some author activity: Armantrout, Naughton, Barwin, Beaulieu, Kratz + mclennan,

Rae Armantrout has two poems in Granta; Katie Naughton has a poem up at Poets.org; Gary Barwin is interviewed over at River Street Writing, and again, via podcast by Jamie Tennant; Derek Beaulieu offers his year in review, as does Al Kratz, and rob mclennan as well.

happy merry seasonal things, from your pals at above/ground press,

some author activity: Naughton, Swensen, O'Reilly, Mohammadi, Rogal + Beaulieu,

Katie Naughton is interviewed by Josephine Gawtry for the blog for Colorado Review, as is Cole Swensen, interviewed by Jake Friedman; Nathanael O'Reilly has work in the fourth issue of Saltbush; Khashayar Mohammadi has some new poems in The /tƐmz/ Review, as does Stan Rogal; and Derek Beaulieu offers his 2023 year in review.

new from above/ground press: But Then I Thought, by Kyla Houbolt

But Then I Thought
Kyla Houbolt
$5

Ethics

Is it ethical to be a frog when the snow is on the ground? To be a frog in winter, in a sound mind and body of amphibious elegance? It isn't right! sing the bugs in their dens, we never got a chance to have amphibious elegance, we only got chitinous chic which is far far less groovy. The bugs grouse among themselves, crowding the rotting tree trunks, clicking and whirring and taking committee votes. But the unconcerned frog, who is not hungry for bug at the moment, casts no stones. There is no call to fiddle with all them bugs! thinks the frog to itself, preening in its winter mudhole. Meanwhile, Creator, in the form of Raven, listens in with amusement. None of these creatures know what's to come, or how blessed their lives are. Though that smug frog might need to be taken down a peg or two, he thinks. Maybe it's time to send in the crows. And of course the poets are listening to all this, and each one is writing notes, and all the notes are different. This is the blessing and the curse of poetry: that it never agrees and that it never agrees. Ethics? Maybe in the spaces between.

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

I read Kyla Houbolt’s poems with excitement — where else am I going to hear about spam farms, heron language, wish onions, and other statistically improbable but poetically inevitable concepts? Who else can find complete and shapely stories to go with those words? What happens next? Something we wouldn’t guess, I think.
        Jordan Davis, author of Noise and Yeah, No

cover artwork by the author

Kyla Houbolt has been writing poems all her life, and began publishing in 2019.  Her first chapbook, Dawn's Fool, was published by Ice Floe press and is sold out; her second, Tuned, was published by CCCP Chapbooks + Subpress. Surviving Death, from Broken Spine, is her third. But Then I Thought is her fourth.  Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Sublunary Review, Barren, Janus, Juke Joint, Moist, Neologism, Ghost City Review, and Saginaw. Most of her online work can be found on her Linktree: @luaz_poet | Linktree Her current social media presence is on BlueSky Social (still in beta as of this writing), here: @luaz.bsky.social, facebook.com/kyla.houbolt/ and on Instagram @kyla_luaz. https://kylahoubolt.us/

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: A PANDEMIC INVENTORY, SPRING-SUMMER 2020, BROOKLYN NY, by Zane Koss

A PANDEMIC INVENTORY, SPRING-SUMMER 2020, BROOKLYN NY
Zane Koss
$5

when we thought it would be over in a month or so.

when we thought it would be over by summer.

when we thought it would be over by the fall, surely.

when we thought probably by christmas we could travel again.

when we began planning travel for next summer.

when we pushed those plans to next winter.

when it was all going to be over soon.

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

Zane Koss is a poet and translator, currently living in Guelph, Ontario. He is the author of harbour grids (Invisible, 2022) and co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace with Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz and Whitney DeVos. His poetry, translations, and essays can be found in various print and web publications, and a handful of chapbooks, including Invermere Grids and The Odes (Incomplete with above/ground press. His next book of poetry, Country Music, is forthcoming from Invisible Publishing in 2025.

This is Koss’ third above/ground press chapbook, after Invermere Grids (2019) and The Odes (Incomplete (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

some author activity: Turnbull, Hogg, Houbolt, Armantrout, Baker + mclennan,

a videopoem by Chris Turnbull (and Robert Hogg) is now online at The Typescript; Kyla Houbolt has new work up in the Spotlight series; Rae Armantrout has a new poem online, via Poetry Magazine; Jennifer Baker recently launched her interactive poem, "Hands"; and rob mclennan has recently been announced as a Juror for the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2024!

some author activity: Mody, Berlatsky, Johnson, Rogal, Morton, Boyle + Kronovet,

Monica Mody has a substack now, and has work featured at Scroll India; five fleas has published a short poem by Noah Berlatsky; Chris Johnson is interviewed by Andrew French for the Page Fright Podcast; Stan Rogal, Colin Morton and Frances Boyle each have new work in the latest issue of Pinhole Poetry; and Jennifer Kronovet has new work up at Zocalo: Public Square.

new from above/ground press: Between the Lakes, by Ben Robinson

Between the Lakes
Ben Robinson
$5

Between the Lakes Treaty – 1784 – revised 1792



– to ensure its boundary line was more



accurately laid down – nearest corner of the tract to



Hamilton – the creek that flows from a

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

“Between the Lakes” owes research debts to Darin Wybenga of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and Saman Goudarzi.

The italicized sections quote from the text of the Between the Lakes Treaty [1792] which can be viewed via the QR code.

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in the fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.

This is Robinson’s third above/ground press title, after Talking Gibberish to Strangers (2019) and Dept. of Continuous Improvement (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

some author activity: Reimer, Mody, Armantrout, Niespodziany + periodicities,

Nikki Reimer is interviewed by Ariel Gordon in Prairie Books Now; Monica Mody is welcomed to town in an article celebrating Diwali by Melinda Palacio, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, in the Santa Barbara Independent; Rae Armantrout is featured over at Only Poems with poems and even an interview; Benjamin Niespodziany has new work at gone lawn; and you saw that periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics is now at Blsky, yes?

new from above/ground press: with the lakes, by Colin Dardis

with the lakes
Colin Dardis
$5

Shipwrecked


i.
Aweigh of junk piles,
untold centuries
teased from their rust,
resurfacing; a gravity
towards the shoreline.

ii.
Disturbance amidst rocks:
seabed whispering
as currents play their hands,
lifting pennies from eyes,
a cure for blindness.

iii.
Without light
and too much weight,
hull and reef conjoined.
The lighthouse blinks
in disbelief.

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

Cover image: extract from And Man appeared; questioning the earth from which he emerged and which attracts him, he made his way toward sombre brightness by Odilon Redon, 1883

Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent writer, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. His most recent book is Apocrypha: Collected Early Poems (Cyberwit, 2022). His work, largely influenced by his experiences with depression and Asperger's, has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA. Previous collections include All This Light In Which To See The Dead: Pandemic Journals 2020-21 (Rancid Idols Productions, 2022), Endless Flower (Rancid Idols Productions, 2021), The Dogs of Humanity (Fly on the Wall Press, 2019), and the x of y (Eyewear, 2018). The latest release from his DARDIS sound project is Funerealism (Inner Demons Records, 2022).

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

Susan Kay Anderson reviews Heather Cadsby's How to (2023)

Susan Kay Anderson was good enough to provide the first review of Heather Cadsby's How to (2023) over at NewPages; thanks so much! See the original post here. As she writes:

The prose poems in How To by Heather Cadsby are hilarious, and their titles are satisfying enough, let alone the bodies of the poems. Some examples: “How to catch flamboyant bohemians,” “How to tell if it’s different,” and “How to look at a broken fountain.” Each one offers its own non-advice and leads me to hunger for more.

I love how Cadsby plays with expectations. These poems offer surprises that are language-based without being frustrating to read. They are LOL poems, as in this line from “How to know if your venn diagram is pentimento”:

Golf is geometry as is burlesque.

These are funny and my mind creates illustrations or comic images to go with them as I read. I am challenged by this as a reader and also immensely entertained. Not a lot of poetry is funny. Many times, when poets try to be funny, they start rhyming or sound like Dean Young imitators (even though that is a good thing). Thank goodness to have read Cadsby’s inventions, I say to myself, wondering how I will manage to set this book down and get my mind back.

new from above/ground press: The Last Horse: Prologue, by Aaron Tucker

The Last Horse
Prologue
Aaron Tucker
$5

    Plague.
    By the time scientists pulled all the global data together, publishing a breathless set of papers in Nature that then crept into the mainstream media, nearly eighty percent of the world’s horse population was infected.
    Footage: a camera man walks through a barn, hay bales and farming equipment, and people in all-white decontamination suits look into the different stalls; each horse that comes into frame is listless, their manes flaccid and paling, their nostrils filled and noisy with heavy breath, the lustre of their coats lost to the ribs showing through. A suited person runs their hand down the long neck of one, the horse’s head turning towards the affection despite its obvious weakness, patting it while explaining to the audience that the animal has only a day more to live, that whatever had infected it had also sterilized it. That any horse found to be infected had roughly one week, a death sentence that no one could identify the cause of, let alone a cure.
    Cattlemen gathered and drew the obvious parallels to hoof-and-mouth disease and recalled stories, their own or the generations before’s, of having to quarantine then slaughter cows, healthy or not, who had come into contact with those infected. A coffee steams in a man’s hand, a diner with three others around the table, and he describes his father, rifle in hand, walking towards the field at the far end of their pastureland, the swish of bright green grass through his cowboy boots, grass that was perfect for grazing but now to left grow ankle-, knee-length, wild and weeds. The man’s father and his neighbours had cornered the cattle along one stretch of fence, where they clustered and bawled and tried to move forward, met each time they advanced with a rifle shot into the air to frighten them back. Seated on a tractor fixed with a giant earth-moving scoop at the front, the man watched the men march with their guns dutifully on their shoulders, to the herd, and, after a brief countdown, killed every single animal. The man helped his father and the others dig the grave, a deep long ditch that the cattle were rolled into, one after another, one on top of another, a heaping mass, steaming with fresh blood, hides, eyes, teeth, hooves, cattlebrands, then the dirt over top, afterwards packed tightly by the tromp of boots. The sun came over the mountains the next day, lighting the valley floor. “We never entered that field again. We left it and eventually God took it back and you couldn’t see the fenceposts, and it was like nothing had happened, that no life had ever been there. I dream about it, you know, often, when I come to remember my dreams in the morning.”

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

Aaron Tucker is the author of two novels, three books of poetry and two film studies monographs. His latest novel, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys (Coach House Books) was named one of the best books of 2023 so far by The Toronto Star. His doctoral dissertation “The Flexible Face: Uniting the Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies” (March 2023), and was nominated for the York University Dissertation Prize; his graduate work at York’s Cinema and Media Arts department won the Governor General's Gold Medal. In addition, he is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto where he is recreating the history of AI in Canada as a technonational project. He grew up on the Sylix Territory in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, and currently lives and works in Tkaronto on the lands covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant.

This is Aaron Tucker’s fourth chapbook with above/ground press, following apartments (2010), punchlines (2013) and Catalogue d’Oiseaux: Toronto — Mainz-Kastel (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

Susan Kay Anderson reviews Leesa Dean's Apogee/Perigee (2023)

Susan Kay Anderson was good enough to provide the first review of Leesa Dean's Apogee/Perigee (2023) over at NewPages; thanks so much! See the original post here. As she writes:

Apogee/Perigee by Leesa Dean is about relationships near and far. What is the poet’s relationship to situations, people, and other everyday items? I see Dean’s poems in a creative, concrete way; and see them as points on an astrology chart, which is circular and the connecting points to various houses/states of being. This is a sacred, esoteric book of poems not to be approached offhandedly. Slowly, by studying these dialed-up, circles of potency, there is a lot revealed, as in these lines from “House of Values”:

[. . . ] movies
on repeat. ice cream on repeat.
dinner at bedtime. toys kept in
Crown Royale bags.

At first, I did not get that these were astrology charts. They looked like maps with scroll and script writing. When I went back and examined them, it was plain as can be. In these lines, Dean remembers her grandmother’s teachings:

[. . . ] her eyes lit like
bright swans when her mouth
formed the words.

I love, “her eyes lit like bright swans” so much. I can see and feel this image. The mystery, the sacred, and the overcoming of what was endured make for careful reading. If I read nothing else, I would be satisfied.

some author activity: Unsworth, Weaver, Bell, Morton, Bowering, Hogg + mclennan,

Lydia Unsworth has a poem up as part of the Tuesday poem series; Andy Weaver is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Wade Bell, Colin Morton, George Bowering and others all have new pieces as part of the "Remembering Bob Hogg" feature at The Typescript; and rob mclennan answers one question for Hollay Ghadery at River Street Writing.

new from above/ground press: Misremembered Proverbs, by Adriana Oniță

Misremembered Proverbs
Adriana Oniță
$5

ȚARA ARDE ȘI BABA SE PIAPTĂNĂ

The country is on fire and the old woman is brushing her hair.

Because she can’t smell the smoke. Because she’s combing out the flames. Because her country is a rough draft. Because she set fire to the country. Because she’s seen it all. Because she knows rain is coming. Because she won the war. Because she lost her children in the war. Because she wanted to become proverb. Because she is the library about to burn. Because her body is bait.

Țara arde and she can’t smell the smoke.
Țara arde and she’s combing out the flames.
Țara arde and her country is a rough draft.
Țara arde and she set fire to the country.

Țara arde and she’s seen it all.
Țara arde and she knows rain is coming.
Țara arde and she won the war.
Țara arde and she lost her children in the war.

Țara arde and she wanted to become proverb.
Țara arde and she is the library about to burn.
Țara arde and her body is bait.
Țara arde și baba se piaptănă.

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

Adriana Oniță is a poet, artist, educator, and researcher with a PhD in language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. As founding editor of The Polyglot, Adriana is proud to have published more than 200 writers and artists working in over 55 languages. Her recent multilingual poems appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, and Tint Journal. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Misremembered Proverbs (2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). Adriana works as editorial director for the Griffin Poetry Prize and lives between Edmonton and Sicily. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com, and connect with her on social media: IG: adi.onita, Twitter: adi_onita.

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

Susan Kay Anderson reviews rob mclennan's The Alta Vista Improvements (2023)

Susan Kay Anderson was good enough to provide the first review of my own chapbook The Alta Vista Improvements (2023) over at NewPages; thanks so much! See the original post here. Although: is it angsty to consider the countryside? As she writes:

There must be an angst category in poetry called urban angst poetry when you realize you live in a city but have been feeling and acting like you are in the countryside. Maybe that’s not the case, here, exactly. More like pandemic angst, which the entire planet can relate to. rob mclennan’s Alta Vista Improvements is a place where such a realization occurs and is one of above/ground press’ unique pamphlets churned out in Canada. Here are a few lines in the titular poem in Section 5, which I loved reading:

[. . . ] this through-line
of patchwork housing, outcrop. A craft

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

This is delicious writing! mclennan highlights the loss of the family goldfish through multiple fish, multiple losses; something is wrong in the picture of domesticity. What is it? We don’t exactly find out, yet travel the off-road territory with mclennan and enjoy every moment. In “Summer, pandemic,” as he waits for us in the car, his loyalty goes above and beyond to the complicated:

[. . . ] I perch in precooked car
awaiting our cat, in his follow up appointment
to recent dental extraction [. . . ]

Will life get itself all sorted out? In The Alta Vista Improvements, we sit and ponder (and hope) in all the wreckage.

some author activity: Armantrout, Hyland, mclennan, Jirgens, Hogg, Logan + Anstee,

Rae Armantrout and MC Hyland have new work in Copenhagen Lit; the audio for the interview RC Weslowski and Kevin Spenst did with rob mclennan for Wax Poetic is now online; Karl Jirgens reflects on Robert Hogg in The Typescript; Nate Logan has three poems up at cul-de-sac-of-blood; and Cameron Anstee has a piece on book culling at The Richler Literary Project.

new from above/ground press: river / estuaries, by Julie Carr and rob mclennan

river / estuaries
Julie Carr and rob mclennan
$6

river : three


where girls test ice    tapping boot heels against fragile shine

where masked they swing

where long fronds bend toward the duckpond’s lip

as if to drink or kiss

I’d been reading about boys online in their secret spaces they

give each other hard-ons talking about raping fat Jews

I’d been thinking about my mother’s face when she was

by something she’d read or remembered made afraid.

when we walked into a crowd

of history’s predatory glances    we knew them    they were

as if our friends

they stood    held the ropes and rocked

until the swings jumped the air    their torsos nearly

horizontal   like hawks.


 
estuaries : three


boot heel, marks        a question; how this body
crumbles,

        through soil erosion, deforestation,

overgrazing, overfishing
, or the filling of wetlands,        such fury,

    curtailed by dirt,

        *

I walk into a crowd        , an ocean
    of intimate glances, procrastinations

on the edge of; [estuaries: roped and rocked]

        how I did not know

how betrayal unfurls, congeals;
, the blue spark, torsos

how one unpacks speech: one lifts
            a stone,         inspects

and audits every fissure,    
    
        *

what is this love?            had ever
                    kissed

    , such fundamental action

    , such raw, and outward

let’s go down, come on down

until the swings jumped air,

        *

to surround yourself with water
does not portray you
                , land

we test the ice; and tether,

        *

the assumption            of the rockface,
    scars, a transport
            with my mouth

, these horizontal wings; a spread of lilacs,
lilies, intemperate water-fowl,
                    the mallard’s
    green head like a handle,

I could scarcely bid

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

Julie Carr’s most recent books are Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West, Real Life: An Installation and the essay collection, Someone Shot My Book. She lives in Denver where she helps to run Counterpath and teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

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 titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). Fall 2023 also sees the publication of groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press, 2003-2023 (Invisible Publishing). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. 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-eighth above/ground press chapbook, following edgeless : letters, (2023), The Alta Vista Improvements (2023), 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

groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 has landed!

the anthology groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 has officially landed! (pictured here with copies of the first two volumes); you can pick up a copy via Invisible Publishing (who also has copies of the second volume, ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013, originally published by myself and Christine McNair, who designed it also, through Chaudiere Books), or this weekend, as part of the ottawa small press book fair pre-fair reading on Friday and/or Saturday fair [note different location: Tom Brown Arena]! Thanks brilliantly much to Invisible publisher Norm Nehmetallah and designer Megan Fildes for their incredible work to bring this project to life!

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, November 17: Kearney, Hawes, Pennock, Beaulieu + (possibly) McNair,

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series
the glorious return (after four years!) of the pre-small press book fair reading
celebrating 29 years of the ottawa small press book fair
featuring readings by:

Rae Kearney (new to Ottawa!)
James Hawes (Montreal)
Tyler Pennock (Toronto)
Derek Beaulieu (Banff)
              + possibly (childcare-dependant)
Christine McNair (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, November 17, 2023
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

[And don’t forget the ottawa small press book fair, held the following day (NOTE DIFFERENT LOCATION) at the Tom Brown Arena]

Rae Kearney [pictured] is a poet and designer who just moved to Ottawa after spending time on the west coast. This year, she helped edit and design The Lupine (2023), a new journal published alongside the Whistler Writers Festival. Previous work can be found at above/ground press (2020) and in antilangmag no.3 (Winter 2019).

James Hawes lives and writes and makes films in Montreal. His poems have been published in print and online journals across Canada. His full length book of poetry Breakfast With a Heron (Mansfield Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 ReLit Award. He is the author of 3 chapbooks; Bus Metro Walk (Monk Press) was long-listed for the inaugural Nelson Ball Prize, The Hotdog Variations (above/ground press) and under an overpass, a fox (Turret House) was recently shortlisted for the 2023 Nelson Ball Prize. He started Turret House Press in 2023, dedicated to publishing new and experimental Canadian poetry. He has 2 cats.

Tyler Pennock is the inaugural Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at Carleton University. They are a two-spirit adoptee from a Cree and Metis family around the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta, and is  a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. They graduated from Guelph University’s Creative Writing MFA program in 2013.Their first book, BONES (Brick Books) was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry. Their second book, BLOOD was released in September 2022. They currently teach at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto.

Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent volume of fiction, Silence: Lectures and Writings, was published by Sweden’s Timglaset Books, his most recent volume of poetry, Surface Tension, was published by Toronto’s Coach House Books. Beaulieu has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students, the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for this dedication to Albertan literature and is the only graduate from the University of Calgary’s Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts ‘Celebrated Alumni Award.’ Beaulieu holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University, has served as poet laureate of both Calgary and Banff, and is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Christine McNair is the author of Charm (Book*hug, 2017) and Conflict (Book*hug, 2012). McNair lives in Ottawa where she works as a book doctor. And she even has a new chapbook with shreeking violet press!

some author activity: Cantrell, McNair, Berlatsky + Witek

Walking the Wrack Line? by videographer-photographer Matt Roberts and poet Terri Witek. Photo by Rick de Yampert

Andrew Cantrell has new work up at Annulet; Christine McNair is interviewed alongside Elee Kraljii Gardiner for Amanda Earl's The Small Machine Talks podcast; Noah Berlatsky is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and forthcoming author Terri Witek is part of "Cuerpo-territorio: Reverberations of Belonging," an exhibit at Stetson University's Hand Art Center.

new from above/ground press: Gardens in Motion, by Stephen Collis

Gardens in Motion
Stephen Collis
$5

went out to walk at plant pace

long arcing stride of rubus stepping canes

coastal rainforest zone Pacific mists

to berry and behold

if we ever come this way again the seeds were saying

sown on the wind and trampled on the trail

gut carried and shat forward

mycelium inching beneath the forest’s shifting fringe

some forgotten corner of the holy forest

bees’ jet-black bodies and blue iridescent wings  

time lapse and our lapse in timing

no future as sure as less abundant being

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

Stephen Collis' many books include Almost Islands and A History of the Theories of Rain. Most recently he edited A Dream in the Eye: the Complete Paintings and Collages of Phyllis Webb. He lives near Vancouver and teaches at Simon Fraser University.

This is Collis’s third title with above/ground press, after NEW LIFE (2016) and FIRST SKETCH OF A POEM I WILL NOT HAVE WRITTEN (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: STORY LINE, by Rae Armantrout

STORY LINE
Rae Armantrout
$5

     STORY LINE


Kids like talking animals
as well or better than
they do people--

until the wolf eats gramma

then tells Red
a love story.

After that, children
are concerned
about trajectories.

     *

The gulls are worked up
this morning, swooping and circling
one dilapidated house.

The crows lining the wire
ignore them.

This is the beginning
of a story
with two characters,

but the narrator
has gone missing.

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

Writing for the Poetry Foundation, David Woo says that Rae Armantrout’s recent book Finalists (Wesleyan 2022) “emanates the radiant astonishment of living thought.”  Her 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. Her other books with Wesleyan include Partly: New and Selected Poems, Just Saying, Money Shot and Versed. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. She is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. A new book, Go Figure, will appear from Wesleyan in September, 2024.

This is Armantrout’s third above/ground press title, after Custom (2012) and Rituals (2013).

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: glass / language / untitled / exaltation (second printing! bpNichol winner!), by Jason Christie

glass / language / untitled / exaltation (second printing
WINNER OF THE 2023 bpNICHOL CHAPBOOK AWARD
Jason Christie
$5

a small song

            For Andrea

If I struggle to arrive like a union of treated pianos,
then I’ll bind to that sound some vitamin D and toast
if I'm a hot Monday wavering, then, look,
what a way to start writing without myself.
If I'm somewhat public in the public’s mind, I’ll listen.
If your body says walls are a problem
where forests mean otherwise than being
is it a fine memory itself becoming afraid to village?
Either way, if I've held you close enough in that moment
when the aesthetic clicks, then I'm expansive in the way
I've used the word relentless to describe reading,
quiet mornings in letters or a tantrum, a roundabout
or in a round, a resounding ballad of dissonances plays
and a coffee machine beeps: sound in a box.

* * * *

I wrote the poems in this chapbook during a period of years where my language and memory were shattered by sleep deprivation. In order to keep myself connected to poetry, I started writing in a file about our life with young kids. I didn't think much about what I was writing. The point was to do it. I amassed a large repository of content, but I stopped adding to it as life found a new level.

While reflecting on how hard it was to remember anything as a result of years of disrupted sleep, I realized that what I had in the original file was literally stored in memory on my computer. I wondered if I could treat that original material with processes that would be similar to what was happening to my mind during sleep deprivation?

To replicate some of the effects of memory loss and the difficulty of thinking, I wrote Python scripts that cut up, recombined, and selected random lines from that source material. The results were a mess, but I edited them to try to make sense of the jumble that had once been rational.

Much like how memories are stories, how we gloss over the messy, difficult, or impossible to recall details, how we invent the connecting pieces to attribute to our memory a sense of completeness, I worked on the poems to attempt to let them become something new, an active remembering. Memory, as I now think of it, is not entirely an act of recall with varying degrees of fidelity, but also an act of creation. We look at the glossy or glossless images of our past and glue them together into a whole new collage.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
November 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
second printing : originally published in October 2022
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover image by the author

Jason Christie lives 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, some of which appear in this chapbook. In November 2023 he won the bpNichol chapbook award for Glass Language Untitled Exaltation (excerpt) (above/ground).

This is a second printing of Christie’s eighth chapbook with above/ground press, after 8th Ave 15th St NW. (2004), Government (2013), Cursed Objects (2014), The Charm (2015), random_lines = random.choice (2017), glass language (excerpt) (2018) and Bridge and Burn (2021).

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

As part of his win, above/ground press is offering copies of all but one (his 2013 title, Government, is essentially out-of-print) of his above/ground press titles over the years as a bundle: 8th Ave 15th St NW. (2004), Cursed Objects (2014), The Charm (2015), random_lines = random.choice (2017), glass language (excerpt) (2018), Bridge and Burn (2021) and glass / language / untitled / exaltation (second printing, 2023) for $35. I only have ten bundles to offer (add $3 for postage; in US, add $5; outside North America, add $10)

Jason Christie's glass / language / untitled / exaltation (2022) HAS WON THE 2023 bpNICHOL CHAPBOOK AWARD

Incredible congratulations to Ottawa poet Jason Christie, who has won the bpNichol Chapbook Award for his glass / language / untitled / exaltation (above/ground press, 2022)! Check out the Meet the Presses YouTube channel, where they have a video of Jason reading from the poems! And congratulations to the other shortlisted titles as well: Light Years, by Laboni Islam: baseline press; The Lake, by James Lindsay: knife/fork/book; Third State of Being, by Cassidy McFadzean: Gaspereau Press; I Need Not Be Good, by kitchen mckeown: Rahila’s Ghost Press (all of whom are also reading from their titles on the Meet the Presses YouTube channel). The prize was announced earlier this afternoon in Toronto at this year's Meet the Presses Indie Market! Unfortunately, above/ground press was unable to be there this year, but Jason is on-site (presumably) signing and selling many copies of the second printing of his award-winning title!

As part of his win, above/ground press is offering copies of all but one (his 2013 title, Government, is essentially out-of-print) of his above/ground press titles over the years as a bundle: 8th Ave 15th St NW. (2004), Cursed Objects (2014), The Charm (2015), random_lines = random.choice (2017), glass language (excerpt) (2018), Bridge and Burn (2021) and glass / language / untitled / exaltation (second printing, 2023) for $35. I only have ten bundles to offer, so get those orders in! To order, send cheques (add $3 for postage; in US, add $5; outside North America, add $10) 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

Here's the short write-up that Meet the Presses read for me as part of the award announcement, in my absence:

I’m enormously pleased to hear that Jason Christie’s glass / language / untitled / exaltation won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award. This was Jason’s third time on the bpNichol shortlist, all of which were with above/ground press titles—his Cursed Objects (2014) made the 2015 shortlist, and Government (2013) made the 2014 list—three of some eight different titles of his that above/ground press has produced since 2004, back when he still lived in Calgary.

It is exciting to consider that this win adds Jason’s name to a list of Canadian writers that includes Mark Laba, Paul George Bowering, Janice Williamson, Barry McKinnon, Robert Kroetsch, P.K. Page, Stan Dragland, Lisa Robertson, Christine Leclerc and Gil McElroy, all of whom also won the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Jason’s work has long deserved an attention more than what it has been, although one might say that of most poets working in Canada. What am I even saying? Jason is great and his work is great and you should read more of Jason’s work. I am proud to know that above/ground press has played even a small part in any of this.

new from above/ground press: Dinosaurs of Glory, by Nikki Reimer

Dinosaurs of Glory
Nikki Reimer
$5

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

This chapbook is a companion piece to Reimer's 2023 poetry book No Town Called We (Talon Books), which launches in Calgary at Shelf Life Books on Wednesday, November 8, 2023 as part of the Talonbooks Fall 2023 Poetry Launch.

Nikki Reimer is the author of four books of poetry, most recently No Town Called We (Talon Books). They make art, write non-fiction, and are currently studying towards an MA in Communication. Reimer is a carbon-based chronically ill neurodivergent prairie settler of Ukrainian and Russian Mennonite descent who resides on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta. They are very tired.

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

Barry McKinnon (1944 – 2023)

Barry McKinnon and Brian Fawcett in Toronto, 2004

Sad to hear from Paul Nelson that Prince George, BC poet and above/ground press author Barry McKinnon died yesterday morning. above/ground press was fortunate enough to publish two chapbooks by McKinnon--Into the Blind World (2012) and G o n e S o u t h (2021)--as well as include work by him in an issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] in 2022, with follow-up interview. A larger obituary/write-up forthcoming at robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom, by Noah Berlatsky

Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom
Collages and Uncreative Writing
Noah Berlatsky
$5

Variation on Select British Eloquence

“The oratory of Charles Darwin,” noted Mr. Karl Marx, “was uniquely suited to the theme of the origin of specie; not only did it open, like a luminous shower of golden boxes to reveal perfumed lumpen proles in whose sullen mental tergiversations the wild wealth of pensions struggled till sufficiently fit to be invested with the gay habits of usorious semites, but it also closed within its tinkling xanthic cataracts those prostrate securities which must be eliminated through probity and private rectitude if teleological apocalypse is to come. When, mounted upon his bloody posterity, he rode out over the Western force of historical materialism with jingling padlocks on his virile imperatives and Mao Tse Tung by his side, even Lord Vader—no friend to Natty Bumppo’s raw, Rousseauian marketing Jüngness—was moved to the following eulogium:  ‘His defense of Rockefeller and Gates from the overly fastidious savagery of weak-minded poor rates defiled evil and degraded apathy; it showed every discerning malefactor that only mercantilism’s unremitting actuality could be justly considered truly brutal.  One listened to it with a mixture of voluptuous impiety and copious vacancy, until suddenly, before one could say “never tell a lie,” one found oneself up to one’s wooden teeth in happy Negroes.’” Clearly the bloom-on-the-rose appeal of self-assertion by scientific statesmen had reblossomed—leavened, perhaps, with the fertilizing yeast of honor—and anthropological authority was once again perceived as the thorn with which rich and powerful pricks might procure necessitous, supple virtues from innumerable vice-ridden climes.  Armed only with a tape measure and sprightly sallies of obsequious condescension, compulsive phrenologists began to classify with impunity every man-servant by the magnitude of his erect countenance and, subsequently, to organize for each a tour of the corrupt capitals of Europe during which, they sincerely hoped, prodigious indigenous flab would stimulate the exquisitely tentative penetralia of unpolluted Frenchwomen to write novels of social protest.  Such strenuous employment—requiring the analysis and digestion of vast, shapeless ethnics—is the angelic equipage that, if supported by parental liberality, will carry a reforming aesthete out of the temperate gated estates of his aery navel, through open champaigns bubbling with the thermal rhythmus of racy literature, and into charity bazaars where, at one brightly draped cathexis, graceful maidens with pitchers on their heads and republican enthusiasm in their dark machines alchemically concentrate the wandering glances of colonial ravishers while, at another, orphans resting sweetly in specimen jars soften the austere and turgid wearisomeness of £10,000,000—I mean, they are chained to siphoning apparatuses which distill their biographies into rational policies or coffee-house apotheoses. Similarly, the essence of the simple man of the earth may be woven into dusky breeches for his betters, thereby ensuring that the albino bottoms of incontinent worthies are never the butt of shameful ramifications and that, when an inevitable besmirchment regretfully occurs, it does so but obscurely. These, then, were the valuable carbuncles wrested from wretched refuse’s ruined flesh by the abstruser inquiries of vivisection! Detached body parts of extraordinary force and beauty are undoubtedly useful in peddling spirits, nostrums, and undergarments; if dwelt upon exclusively, however, they are sure to vitiate the taste, and thus place between the man of leisure and the full enjoyment of degenerate strumpets a concave speculum of morose function which, instead of refracting light, bends ardor, focusing concupiscence solely upon distaff forms of unimpeachable pulchritude, rather than allowing coruscations of amatory interest to scatter and twinkle upon the variegated subtleties of delight suggested by, for instance, overly adipose hindquarters, feminist viragos, or a dirty-faced urchin.  Of course, if avarice had been unnaturally constrained by the deadening prophylactic sheath of taste and discrimination, or if the acquisitive talent had not been given boundless scope in which to discharge its manly romanticism, the parturient labor of Adam Smith could never have brought forth such an ample imaum as Henry Kissinger. As it was, his pickled intellect was spread wide to commercial intercourse from the remotest part of the globe, and the stream of surplus revenue—once it had penetrated his ductile syllogism found in him a fecund New Haven where the healthy seed of sinecure might grow into the mighty oak of a Yale undergraduate, and the acorn of substantial liberal humanist ancestry sprout into the squirrel of shameless oppression. He knew that the most potent engine of chaste Irish pathos for the professional class was that vocem exiguam, the shrill and stumbling brogue of the Amerindian, which, in its extemporaneous Attic eloquence, so memorably inspired the Marquis de Lafayette to strip off all his garments, don a Malcolm X cap, and quip “Ich bin ein Berliner.” It is hardly necessary to add that this boyish hilarity soon led organically to a didactic enumeration of Russian armament. In a speech of five hours long delivered at the society for Speculative Microcosm Management, Benjamin Franklin—who was, at that time, although young, already an authentic philosopher-ninja, in full possession of his gigantic Eternal Wisdom powers, able to mutate sombre abolitionism’s sterile upright moralism into practical compromise’s cheerfully crippled dissipation by launching from his noble-browed bosom burning bolts of electric gout—explained that the irresistible seductions of Turkish perversions would indeed, if not enervated, relax the solids of the national body, resulting in despotic Oriental dropsy, but that there was no real cause for alarm, as he was prepared to develop an entirely new science of Unitarian ferocity: a science which could forge the withering interrogatories associated with universal philanthropy into an assemblage of levers and pulleys by the secret use of which the common tongue could be extracted and placed, gently but firmly, on the elegantly mangled teat of self-reliance, inducing the abandoned imperial sow to carry her healthy system to an early grave in a foreign constitution. The aforementioned truths, being of imperishable value, could not help but make the structure of his mind a household institution, like the microwave ovens which wait in the forest of Africa to fall, without a moment’s warning, upon the Groom of the Bedchamber, wrap him in a palliative maze of metaphorical confusion, and throw him down, by analogy, upon Mr. Isaac Newton, prompting that impetuous entrepreneurial treasure to invent John Wayne and then, against all the tenets of gravity, to drop him upwards—past pine tops waving with ancient relevancies—past winds breathing with the deliquesced corpses of indigent men of genius—past splendid puppets dreaming of sociology flowing through the polished interior ministries of space—in short, past all gross sublimity and encumbrance, and into the silent sidereal well where the drowned Gospels’ maxims are whelmed by the Britannica’s wider views, there to rest, massively indolent, until the prophesied time when his merciless generalizations and robust know-how will be needed to strategically defend us from the short-sighted imbecilities of grog-quaffing journeymen. Amidst the ferocious mobs of humble seekers methodically snubbing the supposedly befuddled constables whose salaries they subsidize, who but he understood that pedantry is not a means, but rather a blank and glorious end, fulfilling in every particular the hopes expressed by the first mute and hairy Australopithecine when, drawing about him his primitive flint nanomachines, he inscribed the shadow of a wooly shibboleth on the wall of his cave under the assiduous misconception that, as George Will states, "striking the chthonic umbra would slay the Platonic pundit lurking beyond the circle of the Internet’s wet, red glow; he could then dismember me, fashion an imitation firmament from my foreskin and a counterfeit fundament from my diaphragm, and reside thereafter in a mammoth bag of nugatory echoes, ever sipping sagacity from my engorged logos (an act of false deiphage which, if prolonged indefinitely, promised to make man a vestigial appendage of his own evolving jaw)”?  Who other than he possessed a drain in his forehead down which recipients of Poor Relief—flushed from the strain of having their ethically defective super-egos replaced with magnetized subcutaneous case-workers—swirled with such majestic abjection that hooligans expelled from Public Skulls, long thoughtlessly de facto, were recalled, like René Descartes, to the cortex, and embalmed in beautiful Panopticons? His later life was saddened when he realized that the Industrial Revolution, or, more specifically, the invention of the pneumatic Bastille, had elevated sissified diction to a position of mastery formerly reserved for the epistles of our Founding Fathers, and that his decision to accept undisciplined kisses from the libertine lips of militant militiamen had transformed him into a prince of purity at the precise historical instant that amphibious miscegenists—who, we now know, achieved photogenic, desultory diversity by moistening their thin skins with the secretions of leprous domestics—seized control of the United Nations, and began to suppress with tolerant “Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacks” not only Islamic dissent, but also his own personal, patented brand of Milton’s Peppery Anti-Popery, long used, in accordance with the hopes of his friends and the demands of his wife, to season a potpourri of after-school pogroms cooked up for young, troubled Princesses in danger of becoming Whores of Babylon. Yet, even in adversity, he never lost his Elgin Marbles, which continued, until his death, to blare from his famous and scrupulous blunderbuss whenever perfidious philistine microcephalouses, forgetful alike of verbal chastisement and brutal bludgeoning, dared to blaspheme the radar screen of Zeus by creeping from their proper station in the woodpile. To inflict peremptory punishments, without in any way adverting to the Euclidean theorems of bilious jurisprudence constructed by compass, protractor, and inverse geometric peristalsis from Everyman’s inalienable intestine, at the least calls for an advertorial-cum-apologia, if it does not, indeed, merit severe animadversion and obloquy. We must remember, however, that, at that period, the heroic champions of natural law—Captain Leviathan, Prerogative Lad, the Iron Advocate and his pal Magna Cartridge, Miss Manners, Apriorion, King James Bivalve (a.k.a. the Submarine Sahib), and even the Hooded Utilitarian—were animated by an antinomian afflatus; it is fair to say that the wits of the wiliest warden then could not have secured what now the merest traffic cop apprehends, viz.—that, at the Hall of Justice, super-powered stenographers have, in the interest of putting the “auteur” back into “authoritarian,” grown countless Shakespeare-clones from the Bard’s vile, sycophantic jelly—that these clones, when the monarch’s pet monkey defecates upon their silly, genuflecting goatees, moan forth, in stochastic rapture, “O! O! O!” “Sa, sa, sa, sa!” “Et tu,” &c.—and that, before the Last Judgement, the transcription of these susurrant vocables is certain to spell out, in the supine scripture of the avant-garde, a perfect municipal code.

*

A Note on Process

The poems here are almost all created by taking words, phrases, and texts from a range of other books or sources. In some cases fairly long phrases are reproduced fairly unaltered; in others things are scrambled more freely; in some I use the structure of a text while substituting my own words.

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

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer and the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941/48 (Rutgers UP 2014). Poetry chapbooks include It’s Fab (Origami Poetry Project 2023), No Devotions (LJMcD Communications 2023) and a forthcoming full length, Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda 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