some author activity: Clayton, Boyle, Reid, Smith, Solomon, Dolman + Baker,

Conyer Clayton has some new work up at the ex-puritan, as does Frances Boyle; Clayton also has some new work up at Vallum magazine; Monty Reid had some poems up at The Dodge (that I hadn't noticed prior); Steven Ross Smith has a piece up in the "Tuesday poem" series; Misha Solomon has a poem up in the "Poetry Pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; and did you see that Conyer Clayton, AJ Dolman and Jennifer Baker are reading soon in Kemptville, Ontario at the North Grenville Public Library?

new from above/ground press: Une Couronne Cassée Pour Ma Sœur, by JoAnna Novak

Une Couronne Cassée Pour Ma Sœur
JoAnna Novak
$5

The door creaks & she pulls it shut.
My sister is afraid. Her white gown
    doesn’t really close, her veil, parted
lips, open palms, psalms sung, one
    bed to another. Pewed-prayers, her voice
bread not bred, hips hitched to the body
    of the man under her tongue. This
will not be simple. She is so busy being
    vernacular & vain, missal-less
in the neighbor’s garden. Birds. Bouqueting
    kale. Enkindled kindness, tithes,
she removes her shoes to become a pronoun.
    Stone beneath her skirts, down she goes.
What vibrates in those eighteenth-century walls?

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

JoAnna Novak latest book Domestirexia: Poems was published by Soft Skull in 2024. She is the author of the memoir Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood. Novak’s short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is also the author of the novel I Must Have You and three additional books of poetry: New Life; Abeyance, North America; and Noirmania. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications.

This is Novak’s second above/ground press title, after Knife with Oral Greed (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

some author activity: Abel, Bowering, mclennan, Dean + Young,

Jordan Abel has won the 2024 Banff Mountain Book Competition Prize for Mountain Fiction and Poetry; The George Bowering Collection and Reading Room is scheduled to be installed in Special Collections at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2025; rob mclennan was interviewed by Alan Neal for CBC Radio's All In A Day; and Leesa Dean is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey ; and did you see this interview with American poet Geoffrey Young?

new from above/ground press: A Love Poem While the Children Sleep, by Julia Cohen

A Love Poem While the Children Sleep
Julia Cohen
$5

Even I will move through the night
I will move through the night out
of the way, even
 
to make room
for the thud
of love
 
call it eating the moon’s ass
 
eating the moon’s ass
is something you’d write
& I’m writing it for you
inside the thud
 
*
 
Even if our hands are cold
the same cold temperature, even
 
I will lend you
my belly
to sleep
like we are links
in a drowsy fence
fallen over
in a Wyoming wind
 
*
 
I love to fuck
up books ("A Love Poem While the Children Sleep")

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

cover painting:
Li Shan Chong, lovely soft morning cream bed series #1903.
Acrylic on Canvas.

Julia Cohen is the Director of Writing at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. She is the author of three books, most recently, I Was Not Born (Noemi Press) and the forthcoming collection of essays, Freak Lip (Texas Review Press, Fall 2025). Her work appears in the Georgia Review, The Southeast Review, Fugue, and The Bennington Review. She co-curates, with Abby Hagler, a poetry interview series at Tarpaulin Sky Magazine. She lives in Colorado Springs with her family.

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: DOCTOR SHAMAN, by Susan Gevirtz

DOCTOR SHAMAN
Susan Gevirtz
$5

Origin is a practice of revision

Diagnosis a practice of reception, a social event a place of encounter

You are changed by attendance
The event changed by your presence         


The commentators say the relation with the text is NATAN, a palindrome  

It changes while you read it     You are read while you read it

The text needs us
–you don’t just take from it

You give to it  -- It takes from us

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the twenty-sixth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
November 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Susan Gevirtz is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Burns (Pamenar 2022), Hotel abc (Nightboat, 2016) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street, 2010). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat, 2013), and Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang, 1996). She was associate editor of HOW(ever), a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s poetry and scholarship, and served on the advisory board for its successor, the online journal HOW2. In 2004, with poet and restorer of maritime antiquities, Siarita Kouka, she founded the Paros Symposium, an annual meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. Gevirtz was Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University, California, for ten years, and subsequently taught in the Visual and Critical Studies and MFA programs at California College of the Arts, as well as in undergrad Writing and Visual Studies. She is currently a writing mentor through Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration. She is based in San Francisco.

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: Donato, Robinson, Ross, mclennan, Inniss + Boyle,

Joseph Donato has a poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; Ben Robinson answers the '12 or 20 questions' interview; Stuart Ross has new poems in the new issue of Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, as does rob mclennan, who also has a piece up at Still Point; Scott Inniss had some work up at Still Point a while back, also; and Frances Boyle has a poem online at The New Quarterly,

new from above/ground press: And Absurd Cycle, by Drew McEwan

And Absurd Cycle
Drew McEwan
$5

We behaviors rituals

overwhelming serious victims
behaviors
the lengths prevent pleasure
drugs people chemistry

less and OCD

Form in common devastating lives
washing the difficulty
impatient performance hour’s Obsessions
mental Latin

in distress is something pleasant

understood extremely body extremely everyday
physically use transmission
patient rituals make People
and repeat overwhelmed and absurd cycle

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

Drew McEwan is the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously (forthcoming, 2025). She has also published numerous literary chapbooks including Conditional, Can't tell if this book is depressing or if I'm just sad, Theory of Rooms, and Recoveringly. She works as an educator and researcher at the University at Buffalo.

This is her second title with above/ground press, after theory of rooms (2016).

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

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, November 15: Sherwood, Reid, Hamilton, Baglow + Rodrigues,

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

The Factory Reading Series
the pre-small press book fair reading
celebrating THIRTY YEARS of the ottawa small press book fair

featuring readings by:

Claire Sherwood (Montreal)
Monty Reid (Ottawa)
Seymour Hamilton (Chelsea QC)
John Baglow (Ottawa)
+
Tazi Rodrigues (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, November 15, 2024
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
Anina’s Café, 280 Joffre-Bélanger Way

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

Claire Sherwood [pictured] is a Montreal writer, visual poet, and oral storyteller. Her short fiction has appeared in Minority Reports: New English Writing in Quebec (Vehicule Press), and her poetry in Kola Magazine (The Black Writers’ Guild), Zettel Magazine (Underbridge Press), carte blanche magazine (QWF online), Helios (Ediciones de la Salamandra Negra), My Island My City (sitting duck press), What Lasts (2 Susans Poetry Circle). Her new chapbook Eat Your Words was published by Montreal’s Turret House Press.

Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan but has made his home in Ottawa for the past 25 years. He has published a dozen books of poetry, most recently Garden (Chaudiere, 2014) and Meditatio Placentae (Brick, 2016). He has also published award-winning non-fiction and more than 20 chapbooks with publishers in Canada and abroad. His work has won National Magazine Awards, the Lampman Award, the Stephansson Award (3 times) and has been short-listed 3 times for the GGs. Magazine publications include The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, CV2, The Puritan, Train, Dusie, Manoah and many others. His latest chapbook Vertebrata was published by Montreal’s Turret House Press.

Seymour Hamilton lives in Chelsea, Quebec with his wife Katherine. He is much happier writing stories than he ever was before he retired from ordinary work-work, which in his case involved a lot of marking, editing, and writing in the academic world and the civil service.  He has written eight books of fiction, six of them a post-apocalypse science fiction trilogy that got out of hand and spun off three sequels, with a seventh coming soon.  He also wrote a novel about 1960s back-to-the-land hippies in Nova Scotia, and a collection of inter-related stories called The Laughing Princess, which feature dragons of great power and authority.

John Baglow is a former union executive officer (PSAC), and presently writes and lives in Ottawa. Baglow has published three books of poetry, Emergency Measures (Sono Nis Press, 1976), Journey Under Glass (Penumbra Press, 2004), and more recently, Murmuration: Marianne’s Book (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023). He has also written a critical study of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, The Poetry of Self (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987). His poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, nationally and internationally.

Tazi Rodrigues (she/her) is a writer and aquatic biologist. A second/third-generation-settler from Treaty 1 territory, she lives in Ottawa on the unceded land of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. She placed second in the 2023 Kloppenburg Hybrid Grain Contest for her essay on learning Portuguese and listening to fish, and won the 2024 Diana Brebner Prize for her poem on looking for bees. Other writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, CV2, and Canthius. She is currently writing about ecological sound, caring for the worms and foster cats who live with her, and counting bugs at her neighbourhood pollinator garden.

some author activity: Rexilius, Mody, Earl, mclennan, Logan + Dewinetz,

Andrea Rexilius is interviewed, alongside Heather Garbo, for Westword; Monica Mody is discussed in an article by Yashaswini Krishna, "Poetry's role and the financial struggles of poets today," at NewsTrail; Amanda Earl has a visual poem in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; rob mclennan has an excerpt of the work-in-progress, "the green notebook," up at Annulet, and is interviewed by Ivy Grimes for Writing Thoughts; Nate Logan has a new poem up at LEAVINGS and then another new poem up at LEAVINGS and also a poem at The Tiny; and did you know that Jason Dewinetz received a "Distinguished Alumni Award" from the University of Victoria a few years back?