some author activity: mclennan, Armantrout, Fagan, drystek, Tate + Schapira,

rob mclennan is interviewed by Megan Nichols as part of the What We Aim To Do podcast; Rae Armantrout has a poem, draft and short write-up at underbelly; Cary Fagan has started doing chapbook reviews again over at his blog; nina jane drystek has a concrete sound poetry recording newly up at the ex-puritan; and Bronwen Tate did a short substack write-up on what Kate Schapira has been working on the past few years.

newly posted at periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics: folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)

folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
, edited by Jeremy Stewart and Donna Kane : see the expansive folio here

above/ground press has produced a couple of chapbooks by Barry McKinnon over the years--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, which is very much worth reading.

new from above/ground press: i wanted to say something, an elegy, by rob mclennan

I wanted to say something,
: an elegy,
, for Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)
rob mclennan
$5



published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2024
published simultaneously online as part of the tribute folio Barry McKinnon (1944-2023), eds. Jeremy Stewart and Donna Kane, at periodicites: a journal of poetry and poetics
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover photo: Rae Armantrout and Barry McKinnon at VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, March 2012.
photo credit: rob mclennan

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 World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023), as well as a recent chapbook through Montreal’s Turret Press, and a further forthcoming with Toronto publisher Gap Riot Press. His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) is scheduled to appear in August 2024, and a further poetry title, the book of sentences, is forthcoming with University of Calgary Press.

This is mclennan’s sixty-ninth above/ground press chapbook, following the recent river / estuaries (with Julie Carr; 2023), edgeless : letters, (2023), The Alta Vista Improvements (2023), Autobiography (2022), 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), etcetera.

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: Kemp-Gee, Jirgens, Kroetsch, Webb + mclennan,

Meghan Kemp-Gee has three poems in issue six of Couplet Poetry; Karl Jirgens' work is part of Jim Andrews' new Sea of Po site, and Jirgens also has new poems for Al Purdy, Robert Kroetsch, Raymond Souster and Louis Dudek over at The Typescript; Lindsey Webb is interviewed by Madeline Howard for Coveteur; and rob mclennan has a new poem up at John Stiles' How Yah Doon?

some upcoming author readings: mclennan in Picton, Ebbitt in NYC + Tracy, Casteels + Heroux in Kingston, etc

rob mclennan reads with Kingston poet and Anstruther Press author Y. S. Lee on Thursday, June 20 in Picton, Ontario as part of the PEP Rally series hosted by Assembly Press: 6:30-8pm at Books & Company, 289 Main Street; Katie Ebbitt launches her above/ground press title alongside Riley Mac, Sophia Kiam, Coco Gordon Moore, Krithika Varagur and Stephanie Wambugu as part of Red Room KGB, 7pm on Sunday, June 23 in New York City; Dale Tracy launches her above/ground press title alongside Michael e. Casteels and Jason Heroux chapbook launches on Tuesday, June 18, 7pm, at Novel Idea Bookstore in Kingston, 156 Princess Street ; and you heard the ottawa small press book fair is next weekend, yes?

new from above/ground press: Unsovereign, by Kacper Bartczak (trans. Mark Tardi

Unsovereign
Kacper Bartczak
translated from the Polish by Mark Tardi
$5

Hybrid engine triptych


1.

in singing the song all freight

migrates synthesizing a mineral loss

imparts the viscosity of light



2.

biometric sculpture a direct inject

vacuum emission in a unit

a buoyant mouth squishes a piston

spewing a party of grease light



3.

listen on the fora for all sorts of crash

see the algaesphere ionizing

expediting a party of sinking light

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover image: Agnieszka Kowalska-Owczarek
A watercolor from the series Wibracje – Linie z Niekończoności [Vibrations – Infinity Lines]

KACPER BARTCZAK is a Polish poet, scholar, and translator. Recent volumes include Czas Kompost [Time Compost] (2023), Widoki wymazy (2021), Naworadiowa [Radionaves] (2019), Pokarm suweren [Food Sovereign] (2017), and Wiersze organiczne [Organic Poems] (2015), which was nominated for two major awards in Poland. He has translated and published volumes of selected poems by Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, and Peter Gizzi. as well as the work of many other poets into Polish. In English translation, recent poetry of his has appeared in Poetry, ANMLY, Denver Quarterly, Interim, MAYDAY, and Berlin Quarterly. His awards include two Fulbrights––at Stanford and Princeton, respectively––and a fellowship from the Kościuszko Foundation at Florida Atlantic University. He is an associate professor and department chair at the University of Łódź.

MARK TARDI is a writer and translator whose recent awards include a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowship. He is the author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), and his translations of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive Press) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021. Recent writing and translations have appeared in Poetry, Conjunctions, Guernica, ANMLY, Full-Stop, Interim, Cagibi, Denver Quarterly, and in the anthology The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition Press, 2023). Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland will appear with Litmus Press in September 2024. He is on faculty at the University of Łódź.

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

an above/ground press (zoom) launch, May 19, 2024: Ballard, Eleftherion Carr, Deutch, Ebbitt + Polyck-O'Neill : video now online,

In case you missed it, the video for the above/ground press (zoom) launch from May 19, 2024 is now online, posted to the same YouTube channel that also hosts the ongoing  virtual reading series via periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. With readings and launches by five different above/ground press authors: Micah Ballard (San Francisco CA), Melissa Eleftherion Carr (Ukiah CA), Amanda Deutch (Brooklyn NY), Katie Ebbitt (New York NY) + Julia Polyck O'Neill (Toronto ON). lovingly hosted by rob mclennan,

 

 
You can find the link to author biographies, as well as to each of the new chapbooks they were launching, here.