new from above/ground press: Passing Through: A Traveler’s Log(s) / Movements 1-23, by Thor Polukoshko

Passing Through: A Traveler’s Log(s)
Movements 1-23
Thor Polukoshko
$5

Movements 2-6: The British Museum, London

salty brow      
cotton
plastered    
to skin  
between
shoulder      
blades       
collar not
enough         
ventilation
deep     
breaths         
but     
breaths
within           
cloistered          
wooden prison

tandoori’s
revenge
strikes
in Ancient
Greece

haste back
through time
to proper
receptacle
fountain of
shit under fountain
of knowledge more
sweat more
waiting for other
visitors to use
electric hand-dryer
to hide
noisy shame

repeat: Ancient Egypt
repeat: Medieval Europe
repeat: before gift
shop exit

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

Thor Polukoshko was one of the founding editors of Memewar Magazine, and his work has been published in West Coast Line and The Incongruous Quarterly. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Langara College / snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓ in Vancouver, where he has organized and hosted the Strangers on a Train reading series for the past decade.

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: Manery, Markotić, Doller, Straumsvåg, Heroux, Fagan, Barwin, Reid + Solomon,

forthcoming author Sandra Doller is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Dag T. Straumsvåg and Jason Heroux's collaborative chapbook gets a nice mention by Cary Fagan over at his review blog; Gary Barwin has an archived poem up at The Walrus; Monty Reid is reviewed by Dawn Macdonald; and Misha Solomon has new work up in the Spotlight series.

new from above/ground press: Gag, by Lydia Unsworth

GAG
Lydia Unsworth
$5

And My Body and Your Body Were Shaking Gently With the Laughter That Does Not Stop

He’s fighting with me, trying to return to what it was. It can’t be done. The lid won’t go back on. He says tussle to make it okay, this subtle lack, this distant punching. He says cross. In his world, no one is angry. Life is set up to coil around the children. He can’t process his behaviour midweek. People let each other down. No one is awestruck, horny, devastated. Nothing salubrious in the way the dishes are laid on the table. There are excuses – practical matters get in the way. We don’t understand why we don’t have love, but on the other hand, looking at the calendar, it’s obvious. We work late through the night, feel fury like groundswell. Injustice rises like a trapped vein. There is slowness, which is presented differently to being afraid. There is no cowardice, this is merely convention. I am the wild one. I am the one who has gone wrong. I am the emotional terrorist. It is I who slipped out of the frame. You will ruin my entire life, he says.

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

cover image: Cay

Lydia Unsworth is a poet based in Greater Manchester, whose recent collections include Mortar (Osmosis), These Steady Bulbs (above / ground) and cement, terraces (Red Ceilings). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Oxford Poetry and Shearsman Magazine. She is currently undergoing a PhD exploring kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. Her latest book is called Arthropod and is published by Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers.

This is Unsworth’s fourth above/ground press poetry title, after I Have Not Led a Serious Life (2019), Residue (2022) and These Steady Bulbs (2024).

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

Larry Sawyer (1970 - February 28, 2025) : (plus fundraiser,

Sad to hear, through Mark Goldstein and Lea Graham simultaneously, that Toronto-based poet, editor and organizer Larry Sawyer died the other night in Toronto. An active and community-minded poet, publisher and reading series organizer, he authored a small mound of book and chapbook titles, founded and edited milk magazine and spent fifteen years running the Myopic Books Poetry Reading Series in Chicago before relocating to Toronto with his partner, the poet Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, during the first Tr*mp Presidency. If such might be possible, there's currently a fundraiser going on, to help raise funds to hold proper memorials for him in Chicago, Fairborn and Toronto.

above/ground press produced his small chapbook A Chaise Lounge in Hell (2003), and I originally connected to him and his work through his online poetry journal milk magazine (begun as a print journal back in 1998). It wasn't until they'd moved north that I had a chance to meet him, once he'd started the milk magazine reading series over at Type Books on Queen Street, and I read there at least twice, including in 2022 [see my note on such here]. According to his Facebook page, he signed a contract with Guernica Editions back in May, 2024 for The Blue Butterfly (2026). It would have been nice for him to have seen that publication through. Tony Trigilio posted a note on him here, with another tribute offered by Mark Lamoureaux here. Larry was a good fella, and huge supporter of poetry. He will be missed.

Alan Parry reviews Lydia Unsworth's Residue (2022)

Merseyside-based writer, editor and lecturer Alan Parry was good enough to provide the first review for Lydia Unsworth's Residue (2022) over at The Broken Spine. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Parry writes:

Lydia Unsworth’s Residue is not here to tuck you in with neat resolutions or let you bask in warm nostalgia. This is a book that drags you through the wreckage of past homes, past selves, and forces you to confront what’s left behind. It’s restless. It’s jagged. It doesn’t give a fuck about linearity or easy sentimentality. Instead, it builds a geography of dislocation: places that don’t fit, memories that won’t sit still, identities that keep shifting under your feet.

It reads like a poetic fever dream, a history of homes unravelled in snapshots, from childhood to now. Each poem is tethered to a location, but don’t expect stable ground. These spaces are in flux, warped by time, distorted by memory. Think of it less like a roadmap and more like a ghost tour – each stop marked by what is caught in liminal spaces, what stains, what refuses to be scrubbed away.

Place as a Wound, Memory as the Scar
Unsworth knows that home is never just bricks and mortar. No, it’s a psychological battlefield! Manchester Road (formative years) puts you right in the thick of it, in a house ‘up against a long main road’ – where privacy is a joke and exposure is constant. There’s a hole – literal or metaphorical – ‘like a hole through the middle of me’, an image so blunt it leaves a bruise. This is what Residue does best: it turns domestic space into something unstable, something that betrays and consumes.

Then there’s Castle Irwell (a messy escape), which captures the chaos of shared living, where bodies blur into each other and solitude is a luxury. ‘Eleven is a team but what I needed was confessional.’ That line alone is a gut punch. Because what’s lonelier than being surrounded by people and still feeling like a ghost?

The Poetry of Fragmentation: Syntax as Architecture
Unsworth doesn’t write neat, tidy verse. Her poetry is fractured, staccato, broken (like our spines) in all the right places. It mirrors the instability of memory, how it skips, erases, distorts. In Brook Drive (including the day that cherry tree was planted), she captures the fluidity of perception in clipped, surreal bursts:

‘spaces are ill-defined / corners become whatever you like / a scurry of ants in a decked-out butter tub.’

Objects lose their meaning. Boundaries shift. Reality is whatever your mind decides it is. And the form of the poem reflects that, refusing to sit still, refusing to behave.

Then there’s Furnesses (tiny fires), where short, rapid-fire lines create a breathless momentum. ‘A ceiling high above a hide of eyes / settle into complete knot of two and hi-fi.’ It’s claustrophobic, relentless, like trying to get comfortable in a room that keeps shrinking around you.

The Emotional Aftershock: What Residue Leaves Behind
The real power of Residue is how it lingers. These poems aren’t just recollections. They haunt! Riverbank (it ended badly) takes something as mundane as a pigeon and turns it into an omen:

‘a pigeon billows through the curtains / disorder of cloth and stifled wing.’

The weight of absence, the ache of something lost, it’s all there, stripped bare. And then it hits you with: ‘only so much can be held / only so much can be held in.’ That’s the punchline of life, right? We try to hold onto places, people, versions of ourselves, but in the end, most of it slips through.

Heald Place (I begin to show my age) lays it out in brutal clarity. The walls of the house are ‘smashed to bits on a Saturday night by drunken younghards.’ Decay isn’t poetic here. It’s inevitable, ugly, and unceremonious. The past doesn’t crumble beautifully. Rather it gets kicked in, pissed on, and left behind.

Final Verdict: Read This Before You Move Again
Without doubt, Lydia Unsworth has written something that refuses to settle. Residue is what happens when you put a stethoscope to the walls of every place you’ve ever lived and listen to what’s still breathing inside. It’s fragmented, disorienting, sometimes even messy. Here’s the kicker, that’s the point! Memory isn’t a straight line. Neither is belonging.

So, if you like your poetry neat and polished, this might not be for you. But if you want something raw, something that gets under your skin, something that reminds you what it feels like to stand in the doorway of an old home and realise you don’t quite fit there anymore… this is it!.

Unsworth doesn’t just write about places. She writes about what places do to us. And Residue makes damn sure you don’t forget it.

some author activity: Birchard, Earl, Norris, Armantrout + Pittella,

Guy Birchard's work is discussed by Yukon poet Dawn Macdonald, over at her recently-launched substack, where she also discussed Amanda Earl's work and Ken Norris' work; the full text of "Poetry Meets Physics: Poet Rae Armantrout Reading and in Conversation with Physicist Ben Buchler. Street Theatre, Canberra, Thursday 19 September 2024" is online as a pdf; the first four poems from Pittella's above/ground press chapbook have been translated into Italian by Gianluca Rizzo and published online at rossocorpolingua: and Pittella also has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series.