some author activity: Barwin, Kratz, mclennan, Prime + Hofmann,

husband and wife Gary Barwin and Beth Bromberg are featured in the Toronto Star; Al Kratz is zoom-interviewed by Constance Malloy as part of her "In Conversation" series; rob mclennan has a new poem up at his blog; Tom Prime has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; and Ava Hofmann has some new work posted at Sulfur.

new from above/ground press: The Hotdog Variations, by James Hawes

The Hotdog Variations
James Hawes
$4

& dog
a relish hot
with mustard

with relish
& hot a mustard
dog

hot relish
& a mustard
with dog

dog a mustard
with hot
& relish

a relish
with dog &
hot mustard

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

James Hawes lives & writes in the Montreal borough of NDG. His work has appeared in various print journals & online sites. His chapbook Bus Metro Walk (Monk Press) was long-listed for the inaugural Nelson Ball Prize in 2020. His first full-length book of poems Breakfast with a Heron (Mansfield Press) was published in 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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: The Great Beauty, by Anik See

The Great Beauty
Anik See
$5

In a village in Canada's north, just under the Arctic Circle, two ravens are having a conversation. (A third turns it into an argument.) Two planes fly overhead each day. The noon whistle still goes off at noon. The occasional Ford truck chortles past, and you try hard to think of another noise, but you can’t. Not even a dog barking here and there. There’s a grader for a single day in June, repairing the winter potholes. Distant voices from the other side of a hedge, soft enough to not be able to make any words out. That’s it. On your first night here, you heard a woman scream – a long, horror movie kind of shriek – at three in the morning, but it was silent after that and hard to take seriously in all that 24-hour summer light. A joke, surely. And no news the next day of anything bad having happened. The trust and comfort of living in a small town. If anything happens, you’ll hear about it. Perhaps not accurately, but it will be known. You can’t miss a thing.

The village, and the silence. What was there long before us, and, at the same time, possibility.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the seventh title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
March 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Anik See is a Canadian writer and audio producer living in The Netherlands. She is the author of A Fork in the Road (Macmillan, 2000), Saudade: the possibilities of place (Coach House Books, 2008) and postcard and other stories (Freehand Books, 2009). Her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, has appeared in Brick, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, Geist, grain, The National Post and Toronto Life, and has been nominated for numerous awards.

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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: Chronotope, by David Dowker

Chronotope
David Dowker
$5

Crash Flow

The sleep we need deceives us
into thinking we are in control.
So oneiric oratory resounds
beyond dream's penumbra,
voluptuous slumber capture.
An aberrant idiolect mutters
portents of personification
and recurrent deferred futures.
A bitter tax trickles down . . .
thus insurgent up-grudge, gets
with it and what not, syllabic
ingots, word-derivatives
exchanged for time nodules,
critical capital glut, puts and calls
of the new feudalism.
The anecdotal focal length
is measured in ruins. Eon
warble as pomegranate grid.
Persephone in cellular
hell. Havoc text distributed
as seed or bitmap. By any
other name, genetically
modified or chemically
enhanced, trans-planetary loss
or gnostic occupation, the un-
grammatical dark we come to,
loosely, disinhibited. A
sentence is an iteration.
The folding up of history
in this case is loaded, like-
wise the lesions of being
human. An an-
thology of misery would be
preferable to that abstract
mash-up of casual myth-
ologies. The irony
cannot but brutal be.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

David Dowker was born in Kingston, Ontario but has lived most of his life in Toronto. He was editor of The Alterran Poetry Assemblage from 1996 to 2004 (which can be accessed at Library and Archives Canada). Machine Language was published by BookThug in 2010 and Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal (with Christine Stewart) in 2013. Chax Press published Mantis in 2018. Dissonance Engine is forthcoming from Book*hug.  

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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: zero dawn, by Shelly Harder

zero dawn
Shelly Harder
$5

once there was a kingdom in the clouds

 

I cannot go there now

 

my mother held me to her chest

 

and the stagger

 

of her breath

 

was the motion

 

that clawed open

 

the duration of things

 

sometimes I watch the stars and they belly dance

 

the moon slinks 

 

things happen

 

tinctures of gentle chaos

 

brutality  

 

bodies melt

 

severe dusk 

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Shelly Harder is the author of intimology (Frog Hollow Press) and remnants (Baseline Press).

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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: O'Reilly, Boyle, mclennan, Williams, eckhoff, Pirie + fitzpatrick

Nathanael O'Reilly responds to the '12 or 20 questions' interview; Frances Boyle has new work up at long con magazine and Sheila-Na-Gig, a YouTube reading of three poems included in Dreich, as well as work in the second issue of n-o-b-o-d-y alongside rob mclennan, Julia Williams, kevin mcpherson echkoff, Pearl Pirie, ryan fitzpatrick and multiple others.

new from above/ground press: buttons and bones, by Alexander Joseph

buttons & bones
Alexander Joseph
$5

that same song sung from auschwitz to charlottesville
what am I without a people a land a knowhow a home
but an angry white boy in sweat damp sheets
dreaming of yellow ribbon tangled in curly hair
waking with ruined fruit on my new world tongue

what am I without the rain or blue sky
other than scared of what’s above or reflected
hiding in sawmilled pine or history of the camps
covering myself with the names and color they gave us

what I am but flat footed and complicit
a conqueror clinging to a conquered past

no necklace or history to show my pride 
no native language to detail the dirt
no bread to break nowhere to go back to

but in my dreams I walk with grandfather to town

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover artwork: Jaiden Dokken

Alexander Joseph is a Jewish-American, twenty-six-year-old writer. It is said in the Talmud that there are three ways to be a good Jew: study, prayer and acts of loving kindness – Alexander thinks of his writing and work as an educator as a mix of all three. His fiction has been published in the anthology Stories That Need to be Told by Tulip Tree Press, as well as in Lotus Eater Magazine, Bombay Gin and Clover: A Literary Rag. Alexander has received four honorable mentions in various Glimmer Train Magazine Short Story and New Writer contests, has been shortlisted multiple times for the Faulkner Awards, and was a finalist for the 2020 Orison Fiction prize. His essays have been published in the Boulder Daily Camera and his poetry has been published in Boomer Lit Mag and BlazeVox Magazine. He has an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School, where he teaches creative writing. He hosts the podcast American Wasteland, which has thousands of listeners and on which he reads his fiction, and he writes a weekly prose poetry column in The Mountain Ear Newspaper in Nederland, Colorado.

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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com