new from above/ground press: Bits and Bobs, by Ryan Stearne

Bits and Bobs
two stories by Ryan Stearne
$5

     The kitchen is not a large kitchen, but neither is it a small one. Margaret, or Midge as Harold calls her, always thought it was the perfect size. She thinks this is especially so considering it’s just the two of them, as it has been for the thirty years they’ve owned the house. They bought 4515 Coronation Drive from a couple of elderly empty-nesters who after watching their children fly away had also decided it time to move south. Immediately, Margaret and Harold decided to make the home their own, wallpapering the upper kitchen cupboard doors with a corn print paper that screamed ‘corn is eaten here!’ Then, they painted the lower cupboard doors, all the cupboard frames, walls, and ceiling a periwinkle blue. The shade clashes horrendously with the print, but Margaret likes it and Harold doesn’t mind. In the center of the room is a small steel-edged laminate table that has no opinion of corn, one way or the other.
          ("Vienna Sausage")

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2023
as the nineteenth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Ryan Stearne is a PhD student in English Literature with a focus on prose fiction at the University of Calgary. “Attachments” and “Vienna Sausage” are a part of a cycle of short stories centered on how we connect or disconnect with our bodies and situated in Alberta. Ryan can be reached at RyanStearneWrites@gmail.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

some author activity: Deutch, Arnott, Betts, mclennan, Christakos, Robinson, Jirgens + Smith,

Amanda Deutch has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Joanne Arnott has been named a "Life Member" of The League of Canadian Poets; Gregory Betts has new work and a short write-up on NFTs online at Rattle; rob mclennan has new work in horseshoe journal here and here, as well as a brand-new substack post from "Lecture for an Empty Room"; and Margaret Christakos and Ben Robinson both have new work in Hamilton Arts & Letters, which also includes a conversation between Karl Jirgens and Steven Ross Smith on their ongoing fictions.

new from above/ground press: errand : towards, by Brad Vogler

errand : towards
Brad Vogler
$5

tatter trail of borrowed words
wilderness an easier thief makes

yours are hands of helping
poised perching lurch of love

I wanted to fill my edges with you
become the sleeper you secret with

Note 
The poems in errand : towards involve two source texts, Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract and Ronald Johnson’s Radi os. The process began by reading corresponding pages of each text, and choosing a word/words from each. I would write the word(s) down in my notebook making two columns of text. After working my way through the books, I took the words and started assembling fragments/poems from the text gathered. As I was working I ended up adding words, lines of my own, and a couple of poems/pieces were written during the process of assembling from the original texts.

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

Brad Vogler latest project is A Viewing Space, a platform created for various place/time investigations. The first publication launched with Quietly Between, a collaborative book of poetry and photography. He’s the author of my radius, a small stone (Spuyten Duyvil), and i know that this ritual (Lute & Cleat). The full-length version of errand is forthcoming in the spring of 2024 from Sonorous Anchorite. He works with Delete Press, Posit, and is the editor/designer of Opon and A Viewing Space.

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

pre-order now available! groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press: 2013–2023

Celebrating thirty years of continuous activity with well over twelve hundred publications to date, groundwork celebrates the third decade of rob mclennan’s Ottawa-based above/ground press, publisher of lyric, innovative, and experimental writing across a wealth of chapbooks, broadsides and multiple simultaneous journals, including Touch the Donkey, The Peter F. Yacht Club and G U E S T [a journal of guest editors]. Following on the heels of the anthologies GROUNDSWELL, best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003) and Ground Rules: the Best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013), groundwork pushes against the short-lived and the ephemeral of small and micro press publishing. Firmly situated in his home base of Ottawa, above/ground press revels in the possibility of expansive conversations between writers, writing and readership, and groundwork works to acknowledge mclennan’s deep and ongoing dedication to the work of hundreds of contemporary writers across North America and beyond. See link here to pre-order!

Contributors:

Jordan Abel
Jennifer Baker
Gregory Betts
Alice Burdick
Allison Cardon
Kimberly Campanello
Norma Cole
Julia Drescher
Kristjana Gunnars
Natalie Hanna
Brenda Iijima
Emily Izsak
N.W. Lea
damian lopes
Natalie Lyalin
Rob Manery
rob mclennan
Christine McNair
Allyson Paty
Julia Polyck-O’Neill
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Stuart Ross
Kate Siklosi
George Stanley
Hugh Thomas
Chris Turnbull

new from above/ground press: Simple Location, by Andrew Gorin

Simple Location
Andrew Gorin
$5

Skunks Eat Leaves

Skunks eat leaves, peaceably in our garden
As if this sibilance mattered to them
Ferns confirm a photorealistic atmosphere
Friends go in a hose to drink

When you expect it, there it is
The cup knows the hand like a question
Creases time in the static, turning air
Into vacuoles of discomfiture
Do not adjust your lawn protocol

Skunks eat leaves, mean art hogs
Hogs mean art, art eats
Capital. I have used up all
Of my words for accumulation

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

Andrew Gorin teaches in the departments of Environmental Studies and Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is the author of Someone Like You (Gauss PDF, 2017), and the creator and co-editor of the collaborative writing project Executive Orders (The Operating System and Organism for Poetic Research, 2017-ongoing).

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: Carisse, Sparling + Pirie,

Russell Carisse has a new poem up in the Tuesday poem series; Ken Sparling displays his handmade books at the Coach House Books website; and Pearl Pirie posted a report on the pre-small press fair reading the other night, as well as receiving her festschrift!

The Factory Reading Series: Kevin Spenst’s grand tour! w Conyer Clayton + rob mclennan,

The Factory Reading Series Presents:

readings and chapbook launches by:

Kevin Spenst (Vancouver)
Conyer Clayton (Ottawa)
+
rob mclennan (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Doors 7pm / Reading 730pm
Ten Toes Coffee House and Laundry
837 Somerset Street West (at Rochester Street,

Kevin Spenst (he/him) [pictured] is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, and Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse (all with Anvil Press), and over a dozen chapbooks including Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press), Upend (Frog Hollow Press) and an upcoming holm with the Alfred Gustav Press. His most recent writing has appeared in the anthologies Event 50: Collected Notes on Writing and Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing. His book launch during the pandemic was featured in a book about creative practices: The Creative Instigator’s Handbook. He teaches creative writing at Vancouver Community College and Simon Fraser University and he lives in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory.

Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer, editor, and musician whose multi-genre work often explores grief, disability, the climate crisis, and gender-based violence through a surrealist lens. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Finalist for the Pat Lowther Award and Raymond Souster Award), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the 2021 Ottawa Book Award), and many solo and collaborative chapbooks. They are the Nonfiction Editor for untethered magazine, a Poetry Editor for Augur, and a member of VII; an Ottawa-based poetry collective.

The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), the chapbook The Alta Vista Improvements (above/ground press, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). 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

new from above/ground press: Report from the Pirie Society. Vol. 1 No. 1

Report from the Pirie Society
Vol 1. No. 1
edited by rob mclennan
$7

an assemblage of writing in response
to the work of Pearl Pirie

including
poems, critical writings
and
philosophical transactions

with contributions by:
Cameron Anstee
Gary Barwin
Frances Boyle
Malcolm Curtis
Frank Davey
Michael Edwards
Robyn Fadden
Kim Fahner
Rachel Fernandes
Mark Grenon
Tanis MacDonald
rob mclennan
Wanda Praamsma
michèle provost
Monty Reid
Sandra Ridley
Bryce Warnes
Grant Wilkins

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
full list of published reports here
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Report on the Society logo by C. McNair, editor’s devil (retired)

Pearl Pirie has published five chapbooks with above/ground press: the oath in the boathouse (2008), vertigoheel for the dilly (2014), today’s woods (2014), sex in sevens (2016) and Eldon, letters (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 robmclennan.blogspot.com

Billy Mills reviews Jordan Davis' NOISE (2023)

Billy Mills was good enough to provide a first review of Jordan Davis' recent NOISE (2023) over at his blog, alongside a slew of other reviews (including a non-above/ground press title by above/ground press author Buck Downs). Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. As he writes:

Davis’ own Noise is published in Ottawa by Rob McLennan’s above/ground press. Davis is a New York poet, which is to say that he is a poet of hard surfaces, with he shades of Ashbery and O’Hara floating around somewhere beneath them, which is intended as praise; we all have our forebears. Where the comparison is most true is that everything you need to read a Davis poem is in the poem you’re reading.

In many of the poems here, Davis’ language reflects the somewhat random nature of reality as a source of delight:

The Ultimate Team Chart

Given how much of time pearls.
Now, take a walk from the subway
to your last place of residence.
The changes to the roster of local retail.
A couple you always noticed
with a new dog, facial scars.
The thick light of a humid day,
swelling of the river. Love the car
comparing subwoofers. I love
the givens of a neighborhood,
the opportunities (declined) to become jaded.
My art is what’s eating your shoes.

This is a kind of quantum Heraclitus; you both can and cannot enter the same neighbourhood twice, but what marks Davis out as a poet is that refusal to become jaded, an ability both to see and to articulate the extraordinary in the everyday, the aliveness of things. Which is not to deny an innate scepticism that also informs his work:

What separates us from the animals?
I’ll answer with the animals: a fence.
[from ‘Think Tank Girl’]

But then again you cannot celebrate the messy totality of the world without including the warts. It is this acceptance of complexity that drives these poems:

I keep thinking I have something
to show you, like noticing
what I was thinking when I wasn’t thinking
which was partly what you were saying,
something about happiness and sex and something
you wouldn’t think I would think, noticing
how quickly once around the park was becoming
sunrise flickering on the edge of your collar.

The interweaving of the personal and what, for want of a better word, we might call the philosophical, is made possible by the syntax and rhythm of the lines. In particular, the stop/start stress patterns frame the process of thinking through:

I keep thinking I have something

to show you, like noticing

what I was thinking when I wasn’t thinking

which was partly what you were saying,

Of course, others may read differently, but however you parse it, the language of prosody, of metrical feet and regular patterns, is inadequate to the movement of these lines, with long runs of unstressed syllable bumping up against paired stresses. And his musical range is wide, as evident in these taut lines from ‘The Moon Outshined by Cigars’:

Two arcs joined at the ends
a thin scree. The sink
gills up Bromeliad
unabridged

Or these more relaxed, but no less intricately patterned, ones from ‘Periphrase’, one of the longer poems here:

People are like plants; I’m trying to get you to propagate,
But I can’t do it with just poetry –
And by the way unless you have a child nobody’s going to believe how beautiful I say you are.

But enough. He’s a poet. Go read him.

some author activity: Kemp-Gee, Niespodziany, Williams, Armantrout + Meyerson,

forthcoming author Meghan Kemp-Gee has new work up at Couplet Poetry; Benjamin Niespodziany wrote on forthcoming author Evan Williams' work to accompany some new pieces up at Mercurious; Rae Armantrout has two new poems up at Granta; and Ben Meyerson is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey.

THIS WEDNESDAY: the ottawa small press book fair pre-fair reading:

readings and chapbook launches by:

Jennifer Baker
David Currie
Vera Hadzic
rob mclennan
+
Pearl Pirie

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
As a precursor to Saturday’s spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair
at Jack Purcell Community Centre:
Doors 7pm / Reading 730pm
Ten Toes Coffee House and Laundry
837 Somerset Street West (at Rochester Street,

Jennifer Baker is a poet and Adjunct Professor of English Literature at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of three chapbooks: Abject Lessons (above/ground press, 2014), Groundling (Trainwreck Press, 2021, reissued by above/ground press, 2023), and Memento Mishka (with David Currie, Apt.9 Press, 2023). Her poetry, reviews, and articles can be found in Ottawater, Dusie, Canthius, The Bull Calf, Canadian Literature, The Journal of Canadian Poetry, and Robert Kroetsch: Essayist, Novelist, Poet (University of Ottawa Press, 2020), among others, and she is the 2022 honourable mention recipient of Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize.

David Currie is a writer in Ottawa.  He is the author of five chapbooks and no book books. His chapbooks include Bird Facts (Apt 9 Press, 2014), Mystery Waffles (In/Words Press 2014), Poems for the Mishka (Shrieking Violet Press 2015), The Planets that Block our Light (In/Words 2015), and now Memento Mishka (Apt. 9, 2023) in collaboration with Jennifer Baker.  His poems have appeared in magazines across Canada most recently in Plants, Animals, and Humans (Apartment 613 2023).  He currently works as a political organizer – a job which brings him to exotic locations across Canada most recently the resplendent former municipality of Kanata.

Vera Hadzic is a writer from Ottawa, Ontario, currently studying English and history at the University of Ottawa. Her work has appeared in Minola Review, flo., and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, is from Proper Tales Press.

The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), the chapbook The Alta Vista Improvements (above/ground press, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). 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

Adding Up to This (Catkin Press, 2023) is Pearl Pirie’s [pictured] newest chapbook. Her next upcoming chapbook is A Couple Sumerians (Turret House Press, 2023). rain's small gestures (Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the Nelson Ball Prize 2022. footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). Support her at Patreon for the price of a coffee or less where there are author updates and poem drafts. Or at Substack where she writes in-depth essays. www.pearlpirie.com

new from above/ground press: “Almost Alive,” by Julia Drescher

“Almost Alive”
Julia Drescher
$5

If beginning exists it might be a rhythm

Lists, questions, organisms

“Beyond the surfaces of support”

This vulgar flower, that trashy nerve

Venting valvic & pinched

“Attracting men who become defensive”

Every monday late august a different century

In the dim light of morning a leaden prosody goes walking

It gathers its skirts & squats

With descriptive organs

A flowering muscle’s slow mountain

A discomposure in the shoulder

The jaw falls open

With an unfamiliar sense

It is acorn-shaped, it is brushing gradients

Slow curves & passing language

Time breeds surface & rhythm works

Weather like a gift gone wrong

Walking & wiping its face on the lawn

Where the body collapses, more or less

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

Julia Drescher has one full-length collection from Delete Press (OPEN EPIC, 2017) & chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Further Other Book Works, & ypolita. This is her third title from above/ground press, after BLATTA & Metastatic Flower (2020). She lives in 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

some author activity: Ace, McEwan + Shea,

Samuel Ace has new work up in The Ex-Puritan, as does Drew McEwan; and Michael Martin Shea has new work up at Tyger Quarterly.