost makes me think I should be attempting anniversary events and/or general above/ground press readings in Toronto a bit more often. Although at least two in the crowd didn't understand, at first, that above/ground is an Ottawa-based publisher, and wondered why I'd pointed out the rarity of the Toronto above/ground press reading. Heck, at this point, I probably have enough authors around that I could easily do more than a couple of cities, whether Montreal, Vancouver or even an American city or two. The one time I did an above/ground press feature in New York, as part of the Boog City series in January 2004 (for the sake of the tenth anniversary anthology), we had to fly everyone in (Brockwell, myself and Clare Latremouille).

[Hazel, Shannon and Ashley-Elizabeth at the end of the evening] The high points were plenty and the performances great; the highlights would also include the fact that I hadn't actually heard Braune or Beaulieu (now that he's relocated from Calgary to Toronto) read before (both of whom are also reading at the Ottawa event), the stellar reading that Hugh Thomas gave, or even the fact that Shannon Bramer appeared (I've barely seen her in years; remember that chapbook I produced of hers, moons back?).

[myself with Dale Smith and Stephen Brockwell, pre-reading] A lovely bonus to the day was the fact that I was able to meet up for a pre-reading drink with Dale Smith at the Duke of York, a wee pub just close to our hotel. Stephen Brockwell met up with us later, once he'd arrived via rail.

some author activity: Pirie, Kaminski, Collis + Young,

Pearl Pirie gets a good write-up in The Kitchissippi Times; an audio interview with Megan Kaminski now exists over at Radio Free Albion; Stephen Collis is interviewed over at thecanadaproject; and Geoffrey Young has a new essay up at ottawa poetry newsletter.

Kimberly Ann Southwick reviews Sarah Mangold's A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (2016)

Kimberly Ann Southwick reviewed three recent chapbooks over at the Ploughshares blog, including Sarah Mangold's A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (above/ground press, 2016), a chapbook still very much available. Thanks so much! This is the second review of Mangold's latest, after Greg Bem reviewed such over at Queen Mob's Teahouse. You can see Southwick's full review here.

In A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (above/ground press, March 2016), Sarah Mangold deals mainly with landscape: clouds, mountains, trees, and how these, though so different from state to state, country to country, render themselves similar in ways that help connect, particularly to each other but also to art, as in “:Originality Is a Working Assumption:” when she writes, “cloud a punctuation / mark torn apart by a miracle: extract saint from common space.” The saint here is birthed by the mark of something common (a cloud) but simultaneously extraordinary (the miracle).

Mangold’s universals are most often found in nature and the idea of it as a system. In “Speak and I shall baptize you,” the poem containing the line that is the chapbook’s title, she writes: “the history of the system is itself a system / rent in human space / liberated from all lawns.” These lines help lead a reader to the understanding that when we look at and try to understand the earth and its creatures—including humans—no matter our expertise, education, or career choice, we can only ever do so from our own present reality.

Touch the Donkey : back issue sale,

JOIN THE CROWD! Until September 15, 2016, why not pick up any five of the first ten issues of the quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] for only $20? (plus shipping, of course)

Touch the Donkey #1 : new work by Camille Martin, Eric Baus, Hailey Higdon, rob mclennan, Norma Cole, Elizabeth Robinson, Rachel Moritz, Gil McElroy and Pattie McCarthy. Touch the Donkey #2 : new work by Julie Carr, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Pearl Pirie, David Peter Clark, Susan Holbrook, Phil Hall and Robert Swereda. Touch the Donkey #3 : new work by Gil McElroy, j/j hastain, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, Susan Briante and D.G. Jones. Touch the Donkey #4 : new work by Maureen Alsop, Stan Rogal, Laura Mullen, Jessica Smith, Lise Downe, Kirsten Kaschock, Gary Barwin, Chris Turnbull, Nikki Sheppy, Lisa Jarnot. Touch the Donkey #5 : new work by Edward Smallfield, Rob Manery, Elizabeth Robinson, lary timewell, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, ryan fitzpatrick, Christine McNair. Touch the Donkey #6 : new work by Lola Lemire Tostevin, D.G. Jones, Aaron Tucker, Deborah Poe, Jason Christie, Jeffrey Jullich, Jennifer Krovonet, Kayla Czaga, Jordan Abel. Touch the Donkey #7 : new work by Stan Rogal, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Suzanne Zelazo. Touch the Donkey #8 : new work by Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Gil McElroy. Touch the Donkey #9 : new work by Stephen Collis, Laura Sims, Paul Zits, Eric Schmaltz, Gregory Betts, Anne Boyer, François Turcot (trans. Erín Moure, Sarah Cook. Touch the Donkey #10 : new work by Meredith Quartermain, Mathew Timmons, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Amanda Earl.

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

Be sure to check out the Touch the Donkey blog for some sixty interviews (and counting) with a variety of contributors!

And of course, subscriptions for future (quarterly) issues are available as well! Five issues for $30 (CAN/US). Watch for the issue #11, due to land October 15th!

And check out our Facebook group for ongoing interview and issue notifications!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/664316740327618/

Touch the Donkey. Everywhere you want to be.
http://www.touchthedonkey.blogspot.ca/

the above/ground press 23rd anniversary (Ottawa) reading! September 10, 2016

above/ground press presents readings and other such by an array of poets:

Stephanie Bolster (Montreal)
Braydon Beaulieu (Toronto)
Sean Braune (Toronto)
+ Pearl Pirie (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by above/ground press editor/publisher rob mclennan
[and don't forget the Toronto event, August 25th!]
7:30pm, Saturday, September 10, 2016
Black Squirrel Books & Café
1073 Bank St, Ottawa

$5 at the door; includes a copy of a recent above/ground press title

Stephanie Bolster is the author of four books of poetry, the first of which, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Signal/Véhicule, 1998), won the Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Awards. Her latest book, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (Brick Books, 2011) was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award and more recent work was a finalist for the Canada Writes/CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal, where she also coordinates the writing program.

She is the author of three above/ground press chapbook: Three Bloody Words (1996), Biodome (2006) and Three Bloody Words : Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2016).

Braydon Beaulieu is a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary where he studies creative writing, poetics, science fiction, and games. He lives in Toronto.

He is the author of the above/ground press chapbook ERASURE: A Short Story (2016).

Sean Braune’s theoretical work has been published in Postmodern Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, Canadian Literature, symplokē, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in ditch, The Puritan, Rampike, and Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere.

His first chapbook, produced by above/ground press, is the vitamins of an alphabet (2016).

Pearl Pirie does bookish and lookish things. She has made a bunch of chapbooks & you probably should too.  (Bio is Italian for speaker’s corner, right?) For those who answer no, Pirie has been published in 3 books, a few anthologies, many chapbooks and has a renewed love of canoes. www.pearlpirie.com has resources for templates.

She is the author of six above/ground press publications, including the chapbooks oath in the boathouse (2008), vertigoheel for the dilly (2014), today’s woods (2014) and the brand-new sex in sevens (2016).

rob mclennan's King Kong (2016) makes Rusty Priske's Reading List

Ottawa poet Rusty Priske was good enough to mention rob mclennan's King Kong (2016) as part of a recent reading list, as well as a short write-up on why it took "so long" for mclennan to be inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. Thanks much! And of course, copies of the chapbook are still very much available.

Rhoda Rosenfeld on lary timewell's Odds Are

Carol Reid was good enough to send along this comment by Vancouver artist Rhoda Rosenfeld, who said this on Facebook about lary timewell's Odds Are (2016). Thanks much! And of course, the book is still very much available.

the above/ground press 23rd anniversary (Toronto) reading! August 25, 2016

above/ground press presents readings and other such by an array of poets:

Braydon Beaulieu (Toronto)
Ashley-Elizabeth Best (Kingston)
Sean Braune (Toronto)
Stephen Brockwell (Ottawa)
Sharon Harris (Toronto)
+ Aaron Tucker (Toronto)
with the possibility of an unnamed (for now) special guest reader,

lovingly hosted by above/ground press editor/publisher rob mclennan
7:30pm, Thursday, August 25, 2016
The Steady Cafe & Bar
1051 Bloor St W.
www.TheSteadyCafe.com

$5 at the door; includes a copy of a recent above/ground press title

Braydon Beaulieu is a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary where he studies creative writing, poetics, science fiction, and games. He lives in Toronto.

He is the author of the above/ground press chapbook ERASURE: A Short Story (2016).

Ashley-Elizabeth Best is from Cobourg and now lives and writes in Kingston. Her work has appeared in CV2, Berfrois, Grist, dusie, Ambit Magazine and The Literary Review of Canada. Her debut poetry collection Slow States of Collapse was shortlisted for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and was published with ECW Press in April of 2016.

She is the author of the above/ground press chapbook Now You Have Many Legs To Stand On (2015).

Sean Braune’s theoretical work has been published in Postmodern Culture, Journal of Modern Literature, Canadian Literature, symplokē, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in ditch, The Puritan, Rampike, and Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere.

His first chapbook, produced by above/ground press, is the vitamins of an alphabet (2016).

Stephen Brockwell is an Ottawa poet and small business schlub. His poems are forthoming in Arc and Inwords. He is preparing workshops on poetry and philosophy for the Ottawa Public Library. His chapbook Where Did You See It Last? appeared in June with Ottawa's Textualis Press, and he has a new poetry title out this fall—All of Us Reticent, Here, Together—with Mansfield Press.

He is the author of four chapbooks from above/ground press: Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films (2014), Excerpts from Impossible Books: The Crawdad Cantos (2012), Impossible Books (the Carleton Installment) (2010) and Marin County Poems (2001). He had work reprinted in the anniversary anthology Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013).

Sharon Harris is a Toronto artist/writer whose poems have been anthologized in The Broadview Introduction to Literature, The Last Vispo, and Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. She is the author of chapbooks from bookthug, In Case of Emergency Press, and above/ground, and her first full-length collection, Avatar, was published by The Mercury Press. She has written articles for Geist, The Globe & Mail, and Open Book Toronto;  is a past contributor to Torontoist and Word Magazine; and her work has been published in The National Post, dANDelion, The Capilano Review, Drunken Boat, The Volta, broken pencil, and Vallum. I Love You Toronto, her exhibition of photographs, appeared in newspapers, magazines, and on radio and television across Canada.

She is the author of the above/ground press chapbook LIKE (2014) and “More Fun With ‘Pataphysics” STANZAS #43 (2006). She had work reprinted in the anniversary anthology Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013).

Aaron Tucker’s first full collection of poetry, punchlines, was published by Mansfield Press in Spring 2015. Additionally, he is one of the co-creators of the ChessBard (chesspoetry.com), an app that that translates chess games into poems. His collection of essays Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in July of 2014. By day, he is a professor in the English department at Ryerson University where he is currently teaching essay writing and digital literacy to first year students; by night, he is working on learning chess in between watching his beloved Raptors lose games. You can reach him atucker[at]ryerson[dot]ca.

He is the author of the above/ground press chapbooks punchlines (2013) and apartments, section three (2010). He had work reprinted in the anniversary anthology Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013).

some author activity: Newlove, Clarke, Earl + Best,

Both John Newlove (by Shazia Hafiz Ramji) and George Elliott Clarke (by Jeffrey Mackie) have new write-ups on their work as part of the Brick Books Celebration of Canadian Poetry; Amanda Earl is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Ashley-Elizabeth Best is interviewed over at The Town Crier.

some author activity: Earl, Christie, eckhoff + Kronovet,

Amanda Earl has new work up at h&; Jason Christie has some new work and a statement featured at Drunken Boat; kevin mcpherson eckhoff is interviewed over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; and parts of Jennifer Kronovet's above/ground press title are reprinted over at Carrie Etter's Sudden Prose.

Phil Hall and Natalie Morrill read together in Kemptville, ON: Saturday August 6, 2016

The Factory Reading Series: Quartermain, jarvis + Reid, September 1, 2016

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:
The Factory Reading Series:

Meredith Quartermain (Vancouver)
jenna jarvis (Ottawa)
+ Monty Reid (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Thursday, September 1, 2016
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

Meredith Quartermain’s [pictured] second novel, U Girl, will be published by Talonbooks Aug/Sept 2016. She is also the author of I, Bartleby: short stories; Recipes from the Red Planet (finalist for a BC Book Award (Fiction)); Nightmarker (finalist for a Vancouver Book Award); Rupert's Land: a novel; and Vancouver Walking (winner of a BC Book Award (Poetry)).

jenna jarvis is a poet and a barista. her writing has appeared in puritan magazine and keep this bag away from children, as well as in various zines and microblogs, including a recent above/ground press broadside.

Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, worked for many years in Alberta, BC and Quebec, and now lives in Ottawa.  His Meditatio Placentae was published by Brick Books in 2016.  Previous books include Garden (Chaudiere), The Luskville Reductions (Brick), and CrawlSpace (Anansi) as well as chapbooks such as Kissing Bug (Phafours), Moan Coach (above/ground) and Site Conditions (Apt 9).  His frequently-modified A Gran Zoo remains forthcoming from BuschekBooks and his current project, Intelligence, is nearing completion.  He has won Alberta’s Stephansson Award for Poetry on three occasions, the Lampman Award, two national magazine awards, and is a 3-time nominee for the Governor-General’s Award.  He is currently the Managing Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and Festival Director at VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.