founded July 1993 : CELEBRATING THIRTY YEARS OF CONTINUOUS ACTIVITY IN 2023 + MORE THAN 1200 PUBLICATIONS TO DATE! Ottawa-based poetry chapbook + broadside publisher; publisher of The Peter F. Yacht Club (a writer's group magazine) + Touch the Donkey (a small poetry magazine) + G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] + periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, as well as home of The Factory Reading Series (founded January 1993); edited/published/curated by rob mclennan
13 more songs the radio won’t play … Stan Rogal $5
Comes Love
Why, baby, why, baby, why, baby, why? Questions of the soon-to-be-slain. Where fat grim orange jack-o-lanterns leer & empty vases you endow with flowers fill the gloom. That’s all brother (don’t try hiding). Comes love, nothing can be done.
It’s a cheating situation, yes? Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger. Will be the bomb, the door in the wall, an offer of instantaneous intimacy, of perpetual (e)motion. That’s all brother (don’t try hiding). Comes love, nothing can be done.
Ah, sweet easing away of all edge, evil & surprise! The sometimes mouth that masticates or gags. Everything that acts is actual. (I believe it’s the auratic quality that sucks one in). Comes a sad song, give your nose a little blow. Comes the devil, you can tell him where to go. Comes love? That’s all brother (don’t try hiding). Comes love, nothing can be done.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press December 2021 a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Stan Rogal lives and writes in relative obscurity in the hamlet known as Toronto. He has been rumoured to have published widely and is the apparent author of 25 books (6 novels, 7 story and 12 poetry) and several chapbooks (most with above/ground press). He is a former Master bowler and retired dart champion.
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
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is the author of A
Brief History of Fruit, winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry from the
University of Akron Press, and BETWEEN, winner of the New Women’s Voices
Chapbook Prize from Finishing Line Press. She teaches creative writing and
American literature at the University of Ottawa, and you can find her on Twitter
at @kqandrews.
Susan J. Atkinson : “Reading Palms,” “The Dining Room Poem by another Poet”
and “Interpreting Rothko”
Susan J. Atkinson’spoems have won a number of awards, most recently
first prize in the 2019 National Capital Writers Contest and chosen as a
Notable Mention in the 2020 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse. She has new work
in Grain Magazine and The Queen’s Quarterly. Her first full-length
collection, The Marta Poems was published by Silver Bow Publishing
in 2020 and her chapbook The Birthday Party, The Mariachi Player and
The Tourist came out in Spring 2021 with Catkin Press. Visit www.susanjatkinson.com
for more information.
Frances Boyle : “The whole tall world” and “Abbey”
Frances Boyle is the author of two poetry books, most recently This
White Nest (2019). She has also written Tower, a Rapunzel-infused
novella (2018), and Seeking Shade, a short story collection (2020) which
was a first-place winner of the Miramichi Reader’s Very Best! Awards, and a
finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award and the ReLit Award. Her writing has been
selected for the Best Canadian Poetry series, nominated for the Pushcart
Prize and Best of the Net, and published throughout North America and
internationally. Frances’s third book of poetry is forthcoming in fall 2022
with Frontenac House Press. www.francesboyle.com
Jason Christie : “Slow death”
Jason Christielives and writes in Ottawa. He is the author of Canada
Post (Invisible), i-ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract), Unknown Actor
(Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). His most recent chapbooks
are: Bridge and Burn (above / ground) and Heavy Metal Litany
(Model press). He is looking for a home for a new manuscript of poetry he wrote
with the help of several Python scripts.
Conyer Clayton : “Family Dinner” and “Intruder,” both from But the
sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (Spring 2022, A Feed Dog
Book by Anvil Press).
Conyer Clayton is a writer, musician, editor, and gymnastics coach
living on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. Her debut collection, We Shed
Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020), won an Ottawa Book Award
and was a Relit Award finalist. She's released 2 albums and many chapbooks;
recently, Towers (Collusion Books, 2021) by VII, of which she is a
member, and Sprawl (Collusion Books, 2020) written with Manahil
Bandukwala, shortlisted for the bpNichol Award. Her second book, But the sun,
and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (A Feed Dog Book, Anvil Press)
is forthcoming Spring 2022.
Laurie Anne Fuhr : “applicable skills of the military brat #1” and “applicable
skills of the military brat #2,” from night flying (Frontenac House
2018).
Laurie Anne Fuhr, ex-Ottawan, current Calgarian, is author of night
flying (Frontenac House 2018), which was shortlisted for the Robert
Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry 2016 in ms form. Fuhr had work in several
anthologies in 2021, including Uncommon Grounds: poems by the Espresso Poetry
Collective (epcpress 2021); Wonder/Shift 40th Anniversary Anthology
(AWCS Press 2021); and The Stroll of Poets Anthology (2021), and had a
poem on a tall can with Blindman Brewing's Session Stories series (ed. Jason
Lee Norman). Her poem mixed media was shortlisted in the Freefall Magazine
poetry contest 2020 (Judge Gary Barwin). Her work has been published in an
above/ground chapbook and in many periodicals like This Magazine, Journal
of Literature and Aesthetics (India), Bywords, and Prairie Journal.
Fuhr is a poetry instructor with alexandrawriters.org; its poetry workshops are
now open to all on Zoom.
natalie hanna : “keep moving / keep sleeping” and “to learn of
making”
natalie hanna is a queer, disabled, feminist, Middle Eastern,
Ottawa-born lawyer. She runs battleaxe press, and has authored thirteen
chapbooks, including three titles with above/ground press, Baseline Press
(2020), and collaboratively with Liam Burke, machine dreams, from Collusion
Books (2021). She is working on her first full length poetry collection. Her poetry,
interviews, and commentary have been published in Canada and the U.S. Learn
more: https://nhannawriting.wordpress.com.
Robert Hogg : “The Poem that Starts in the Night”
Robert Hogg was born in Edmonton, Alberta, grew up in the Cariboo
and Fraser Valley in British Columbia, and attended UBC during the early
Sixties where he was associated with the Vancouver TISH poets, co-edited
MOTION - a prose newsletter, and graduated with a BA in English and
Creative Writing. His books include: The Connexions, Berkeley: Oyez,
1966; Standing Back, Toronto: Coach House, 1972; Of Light,
Toronto: Coach House, 1978; Heat Lightning, Windsor: Black Moss, 1986; There
Is No Falling, Toronto: ECW,1993; and as editor, An English Canadian
Poetics, The Confederation Poets – Vol. 1, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. He
recently published several chapbooks: from LAMENTATIONS, Ottawa: above/ground,
2016; two Cariboo poems, Ranch Days – The McIntosh from hawk/weed press
in Kemptville, ON; Ranch Days—for Ed Dorn from battleaxe press (Ottawa
2019); A Quiet Affair – Vancouver ’63 (Trainwreck, May 2021); and in
August 2021 a chapbook titled From Each Forthcoming (above/ground). In
December 2021, a chapbook will be released from Hogwallow Press, called The
Red Menace, and another from Apt 9 Press in Ottawa, called Apothegms.
Margo LaPierre : “A Video of You, Laughing” (first published in Mineral
Lit Mag), “Hysterosonogram” (forthcoming 2022 in Sable Books’ disability
anthology The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet) and “Air Show” (first
published in Train Journal)
Margo LaPierre is a freelance editor and author of Washing Off
the Raccoon Eyes (Guernica Editions, 2017). She serves as newsletter editor
of Arc Poetry Magazine and is a member of poetry collective VII. She is
the winner of the 2021 Room Poetry Contest and the 2020 subTerrain
Lush Triumphant Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2021 Fiddlehead
Creative Nonfiction Contest. She is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at
UBC. Find her on Twitter @margolapierre.
Gil McElroy is reading three new poems from his ongoing project, The Julian Days.
Gil McElroy is a poet currently living in Colborne, Ontario.
rob mclennan : “Autobiography of green,” “Coordinates” and “Burning
the dead grass”
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, his most
recent poetry title, the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press,
2022), is now available for pre-order. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic
beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and
mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as
writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
Christine McNair : “Déjà Entendu” and “Déjà vu”
Christine McNair has published two books of poetry with Bookhug – Conflict
(2012) and Charm (2017). Her most recent manuscript is a hybrid
non-fiction poetry manuscript focused on preeclampsia, illness, and disability.
She works as a book doctor in Ottawa.Also
– she recorded this last year for Canthius but it may have been lost in
the ether, much like she was lost in the Christmas tree.
Pearl Pirie : “Daily you detail weather” & “time scales
mountains” are from the tentatively titled, “Well-Behaved Thistle.” If you’re a
potential publisher, ask for it by name.
Pearl Pirie’s fourth poetry collection is footlights (Radiant
Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures (Apt 9 Press, fall 2021) is
minimalist poems. Mudflaps for Short Dogs is out from Trainwreck Press
(July 2021). Interact with her at Instagram or Patreon at Pearlpiriepoet.
Stuart Ross : “A Stephen Crane Christmas,” “Sixty-Two” and “Razovsky
On The Volga”
Stuart Rossis a writer, editor, and writing teacher, the author
of 20 books of fiction, poetry, and essays, and countless chapbooks and ephemera.
He received the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize and the 2021 James Tate Poetry
Prize. Stuart’s work has been translated into Nynorsk, French, Spanish, Estonian,
and Russian. His most recent book is 70 Kippers, written with his
dearest friend, the late Ottawa poet Michael Dennis. Stuart’s hybrid poem/essay
The Book Of Grief And Hamburgers, dedicated to Michael, comes out this
spring from ECW Press. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar : from the Perimeter sequence in Bramah and The Beggar
Boy
Renée Sarojini Saklikar is a poet and lawyer who lives in Vancouver on the unceded
traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples. She is the author of four books,
including the ground-breaking poetry book, children of air india, about
the bombing of Air India Flight 182 which won the Canadian Authors Association
Poetry Prize and is the co-author, with Dr. Mark Winston, of the poetry and
essay collection, Listening to the Bees, winner of the 2019 Gold Medal
Independent Publishers Book Award, Environment/Ecology. She is currently
working on Book 2 of the THOT J BAP series, an epic fantasy in verse.
This poem is from the
Perimeter sequence in my epic fantasy in verse, Bramah and The Beggar Boy
(Nightwood Editions, 2021).
An early version of this poem,
one of the first in my long poem series, https://thotjbap.com/, first appeared in
a beautiful hand made chapbook by the late Marthe Reed, to whom I was introduced
by rob mclennan at the Factory Reading Series in Ottawa.
Other poems from the sequence
also appeared in Kathryn Mockler’s The Rusty Toque.
With gratitude for these, past
and present, who support/supported long form poetry.
D.S. Stymeist : Big Ride: Passage 1” and “Tonic.”
D.S. Stymeist’s debut collection, The Bone Weir, was published
by Frontenac in 2016 and was a finalist for the Canadian Author’s Association
Award for Poetry. He continues to publish widely in both academic and literary magazines.
Alongside fending off Crohn’s disease, he teaches creative writing and crime
fiction at Carleton University. He’s the former president of VERSe Ottawa,
which organizes VERSeFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.
On special assignment: Cameron
Anstee, Stephen Brockwell, jwcurry, Anita Dolman, Amanda Earl, Lea Graham, Marilyn
Irwin, Chris Johnson, Janice Tokar, Roland Prevost, Sandra Ridley and Chris Turnbull.
Microbial Soup Kiss Sean Braune and Émilie Dionne $5
dance—like strings or sifflets our heads strike twigs: i heard within the hour, we’d be standing further than two metres apart with masks sewn like love between our smiles, our hope, our fingers in our eyes piercing through ice
published in Ottawa by above/ground press December 2021 a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Sean Braune is the writer of the poetry book Dendrite Balconies (University of Calgary Press, 2019) and the philosophy book Language Parasites: Of Phorontology (Punctum Books, 2017). His first feature-length film, Nuptials, has just screened at the Cyprus International Film Festival (2021).
Émilie Dionne is a health researcher, sociologist, political theorist, writer and visual artist based in Quebec (Montreal & Quebec city). She’s been writing since she was 10, wrote three novels, five plays, many short stories and collections of poetry. Her writing has been published only once before, Secrètes Immortelles (1999), and her visual art is available online. She’s a runner, lover of animals and nature.
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
Memory is vainglory. It perceives the abysm locking arms, their eyes thefts before the bubble the earth has in the mirror. The molehill cathedral braided by long-spinners’ legs throughout the invisible, then cut down to their stars, they dross a ghost through the walls of a little blue rain-cloud. This belief can never be broken down to the atomi members of the self, memory, nor can the personated memory translate the ghastly belief staring back at them, when your backs are turned. The fact decays, dashed to pieces and scattered either way beyond the screen. Those huge caves open into my lips and lose children to close when I forget them. What has happened is no memory. My memory does not know, so I sit, and attempt to express that, non-come, without being.
O’erhead, below where we were sitting, in a long room rounded at the corners, not so deep I canst perceive the portal we all, sweet friends, open into. Small performances below dream up work for characters copied from the star figures painted along the walls. They are unrecognizable to us, who, myself excepted, have no memory, though it is perhaps the walls who should remember us. One curiosity is that, of whatever matter we composed this mural, the history of the figures composed by stars, we have no more of that material. I wonder at times if that history could be finished. Or if anything could be more perfect.
What could this mean, in heaven? If we are some part of the earth that carried over, then are these paintings from her former life? Could the same be said, then, of they who performs beneath? We have seen no stars that resemble them, so they may be false, a performance, a memory. No person can keep a memory. It is alive. Because I have a memory, I have never been on stage.
I need to start a little before my memory. But Paradise has never been denied darkness.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press December 2021 a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Urië V-J – Moravian-Canadian essayist, poet, speculative geographer and hermetic technician – has lived in the vicinity of White Rock, BC since the late 2020s. They are co-founders of the Nelson Push for Chemical Goverment (Surveyor). A monograph of correspondence with Tzixen Planchette is being prepared by Govinda Craig for the Free University of the Half-Moon Bay beginning in 2015.
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
Billy Mavreas recently discovered two reviews of his above/ground press chapbooks we weren't previously aware of, as "Ryan C." reviewed B V A (2019) over at his blog here, and drop (2020) over at his blog here. Thanks so much! Especially given that these are the first reviews of either, we are even that much more grateful. And did you hear that Mavreas has a full-length forthcoming from Conundrum Press? That's pretty cool.
I love the poetry Susan includes in her fascinating flash fiction. For example, this line about a goldfish: “His translucent fins fanned like the scarves of an old burlesque dancer still going through the motions.”
These ten stories take us deep into the lives of the characters, and not the normal fiction characters of politics and fame. Susan instead focuses on our friends and neighbors, and manages to reach in and expose my own foibles to myself. My gut tells me that you too will find yourself in at least one of these stories, and members of your family in other stories, and for sure your next-door neighbor. And, those characters whose stories are unique and new to you will become life-long friends due to Susan’s love of her characters. I know Hank now has a soft spot in my heart, and I wish him a long life with good friends.
Susan’s descriptions of events are precise and vivid: “And wasn’t this what you did, when you lost a guy who probably wasn’t your forever guy but what if he WAS? You go crazy. You rage. You weep. You break into his trailer and sit on his couch with a knife across your lap, so he will shit himself when he opens the door after a long shift, sore and beat, and all he wants in life is a shower and to be left alone.” Another story paints a colorful picture of living together full-time, “Resentment, old as this marriage, sticks to doorknobs and window sills. It gums up the corners.”
I marvel at how Susan seemingly effortlessly embeds seventeen syllable micropoems into her stories. I just stare in wonder at and savor the skill, and admire the work that goes into this precision. From two different stories: “Mrs. Anderson stretched as birds chittered, a brook sputtered over stones.” And “You were the girl who could never leave. How did they know you slept through it?” With this careful, pristine writing throughout, I highly recommend this book for your reading pleasure. The stories I have seen previously live just as strong with re-reading, and I know this will be a small book I’ll return to with pleasure.
Fire and Flood: Enacting Rehearsal as Performance Sarah Rosenthal $5
Author’s Note
This essay is from the collection One Thing Follows Another: Engaging the Art of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, a collaboration with poet Valerie Witte. In this project, we explore the work of dancer-choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti—both at various inflection points throughout their careers and in this particular moment. Through a combination of chance operations and intentional artistic choices that push us to unexpected places, and via innovative forms and techniques—including collage, erasure, and our own inventions—we deconstruct the essay form to examine what we as poets, each with our own highly charged relationships to dance, can contribute to the conversation about these pivotal figures in postmodern art.
I am grateful to the many people and organizations who have supported and continue to support this project. I look forward to acknowledging them all in the book.
Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, forthcoming), The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 2019; collaboration with Valerie Witte), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her short film We Agree on the Sun has received numerous accolades on the film festival circuit, including Best Experimental Short at the 2021 Berlin Independent Film Festival. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and writing residencies at Cel del Nord, This Will Take Time, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, and New York Mills. She lives in San Francisco where she manages projects for the Center for the Collaborative Classroom, works as a Life & Professional Coach, and serves on the California Book Awards poetry jury. More at sarahrosenthal.net.
This is Rosenthal’s second above/ground press title, after Estelle Meaning Star (2014).
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
So, shipwrecked alone by language on an unknown shore, gasping for breath, bereft, cleaved, and cleft, the charts and logbooks floating away in the sea foam, I am left merely words —but what is so “mere” when a word is a tireless messenger of the cultural archive of the possible, eternally dragging its weight, changing nothing less than content and meaning, the way a single page might recall with a dazzling un-clarity the two minutes one morning centuries ago
published in Ottawa by above/ground press December 2021 a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Andy Weaver has been called, by his favourite small press publisher, the most glorious of bastards. Both parties consider this a compliment.
This is Weaver’s fourth above/ground press chapbook after Three Ghazals to the constellation Corvus (The Crow) (2001), Other Work for your Hands (2004) and Concatenations (2014).
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
within the night another night and in that night another night still will it ever stop flowers, bombs, fever unbroken like juice from any moon or a lamb made of sticky dust I dig my way out I dig so slow
published in Ottawa by above/ground press December 2021 a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Simon Brown (he/they) is a self-taught and late-blooming poet and translator from rural southwestern New Brunswick (Peskotomuhkati traditional territory) now based in the Quebec City area (Wendat and Abenaki traditional territory). His texts have been presented in books, interdisciplinary artworks, collaborative performances, and via platforms such as Lemon Hound, Estuaire, Mœbius, Vallum, Poetry Is Dead, Watts, and filling Station. This is his second English-language chapbook, after this mud, a word (Frog Hollow Press, 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
I want to confess to his open eyes. I lay on his chest, on his single bed. He is a benevolent nothing, comme un moine. He listens without pressing. He does without doing. I lay with my deliberations and thought-circles, my loops, my over-analysises pinned down, swirling, and building at the dam in my throat. Nate's steady open gaze. I'm-ashamed-of-the-person-I-give-you-it's-a-husk-of-myself. But I don't say that; you wouldn't have understood 'husk'. "Je reconnais en moi les gestes obséquieux et réticents, les brusques scrupules d'une soul in hiding. Shame. It's me and it's not me." A husk of myself. I rest my chin on the give of his belly. We take a walk through his woods later. A plot of falling trees, of mushrooms and tentative greens. This is our early spring, the brown silence. Our palms sweat together.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press December 2021 a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Mayan Godmaire has always been enchanted. By words, by spells, and by the uniqueness of life. They see words as a subtle art and crafts them to create distinctive and subtle atmospheres. They have participated in several of Dawson College’s publications as an editor. Their first published story “And Church Lay Silent” can be found in Dawson’s Creations Journal. Mayan began writing fantasy stories when they were eleven and the creative output has never ceased. If they could shape the world to their will, the earth would be a cross between Pirates of the Carribean and Lord of the Rings.
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 LEAVES GARY BARWIN AND ROB MCLENNAN ABOVE/GROUND PRESS, 2020
In a collection with a title that rings Whitmanian, seasoned collaborators with over 50 books published between them, rob mclennan and Gary Barwin offer five brief pages of poetry that come closer to feeling very Bradburian, examining the the collision of nature and the technology of language. Though the collection is co-authored, there’s no clear indication how the authoring is split. This defensively layered distance provides shade from nature’s “extraordinary example” which can only be recorded, “screen-captured,” and played back on a loop while itself remaining wholly separate and intact. The poems alternate pages with images of a bird in varying poses whose head is covered by a blank dialogue bubble. So, what do the birds say in their silence? “Honestly, say the birds. You humans. It’s not about language.” The voice of the speaker/s is aloofly clinical: “One wishes not to speak of birds, their extraordinary example. / One takes out a photocopy of a bird.” This evasive voice remains throughout the book’s 10 brief sections (the sections range from 2 to 9 lines each), maneuvering to explain that “by ‘one’ one means ‘we’ or ‘forests’ or ‘birds.’” Humans often possess an anxiety-driven need to fill silence with words, to enter a space and begin claiming. The chapbook opens, “One takes one’s computer into the woods and types ‘bird.’” This exploration of reality versus reproduction is at the heart of these poems: “The yes of the mystery.” It reads like an investigation: “There’s a river. What does it mean, this river? / There’s a sentence. That’s what it means, this curve.” And the investigation is not without its findings, as the speaker states, “Listening is always beginning again.” An atomized mingling of time and state of being occurs, as “A tree has a premonition of being cut into ladders; a leaf // in the folds of a hundred books.” There is nature in its essence, and there is what writers and artists make of nature, and in Some Leaves Barwin and mclennan “make the distance philosophical.” The collection (really a single, flowing poem) is exactly that: a voice philosophizing on what it means to use artifice to convey nature. There is one final image that is not a bird, but instead a dialogue bubble containing only three ellipses points surrounded by two leaves—perhaps indicating the abandoning of language in the face of nature. In the end, mclennan and Barwin seek no epic project, but rather an ironic self-minimalizing, an attempt to ask how valuable language is, how much we fetishize it when, in the end, “A tree is always already music.”
It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in extraordinary times, although as Monica Mody writes in her new chapbook Ordinary Annals, “Everything was being shredded long before we noticed.” And yet, Mody’s title is unassuming. Ordinary: run-of-the-mill, quotidian—right? Still, the ordinary world, and her revolutions, are a marvel: “Every season that turns brings us back / to pitted dark, moon folding into sun.” Poets have a responsibility to record the revolutions of the world, hence annals.
The extra/ordinariness of our times—that is to say, the admixture of the unprecedented and the cyclical—gives a spiral shape to Ordinary Annals. Mody reaches for the extraordinary but is still “entangled with the world, that place / I become / me, ordinary / shattering into we.” Grief and weariness lead her to lay her body down (I think here of the Nap Ministry), enabling her to “connect with tendril, still—,” drawing energy from the hurt and beautiful earth to be reborn.
Mody lovingly but firmly critiques the desire to erase the specificity of our griefs:
Now don’t say,
We’re all the same & love is the answer.
What does it take to attend— not flinch—at different
trajectories of suffering? Can we honor healing
histories, their immense particularity
and is that love rehearsing?
and elsewhere:
If through our gestures we take away
another’s power —enable colonization—
we fail Earth & Waters.
She also critiques the impulse (imperative?) to ‘return to normal’ and repress our grief (since we can’t simply erase it) at the interlocking crises of our time.
Mody begins Ordinary Annals knocking into the glass walls of language: “I want to rise above my limitations.” What limitations? “I want to let bird shapes of words flock together into language that will / change skies.” Can language change skies? Mody writes elsewhere, “I’m just so sick & tired of being Poet” and in that moment it is because “losses stitch [her] tongue into clawed mouth” and another of the responsibilities of the poet is to sing the losses. I read into this not just despair for the losses themselves, but despair at not having been able to forestall them with the poet’s tool, language.
This desire to solve or resolve or memorialize in tension with another mode, that of, “rocking in this moment of undecidability, not becoming anything at all,” a formlessness that presents itself as a space of repose in between breaths or throbs.
Ordinary Annals is the work of a poet attuned to the entanglement of word and world, memory and moment, love and suffering. With her willingness to share her progress in language through “this time of grave despair,” Mody joins her elders in:
tell[ing] us of the many gates around the world that are opening Gates opened by great white wings of love—of sorrow
Each gate points straight to our hearts That place where broken
realities are woven
She models her movement toward these gates for all of us ordinary would-be weavers “shattering into a we” and I’m grateful for it.
A Wolf Lake Chorus is a dramatic voice-poem for poet, birds, & saw: 1 poet, 8 birds, & 1 musician bowing a saw.
.
Silence.
A podium rigged with a microphone at centre stage. Two high screens behind.
The poet & the musician walk onto the stage.
The poet goes to the podium. The musician sits on a chair at the side of the stage.
The musician plays the saw.
Silence. ("Stage Directions")
Note
A Wolf Lake Chorus began as an invitation from Madhur Anand in 2015 to write a poem using only the words contained in one of her academic articles. The article chosen is mentioned in the poem.
Originally called The Overstory, it was performed in Guelph at Silence on Friday May 18, 2018 as part of an evening of performances in support of Wolf Lake. Also presenting were Madhur Anand and Gary Barwin.
The cast included David Lee on bass and Georgia Urban on musical saw, plus 8 volunteers who were the birds. I am grateful to everyone involved, especially the birds for their overlapping voices.
This is Phil Hall’s fourth above/ground press chapbook, after Verulam (2009) and the collaborative Shikibu Shuffle (with Andrew Burke; 2012) and Alternative Girders (with Stuart Kinmond; 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
Litzine, by Nathanael O’Reilly, 40 pgs, above/ground press, abovegroundpress.blogspot.com, $5
Ever wonder what the working-class white guy around the corner is thinking? You know, the one who has bumper stickers of Nirvana, screams that Trump is an idiot, and has teeth stained yellow from cigarettes? Surprisingly, he’s got an in-depth mental life, and he’s writing a book about it. Or perhaps that’s not a surprise.
Blue by Nathaniel O’Reilly is a tender song for male alienation and longing. O’Reilly has a vulnerable touch that fully flushes out the themes in each poem. He grapples with losing friends as he ages, the fear of becoming a father, and childhood memories that teach him something new every day.
The main drawback is that, for all of it’s loneliness, O’Reilly’s work sounds like many others, and comes off as wannabe edgy. Juvenile warbles like “I lay on the floor / listening to Nirvana / writing my first letter / to her” give the vibe of someone trying desperately to stand out from the crowd, and that inevitably falls flat. O’Reilly isn’t saying anything new or adding a different voice, and thus drowns himself out in a saturated market.
Granted, there are certain poems where he tackles issues with tenderness and altruism. In an ode to who I imagine is his child, he asks “Will you love learning / like your parents, will you / be athletic, artistic, scientific?” When ruminating about who his child might grow up to be, O’Reilly touches on real parental anxieties and demonstrates them. He presents wishful thinking and imagines himself walking hand-in-hand with his child for as long as possible.
It’s these touching moments that give Blue a sense of urgency. Contrasted with lines like “The orangutan reaches the peak of his climb, / surveys the scene where he defecated,” the vulnerability of a man comes off as authentic. You just wish there wasn’t a warped edge to this sensibility.
causal yet caused by something, un- moved & moving, one is something beautifully done whose doing cannot ever be known.
there is nothing in the universe more tenuous than beautiful more beautiful than one & the important thing is that it stands tall, stands all tender flag half- blown stoic waiting alone
published in Ottawa by above/ground press November 2021 a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Kevin Varrone is the author of three full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks. He lives outside Philadelphia and teaches at Temple 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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
Yes, you can eat your darling
goldfish. He is most likely a form of ornamental carp, and he will taste as you
expect: muddy and full of bones.
You can eat all your darlings, once
you kill them. Although why you killed Prince Harry the goldfish I cannot understand.
Was it all the staring, his bulging eyes? Was it his flashy orange scales, so
out of place in your dark, dusty cabin full of your ancestors’ ghosts? Or was
it that his beauty faded by the day, in your care, and you could not bear to
watch it — how his scales grew dull and his swimming listless, until he mostly
stayed put in the middle of the small, round, glass bowl that was his world
since you brought him home from that Memorial Day carnival? His translucent
fins fanned like the scarves of an old burlesque dancer still going through the
motions.
You sure looked like you wanted him
when you paid $3.00, six times in a row, tossing rings onto a pole. Prince
Harry watched you from the table of glass goldfish bowls and saw how you
labored for him, how you fought against your own shortcomings to win him as a
prize. But now it’s August, and you should have set him up with a proper tank
by now, some plastic plants and aquarium gravel, at least.
Prince Harry was an $18.00 goldfish,
which makes him as expensive as any other freshwater fish on the menu at an
upscale seafood place. But you should know that the diet you fed him of
dehydrated fish flakes won’t please your palate nor your conscience. (Maybe you
could have treated him better?)
What’s done is done, I get it. I
just hope you killed him with kindness.
Because, you know, Prince Harry the
goldfish was miserable in that little glass bowl. He was never going to become
the best fish he could be, trapped in there. In the wild — if you had released
him, an invasive species — he could have grown beyond your expectations.
(Seriously, he could’ve grown to be a foot long!) But at what cost to the other
fish in that lake that butts up to your cabin? Prince Harry would crowd out the
ones that belong there.
Your darlings can be eaten, and they
should be, if they fail to thrive. If you fail them.
But Prince Harry the goldfish will
leave a bad taste in your mouth. He watched you toss all those rings at the
carnival. For him. He thought you loved him. He thought he was home.
Susan Rukeyser no longer believes in polite silence. Her debut novel, Not On Fire, Only Dying (Twisted Road Publications), was an SPD Fiction Bestseller. She just completed a new novel. Her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and multimedia work appear in numerous places, online and in print. Susan founded World Split Open Press to publish select titles including Feckless Cunt: A Feminist Anthology. She hosts the feminist, queer, and otherwise radical Desert Split Open Mic. In 2017, she moved home to Joshua Tree, California, although she hails from Connecticut. susanrukeyser.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
