Friday, February 28, 2020

new from above/ground press: Montcorbier, by Guy Birchard

Montcorbier
Guy Birchard
$5



In this the thirtieth year of my life
Having stomached all disgrace
Neither most foolish nor half wise
Notwithstanding all the clouts
Received
At the hands of Thibault d'Aussigny
Bishop though he be, making the sign of the cross
Down the street, he's no one to me. 

Nor Monsignor nor my lord
I had from him nowt but shite
I owe him nor fealty nor homage
Am nor his serf nor bitch
Who fed me on corn dodgers
And water one whole summer
Proved pure stingy, "beneficent" less than tight,
God render unto him what he to me. 

And if anyone objects
And calls this blasphemy
Well, feel me, it aint idle
Bad-mouthing
I have worse to say
If that's mercy he was showing
Jesus king of paradise
Commend, body and soul, the like to him.


published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy


Shy Canadianismo by nature (“having none hath no care to defend it”), Guy Birchard has been just a mother tongue poetry bum these many years with small official second language.  

This is Birchard’s second chapbook with above/ground press, after VALEDICTIONS (2019).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

new from above/ground press: Light Waves The Leaves, by Razielle Aigen

Light Waves The Leaves
Razielle Aigen
$5


Hello , World !

i like the way life collects itself around you . wind & sun  .                           you say
i’m in the mood of the night  & then it’s like “ hello world ! ” when our faces touch a touch , like the fetal zone inside a womb where there’s room . warm . womblike , womb life . lifelike . light cast on the dark places where we touch         in the night . reprogramming our basic syntax ,        morning moods our faces ,    a resemblance of who we might have been before we closed our eyes  . blank spaces         just there in the where where life collects itself around you . wind . sun . mood . womb . face .  we will have been         neither happy   nor sad                   like a mother with no hands collecting  life 
around 
     you .
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Razielle Aigen
is a Montreal-born writer and artist. Her poems appear in Entropy, Contemporary Verse 2, Deluge, Ghost City Press, Train: a poetry journal, Bad Dog Review, The Anti-Languorous Project, Talking About Strawberries all of the Time, and elsewhere. Razielle holds a B.A. in History and Contemporary Studies from Dalhousie/King’s University, and is an alumna of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Friday, February 14, 2020

new from above/ground press: Poems for Lunch Poems at SFU, by rob mclennan

Poems for Lunch Poems at SFU
rob mclennan
$5

Four poems for Kathleen Fraser

1.

If I were to pin my favourite quotes,
this wall might collapse.

Stitched from fragments, and held,
for an instant.

Everything destroyed, Spicer wrote,
must be tossed.

There is always a truth, you wrote,
to such restlessness.


2.

The elegy speaks to an absence
both unexpected

and abrupt. Applies
lyric pressure. She speaks to me

in sentences. Solitude

as capital. Echo, across
these crystalline structures. Poem

as carved diamond, or
a certain uneven panic.


3.

The heart, in whatever language, wants, or
does not care. Incorporate this into what

we have already learned. The water heater
sound like a bird. The furnace

sound like a bird. Everything
sounds like a bird.


published in Ottawa by above/ground press, in part for a reading with Christine McNair in Vancouver on February 19, 2020 as part of Lunch Poems at SFU, with special thanks to Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Simon Fraser University and The League of Canadian Poets.
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry titles include A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and the perpetually-forthcoming Household items (Salmon Publishing). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He is “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He 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 robmclennan.blogspot.com

This is mclennan’s sixty-second above/ground press chapbook, following Somewhere in-between / cloud (2019), Study of a fox (2018), snow day (2018) and It’s still winter (2017).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

new from above/ground press: Thaumaturgy, by Anthony Etherin

Thaumaturgy
Anthony Etherin
$5

WINTER SOLSTICE



Anagrammed Lines


Winter Solstice:
Written close is
woe. Strict lines
wrestle in stoic
selections, writ
low in its secret.



Homonolic Lines

Winter Solstice:
Silver shimmers
needle darkness.
Gilded lanterns
gently splinter
leaden evenings....



Homovocalic Lines

Winter Solstice:
Nights echo, wide.
In the cosmic web,
lives collide.
In the low light, we
find the old rites.


Many of the poems in this collection are palindromes — either by letter, by pairs of letters, by triples of letters, or by word. One poem is an aelindrome, which means it palindromically parses its letters in accordance with a premeditated sequence — for example, the phrase “trap no rat” is aelindromic “in 123”, since its letters are parsed according to the associated palindromic sequence 12321: [t]1[ra]2[p no]3[ra]2[t]1.

Of the non-palindromic poems, some are composed of perfectly anagrammed lines. One piece (“Barely Time”) comprises three anagrammed haiku.

Some poems are minimalist sonnets — three Petrarchan, one Shakespearean and one Spenserian. The Shakespearean sonnet (a tetragram-sonnet) uses only four-letter words.

The other constraints are:

Triolet: A traditional form, of rhyme scheme ABaAabAB (where uppercase letters indicate repeated lines). Uniconsonantal Haiku: A haiku using only one consonant. Homonolic lines: Lines using words with the same letter-lengths. Homovocalic lines: Lines using the same vowels, in the same order, while varying consonants. Beaux Présents: Lines using only the letters found in their first word. Univocalic Haiku: A haiku using only one vowel. Beau Présent: A poem using only the letters found in its title.

Another poem uses only words that contain the consecutive letters “the”.

Cover: “An Incantation” by John Collier (1887).

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Anthony Etherin
is an experimental formalist poet, a publisher, and a sometime musician. For more of his poetry, find him on Twitter, @Anthony_Etherin, and via anthonyetherin.wordpress.com

This is Etherin's second chapbook with above/ground press, after Danse Macabre (2018).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com