some author activity: Martin, Burdick, Earl, Notley + Witek,

Camille Martin has posted "My Evangeline (an illustrated personal essay)" over at her Rogue Embryo blog; Alice Burdick is featured on Catherine Owen's Ms. Lyric's Poetry Outlaws podcast; and Amanda Earl writes about above/ground press, Alice Notley and forthcoming author Terri Witek as part of her AngelHousePress Caring Imagination Crowd Funding Campaign.

new from above/ground press: WAVE 1.0, by Isabel Sobral Campos

WAVE 1.0
Isabel Sobral Campos
$5

& read a biography of Amílcar Cabral

My mother writes her narratives

radiator heat, reflection at bay  

snow raptures windowpane

spinach patch swooning on winter burn

perhaps the nipple will be used

again, an aftermath I wake up

in a toll-breath of anxiety linking

time to loss as it remains evident

my furrowed brow when I look at her

thinking of time & timed processes

reproduction or repro

ducing what happened humble

assaying of facts, “mother land

or ancestral or lion’s land,”

one unravels the political

vision by unearthing a rock

from a building, Caxias, Peniche,

Tarrafal concentration camp

miscegenation by rape-contact

We know that stones speak

their actinic light rumbles

an ineffable shape unbeknownst

to urban colonials, lapidity 

of nightmares,^[1] a stone’s transudation

has a murmuring moan

then a brick in the sun, baked^[2]

seasonal layers, Atlantic fumes,

Finisterre ghosts on horseback

simmering western squalls

---

[1] “Cabral returned to Portuguese Guinea in 1952 to work has an agronomist. For two years he traveled extensively in the colony to conduct its first agricultural census. This gives him the opportunity to learn about the colonial realities experienced by the colonized. His seminal study on land use, crop cultivation, and, among other things, soil conditions, remains a work of reference.” Peter Karibe Mendy, Amílcar Cabral: A Nationalist and Pan-Africanist Revolutionary (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019), 20.

[2] “The ‘Frigideira’ (frying pan), also known by prisoners as ‘extermination chamber’ or ‘torture chamber,’ was a place of punishment where prisoners were tortured, deprived of food and light, and subjected to temperatures as high as 50 to 60 degrees Celsius.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrafal_concentration_camp

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Isabel Sobral Campos is the author of How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020), and Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018). Other works include Material (No, Dear and Small Anchor Press, 2015), Autobiographical Ecology (above/ground press, 2019), and Sobriety Crystal (The Magnificent Field, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, and in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World. A collaborative translation of Salette Tavares's LEX ICON is forthcoming in 2023 with Ugly Duckling Presse. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series.

This is Campos’ second above/ground press chapbook after Autobiographical Ecology (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

some author activity: Blades, mclennan, Dyckman, Robinson, Townsend + Pakdel,

Catherine Owen podcasts a commemoration for the late Joe Blades as episode #34; rob mclennan, Susanne Dyckman, Elizabeth Robinson and Jamie Townsend, among others, have work in the new issue of Trilobite; and Saba Pakdel has a poem in the Poetry Pause series via The League of Canadian Poets.

new from above/ground press: P E S T / (Zion Offramp 65-70), by Mark Scroggins

P E S T / (Zion Offramp 65-70)
Mark Scroggins
$5

Who would spill into the seamless night, heave
the abductor apart? With what conjuration
do you address yourself to the exploit,
the token bypass? Clogged larvae, coagulate
gelid astonishment, were all they could descry
from the cabin, that abscessed and malodorous
primal scene. They joined us there, together we re-
arranged and shuffled densely printed blanks.

About logic they were rarely wrong, those old
    masters, their outlandish clothes
and gorgeous hairdos. Their elaborate ruffs
    and buttery, finely-tooled leather shoes.
Buckles, tassles, silver-headed walking
    sticks. Goose quills and microscopes,
spyglasses and nodding plumes. A camouflage
    bikini, a silk and latex trousseau.
The oracles and sages strut their way
    up the catwalk, toss their heads
at the turn. Syllogism and stemmata,
    quicksilver delta of the calculus
and hungry glimmer of philosopher’s stone.
    Names are sequent to things named, said
    someone: consequentia rerum, but requisite
    for any useful grasp of phenomena.
    Kaleidoscope of the world sliced
    into graspable gobbets, shapes
    modes attributes and other Latin words.
    The teacher says, Salve, discipuli; when
    the virtual session ends, vale. The teacher
    says, fermez vos livres. You’re trying
    to make sense of a new world by reading
    old books again, week in which each day
    has lost its surname, so ____day follows ___day,
    followed by undifferentiated ___day.
    Me, I’m always waiting, that’s what I do.
    Lamp trimmed and ready, parousia-gear stashed
    in a handy cupboard. My Aunt Anne
    would be in her element, downstairs closet
    filled top to bottom with discount
    toilet rolls. The rain almost gentle today.
    A block off someone hammers something. ("65")

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Mark Scroggins lives in Montclair (New Jersey) and Manhattan. His poetry has been collected in Damage: Poems 1988-2022 (Dos Madres Press) and Zion Offramp 1-50 (MadHat Press). His most recent collection of essays and reviews is Arcane Pleasures: On Poetry and Some Other Arts (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour).

This is Scroggins’ second above/ground press chapbook, after Elegiac Verses (2020).

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 Alta Vista Improvements, by rob mclennan

The Alta Vista Improvements
rob mclennan
$5

1.

To suffer detours:         this through-line
of patchwork housing, outcrop. A craft

of optimism, ignorance. The internet equally
bears each alphabet.

Our 1950s dream-house,        capacious backyard,
deep. Trees peak, and ripple. An

undefinable mental space.

Lower sheets. They postcard. Feet fade from the offset.


2.

City ward named

for connecting tissue, thoroughfare. Did Thor invent lightning
or did lightning invent Thor?

Moments season, schedule

appreciations. The rumble of city bus, a firetruck.
Disambiguated,

suburban fractals. Bees forged hexagons, such
minimal density, and everything we construct

either collapse, or a half-life

of centuries. Poison the lake. It is possible
to exist without realizing. ("The Alta Vista Improvements")

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
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 titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. 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, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

This is mclennan’s sixty-sixth above/ground press chapbook, following Autobiography (2022), the collaborative SOME LEAVES (with Gary Barwin; 2020), Twenty-one stories, (2020), Poems for Lunch Poems for SFU (2020), 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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Brown, Collis, Niespodziany, mclennan, Tate + Bell,

Simon Brown has a new poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Stephen Collis reads in Vancouver (with others) on April 6 as part of the first annual Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading; Benjamin Niespodziany has a new poem up at Booth; rob mclennan continues his work-in-progress "Lecture for an Empty Room" via substack, and was interviewed recently by Sam Szanto in her "20 Questions" series; Jillian Hess writes on Bronwen Tate's notebooks; and Wade Bell now has an author website, and a new short story up at The Typescript.

new from above/ground press: genesis, by Laura Walker

Laura Walker
genesis
$5

One

 

in the beginning i shadow you with envelopes, and falling down stairs our breath: the night as it moves. and the lines recede, a thunder; and they are ecstatic in the aisles; and the boats are righted and culled from the bearing deck

 

and the rain
and the dark paper map
and the lineage of small white instruments, arrayed by the door

 

 

and there were the ones who grew; and there were the ones spacious in trees; and there were those who pressed into surface, who suffered and were not to blame: who recorded the sounds of slippers on floors, a traveling back to weather and rind

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover artwork: [untitled], Kevin Walker.

Laura Walker is the author of psalmbook (2022), story (2016), and Follow-Haswed (2012), all from Apogee Press, as well as bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004). Her chapbook bird book was published by Albion Books in 2010. She grew up in North Carolina and now lives in Berkeley, California, where she teaches poetry. In 2022 she joined Apogee Press as a co-editor.

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