new from above/ground press: Heat Lamp, by Pearl Pirie

Heat Lamp
Pearl Pirie
$6

(cinematic)

i          candle
b         ladle 

c         overturned soup
*         gunshot 





D         half moon        
4          sailboat 
≈          uncaring ocean

H         ladder 
v  v      vampire swimming 
o          life saver thrown 

∞         years left for crew learning 

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

Pearl Pirie is an Ottawa-area, Quebec writer. She has been lucky enough to have had four poetry collections published, most recently footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). A past-president of KaDo, an Ottawa-area haiku and tanka group, she is the coordinator of the Betty Drevniok Award for haiku and has been the publisher of phafours press since 2007. Find her at Patreon and at www,pearlpirie.com This book sprung from the forehead of Gary Barwin's anus porcupine eyebrow.

This is Pirie’s seventh chapbook with above/ground press, after the oath in the boathouse (2008), vertigoheel for the dilly (2014), today’s woods (2014), sex in sevens (2016), Eldon, letters (2019) and Rushing Dusk (2024). Report from the Pirie Society, Vol. 1 No. 1, appeared in 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

some author activity: fitzpatrick, Kemp, mclennan, Beaulieu, Saklikar, Collis + Manery,

the Calgary Guardian offers "a day in the life" of poet ryan fitzpatrick; Penn Kemp has new work up at Public Reverie; rob mclennan is interviewed at On Creative Writing, and also has some new work up at Public Reverie; Derek Beaulieu once again offers his annual list of Most Engaging Books; and the audio of Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s Vancouver chapbook launch, hosted by Stephen Collis with readings by Stephen Collis, Annie Lafleur (read by Stephen Collis), Rob Manery, Renee Rodin, Marguerite Pigeon, and Renée Sarojini Saklikar at People’s Co-op Bookstore on Dec. 6, 2025, is now online via Rob Manery.

new from above/ground press: Sadie, by Jill Stengel

Sadie
Jill Stengel
$6

Sadie. She said let me tell you. Another time she did.

Sadie said let me tell you about that time. It was a time it was. A time indeed.

The skirts were a different length that time, and the shoes. You should have seen the shoes.

A ghost in the story. A ghost.

The man he was different. There is always a man who is different. Whether he is different.

Another time she said. And tea.

Sigh. She moved her hand across her forehead. Sigh. To her cheek. She rested her head upon her hand. Stared unblinking. A long time.

Sometimes Sadie said it was hard to tell. Sometimes Sadie said. Sometimes.

In the evening Sadie received flowers.

In the evening Sadie sat at a table. Sat in a chair. Sat in another room.

Sadie would stroll. An elbow cupped. Sometimes.

A profile in relief. The sun and no clouding. Tree leaves and branches. Night and a star. Stars.

Sadie she said Sadie.

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

This is poet and publisher Jill Stengel’s 14th book, 13 of which are chapbooks. Jill is an ardent admirer of the chapbook form. Her a+bend press has released more than 40 chapbook titles, along with a handful of issues of a journal, as well as a small number of full-length books. Jill’s press has published work by some of her country’s foremost experimental women poets, and she continues to promote voices of experimental writers through collaborations, consulting, and editing. Jill is happiest when playing with words. She lives in Davis, California.

This is Jill Stengel’s second title through above/ground press, after tether (2013).

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: Ghosted Under the Christmas Tree, by Kevin Spenst, with Onjana Yawnghwe, Joshua Pitre, Gary Barwin and Derek DeLand

Ghosted Under the Christmas Tree
Kevin Spenst, with Onjana Yawnghwe, Joshua Pitre, Gary Barwin and Derek DeLand
$6

This Machine Kills Fascists 
— co-written with Onjana Yawnghwe 
 
From sunlight in fall to birdsong in spring, 
the spokes of the seasons turn us to tarry. 
The cars are burning electrical corners 
as fumbling fingers button and unbutton.

The spokes of the seasons turn us to tarry
a tad longer in flustersongs we lob at the road.
As fumbling fingers button and unbutton
the edges of a white shirt, and also grief.
 
A tad longer in flustersongs we lob at the road
built as it was on the backs of lost species
waving the edges of a white shirt. And also grief
still and growing, in the process of repair –

gilt as we are on the backs of lost species,
we dig creeks back to cradle some survival.
Still, growing, and in the process of repair,
this machine makes animals of our sins.

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

Kevin Spenst has made many chapbooks and four full-length books of poetry. He’s an organizer for the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and teaches poetry at SFU’s The Writer’s Studio in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory.

Onjana Yawnghwe writes, draws and makes little books. 

Joshua Pitre teaches ESL classes in Montreal, and is the co-author of Recto, Verso, Chez the Devil’s Printers (with Kevin Spenst, Collusion Books, 2022). 

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 35 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984. Recent work includes Bird Fiction, an interactive poetry multimedia work (with Sarah Imrisek) and Muttertongue, a poetry book and recording with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts. He lives in Hamilton and at garybarwin.com

Derek DeLand is an award-winning design architect, published writer, sportsman, artist and musician. His creative work is interdisciplinary and dynamic, and often locates the hidden energies connecting things.

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

Alina Stefanescu : Above/groundings.

American poet, critic and subscriber Alina Stefanescu was kind enough to highlight the press over at her blog, pointing out a whole swath of 2025 titles that caught her attention: Against Perfectionism & Other Poems by John Cone, Spamtoum by Noah Berlatsky, whittle gristle by Lori Anderson Moseman, Bibliomancy by Leah Souffrant, Studies by Micah Anthony Cavaleri, Chimneys by Tom Jenks, My Life as a Notebook by Jason Heroux, The Sun Will Bleach It Away by Rebecca Comay and Cary Fagan, Angel Dust by Micah Ballard, The Oh Oh by Beatriz Hausner, The Man: Micro Poems by Benjamin Niespodziany, The World Is Beautiful by Lillian Necakov, Never Saw It Coming by Steph Gray, pedagogies for the planthroposcene by Orchid Tierney, Lydia Unsworth’s GAG and even a poem by Austin Miles from Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] #44 [see their TtD interview here]. Thanks so much! You can see her original post here.

new from above/ground press: miraculous dead things, by Salem Paige

miraculous dead things
salem paige
$6

i ask you to take a bite out of me

and you comply, after all i
am still flesh only flesh
open for the world to
            cannibalize, if they
want to (most won’t - this
meat is tough on weaker
jaws ( too firm – your
hands find the freshest 
wounds, tongue inside
each, a rhythm in false
defiance burning the air
of this backseat
            final resting place

our gaping mouths, caverns –
yours on mine and mine
spread between my legs
            and growing, this moment
            humid memory to revisit
            from my many             graves.

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

Salem Paige (they/them) is a poet and multidisciplinary artist based on traditional Coast Salish territory (so-called Vancouver, British Columbia). Salem holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Ottawa with a Major in Communications. Their works revolve around the exploration of identity and discomfort through narrative universes where Nature and technology intertwine, and can be found in their collection of poetry, The Third Self (2023, Sunday Mornings at the River Press) and their chapbooks evolution artificialis (2025, Anstruther Press) and to grow roots (2023, bottlecap press), as well as in corporeal literary magazine, Beyond Words magazine, STREETCAKE magazine, Ariel Chart Literary Journal, BiPan magazine, and many others. They have previously been twice nominated for Best of the Net, shortlisted for the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and the Bridport Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the ROOM Poetry Prize. More on Salem can be found at salempaige.com or @corpseofapoet on the Internet.   

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 recording of the recent (zoom) conversation between Renée Sarojini Saklikar and rob mclennan on above/ground press is now online,

in case you missed it, the recent (zoom) conversation between Renée Sarojini Saklikar and rob mclennan
on above/ground press
in which they (also) each read from recent work
is now online: thanks to all who participated!

Renée Sarojini Saklikar is the author of five books, including the award-winning Children of Air India and Listening to the Bees. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Exile Editions, Chatelaine, The Capilano Review, and Pulp Literature. She was Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey (2015-2018), co-founded Lunch Poems at SFU, and teaches Creative Writing at Douglas College. Bramah’s Discovery is the third volume of her epic fantasy in verse series, THOTJBAP, forthcoming in Spring 2026 with Nightwood Editions. She lives in East Vancouver.

Saklikar is the author of three titles through above/ground press: After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees— (2016; second printing, 2019), from The Book of Bramah (2019) and Voices from Planet X ~ speculative verse from the THOTJBAP series (2025).

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

He founded above/ground press way back in July 1993, having produced nearly 1,500 items-to-date, the bulk of which have been single author poetry chapbooks. His publishing mantra continues to be: "relentless."

This is not the first above/ground press event online, as I'm sure you know, with last year's online launches (one and two), or even that AWP offsite reading we hosted in 2023, or the virtual issue of The Peter F Yacht Club. Really, you should be checking out the whole YouTube channel, most of which is made up of the periodicities "virtual reading series," as well as a handful of other things. 

some author activity: Gevirtz, Adams, mclennan, Gordon, Polyck-O'Neill, Schmaltz + Siklosi,

Susan Gevirtz is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Adrienne Adams has a poem up in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; rob mclennan has new work up at Gone Lawn; Nada Gordon's recent Segue Series reading with Kit Robinson is now up on YouTube; and Julia Polyck-O'Neill has a new poem up at NewPoetry, as does Eric Schmaltz, and Kate Siklosi!

new from above/ground press: Certain Forces, by N.W. Lea

Certain Forces
N.W. Lea
$6

Field Triptych


1. 

Shadows lever grass.
The soil is in trouble with ease.
My feet peregrinate
in the suddenly foreign 
autumn blocks.


2.

Frost. Every light is an event,
every event pins light.
We are always convulsing.
There is nothing profound
about the in-groups, 
the corded coteries.


3.

Especially,
when she tilts her head,
slushy with wonder.
Her excellent mind
not tyrannized.
Her skin twinned
with the silent, 
real earth.

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

cover image by N.W. Lea; portrait of the author by Zofia Lea

Born in Whitehorse, Yukon, N.W. Lea grew up on the West Island of Montreal and in and around Ottawa, including Lanark County and the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Tricounty. He currently lives with his wife and two children in Whitehorse. He has been quietly publishing his Surrrealist/Romantic brand of compact, mystical, sad sack poetry for close to two decades. Please find his trade books at invisiblepublishing.com and his chapbooks at abovegroundpress.blogspot.com. When he is not writing, he is parenting, brooding or riding mountain bikes.

This is Lea’s seventh above/ground press chapbook, after light years (2006), Present! (2014), Nervous System (2018), Five Mothers (2019), Less Dream (2021) and Natural Man (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 Peter F. Yacht Club annual regatta/christmas party/reading!

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan,
The Peter F. Yacht Club annual regatta/christmas party/reading

at Anina’s Café, 280 Joffre-Bélanger Way, Ottawa
Saturday, December 27, 2025
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm

with readings from yacht club regulars and irregulars alike, including: Jennifer Baker, Frances Boyle, Conyer Clayton, David Currie, Michelle Desbarats, AJ Dolman, Amanda Earl, Claire Farley, Cara Goodwin, Chris Johnson, Margo LaPierre, IAN MARTIN, rob mclennan, Christine McNair, James Moran, Lee Parpart, Colin Quin, Mahaila Smith, Grant Wilkins and Chuqiao Yang (and possibly others,

see my report on the event two years ago here (last year's event hadn't a report, unfortunately;

new from above/ground press: [OKAY], by Buck Downs

[OKAY]
Buck Downs
$6

[okay] 


this is 
    the last time
I’m doing this
        again

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

Buck Downs divides his time between Washington, D.C., and Ellisville, Miss. His latest full-length is Exit Style, available at buckdowns.com

This is Buck Downs's fifth above/ground chapbook, after Shiftless [Harvester] (2016), The Hack of Heaven (2017), Another Tricky Day (2020) and BURNTORANGE (2025).

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

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell reviews Penn Kemp's Lives of Dead Poets (2025) via The League of Canadian Poets

Katerina Vaughan Fretwell provides a review of Penn Kemp’s Lives of Dead Poets (2025) via The League of Canadian Poets. Thanks so much! This is actually the fourth review of Kemp's title, after Jennifer Wenn's review over at The Miramichi Reader, Karl Jirgens at The Typescript and Gordon Phinn at The Seaboard Review. Thanks much! You can see Fretwell's original review here.

In the golden age of Toronto’s explosive poetry scene in the early 70s, Penn Kemp met many vital poets who have since passed away. Her longstanding connections to these revered poets inspired her to write the chapbook Lives of the Dead Poets. As host of A Space Reading Series (this reviewer exhibited on the Members Wall), publishing with venerable Coach House and living on Toronto Island, Penn made soon-to-be-lifelong friends: Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, P.K. Page (P.K. Irwin as artist), Robert Creeley, Allan Ginsberg, and letter-friend Diane di Prima.

Kemp’s elegies respond to the styles of the poets whom she memorializes in verse: “A lament for those who have left/ the present, the planet and possibility/ behind, left us bewildered by/ no more/ words” (“Lives of Dead Poets”). For Gwendolyn MacEwan, Penn praises: “Your fingers/ semaphore a complex code/ we cannot read.// A ring of hands/ ready to catch or pull you up” (“Not Waving But Drowning”). This reviewer also mourned a cancelled reading by MacEwan up north.

In “Gone Fishing”, Kemp elegizes Robert Creeley in the manner of the famous Kempian wordplay: “Reel back the real, back/ to the little wicker// basket carrying trout,/ Creeley.”

For Ontario poet Ellen Jaffe, Penn includes a poignant event: “Ellen   dying in hospice     listens in on/ Zoom     as Voices Israel read    her poems.// How wonderful   to be read to at last.” (“Homage for Ellen S. Jaffe, Poet”).

Kemp honours bp nichol, one of the Four Horsemen, with a high compliment: “our// Rumi, born in all/ their holy,/ poetic fecundity” (“For bp nichol”), the words lovingly dancing across the page. Phyllis Webb, champion of the anti-ghazal, leaves us in a sense of Kempian whimsy: “How can we forget you?   You left/ a whiff of unicorn   in your wake.” (“The Poet in Charge”). Also magical, John Ashbery, the Rowan Bard, is commemorated thus: “‘Rowan is the tree of power, causing/ life and magic to flower. (“Alphabet for Ashbery”).

A lively anecdote revivifies P.K. Page: “P.K. Page was dressed   to the nines … // At the stove’s first growl,   she leapt up and alighted/ for the evening … closest to the door.// An oil stove had exploded on her ….// But she made that perch [couch arm] hers, crossing elegant legs,/ gallantly …” (“The Girl from Sao Paulo”).

For an elegiac taste of the other poets that Penn wistfully sets in stone, read this marvellous paean to influential Canadian [except Creeley and Ashbery] poets, with a nod to William Wordsworth’s “Ode to Intimations of Immortality”: “Only their poetry can still convey/ intimations of immortality ….// Only their poems can transcribe/ mysterium tremendum …// For me.   For you.” (“One by One, They Depart, the Great Ones”).

For Kemp’s essay sourcing her inspiration, see 
https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/03/penn-kemp-one-by-one-they-depart-great.html.

new from above/ground press: Lakes of Titan, by David Gaffney

Lakes of Titan
David Gaffney
$6

Colony

Row upon row of small people in pods lay perfectly still as if they were asleep. They were small, about the size of ventriloquist dolls, but I was assured that they would grow to become full-sized members of staff. They all looked a little like Melvyn Bragg, even the female ones, with thick ruffled hair and an expression on their faces that suggested they had thought of something droll and would tell you later. Soon the entire company would be run by the creatures they were growing here. Small fans stirred the air about the staff member’s faces to help them get used to adversity, which they may meet in the real world. Lights were low, yet now and again, bursts of colour and fragments of film flashed across the walls and ceiling. Music and podcasts played to ensure that the subjects were equipped with good humour and imagination so they wouldn’t sound robotic like some of the earlier versions. I was told this was top secret. What was even more top secret was which previous members of staff had been computer-powered hybrids of machine and flesh, who had since been decommissioned while we waited for this new batch. Maybe this was something we already knew, but weren’t aware that we knew, like the way the Chuckle Brothers entered our consciousness long before they appeared on our screens. Mahler’s fifth was playing quietly out of the speakers and it reminded me that Mahler’s wife once worked as a lab assistant over-seeing a colony of praying mantis.

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

cover artwork by Gary Fisher

David Gaffney is the author of the novels Never Never (2008), All The Places I’ve Ever Lived (2017) and Out Of The Dark (2021), and the flash fiction and short story collections Sawn-Off Tales (2006), Aromabingo (2007), The Half-Life of Songs (2010) and More Sawn-Off Tales (2013). He has published two graphic novels with Dan Berry – The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head (2018) and Rivers (2021) – and is working on a third. His short story collection Concrete Fields (Salt Publishing 2023) was long listed for the Edgehill Short Story Prize and his latest collection, Whale, was published by Osmosis in 2024. He is Senior Manager for literature at Arts Council England.

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: Smith, Browne, Carr, Ebbitt, Armantrout, Barwin + McEwan,

Mahaila Smith has new work up at Strange Horizons; the recent "Writing as Alchemy" event, featuring readings by Laynie Browne, Julie Carr and Chloe Garcia Roberts, is now on YouTube via the HDS Center for the Study of World Religions; Katie Ebbitt has new work in the Spotlight series; Rae Armantrout has new work in Plume; and both Gary Barwin and Drew McEwen have new work up at The Ex-Puritan.

new from above/ground press: Grotto, by Frances Cannon

Grotto
Frances Cannon
$6

Sympoetics
After Donna Haraway and the Faerie Queen

Trouble in the knots of fertility.
Human fictions, entangled and ongoing,
dying in the muddy compost.
Human beings in interspecies intimacies,
string figures connect seed bags of stories,
overgrown with archetypes and myths. 
I will affirm the fluidity of bodily boundaries, 
together with figures physical and nonphysical.
I want to take the mud, fertile slime, animals, 
plants, fungi, and form new organisms. 
The art of living as a multigender, androgynous symbiont;
seductive forms, a persistent unworking of power.

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

Frances Cannon is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland and Burlington, Vermont. She is the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, an editorial reader for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellowship. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press, 2019), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press, 2017), Tropicalia (Vagabond Press, 2016), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press, 2024), Willow and the Storm (Green Writers Press, 2025), and Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga (forthcoming with Valiz Press in 2026). 

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

De Villo Sloan reviews Johannes S.H. Bjerg and Charlotte Jung's collaborative eyesore (2025) at Asemic Front 2

De Villo Sloan was good enough to provide a first review of Johannes S.H. Bjerg and Charlotte Jung's collaborative eyesore (2025) over at Asemic Front 2. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As they write:

AF2 Review - "eyesore" by Johannes S.H. Bjerg & Charlotte Jung (above/ground press, Canada)

Stockholm-based poet and playwright Charlotte Jung and Danish writer and artist Johannes S.H. Bjerg have collaborated to produce what might easily prove to be this year’s best collection of visual poetry: Jung’s minimalist concrete poetry and Bjerg’s calligraphic, asemic neoglyphs. 

rob mclennan – above/ground press editor – again displays his talent for locating and publishing the best postavant art and lit in his burgeoning chapbook series.  eyesore is eminently collectible, and the thoughtful reader will want to revisit the book many times to explore its possibilities for interpretation.

Johannes S.H. Bjerg is known in the visual poetry community primarily for his calligraphy-based asemic texts. He eschews the faux abstract expressionist approach taken by many of his contemporaries in favor of a stark, black and white textuality that complements Charlotte Jung’s poetry perfectly. Bjerg's vision of asemics is similar to the vision of Jim Leftwich and Tim Gaze (1993).

Bjerg’s compositions in eyesore are imbued with complexity not fitting a strict minimalist definition. His cursive streams weave in, above, and below the boundaries of our shared language.

Yet each piece is a single entity, drawing from the concept of the neoglyph (a term coined by John R. McConnochie). In the context of eyesore, each of Bjerg’s pieces can be read as a single asemic poem in a dialog with Jung’s work. His asemic pieces, for me, are similar to the approach taken by John M. Bennett and Henry Michaux.

In my review of Charlotte Jung’s Collected (Timglaset 2023), I praised her concrete poetry, which I see sharing many traits with the work of Aram Saroyan. She works within the constraints of concrete poetry rooted in Modernity.

Jung also has a unique ability to present fluidity and subtle expression in a way that surpasses the work of previous generations. eyesore is another valuable addition to the growing body of Jung’s work.

rob mclennan has made an important contribution to vispo with the publication of this chapbook. The audience is presented with a unique opportunity to explore “new poetries” in the form of asemic writing and minimalist poetry in a lyric sequence. In eyesore, we see a glimpse of poetry’s future.