Alice Notley (November 8, 1945 - May 19, 2025)

Sad to hear that American poet and above/ground press author Alice Notley [photo lifted from her 2018 '12 or 20 questions' interview] died Monday night in Paris. The tributes will be far-reaching, I suspect, from every corner of contemporary writing across these next few days and weeks. For now, we offer condolences to her family and friends. She came through Ottawa to read at VERSeFest in 2018, which prompted her above/ground press title, and her reading was one of the finest I've witnessed.

new from above/ground press: PSA, by Jason Christie

PSA
Jason Christie
$6
 

Microplastics are forever!

I get itchy just thinking about how my body might change as a result of all the little, hard bits of chemical residue I've absorbed. I guess that's the joy of being human, it’s my privilege, right? Experiencing evolution even if it is uncomfortable. It is a miracle to feel and understand comfort because we experience discomfort. Not simply as a sensation but as a concept that I can enact. Being able to modify myself and my environment. That's power! Now where did I put my limited edition Deadpool mini-figure again? Hey, consider this though. What if because of the microplastics filling our bodies we end up preserved and living forever? What if because we were so fucking stupid we actually and accidentally become immortal? I'd watch that movie. Microplastics, man. 

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

[Jason Christie will be launching this title in Ottawa on August 7, 2025 as part of the above/ground press 32nd anniversary reading/launch at RedBird Live; tickets and other information available soon]

Jason Christie lives and writes in Ottawa with his wife and two children and no pets. His published books include Canada Post (Invisible), i-Robot (EDGE/Tesseract), Unknown Actor (Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). He’s wrapping up a new collection that he wrote with/against/for AI.

This is Christie’s ninth 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), Bridge and Burn (2021) and glass / language / untitled / exaltation (2023; second printing, 2024), which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

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 zoom launch! Tierney, Quartermain, Houglum, Doller + Jenks, May 28 2025

Check out the above/ground press ZOOM launch we’re doing on Wednesday, May 28, 7pm EDT, with myself reading alongside:

Orchid Tierney (OH)
Meredith Quartermain (BC)
Brook Houglum (BC)
Sandra Doller (NY)
and
Tom Jenks (UK)

, all of whom have recent above/ground press titles. Join via the link, here.

Author biographies:

Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her collections include this abattoir is a college (Calamari Archive, 2025) and a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System 2019). She is the author of several chapbooks including looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023), my beatrice (Ottawa: above/ground, 2020), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX, 2019), and blue doors (Belladonna* Press, 2018). Tierney is the coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, and her scholarship has appeared in SubStance, Jacket2, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry, Teaching the Literature of Climate Change, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900. She is a senior editor at The Kenyon Review.

She is launching her second above/ground press title, pedagogies for the planthroposcene (May 2025), following my beatrice (2020)

Brook Houglum published the chapbook Anthronoise with above/ground press in 2024. She teaches at Capilano University and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia on unceded Skwxwú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ lands.

She is launching her second above/ground press title, INVENTORY (April 2025)

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.

She is launching Things Musing (April 2025), her 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)

Tom Jenks is a writer and text artist living in Manchester, UK. His books include The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions), Melamine (The Red Ceilings Press) and Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs (Penteract Press), a pangrammatical novel with Catherine Vidler. He edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects. More at https://tomjenks.uk/

He is launching his above/ground press debut, Chimneys (May 2025)

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.

She is launching her above/ground press debut, I’ll try this hour (March 2025)

some author activity: Cone, Eleftherion, Armantrout, Skrabalek + Gontarek,

forthcoming author Jon Cone has new work up at Ant5; Melissa Eleftherion has new work up at Moira; Rae Armantrout has a new poem, "craft talk," up at The Best American Poetry blog; the video recording of Ryan Skrabalek's Woolsey Heights reading in South Berkeley, California, alongside Cecily Nicholson, Ted Rees and Joni Flint Gonzales, is now online; and I missed it before, but apparently Maxwell Gontarek had some work online as part of the online journal for Pamenar Press.

new from above/ground press: A N G E L D U S T, by Micah Ballard

A N G E L D U S T
Micah Ballard
$6

CONNOISSEURSHIP

Irresponsible joy
recycling moods inhaled surreal
what ifs all heart sensitive aloof
picked up maddening static
detained by a friendly hand
laughing and sinking into the most
luxurious eros. What a show off
yawing at the police
A charmed suddenness always talking
alone in the quasi I am unable
to be sad. You make me believe
I embarrass myself and go to bed early
all these souls jumping
inside and out. I am not asleep
I am only emerging
my broken mask invisible
with a subtle task

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

cover image: Jason Morris, while listening to Dead Moon on repeat.

Micah Ballard is the author of over a dozen books of poetry including Waifs and Strays (City Lights Books), Afterlives (Bootstrap Press), The Michaux Notebook (FMSBW), Parish Krewes (Bootstrap Press), Selected Prose, 2008–19 (Blue Press), Evangeline Downs (Ugly Duckling Presse), Daily Vigs (Bird & Beckett Books), Vesper Chimes (Gas Meter), Busy Secret (first ed. above/ground press; second ed. FMSBW) and Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners (Bootstrap Press). He lives in San Francisco with poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux and their daughter Lorca.

This is Ballard’s second above/ground press title, after Busy Secret (2024). With Garrett Caples, he co-edited G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] #21, “Castle Guestskull” (2022).

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

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 20: Pirie, MA|DE, Bandukwala, Moran + Smith,

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

The Factory Reading Series
the pre-small press book fair reading

featuring readings by:

Pearl Pirie (QC)
MA|DE (Windsor ON)
Manahil Bandukwala (Ottawa ON)
James K. Moran (Ottawa ON)
+
Mahaila Smith (Ottawa ON)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, June 20, 2025
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]

author biographies:

Pearl Pirie lives slowly in rural Quebec. A queer, p/t abled settler on unceded land of the Anishnaabe, she is the author of footlights (Radiant Press, 2020)  You can find her on socials— Instagram, Patreon, Substack and at www.pearlpirie.com.

MA|DE (est. 2018) [pictured] is a collaborative writing entity, a unity of two voices fused into a single, poetic third. It is the name given to the joint authorship of Mark Laliberte and Jade Wallace — artists whose active solo practices, while differing radically, serve to complement one another. Their work has appeared in literary journals internationally, including Augur, CV2, Grain, PRISM, Salamander, The Woodward Review and Vallum. MA|DE has written 4 chapbooks, including the bpNichol award-shortlisted A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books 2020). MA|DE's debut full-length poetry collection, ZZOO, is out now from Palimpsest Press, and another collection, Detourism, is forthcoming with Palimpsest in 2028. More: ma-de.ca

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books 2024; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and the Raymond Souster Award) and MONUMENT (Brick Books 2022; shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award). She has been twice longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

James K. Moran’s poetry and speculative fiction have appeared in Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, Burly Tales, Bywords, Glitterwolf, and On Spec. Lethe Press published his fiction collection Fear Itself and horror novel Town & Train. Moran writes across genres about cosmic carports, drag-queen warlocks and nomadic superheroes. He reviews for Arc Poetry Magazine, Plenitude and Strange Horizons. Findable at jameskmoran.blogspot.ca, @jamestheballadeer.bsky.social (Bluesky) and jamestheballadeer (Instagram). Moran lives in Ottawa, on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation.

Mahaila Smith is a researcher, poet, editor and MA student based on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They won the 2024 John Newlove Poetry Award and were nominated for the Rhysling and Best of the Net awards. They adore fibre crafts and collecting sea-glass. You can find more of their work on their website: mahailasmith.ca. Their debut narrative poetry collection, Seed Beetle is available from Stelliform Press.

new from above/ground press: cuba A book: twentieth anniversary edition, by Monty Reid

cuba A book
twentieth anniversary edition
Monty Reid
$6

 

Imagination
always has a body.

Revolution always
has a boat.

You have entered
the black room

and the celebrated boat
is preserved

in a glass house
in the old city.

Description
is no longer possible.

What's left
of the sea

has never
arrived.

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

[Monty Reid will be launching this title in Ottawa on August 7, 2025 as part of the above/ground press 32nd anniversary reading/launch at RedBird Live; tickets and other information available soon]

Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, and currently lives in Ottawa. He is the author of the full-length collections Karst Means Stone (NeWest Press, 1979), The Life of Ryley (Thistledown Press, 1981), The Dream of Snowy Owls (Longspoon Press, 1983), The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1985), These Lawns (Red Deer College Press, 1990), Dog Sleeps: Irritated Texts (NeWest Press, 1993), Crawlspace: New and Selected Poems (House of Anansi Press, 1993), Flat Side (Red Deer College Press, 1998), Disappointment Island (Chaudiere Books, 2006), Luskville Reductions (Brick Books, 2008), Garden (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and Meditatio Placentae (Brick Books, 2016). The former Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, he was the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival for more than a decade.

This is Reid’s seventh chapbook with above/ground press, following Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (2000), cuba A book (2005), In the Garden (sept series) (2011), Moan Coach (2013), seam (2018) and Where there’s smoke (2023). above/ground press produced the festschrift Report from the Reid Society Vol. 1 No. 1 in 2022.

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: Chang-Richardson,Witek, mclennan, Kaplan, Eleftherion, MacEachern, Moure + Houglum,

forthcoming author Ellen Chang-Richardson answers the '12 or 20 questions'; forthcoming author Terri Witek is featured in the spotlight series; rob mclennan is interviewed by JWT BookAdventures; Genevieve Kaplan has work in the latest Word for Word; Melissa Eleftherion reads for the DMQ Virtual Salon; Jessi MacEachern answers four questions for Erín Moure via YouTube; and did you see that Brook Houglum is the second in the new series of author spotlights over at the above/ground press substack?

new from above/ground press: Chimneys, by Tom Jenks

Chimneys
Tom Jenks
$5

syrup

“I have built a complete and immaculate world”, sighed the Baron, resting a white gloved hand on the green baize table; “but I do not have the time to inhabit it.” Plum trees in jars, marzipan churches, mountains dusted with the rarest of sugars. No, dear Baron, we must remain in this imperfect version, with its leaning trees and crooked rivers, its damp parks and rickety iron bridges. Dogs roam the lanes and find their way into houses. They sit at the table and help themselves to porridge with spoonful after spoonful of dense golden syrup.

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

Tom Jenks is a writer and text artist living in Manchester, UK. His books include The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions), Melamine (The Red Ceilings Press) and Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs (Penteract Press), a pangrammatical novel with Catherine Vidler. He edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects. More at https://tomjenks.uk/

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

Jay Miller reviews Lance La Rocque's Glitch (2020)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Lance La Rocque's Glitch (2020) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Lance La Rocque, I believe, contains such perspicaciousness and self-awareness. I trust his poetry.

It is election night in Canada in what many may consider the most monumental federal electoral happening of their lives, I know I certainly do. Nothing, besides a Xanax dressed as Big Bird from Sesame Street or a steam bath of chloroform could knock me out.

So I am finally picking up a 2020 chapbook by none other than Lance La Rocque to soothe my nerves. I have been saving this work for a special occasion, for not only is it published by rob mclennan’s above/ground press, La Rocque acknowledges two favourites of mine, Stuart Ross and Alice Burdick, in the back of the chap for “generous editorial advice.”

Lance La Rocque is a beloved and celebrated professor of literature and writing at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, has poems in Ross’s Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian poets under the influence, and other creative and academic work reaching back as long ago as 2002 (the last palindrome year of the Gregorian calendar we will witness until 2112).

From Surreal Estate:

    HISTORY IS THE EXCEPTION

    This present
    is this
    present.
    The other ones
    are sleeping,
    their eyes red with
    dreaming.
    Or not.

    The others: imaginary skeletons
    deprived of bodies,
    writhing under
    the linoleum. The asphalt.
    The earth.
    Or not.

    I awaken to this.

    Most things are
    never born.

    But some things are/
    born dead.
    And ghostlike,
    they make their ways
    among the furniture,
    wandering on the brink
    of resignation and despair.

As a millennial, I am of the stubborn inexplicable opinion that some of you reading this might share that in the year 2025, you could still very much base an entire writerly career on the concept of despair and make a life out of it. I think only a handful of Spanish-language writers and a handful of Canadian poets understand this, although it probably has roots in something like Lautréamont.

Regardless of whether you write poetry, non-fiction, or blogs, the theme of despair is such a Mariana Trench of irony and narrative force, like the deep sea itself, I would consider the majority of it unexplored. That, even by mere mention of it, no less in the final line of a surrealist poem, I take it as a sign of perspicacity and awareness unobtainable by a vast swath of living writing authors around the world today. It’s just one of those things to me.

Lance La Rocque, I believe, contains such perspicaciousness and self-awareness. I trust his poetry.

And I say millennial even though the roots extend into the past well before my time because it is exceedingly rare as time goes on, but has been sparse looking back. Sure, you may find themes of despair in works by someone such as Victor Hugo or Bloy (author of the novel Le Désespéré, one of the few titles mentioned by Borges in his inimitable column Biblioteca personal)—it is perhaps best depicted by Alfred de Musset in his 1835 poem Le Pélican [English follows original]:

    Quel que soit le souci que ta jeunesse endure,
    Laisse-la s’élargir, cette sainte blessure
    Que les séraphins noirs t’ont faite au fond du coeur ;
    Rien ne nous rend si grands qu’une grande douleur
    Mais, pour en être atteint, ne crois pas, ô poète,
    Que ta voix ici-bas doive rester muette.

    Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,
    Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots.
    Lorsque le pélican, lassé d’un long voyage,
    Dans les brouillards du soir retourne à ses roseaux,
    Ses petits affamés courent sur le rivage
    En le voyant au loin s’abattre sur les eaux.
    Déjà, croyant saisir et partager leur proie,
    Ils courent à leur père avec des cris de joie
    En secouant leurs becs sur leurs goitres hideux.
    Lui, gagnant à pas lent une roche élevée,
    De son aile pendante abritant sa couvée,
    Pêcheur mélancolique, il regarde les cieux.
    Le sang coule à longs flots de sa poitrine ouverte ;
    En vain il a des mers fouillé la profondeur ;
    L’océan était vide et la plage déserte ;
    Pour toute nourriture il apporte son cœur.
    Sombre et silencieux, étendu sur la pierre,
    Partageant à ses fils ses entrailles de père,
    Dans son amour sublime il berce sa douleur ;
    Et, regardant couler sa sanglante mamelle,
    Sur son festin de mort il s’affaisse et chancelle,
    Ivre de volupté, de tendresse et d’horreur.
    Mais parfois, au milieu du divin sacrifice,
    Fatigué de mourir dans un trop long supplice,
    Il craint que ses enfants ne le laissent vivant ;
    Alors il se soulève, ouvre son aile au vent,
    Et, se frappant le cœur avec un cri sauvage,
    Il pousse dans la nuit un si funèbre adieu,
    Que les oiseaux des mers désertent le rivage,
    Et que le voyageur attardé sur la plage,
    Sentant passer la mort se recommande à Dieu.

    Poète, c’est ainsi que font les grands poètes.
    Ils laissent s’égayer ceux qui vivent un temps ;
    Mais les festins humains qu’ils servent à leurs fêtes
    Ressemblent la plupart à ceux des pélicans.
    Quand ils parlent ainsi d’espérances trompées,
    De tristesse et d’oubli, d’amour et de malheur,
    Ce n’est pas un concert à dilater le cœur ;
    Leurs déclamations sont comme des épées :
    Elles tracent dans l’air un cercle éblouissant ;
    Mais il y pend toujours quelque goutte de sang.

    Whatever may be the concern your youth endure,
    Let prosper this holy wound
    That black seraphims left in the bottom of your heart—
    Nothing makes us so grand as a grand pain;
    But, to be afflicted by it, don’t believe, dear poet,
    That your voice henceforth must remain silent.

    Most desperate are songs most beautiful,
    And I know of timeless ones forged of pure sobs.
    Such as when the pelican, from long journey spent,
    Returns to his reeds under the immesurable fog of night,
    His famished nestlings run along the shore,
    Seeing him from afar alight upon the waters.
    Yet, thinking to seize and share their prey,
    With shrieks of joy they run to their father
    Shaking their beaks upon their hideous glands.
    And he, ascending a tall rock with measured pace,
    Ushering in his flock with pendulent wing,
    Melancholic fisherman that he is, looks to the skies.
    Blood pours out in long streams from his open chest—
    He foraged the sea deep in vain:
    The ocean was empty, the beach was barren—
    For all sustenance he gave his heart.
    Sombre and silent, laid out on the stone,
    Sharing his paternal innards to his offspring,
    He cradles his pain in a sublime act of love.
    Upon seeing his bleeding breast,
    He falters and submits to the feast of his death,
    With tenderness and horror, drunk on pure will.
    Yet betimes, amidst his divine sacrifice,
    Weary of dying from too long a feast,
    He fears his children won’t leave him alive;
    So he rises, opening his wing to the wind,
    And, beating his heart with a wild shriek,
    Cries out a farewell into the night so deathly
    That the birds of sea abandon the shore
    And the straggling beachcomber in his surprise
    Prepares to meet his maker with a little sign.

    Poet, it is thus that the greats perform their craft.
    They let those who live a while make merry and well;
    But the human feasts they serve at their fêtes
    Mostly resemble those of pelicans.
    When they speak thus of false hopes,
    Of sadness and oblivion, of love and malice,
    It makes not a concert to delight the heart;
    Their harried words stick like swords
    And draw a stunning circle in the air,
    But therein always lingers some drop of blood.

[Editor’s note: translation my own —J.M.]

It is with this that I leave you, time no longer permitting me to linger with La Rocque, with a poem of his that encapsulates this:

    Child

    Dark night. Nothing but dreams. That means I have slept, sifting the
    rusty coils.
    and staring through slits on the upper deck where I’ve lost my dime
    again. Again.

    I’d rather have been encased in the silent black rock, and you scrape
    away all the marks
    on the shell. All that I’ve done and not done.

    The silver lining is the long needle. Repeated punctures. Lungs. Ear
    drums. The soft valves
    in sounds it sounds like love is the punishing machine.

    I am begging you god guide my child through the passages and
    creatures
    of this crowded circus. Until he’s done. I can’t.

    I awaken paralyzed, blind from the hammering
    injustice or indifference builds on a face.

new from above/ground press: pedagogies for the planthroposcene, by Orchid Tierney

pedagogies for the planthroposcene
Orchid Tierney
$5

it’s amazing    how fires unfurl strange weathers   brown husks carve         

                   hills tacky with ash      unseasonal fires every season

are a kind bomb      arson is endless repetition       in a hot system        

             feedback notations      craven fires like tourists         

grousing trees and      lichen with fiery indifference      another network

           of dirty looks      smoldering      and smoke trees transfer riches

                   to seedlings      or that stump      there on the hill         

           defines what health      care is      a flashfire      sprouts too soon            

                      charred roots enjoy such strange      world endings    

                           corpse grey dirt      new urfs to grow in

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

Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her collections include this abattoir is a college (Calamari Archive, 2025) and a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System 2019). She is the author of several chapbooks including looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023), my beatrice (Ottawa: above/ground, 2020), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX, 2019), and blue doors (Belladonna* Press, 2018). Tierney is the coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, and her scholarship has appeared in SubStance, Jacket2, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry, Teaching the Literature of Climate Change, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900. She is a senior editor at The Kenyon Review.

This is Tierney’s second above/ground press title, after my beatrice (2020).

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

Jay Miller reviews Eileen Myles' Teenage Whales (2025)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to provide the first review of Eileen Myles' Teenage Whales (2025) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

Let’s talk about Eileen Myles. Teenage Whales was published in March, 2025 by rob mclennan’s above/ground press.

It is a chapbook of poems, the cover printed on off-buff colour paper, with a charcoal drawing of what appears to be a crown with royal jewels in it floating upon a body of water with the moonlight falling upon it. Myles illustrated it themself.

The text of the chap appears to be written in a typeface akin to Lucida Console, one of my favourite fonts. Although it might not be that specific one, the intended effect is perhaps the same overall, appearing to have been produced by a typewriter, perhaps for a telegram, or on a CRT monitor with a Pentium 4 machine bearing a similarly coloured case, hypothetically speaking.

Eileen Myles is a journalist and poet living in two places, New York City and Marfa, Texas. They have published more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and theatre according to Wikipedia. This is the first time I’m reading anything by them.

I read the first lines before reading any of their bio and knew it had to be the chap I reviewed tonight.

The whole chap is the titular poem, Teenage Whales, which I will excerpt up until the first ellipses (which they space out extra between the second and third dot, impossible for me to reproduce here at this moment in time):

    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
    I naming shit
    ripe crest
    darkening
    as it goes
    thun-dar
    goes a plane
    then mumble
    grumble
    I cld
    go down
    & say hello
    yesterday
    when I was
    so morose
    they were
    making me
    glad
    now the tip
    like a dick
    like a clit
    speaks tiny
    shadows
    pouring
    in the sun

This middle section specifically tells so much of the story unfolding in these opening lines: “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 / I naming shit / ripe crest / darkening / as it goes / thun-dar / goes a plane / then mumble / grumble”

So is the voice of the poem the teenage whale, the ma-ma the child speaks to? The whale is cussed out by the black duck but too self-aware to pay him any heed, admitting slash self-referring “I naming shit” before launching into an onomatopoeia of natural phenomenon, the wave crest ripening, darkening, which then melds into a plane overhead thun-darring, then mumbling, grumbling.

It is very telegrammatic. It is very sound-oriented logic. It tells a story, it presents parable-like animal characters, it has dirty words, it has imagery. It has a lot going on for an opening page.

So much is happening it’s hard to quite tell what the point is, but perhaps the point is disorientation:

    will event
    ually
    tell me
    about Patrice
    Lumumba.
    did he
    pass bad
    checks
    probably not
    that poet
    is the
    CIA
    can’t
    I arrange
    anything
    that supports
    empire
    this beach
    touched
    the shore
    of Mozambique
    Anthony
    Bourdain
    went
    there & ate

This is Myles’ second mention of Patrice Lumumba in the poem, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, assassinated in 1961 after being forced out of office.

Stuart A. Reid put a book out with Knopf in October 2023 called The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination covered in The New Yorker the month of its publication. Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker goes on to describe it as a book explaining how Congolese independence was never given a chance.

I was following current events in Congo for about 3 weeks in April 2024, reading the news about it every day. Cobalt, cholera, control.

Just last month, the agreement signed yesterday by the DRC and Rwanda, was just starting out in the form of peace talks. There was no mention of US-led economic involvement a month ago.

So circling back to Lumumba, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence for a long-lasting ceasefire, when ostensibly, the US is waging a diplomatic warpath to seize mineral resources in every country imaginable, including Canada and Ukraine, by any means necessary.

Even Chotiner in his review of Reid’s book on the CIA topic mentions “the geopolitics of the era were by no means straightforward.” He goes on to narrate:

    By August of 1960, the White House, galvanized by Lumumba’s turn to the Soviets, had authorized a secret C.I.A. scheme to “replace the Lumumba Government by constitutional means,” whatever that meant. The same month, at a Cabinet meeting, Eisenhower made comments that some interpreted as a call for assassination. (Lumumba, Reid notes, “offended his sense of decorum.”) C.I.A.-sponsored protests started disrupting Lumumba’s speeches, and then the agency began scheming to kill him.

[...]

    The question that Reid leaves mostly unanswered is what a different policy might have looked like. What if Eisenhower had shown the foresight that he displayed during the Suez crisis? Lumumba’s death occurred three days before the Kennedy Administration took power, but the hope of a substantial shift by a Democratic Administration proved futile. Within three years, the United States had taken over from the French in Vietnam, and went on to fight its own decade-long war there. As has often been said, the habitual error of the United States during this period was to view nationalist struggles for independence through the lens of anti-Communism, and to turn people who might have been allies (Ho Chi Minh is typically cited) into enemies.

So this critical parsing of history sort of becomes a passing context clue for the meat and potatoes of this line in Myles:

    CIA
    can’t
    I arrange
    anything
    that supports
    empire

The follow-up immediately down below of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, then, paints a scene the dizzying depth of confusion we find ourselves in within the greater context of the last half century of Western imperialism, American exceptionalism, and red scare.

Of course Anthony Bourdain fucking ate in Mozambique. I can hear his voice intoning the country’s name as I write, the imperialism of it rank in my ear, though imagined. This is Eileen Myles in full effect.

The between-the-lines commentary borders on risible, if you’re a fan of dark humour, and is such a deep cut as to show even the shadow in the wound.

The wordplay of “can’t I arrange” riffing off the letters in C.I.A. immediately beforehand is the neat little bow tying this package of verse together. It’s not Eileen Myles who is patently absurd, it’s the state of affairs that they versify, that we find ourselves in.

Taken as a whole, Teenage Whale reads like a telegram presaging the rapture (or rupture) of late-stage capitalism.

Then the title of the poem comes into focus shortly after:

    In a jail
    in Scotland
    I learned
    the young
    whales
    have fashions
    the teenagers
    all like
    to swim
    around
    with a
    dead fish
    on top
    of their
    head
    what a lark

It recalls a recent headline that orcas were spotted off the coast of Washington appearing to wear dead salmon as hats. In the orca world, this is their equivalent to a meme.

Eileen Myles is not one to pass up a double entendre as a segue. And in true Rimbaldian fashion, they continue the next page over literalizing the off-hand remark of a lark into an actual bird.

This work is no less discombobulating than the poetry chapbook I reviewed yesterday. Through Eileen Myles’ astringent lean, severe tone and stark zoological metaphors, however, I find solace. An olive branch for understanding this surrealist farce we call the real world.

We are living in truly fucky times, to quote a recent episode of the Ologies podcast.

Eileen Myles seems to have the edge to perfectly bottle it into this poem and they make quite a wry statement in the process, that results in impact more implicit than tacit, even when you have to read between the lines. I can’t wait to read them again. Thanks for reading.