some author activity: Boughn, Mohammadi, Rogal, Reid, Skrabalak + Smith,

Michael Boughn has a new poem up for National Poetry Month, over at the Chaudiere Books blog; Khashayar Mohammadi has a new write-up at Etcetera; Stan Rogal and Monty Reid have poems in the new issue of Pinhole Poetry, and Reid also has new work up at talking about strawberries all of the time; Ryan Skrabalak has new work in Noir Sauna; and Mahaila Smith is interviewed by Myna Chang.

Jay Miller reviews Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to review Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of this particular title, after Pearl Pirie reviewed such via The Miramichi Reader. You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

From Holler (2012):

    Snow

    Every tree
    a birch
    in winter.

I read my old review of Holler in Literatured’s archives and find allusive words such as Whitmanian, Plathian and Plath-like, and the worst offender among them, housewifery, repulsive to the ear, eye, and sense.

What did I know, at the ripe young age of 19, about Whitman, Plath, or the domesticity (or absurdity) of being a hausfrau?

Whitman, arguably, sure, and Plath, I had certainly run into amongst the university shelves if not the public library. But it’s that last one that really did me in.

I find one salvageable morsel from this more-than-decade-old review, the excerpt I used from her work that still haunts me, (above; a Nelson Ball-like joke that smiles upon the competence porn of botanical poetics) and move on to flipping through Alessandro Porco’s introduction, in Deportment (2018), to her selected works, to get my bearings for this review.

And what do I see in Porco? Whitmanesque, Plath, and housewife.

I can’t help but disagree. Carl Watts had a review in rob mclennan’s periodicities a few years after Deportment was published and wrote something to the effect that on several grounds, Porco doesn’t seem to demonstrate what he says he appreciates about Burdick’s past or current work:

“2016’s Chore Choir, with Kingston’s Puddles of Sky Press, for instance, is a pocket-sized, two-page poetic-prose offering that seems like a more clipped and yet more irreverent iteration of the poetics of Holler’s “Mahone Bay rhapsody.” Pleasure Bristles, a chapbook coauthored with Gary Barwin and published by above/ground in the same year as Deportment, disperses Burdick’s tactics further, raising questions about Porco’s conception of a gradual move toward accessibility while also justifying the editor’s selections by further permuting Burdick’s recognizable forms and splicing them Barwin’s.”

And I published her poems in my 2022 zine, poets against fascism:

    Honking bodies

    Honk once if a homunculus

    is jamming in the city core

    yelling freedom into the feathered

    bodies of city birds. The central

    premise of the vaunted naifs

    is immunity bleeds out the weak,

    as if that’s a good thing. Pillows

    plump up in cardinals’ mouths.

    A crested red bird catches light

    as she flies past stained glass.

    I open a door and an eye peers in,

    a warning to scale down

    expectations, accept the dome

    of the golden mean, tunnel

    below the yellow brick road.

I’m sitting here with a tower of books looming over me, remembering how earlier today, I had experienced a lapse in judgment. I thought Alice Burdick had a book out with Gaspereau Press, because Nova Scotia, and I couldn’t find it in my Gaspereau pile. It’s because it was underneath her 2025 publication with no name or title on the cover, just a line drawing of El Yucateco hot sauce, A Holiday for Molecules (2019).

But I’m only as smart as my reviews make me out to be. I see in Porco something that reminds me of what John Metcalf said of critics echoing one another on In The Village of Viger. Just because you repeat something doesn’t make it so.

So today, I want to veer away from repeating what others and my younger self have said for want of more original reflection and approach Alice Burdick’s poetry for the first time again after so many years: no pretense, no comparison, no assumptions, no garbage.

Let’s just get into it.

The first poem is dedicated to Mary Pratt. Pratt is a painter, who lived with her painter husband Christopher Pratt, according to Wikipedia, very much framing their relationship in rural Newfoundland as part of her paintings, which also included many everyday household objects, to paint a scene.

Let’s not get sidetracked, let’s read part of the poem together (it’s a three-parter):

    It’s a wonderful pain
    for Mary Pratt

    1)

    A window in my arm,
    blood and jello. Jar on
    the windowsill, fat red light.
    Mirror is a little bit of help,
    rather unacceptable.
    A lush, expensive decor -
    I could barely wade through
    the carpet. [...]

In the acknowledgements section of this chapbook, she writes that this poem (a two-parter) and the one after it (the other-parter, but actually a second poem) came after watching documentaries on Mary and Christopher (also a painter).

The first half of the Mary poems ends with this assertion: “[...] Here, in this place, / I’m the only one who can rule.”

The second half opens with a courageous tone:

    2)

    There’s an ease in the beginning.
    I will always be who I was,
    but I don’t know what that will be.
    Life is a self-portrait - it is interested
    in being done. [...]

I have thoughts I don’t know whether I’m as courageous as these resounding lines sound to say aloud. But I refuse to repeat. And no need anyways, for what she says is very straightforward: life is a self-portrait, as in, every person is a painter in front of the easel of their own existence. It is interested in being done, and forgive me, Alice, and other readers, because I can’t help but hearken back to what Porco mentioned in his introduction about the painful event of her mother’s tragic passing (her mother was visual artist Mary Paisley who, after enduring years of several, severe illnesses, took her own life in ‘94).

So she sees this documentary about Mary Pratt and finds affirmation for life in her portrayal, as though suicide were not a rankling heirloom of a notion but merely something that happens to other people. Alice Burdick’s poetry can be very frank.

But I don’t want to err into the territory of assumption by assuming that, despite acknowledging the inspiration for this poem, the poet herself is the speaker of the poem. It sounds much likelier that it is Mary, in fact: “[...] Life is a violent affair / of primrose paths. I’ll shuffle off / with those who worked. Maybe / one day I’ll be seen. I cannot hope / beyond my own satisfaction. / I hope I reach, but will not care / about your joy.”

Isn’t that a marvellous way to say a thing? “I hope I reach” beyond her own satisfaction; “but will not care” about the joy of her artwork’s viewers. Their joy is beyond her satisfaction; she paints for herself alone. It is a bold statement and unique to her person—a fantastic first poem.

Then, the second poem begins:

    You did it my way
    after Christopher

    Aesthetics are managed by direction -
    put this here and it is much better.
    A tunnel of disturbing balance.
    Amused contribution -
    a control that always asserts.
    Truth and fiction work together.
    Especially the fiction, because truth
    is never believed. [...]

I hope you sense the tension in my expression and my hesitation to overquote her poems, because they so clearly speak for themselves with an effect I can neither emulate or deconstruct. But Burdick here is self-aware of her relation to the subject and the speaker of the poem, slightly different from the Mary ones before, where it was Mary all the way.

Then, the end, to not leave readers hanging, but not give away the middle of the poem:

    [...] I’m not suicidal - bing bang, wharf.
    Sleep, however, forever -
    that is that, left, fine.
    We’ll leave it there.
    It doesn’t bother me.

It’s hard to tell who the speaker of the poem is talking to, because it feels like she is embodying his persona. Meanwhile, he is simultaneously talking to himself in front of a listener, Mary, but as a way to prove his point, opposite the effect of hers: you can totally commit suicide, he says, “bing bang, wharf.” But he doesn’t see it as an existential threat. He wants to avoid the discomfort I didn’t cite above, but occurs between start and finish: “A wheel turns, and we don’t / take each other seriously. [...]” He wants to resolve conflict; he doesn’t want to talk about suicide.

You know that meme, “there are two wolves inside you”? Christopher and Mary Pratt are two such wolves for Alice Burdick. These poems make such a great opening to this latest batch of her poetry, because any dialogue between two opposite characters, to me, borders on the infinite in possibility. It is borderline mythological. I may also be a bit of a sucker for inspired verse, especially when the inspiration is a wife-husband duo of Canadian painters.

You may also be relieved to hear they divorced in 2005.

What’s the rest of I Am So Calm about? Where did the title come from? Is it unassuming or all-encompassing, neither or both?

There is a poem in here that she describes in the back of the book as being written after she and her younger brother met their older brother for the first time (“On the end of the first reunion”). It's touching. The poem captures a delicate bouquet of emotions: closure, hope, excitement, mundanity, unexpectedness, gratitude, and a whimsically familiar sense of solidarity. As a would-be enjoyer, I’ll leave it to you, reader, to acquire a copy if you’d like to check it out at your local library or through above/ground press.

I continue reading and am humbled by the lassosnap wit she corrals words with. In general, critics overcompare, but Alice Burdick is simply masterful.

There is a poem in here that riffs off of Lorine Niedecker’s “Thomas Jefferson” that’s very good, but I won’t get into here to make myself scarce on comparison, as well as to leave some joys unusurped for those inclined to seek it out on their own. It would make an excellent subject for a future review, too (I never said I would eschew speculation).

Finally, there is a poem about ham: “Spiced ham street party.” It’s five stanzas and concludes the collection but it follows two other poems I could readily call my favourites of the bunch (“Reaction time” and “The bed book”). Read the middle stanza with me:

    The best way to prepare for the apocalypse is to lasso
    the pantry. Imagine the taste of cold war meat. Imagine
    that. The hard ham of dollhouses, chipping teeth.
    Develop your project more, ham, to be considered
    for the grant. Form wings to fly closer to the heat
    lamps. Fly the fondue pot to the edge of the volcano.

Funny, uncanny, brilliant, bizarre. What’s not to love?

Karl Jirgens reviews Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) at The Typescript

Windsor, Ontario writer, editor and publisher Karl Jirgens was good enough to provide the first review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) over at The Typescript. Thanks so much! You can read Jirgen's original post here. As he writes:

Penn Kemp’s latest poetry collection, Lives of Dead Poets, is published by Above/Ground Press, 2025. The cover features images by Penn Kemp’s father. This publication features rob mclennan’s utilitarian design with colour cover and black and white guts. This book offers a series of homages to influential writers who have died. As great literary figures depart, there are resonances. In this brief chapbook, echoes go back 50 years to the 1970s, including the City of Toronto, Coach House Press, Victor Coleman, A Space, the Canada Council, Bronwen Wallace, Fred Wah, George Bowering, audio recordings, Kemp’s archives at McGill University, and P.K. Page’s visit to the Kemp’s residence on Toronto Island. Resonances include Toronto’s Harbourfront,  Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, Robert Creeley, John Ashberry, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Gwendolyn McEwen, the City of Cairo, Sound Operas, the City of Vancouver, Robert Hogg, bp Nichol, GrOnk, Underwhich Editions, the Music Gallery, the Glenn Gould Studio, Sound Poetry, and London’s WordFest. All these people, places, and events resonate along with Penn Kemp’s sense that she was lucky to come of age within such a grand poetic milieu.  

This collection features homages to diverse dead poets while offering an elegiac tribute to past authors who left meaningful impressions on our literary worlds. Penn Kemp’s open stylistics inform these tributes while posing many questions. Are we waving while we are drowning? Why is meaning blurred? Why are possibilities opened? Why is meaning un-fixed? Kemp plays with the building blocks of language. Meanings shift, and become multi-valent, malleable, polysonic, polymorphous, polysemous. Words build and lead to other words, meanings mutate, gears shift, while the line with the lion lying with the lamb goes on the lam. Kemp develops her own signs, her own language. Lexical uncertainties become her style. Doorways open into strange new worlds, open ended, multifarious, rife with free morphemes, rich with latent meaning, and lush with occasional licentious lexicons. Kemp’s style provides an abundance of multiple meanings, language runs freely dialogical. We are granted simultaneous senses of complexities, depths, and layers. With reference to Jack Spicer, Kemp speaks of Rimbaud and says;

read Rimbaud instead and lie

            with the lion on the lam to lie on it,

                        no lie!— loose

occupational hazard—

            pelt, spelt

                        and all played out.

*

Is Kemp echoing Roland Barthes’ (1967) essay, “The Death of the Author,” where he says that the meaning of a poem is not fixed, because it is interpreted by each reader? Or, does Penn Kemp find a greater influence in Derrida, not Barthes? Does each reader hear and see a plethora of wonders? Are these mythologies or writings degree zero (which consider the arbitrariness of linguistic communication)? Does Penn Kemp introduce us to multi-dimensional linguistic spaces? Are we met with subtle or overlooked characteristics which can lead to new insights? Without a doubt. In any case, Kemp hands us a lion in lieu of a line. Are we met with convolutions of the personal and the universal? Are we confronted by undying texts versus human impermanence? I say, yes. See here. Hear for yourself. This is a brief excerpt from Kemp’s poem “Die Verse”;

As if. What matters. As if. What’s left.
As if. We have only our elegies. As if.
Even the need for elegy. As if remembering
and inventing—invenio —as if.
As I come upon. As I discover.
As if in passing through this vale.
As if memory’s world is
as if trudging up sludge,
As if the word that springs to
mind is devotion, as if, despite
the mess, life’s unholy
business forever left
unfinished.

Penn Kemp weaves us spells of language. Makes magic. Bewitches. Casts spells. Which wood have we entered? Witchwood? She leaves linguistic traces. A trail of bread crumbs. Alert readers will find pathways leading to pleasurable open spaces, or strong silences. This writing features multiple layers, meanings and perspectives. In “Alphabet for Ashbery” Kemp says;

Words in proximity to one another
take on another meaning…What you
hear at a given moment is a refraction
of what’s gone before or after.

 Glorious clumps of crimson berries, brilliant in long
September light. Sorbus domestica, a glow
from that prolific rose family. Mountain ash.

“Rowan is the tree of power, causing
life and magic to flower. Not to be
forgotten, set aside, or ignored”—

Pssst! except by the emerald ash borer
that does not attack our rowan,
itself the too-bright green pest—

*

This collection acknowledges various significant periodicals and small presses, including, The Typescript, The Malahat Review, Boneshaker Anthology, Texteditions, Brick, Insomniac Press, Moonstone Press, Above/Ground, plus Penn Kemp’s essay “An Ecology of Intimacy” (https://poets.ca/npm22-blog-penn-kemp/ ). The acknowledgements recognize significant poets including Robert Creeley, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Jack Spicer, Phyllis Webb, Robert Hogg, John Ashbery, James Reaney, Wayson Choy, Les Murray, Colleen Thibaudeau, P.K. Page, bp Nichol, Teva Harrison, Joe Blades, Joe Rosenblatt, Robert Kroetsch, and Ellen S. Jaffe, among others. All of these authors were engaged in the fine art of being. These acknowledgements cover a period from the 1970’s to the present and address years of creative energy. So many heroes are gone now. Friends. One by one, they depart. Leaving voices, memories, wisdoms, and chasms. Penn Kemp’s collection provides a tribute to these and other creators.

You should know about Penn Kemp’s poetry and activism. She has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication (Coach House, 1972). Penn Kemp has long participated in Canada’s cultural life. She’s had roughly three dozen books of poetry and prose published, as well as seven plays and multimedia works, plus collaborations (for example see; www.riverrevery.ca). Penn Kemp served as London Ontario’s inaugural Poet Laureate, and The League of Canadian Poets’ “Spoken Word Artist” (2015).  In addition she is acclaimed as “a foremother of Canadian poetry”. In case you haven’t noticed, Penn Kemp is one of Canada’s national literary treasures. Her recent poetry collaborations include “Intent on Flowering,” https://rosegardenpress.ca/intent-on-flowering/ and her anthology for Ukraine titled Poems in Response to Peril, co-edited with Richard-Yves Sitoski, https://www.rsitoski.com/poems-in-response-to-peril. Penn Kemp’s latest collection of sound poetry, Incrementally, text and album, can be found at https://www.hempressbooks.com/authors/penn-kemp, and www.pennkemp.weebly.com, plus, www.pennkemp.wordpress.com. Kemp has spoken these words for you and for me. Read these readings and writings. Read these pleasures of the text!

Jay Miller reviews Gary Barwin's Seedpod Microfiche (2013)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to review Gary Barwin's Seedpod Microfiche (2013) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! This is actually the third review of this particular title, after Scott Bryson reviewed such over at Broken Pencil, and Ryan Pratt reviewed same via the ottawa poetry newsletter. You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Seedpod Microfiche: a half dozen poems I received last year from rob mclennan, dated August 2013, and written by Gary Barwin.

The cover and back feature line drawings of faceless individuals bearing stethoscopes in an outstretched hand, a grandma-type figure on the front and a Lord Byron-looking type on the back (under a prominent $4 price tag), turnt away from the device being placed under his left clavicle. The title and author name appear in a lovingly unassuming serif, one word on each line, with title case capitalization, and author name all on one line, roughly 6-8px smaller. Stark inkblack on yellow.

The first of six poems has literary resonances from the first line. Yet, I turn away from them to take what’s left without allusion and nostalgia, not to be a literalist or purist, but to appreciate the imagery for what it is rather than what may or may not indirectly imply or illicit: a grass blade, it begins.

The thing about Gary Barwin is his affinity for assonance. There are a handful of other Canadian poets who sometimes pull off what he’s doing on this single page (and if you’re an optimistic judge, even myself, by inadvertent imitation to some extent). Albeit, it’s this rhythm that yanks you into the rut of a groove that combines the sounds of the words with the images it evokes.

Take a look at the logo for my blog, for example. For a minute, Leigh Kotsilidis and I had discussed whether or not to use ol’ timey medical texts (and microfiche!) to achieve the sort of dark academia vibe I was weighing in my head for the branding of this site. I’m glad we didn’t end up there per se, but you have to agree it is a vibe that exists. It’s the same aesthetic as the line-drawn figures on the covers of Barwin’s chap here in my hand right now. Collage removed from the chaos of collage, just a paparazzi flash of clinical press clippings removed from their historical context.

When you hear the title of the chapbook revealed in this opening poem, then, it all sort of clicks in the nebulousness of it all, without feeling like equivocation of any kind: seedpod, microfiche of twilight/a dewdrop observed, a cobweb/a weed-wrapped tongue or treetop.

The second page over, the dissonance encroaches one step further into your experience of reading it for the first time. The words slightly change, one line off, one syllable off, one noun replaced by one verb, but an evocative one, one that might appear with a red squiggle in your word processor or draft email message: the sewn seed is dropped twilight/microfiche an observation tower for wings/weeds, a rupture of the tongue. The mystery does not reveal itself even as it unfolds.

Next page: now lines are more noticeably moving to form a sextet where before there was couplet or triplet, and the ersatz of sounds, nouns and syntax takes on a new valency or prime order. What is the algebra that reverse engineers Barwin’s paperweight enigmas? Their unassumingness certainly does not warrant the impression we need to don the tinfoil hat of Pascalian curiosity to investigate. Let the puzzle remain unsolved. It is not cryptographic, but cryptic for the sake of beauty, not for the sake of being hammered out for good. Format adds square brackets here, as though instructional or journalistic.

Fourth of six poems: seed is the mitosis of sleep. Reminds me of a Nas lyric: I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death. What is a mitosis? Something to do with mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell? Cytology, the part usually followed by cell division, from Ancient Greek mitos, thread, synonym karyokinesis. Division of a cell nucleus in which the genome is copied and separated into two identical halves. An older dictionary (my beloved Annandale) offers a briefer picture: a somewhat complicated process.

Fifth poem, finneganation nearly complete, wake in progress: the truck, only four, asks/what else would stars do but constellate?

Then, further down the page: the way a scientist follows/an atom’s breath//love like a stethoscope/with neither ears nor heartbeats.

The final and sixth poem, perhaps the circumnavigation, the all-the-way-rounding off of the last decimal place in this irrationally derivated equation of a poem sequence: dusk on the owl of the tongue, it proffers.

And I was right: a stethoscope whose end/is its beginning/and whose beginning/is also twilight.

some author activity: Rogal, mclennan, Burdick, Jirgens, Browne, Berlatsky + Boyle,

Stan Rogal is interviewed for National Poetry Month at All Lit Up, and a poem by rob mclennan is posted as part of such; rob mclennan has a new poem up at Oatleaf; Alice Burdick is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Karl Jirgens is included in a feature dedicated to the life and work of Lyn Hejinian at Jacket2, as co-edited by forthcoming author Laynie Browne; Noah Berlatsky has a poem up at Oatleaf; and Frances Boyle has a new poem up at Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

David Dowker (May 20, 1955 – March 24, 2025)

Sad to hear that Toronto poet David Dowker has died, after an extended illness. He was always quietly generous with other writers, slipping into small press fairs to say hello, making his way from table to table. I first heard his name in the 1990s, through his online journal Alterran Poetry Assemblage, probably first through the SUNY-Buffalo list-serve, offering publication to a whole range of experimental poets and poetry, showcasing work that pushed at the boundaries of what might be possible. He was a champion for experimental writing, although never one to push his own work too hard, although that was there, also. Some of his publications over the years include Machine Language (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010), Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal (with Christine Stewart; BookThug, 2013) [see my review of such here], Mantis (Tuczon AZ: Chax Press, 2018) and Dissonance Engine (Book*hug, 2022) [see my review of such here]. I was fortunate enough to produce a chapbook of his, Chronotope (2021), through above/ground press, he guest-edited issue #23 of GUEST [a journal of guest editors] in 2022, and I interviewed him in 2019 for Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal]. He had been an above/ground press subscriber and supporter for more years than I can count, and always attempted to come through small press fairs to say hello if I was ever in Toronto. I shall miss his quiet dedication and attentiveness. He was a kind man.

some author activity: Sikkema, Robertson, Kolewe, Crosby, Shirley, Witek + mclennan,

Michael Sikkema has new work up at cul-de-sac of blood; did you know that Lisa Robertson has an occasional newsletter you can sign up for, as does R. Kolewe?; Gregory Crosby and Vik Shirley each have work up at talking about strawberries all of the time, as does forthcoming author Terri Witek; Chris Banks interviews rob mclennan for The Woodlot; and don't forget that above/ground press has that new substack you can sign up for, with extra-special other things to appear there.

Jay Miller reviews Mayan Godmaire's Yesterday’s Tigers (2021)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review for Mayan Godmaire's Yesterday’s Tigers (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Miller writes:

Published in 2021 through rob mclennan’s above/ground press, Mayan Godmaire is a former student of Sarah Burgoyne from Montreal’s Dawson College, where Godmaire also served as editor of several publications of. Additionally, they have an intriguing essay written as dialogue about decolonizing nature in the online Dawson English Journal, Ecocriticism and the Decolonisation of Nature: A Discussion.

I hesitate to write Dialoghi con Leucò as a potential allusion above, but then I open the chap and read the first word: Persephone. I redouble my too quickly abandoned assurance that there is a hint of Cesare Pavese in Godmaire here. But there is very much also a deliberately 21st-century ecopoetics edge whose ingrained spirituality reminds me fondly of the late speeches and works of Pier Giorgio di Cicco:

    When all the cars will have been taxed or tolled on their way to the cities, when bike paths and parks will have reconfigured our neighbourhoods, when safe and cleaner transportation has cut emissions, a fundamental question will remain. Is the safe city, the sanitized city, the sustainable city the same as the livable city? If all we want is clean and well-designed cities, it will likely come to pass. But in the long run, to save the environment means that we will want to save the environment not just for ourselves, but for each other. And to reverence each other means that we will have to discover each other.

There is something theatrical about this first page of text that I would not want to spoil by quoting directly, but it is an invocation not dissimilar to an epilogue as spoken by a chorus. We’re not in media res; we are part of the ritual that is audience-performance.

    In the here and now, in our ides of March, pestilence’s winter opened the cave for us all to crawl within, again and again.

    Is everybody in?
    Is everybody in?
    The ceremony is about to begin.

The very next page announces an onomatopoeia: BUZZ, SWIRL, SMOKERINGS, BUZZ BUDS BUZZ. There is a drama unfolding here, although maybe I am too TV-pilled to see anything but Euphoria in my head when I read it. Very much not a bad thing. This is story-telling done right. The neverending genderedness of the French language.

What follows next is a little hazy: biking through a hangover into the woods at Oka Beach. This work is more Montreal than Jason Freure’s City of Losers.

    “I once had a very strong feeling that this is my last life,” I tell Bermalva. The shaman’s expression does not change.
    “That’s possible,” she says.
    I can know myself. Je ne dois que m’unir au rhythm qui jetait leurs fleurs.

Franglais for: I mustn’t but become one with the rhythm throwing their flowers.

I hope I parsed that right.

Then, an ending that casts no aspersions:

    I am an empty chalice.
    The midnight whirl-pool, formless.

I won’t spoil any would-be readers with what I see on the next page over. I had to laugh at myself about it.

new from above/ground press: Things Musing, by Meredith Quartermain

Things Musing
Meredith Quartermain
$5

A Miraculous Platter

A giant china leaf – flamboyant green with bold ribs and veins. Scalloped edges. Eight leaflet side-plates to match. Guests oohed and aahed at its whole buttery salmon. I, the hostess, basked – at last I had style. But damn, my husband, drunk, barely vertical, insisted on washing up after the guests left. He chipped the flamboyant green against the sink, leaving a white patch along one edge. How could he not take care! Of this gift that had come with a scarlet candelabra from Robin Blaser. He of tuxedos, heavy rings, Italian loafers.
     I put away my flamboyant leaf, no longer good enough for dinner parties. But maybe I could find china-paint, colour the chip green, make my leaf good enough again. It needed research, phone calls, visiting stores, matching colour, buying paint and brush, setting up a place to work. Half a day or more to love my leaf.
     Our objects hail us, they hurl themselves against us. They are Latin ob -stacles + jacere to throw. Stop, we say. We are the subjects! You are mere objects. But they pull us out of their hats and throw us jacere-sub under their wheels. We bite the wheels. Such delicious rotae. We knit our own long woollen top-hats and pull them down over the rotae. We give these wheels panache.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the twenty-seventh title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
April 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Meredith Quartermain’s most recent book is Lullabies in the Real World (shortlisted for an Alberta Book Publishers’ award). Vancouver Walking won a BC Book Award for Poetry, and Nightmarker was a finalist for a Vancouver Book Award. She is also the author of two novels and two books of short fiction: Recipes from the Red Planet (BC fiction award finalist) and I, Bartleby. From 2014-2016, she served as Poetry Mentor in the SFU Writer’s Studio program. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Prism International, The Dalhousie Review, Event Magazine, The Capilano Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, and many other magazines.

This is Quartermain’s fourth publication but first chapbook through above/ground press, following the broadsides “December 4” (#168, April 2003) and “Geography” (#225, 2005), and “Highway 99,” produced as issue #35 of STANZAS magazine (October 2003).

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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

above/ground press author spotlight #1 : Amish Trivedi

The first author spotlight landed yesterday on the new above/ground press substack!

Amish Trivedi is the author of three books, most recently FuturePanic (Co•Im•Press, 2021) and four chapbooks from above/ground: The Destructions (2015), What We Remembered Before the Fire (2018), The Universe is an Earth-Shaped Urn (2021) and The Breakers (Expanded) (2021). In February 2023, above/ground press produced Report from the Trivedi Society Vol. 1 No. 1 (2023). Trivedi’s poems are in Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and are forthcoming in The Georgia Review. He has an MFA from Brown, a PhD from Illinois States, and is an assistant professor at the University of Delaware. Amish Trivedi reads on April 10, 2025 in Oneonta, New York as part of the Visiting Writers Series at Hartwick College.

some author activity: Browne, mclennan, Paty, Boyle + Saklikar,

forthcoming author Laynie Browne is one of a trio--along with Anselm Berrigan and Kate Colby--discussing Lewis Warsh's poem "Polar Night" as part of the most recent podcast episode of PoemTalk; rob mclennan is interviewed by Hollay Ghadery for the New Books Network podcast; Allyson Paty answers the "12 or 20 questions" interview; rob mclennan has a new poem up at Sumac Literary Review, as does Frances Boyle; and Renée Sarojini Saklikar is the second in the Canadian Poets series over at Peripety and/or Tronies.

Jay Miller reviews Sarah Burgoyne's The Tentaculum Sonnets (2020)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review for Sarah Burgoyne's The Tentaculum Sonnets (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

some author activity: O'Reilly, Gurton-Wachter, Reid, Dardis, Boyle + Aube,

Nathanael O'Reilly has a poem included in Red Room Poetry's Phone-a-Poem project; Anna Gurton-Wachter has a poem in the debut issue of the newly-revived LONG NEWS; Monty Reid has a new poem suite up at IceFloe Press; Colin Dardis has three new poems up at The Pi Review; Frances Boyle has two new poems up at Obindo; and Gwen Aube launches their above/ground press chapbook this week in Montreal! oh, and did you see that above/ground press now has a substack?

new from above/ground press: I'll try this hour, by Sandra Doller

I’ll try this hour
Sandra Doller
$5

They say Credence is
the best American band and
I am in its pocket now
First of now a first of may I
Decembered poem in the pile
Movember may be better
than June for roasting huck
nuts but soon it’s a line like
that that will get you kicked
out of Johnny B’s in a hot
March may I make a
suggestion a pill is not
my name too bad she said
keep driving the car with
no hands and I will surfeit
something out of it serve
it up good I sung from the
back loud and clingy
hear my hymn

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover art by Alphie Doller

Sandra Doller is the author of several books of poetry, prose, translation, and the in-between from the most valiant and precarious small presses—Les Figues, Ahsahta, Subito, and Sidebrow Books. Her newest book, Not Now Now, is forthcoming from Rescue Press. Doller is the founder of an international literary arts journal and independent press, 1913 a journal of forms/1913 Press, where she remains éditrice-in-chief, publishing poetry, poetics, prose, and all else by emerging and established writers. She lives in the USA, for now.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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

Catherine Marcotte reviews Micah Ballard's Busy Secret (2024)

Kingston, Ontario-based reader, editor and writer Catherine Marcotte was good enough to provide the first review for Micah Ballard's Busy Secret (2024) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Marcotte writes

Micah Ballard’s latest chapbook Busy Secret is a quippy, somewhat resigned meditation on the liminal spaces between life and death, and wealth and work. For Ballard’s narrators, these themes are central, presenting the questions that both create and disrupt the everyday textures of our lives. Through its repeated allusions to failed occupations, a distrust of wealth, and a meandering sense of self, the collection considers the relationship between our inner and outer lives and ultimately demonstrates the fragility of the relationship between the two.

In “Moscow on the Hudson,” the speaker treats poems like “diamonds cut for consignment,” gesturing to the modern devaluation of poetics. “Anything misleading count me in,” the speaker adds, as if to confirm that the life of the poet is not often what it appears to be. Indeed, the inner life of the dedicated poet does not always (or even often) translate to the successful outer life of an established one. “Whatever I had to become I became,” the speaker muses, gesturing to the necessity of adaptability in the arts. For Ballard’s narrator, and perhaps Ballard himself, a poet must be ready for a chameleon career, must be willing, as the speaker has been, to not only be a poet, but to be an aspiring poet, an artist cloaked under labels such as student, academic, or even, as in “Moscow on the Hudson,” unlicensed fortune teller.

In “Name Value,” the speaker similarly contemplates life in academia, commenting on the policing of poetry and subtly integrating a metanarrative into the text — a secondary narrative that breaks the so-called fourth wall between the reader and the poem. “Name Value” both acknowledges the supposedly dwindling state of the poetic genre and the fact that the text itself is a poem, beckoning readers to consider the seemingly endless possibilities of the poetic form. Here, Ballard is honest and reflective, imbuing his work with a compelling vulnerability and nuance. Although melancholic about the state and status of modern poetics, Ballard’s narrator is, in a way, also deeply hopeful. Despite his fears for the genre, he continues to write, affirming the writing form’s value in the face of its hardships. In a way, Busy Secret rejects binary organizations, presenting failure and success, as well as delight and disgust, not as opposing states but as conjoined ones. While a “rotting mansion” and a well-populated “Museum of Death” are central scenes, delightful images of mouth-watering “gumbo,” “jambalaya” and “crawfish etouffee” regularly compete for the reader’s (and the speaker’s) attention. The text’s dealings in both extremes are as compelling as they are off-putting, creating a unique blend of short, punchy narratives that spur reflection (and re-reading). A short, impactful read, Micah Ballard’s Busy Secret is a strange, almost enigmatic chapbook that considers the boundaries between our lives and our selves. It is just as sure to resonate as it is to disconcert.

new from above/ground press: The Peter F Yacht Club #35 : 2025 VERSeFest Special

The Peter F Yacht Club #35
2025 VERSeFest Special
lovingly hand-crafted, folded, stapled, edited and carried around in bags of envelopes by rob mclennan,
$6

With new writing by a host of Peter F Yacht Club regulars, irregulars and VERSeFest 2025 participants, including Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, Susan J. Atkinson, Frances Boyle, Jason Christie, Michelle Desbarats, Em Dial, AJ Dolman, Amanda Earl, Cara Goodwin, Phil Hall, Jessica Hiemstra, Rebecca Kempe, Laurie Koensgen, Margo LaPierre, Karen Massey, rob mclennan, Pamela Mosher, Salem Paige, Terese Mason Pierre, Pearl Pirie, Monty Reid, stephanie roberts + Grant Wilkins;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
[a small stack of copies will be distributed free as part of the fifteenth annual VERSeFest, March 25-29, 2025]
[see the prior issue here; see last year's VERSeFest issue here]

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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

VERSeFest 2025 : Andy Weaver, Phil Hall + Eileen Myles

above/ground press authors Andy Weaver, Phil Hall and Eileen Myles read in Ottawa this week as part of VERSeFest 2025! Tickets are still available! And Myles even reads at Carleton on Friday at noon at a free event! Might we see you there?

some author activity: Robinson, Banks, Ross, Hall, mclennan, Weaver + Boyle,

Ben Robinson has some new poems up at the temz review; Chris Banks posts an essay over at The Woodlot, on how he still believes in National Poetry Month; Stuart Ross has a bunch of new poems up at Mercurius; Phil Hall is interviewed by rob mclennan for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, as is Andy Weaver; and Frances Boyle has a new poem up at Concision.

new from above/ground press: Teenage Whales, by Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles
Teenage Whales
$5

the birds
push
the diamonds
the reddish
weave
of my knee
Honey’s heh heh
that shakes
her belly &
her back
it catches
in the back
of her
throat
ma-ma
goes the child
we want
to go
what the fuck
are you
doing here
with your
children &
a black
duck dips
his head
behind
a wave
is gone
[...]

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as part of the author’s participation in VERSeFest
March 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover illustration by the author

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist and art journalist. Their latest books are a “Working Life” and Pathetic Literature. They are currently at it on a very long novel, out in ‘27, maybe. They live in NYC & Marfa TX.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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: Parallax Days, by Gregory Crosby

Parallax Days
poems
Gregory Crosby
$5

Apollonian

He looked at her the way Buzz Aldrin might glance at the moon while wheeling the trash to the curb.



Mourning, After

He woke up with moon breath, & the stink of cheap sunlight still clinging to his skin.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever (2021, Brooklyn Arts Press) and Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion (2018, The Operating System). He is currently the poetry editor for the online journal Bowery Gothic.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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

Pearl Pirie reviews Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025)

Quebec poet, editor, writer, reviewer, editor, publisher etcetera (and above/ground press author) Pearl Pirie was good enough to provide the first review for Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Pirie writes:

I Am So Calm by Alice Burdick (above/ground press, 2025) is the latest from a poet who has been putting  out surreal books since at least 2002. Her most recent full collection is Ox Lost, Snow Deep (A Feed Dog book/Anvil Press, 2024).  

From what I’ve read this chapbook seems consistent in style, although I won’t offer a title by title comparison. I Am So Calm sets mid-field in surreal. The poems feel like disorienting lists of non-sequiturs or axiomatic koans. That said, “non-sequitur” presumes one thing should follow from the previous when that sort of linkages is a construct and her objects and awarenesses are discrete and independent, explicitly “a tapas of small moments.” (p. 17). Line progressions outright refuse cis-het military industrial late-capitalist hierarchical culture of How Sense is Conveyed.  

Grounding phrases break in and flit away. Marginalia is welcomed into the body. What does it matter for, as she concludes with admission of ephemerality of both grief and grace, “Our bodies take everything in, then dispose/ of the everything, gradually.”  

Because the sentences and semantics in each line are simple, short and small it seems to instruct the reader to move quickly, but the collective run of sentences confound a quick reading. How does anything fit?  One needs to squint or look at middle distance to not see so literally a pattern or progression. We get permission to not have authorial authority over all we see, whether we read of speak. See the foci  captures chosen in the last fifth of “The Bed Book”, (p. 14-15)  

Floorboards creak, heels of a bouncing child  
smash down from above. That  
was a successful quesadilla.  
I like the idea of beginning  
in the middle. Then please,  
don’t worry about the fog.  
Aureola? Or corona?  
What is the light  
that carries us all?  
What is the light that embalms?  

It is the barely differentiated everything, the chaotic flourishing that carries us, illuminates us, not the still profundity of interstitial reflection. Rather than staid and proper it’s vivid and irreverent urging to live, live, live, “bounce meaty bellies off each other, dance.” (p. 20)  

In “A Real Success”, Burdick writes, “To not speak is to succeed” and continues,  

"Let concerts happen with more air  
about them. The audience  
a required entity."  

It echoes the absurdist play In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (Grove  Weldenfeld, 1967) when the Player said, “the single assumption that makes our existence viable—  that somebody is watching…every gesture and pose vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds.” What matters is the sharing, the joining of focus, not the  containing, elevating and perfecting on plinths a historically inaccurate construction of calm order.  If the poetry were to have a theme song it might be “Chicks Dig It”, (“pain hurts, but only for a  minute. All you’re left is with the memories you made. Life is short. Best live it.” I hope I’m nailing that and not paraphrasing).  

It may be a different form but as with artistic expression, it wrestles with how to live well. Towards the last 10% of “If you do this, honour will result” we have an index of values of sorts:

"...We’re all  
just doing the best we can. Graft a tree onto another tree,  
a wedge to reanimate flowers. Shelter your loved ones’ bodies  
and listen when they tell you who they are, what makes them  
feel safe, what they need, what they notice. Instruct destruction  
to fold its retractable blade. Hold me, my own arms.  
Upend honour and drain the rigid globules."  

Destruction as a switchblade, grafting to another as resurrection to blooms, flush the parts that clot your flow. Yet said fresh and to be confoundingly slow so it can’t be quickly glossed over. There is something toward a profound lesson and closure at the end of poems and something of a flotsam, jetsam swirl around a theme that prevents it from being random and more towards bastard ghazal. It is a hyperactive sort of mind but one that insists on kindness and accepting in what is and asks what could be if we think without the usual blinders, partitions, rules and boundaries?

new from above/ground press: Market Discipline, by Kevin Davies

Market Discipline
Kevin Davies
$5


This grim cart an ocean between us.
That’s what it feels like and that’s what it is.
This highfaluting gimcrack awaiting whistle of approval.
That’s what we talked about as the blimp plummeted.

This criminology a flawed paean, all.
That’s the verdict that emits City Hall.
This crimp in the wing of the suspect spaniel.
That’s what we’ve got saved instead of the throbbing dossier.

This the new puzzler from the pen of the abbot’s double cousin.
That’s just how it works in these misspelled parts.
This overproduction an all-too-padded shank of decimal innovation.
That’s what I’m trying to understand about what used to be the river.

This is all you’ve got and you’ve come all this way.
That’s the awesome deed itself in dungarees.
This pinion you speak of, Plato, can it measure levels of disorganization?
That’s what the contract is said to have said to have specified.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard the alto wail of what is lather.
That’s a project for another time and altered trapeze.
This cruciform range of options applies itself to plateau sage.
That’s I suppose what we get for trusting those who once lived on boats.

This is Mike, my old friend and new adjutant.
That’s my way of saying goodbye to a whole range of associations.
This sound familiar?
That’s the nightly cannon in Stanley Park reminding us to floss.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Kevin Davies was active in the Vancouver poetry scene in the 1980s and has lived in New York City since 1992, working as a copyeditor and writing instructor. His books include FPO (2020), The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (2008), and Comp. (2000), all from Edge Books in Washington, DC.

Market Discipline is a section of Salacious Dossier, forthcoming from Talonbooks in 2028. Also forthcoming: Transfer Portal (Edge, 2025) and Three Yards and a Cloud of Ducks (Roof, 2027).

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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: fitzpatrick, Pakdel, Armantrout, Kemp + Boyle,

ryan fitzpatrick is the first in the Canadian Poets series over at Peripety and/or Tronies; Saba Pakdel has a poem up in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; Rae Armantrout has three new poems up at N+1, and two new poems up at The Fortnightly Review; Penn Kemp has two poems and two paintings over at The Typescript; and Frances Boyle has new work at Full House Literary and a further at Major 7th Magazine.

new from above/ground press: whittle gristle, by Lori Anderson Moseman

whittle gristle
Lori Anderson Moseman
$5

Kerf

Kerf, the space left by a saw blade,
lets grass blades thrive between
gang planks serving as tables
upturned to become raised beds.
Each surrogate coffin piled on top
of another is mortared together
with fertile soil blessed with seeds.
Combating sterile, reified space,
grass grows tall between table slats—
tall enough to bend like widows
keening with grief, grasping for light.
Doris Salcedo’s Plegaria Muda
is watered by testimony of mothers
of the disappeared in Columbia.
Victims of gang killings in LA
are harbored here, resting
like dry docked skiffs waiting
for a marsh to silt in, for meadow
to offer a softer landing.
Upended table legs are divining rods
hovering over those we won’t forget.
In an act of love, of weekly tending,
docents dutifully trim this grass respite.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

For Lori Anderson Moseman’s recent work, see Quietly Between, a 2022 poetry/photography collaboration available from A Viewing Space. Her recent experimental poetry collections include Darn (Delete Press, 2021) and Y (Operating System, 2019). For her artist book collaboration with Karen Pava Randal, see Full Quiver (Propolis Press, 2015) and Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Her collaborations with Brazilian printmaker Sheila Goloborotko include “Jarring Bits” (Talon Review, 2019), “insistence, teeth” (Dusie.org, 2014), Creation (2012), um daqueles lugares sublimes (2008). See https://loriandersonmoseman.com

This is Moseman’s third title with above/ground press, following Okay (2023) and Too Few Words (2023).

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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

Pearl Pirie reviews Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (2025)

Quebec poet, editor, writer, reviewer, editor, publisher etcetera (and above/ground press author) Pearl Pirie was good enough to provide the first review for Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (2025) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Pirie writes:

Andy Weaver teaches poetry and creative writing at York University and has published three books of poetry, most recently this (Chaudiere, 2015). I feel I’ve read Andy Weaver before, or maybe I only saw him perform. Or I’ve read so many reviews with excerpts by rob mclennan that I am familiar his work that way. From what I’ve seen his form of poetry makes use of the whole page, not as in scattered individual words but as metrical spacing of phrases.

I recently reread ligament/ ligature by Andy Weaver (Model Press, 2022). ligament/ligature, his previous and longer chapbook, used space and line breaks enact the physical space and the leaves in the mental tree turning, and controls pacing.

That chapbook is a poetry not much more of quotidian observations but meditating on our individual responsibility to create love and tenderness and connection. They don’t feel didactic so much as being let into a secret room of the head without social filters, some showmanship caper. The reader is given a chair as an equal, rather than a back seat in the lecture hall.

The Robert Duncan at Disney World has something of the same convention of adding space to the poem. The poems take up the amount of page it needs rather than be tidily obedient to the left margin. They are not built up as a prose argument of a stone house but more of a metal framed glass structure. The air in the poems signal the reader to slow down but the ideas being digested are heavier but on a comparable tack.

The poems are starting with a thesis of what-if to explore if Robert Duncan were dropped into the commercial epicentre of branding, what would he think and by extension, what might we if we paused long enough.

The precise word choices makes it akin to a haiku series. That aesthetic may be an influence given his references to other Japanese practices throughout the work. In section 4 of 10 (p.4) the imagist of “childhood snow/forts to escape/into blazing sunlight” with the volta that surprises, not to escape into snow forts, but what is built is escaped by returning to sunlight.

He floats interesting concepts, such as in the same section above, abundance as the blind spot with the continuity effect perhaps bridging gaps between negative content.

In a way, I’d like poetry to be transmitted like a Ted Lasso script hyperlinked to all embedded references so I could chase every tangent, to lazily help me unpack a phrase such as “a fordist/ assemblage of hope” but I guess I know what he means of the shallowness of modernist capitalism doing pre-fab assembly line work for identity, like Ford’s practice aimed at Manifest Destiny of patriotism. We are in a system we can’t control.

His criticism of the distraction/entertainment era, the rides (literal and figurative) that make for a collective screaming, “terror’s new grace note” has not so much cynicism as a call to do better as individuals and as a society, to dig deeper. He does so in lovely language and with a love for language “the ichor oozing from heel blisters/an anchor”. Who knew there was a word for that translucent stuff in blisters except water?

To chime it off anchor is rather sublime. Our pain is what can ground us to meaningfulness, to a sense of significance. If it is not a threat, or trauma, if it floats without repercussions, we can safely turn off our critical faculty. When amusement dominates, that evasion becomes a Trojan Horse, he seems to say earlier but by section 8 makes more explicit.

Overall the chapbook is thoughtful and considered and makes space for us to interrogate what a considered life of our own would look like, rather than let ourselves be railroaded by urgency of marketing and frenetic clickbait of news and the Muchness of Paying Attention to Everyone.

The poetry demonstrates a slowing down, a coming around to make the world we would choose to live in.