new from above/ground press: SOME OF THE PUZZLES, by M.A.C. Farrant

SOME OF THE PUZZLES
M.A.C. Farrant
$5

Puzzle of Nothing

Two painters become bored with their subjects—daffodils, dogs, marinas.
        Then by chance they read a quote by artist Mary Pratt that appeared in her obituary. “My only strength is finding something where most people would find nothing.”
        Right then they decide to spend the rest of their lives looking closely at nothing, believing they have found the doorway into the sublime.   
        So far there is nothing of interest in this puzzle. It’s mainly Rolf working doggedly on a painting of his bathtub, Rita studying trash at the top of the driveway, some beige shading in the background.
        But then the puzzle begins to shimmer.  This is because Rita looks up and sees something where before she had always seen nothing of interest—the sky—and in particular, a towering cumulous cloud backlit by the sun.  The cloud sears her sensations.
        “The real secret of the arts,” said Zen master Shunryu Suzuki.  “is to always be a beginner.”
        When you finish this puzzle there will be nothing there.

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

M.A.C. Farrant is the award-winning author of seventeen works of fiction, memoirs, and two plays. She has published eight books with Talonbooks, the most recent being her trio of miniature fiction: The World Afloat (2014), The Days (2016), and The Great Happiness (2019) and the current One Good Thing—A Living Memoir (2021), a BC Bestseller. She lives in North Saanich, British Columbia. https://talonbooks.com/authors/mac-farrant

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: WORM HOLES, After Cao Fei’s La Town, by Jamie Townsend

WORM     HOLES
After Cao Fei’s La Town
Jamie Townsend
$5

Five years ago I stumbled into Cao Fei’s La Town installation while wandering PS1, MOMA's satellite location in Queens. The exhibit seemed to glow in the too bright light of day after a seamless nocturnal slip into extinction, reemerging into a city that spat me out just a few months previous. Cao’s nightmare models scattered around the gallery—crumbling cityscapes, pastoral wastes, vast yet claustrophobic galleries, airline hangers packed with featureless crowds and escaped zoo animals—equal parts Through the Looking Glass and Escape from New York. Dozens of display cases featuring tiny railway figurines, distressed by hand, fluxes of hardened gel obscuring flames or plasticine waterlines rising to envelope train platforms—a wormhole metropolis, a city on fire, a night museum, a biblical deluge.

Having lived in at least a dozen apartments over the last decade, guided in part by economic and emotional ground zero, death, illness, depersonalization and creeping debt, Cao’s looped film with it’s Hiroshima Mon Amor narration panning over motionless, apocalyptic stagesets matched a pervasive, libidinal fear I had carried with me out of a strict evangelic childhood. A non-linear continuum blossomed in my mind like the germ of Satanic panic, globally gone to seed. Or a sudden point of connection—reading Dhalgren on a fainting couch in another city, another relationship I escaped from almost too late. No rapture at the end of my portrait of an artist but something new, inscrutable, dangerous, liberating.

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

cover image: Sunbathing on the Edge, Pier 52, (Matta-Clark's
Day's End), ca. 1977 Shelley Seccombe

Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer/transfemme poet and editor living in Oakland, CA. They are the author of 6 chapbooks as well as 2 longer collections Shade (Elis Press) and Sex Machines (speCt!). They are also the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone). With Nick DeBoer they curate Elderly.

This is Townsend's second above/ground press chapbook, after Pyramid Song (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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: In the Museum, by Conor Mc Donnell

In the Museum
Conor Mc Donnell
$5

In the Museum             Capgras’ Exhibit

[Reference 3]

(1) These people were for teaching purposes only. (2) The compromise grew subject to stories of air electricity & oils. (3) Began with smudges on portraits  stains on a face lazy words waiting for sound to be made. (4) Their hearts sweat & swell like coronal silhouettes. (5) They split and float to the surface switching off ancient death signals on the way smoothing rough edges and sanitizing variant geometries. (6) There are no textures when it is done. (7) The museum knows the difference. (8) Nothing is moving now. (9) Paintings sculptures tapestries all replaced with perfect soulless copies. (10) Nothing behind the eyes. (11)

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

cover illustration / Ogham translation by the author

Conor Mc Donnell is a physician & poet. His debut poetry collection, Recovery Community, is now available on Mansfield Press. This is his 3rd chapbook. His next full poetry collection is titled This Insistent List.

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: Kid Commitment Proves Them Wrong, by Adam Thomlison

Kid Commitment Proves Them Wrong
Adam Thomlison
$5

Kid Commitment pushed himself to a full 12 rounds of shadowboxing – a championship-length fight – just to see if he could. And with fatigue he realized: Shadowboxing is just role-playing for a different kind of nerd.

He spent nights alone with a bottle. "At least booze will never betray me." Then he chipped a tooth and his world collapsed.

Agent Smith had been shot dozens of times. Only the first one hurt, because he took it personally.

"Brunettes will be the death of me," joked the thug who knew it would actually be bullets. Then a brunette pulled a gun on him.

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

Author and journalist Adam Thomlison’s work has appeared in national newspapers and bus-station bathroom stalls, and has gotten him banned from Parliament Hill. His third book, the multi-genre parody A Thief, A Spy, and the Corpse Who Rode Shotgun, was released in 2019. Information about this and his other fictional exploits can be found at 40wattspotlight.com, or by e-mail at mail@40wattspotlight.com.

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: Retrofit Me, by Alyssa Bridgman

Retrofit Me
Alyssa Bridgman
$5
 

Towers

the physics of towers always baffled me
glass and steel—all windows—all sides

poplars in the breeze bend but don’t break
each branch knows exactly where to go

geometry in all things reflected—except perhaps
in the jagged shard of a piece of glass turned

light means nothing to eyes that remain dark—
looking inwards always and never out

but this natural math doesn’t work when you’re
counting calories and the mirror adds ten pounds

we are consumers in all that we do for ourselves
covetous eyes greedy for that new piece of metal

no concept of cost or what was lost in the hurried
rushing from A to B and so on and so forth

algorithm—I always thought it was spelled
rhythm like a song danced out in numbers

these figures ripple in the sun glinting blind
and we look down to see the sky in reflections

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

Cover illustration/design: Alec Bridgman

Alyssa Bridgman is a Vancouver based poet who lives on the unceded territories of the Kwikwetlem, Tsleil-Waututh, Katzie, Musqueam, Squamish, Quay Quayt, and Sto:lo First Nations. She has recently completed her MA in English literature at Simon Fraser University and has a particular interest in local ecological poetry. Her first chapbook, Hedge, was published by above/ground press in 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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: Labour Day, by James Lindsay

Labour Day
James Lindsay
$5

April 22, Winnipeg
From above I saw Manitoba
Ice break apart like from above
I saw California peppered
By wildfire after a never ending
Airport with crumpled sighing
River lines like bunched veins
And from above cloud fields
That feel the missing more than
Your worst nights without the white
Noise machine and my phone breaks
You into hotel blind slats putting up
A pitiful resistance against streetlight

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

James Lindsay is the author of the poetry collections Our Inland Sea, Double Self-Portrait, and the chapbook Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis!. He is owner of the record label Pleasence Records and works in publishing.

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: Barkman, Pirie, Prime + Christakos,

Carla Barkman (the poet formerly known as Carla Milo) is currently being interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; Pearl Pirie is interviewed by Bill Arnott; Tom Prime is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Margaret Christakos has some new work up at Canthius.

Bryce Warnes reviews N.W. Lea's Less Dream (2021) at The Pamphleteer

Bryce Warnes was good enough to provide a first review for N.W. Lea's Less Dream (2021) over at The Pamphleteer. Thanks so much! You can see his original review here. As he writes:

NW Lea | above/ground press | Ottawa, 2021

Staple-bound, 12 pages | Purchase

Among his work’s themes, Lea has named encounters with the Real. One way he gets there: the double take, the second guess. “Void” opens with a list of struckthrough images, proclaims “I’m putting an end / to these twittering lists,” then finds egress from the world of surfaces via birds in a tree, “little adorable portals.” “You could murder every witless thing / in you. Every wishing thing,” proclaims “Murder Ballad,” flexing a knack for the near-homophonic reaching back to 2006’s light years (above/ground). Lea bends language until hairline cracks appear, letting the light shine through—and he’s been doing so for years. Less Dream is only the latest entry in a singular, numinous body of work.