some author activity: Houbolt, Earl, Campos, Cannon + Niespodziany,

Kyla Houbolt gets a spotlight with some new poems via the SHINE international poetry series; Amanda Earl is interviewed by Kathryn Mockler for Send My Love To Anyone; Earl is also offering poetry mentorships (with scholarships available); Isabel Sobral Campos is running an in-person workshop on Baudelaire, weekly across May, in Somerville MA; Frances Cannon has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series; and Benjamin Niespodziany wrote on Chicago's Test Reading Series for Zona Motel.

new from above/ground press: Vast Spaces, by John Levy

Vast Spaces
John Levy
$6

YUKI
                                               for Angella Kassube

The Japanese word for snow, plus the name Angella gave her cat. When it snows in Minneapolis, the snow never completely fills the u in Yuki’s name. Nor the opening at the top of the Y. Both spaces are too vast, as is Yuki’s spirit, an immensity which animates her entire body and which Angella understands better than anyone when she looks into Yuki’s eyes.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover photo by the author: “Half Moon Bay”

John Levy lives in Tucson. He is married to the painter Leslie Buchanan. His collection of poems, 54 poems: selected & new, was published by Shearsman Books in 2023. 

This is Levy’s second chapbook with above/ground press, after To Assemble an Absence (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

new from above/ground press: The Unknotter, by Christina Wells

The Unknotter
Christina Wells
$6

Spilling Suns

First, a ghostly trace of head,
then stomach, then paintbrush tail,
emerging from the Atlantic,
an image sharpening like a Polaroid.
My father hauling in a 50-pounder,
big mama, old and fat, fabled.
The charm of her freckles, scorched
smudges in the light, her lateral lines, silver
arrows pointing to the sun.

She can lay out more eggs
than 28 smaller ones just like her.
Longlines, draggers couldn't hold
her back. For a quarter-century
she skirted past gillnets, box-shaped
traps, sharks, the cannibals
of her own kind, surviving below
pinkish shale crevices, the dense
gelatin of the deep rushing her on.

Then, the quickness
of the act: his haul.
The gaff.
(Oh, that sharp hook.)
Slide over, belly fat glistening.
The cut.
(Oh, the ready knife.)

Sun beats its fire into her round eye
for the first time. The whole of her
belly rich, roe-distended.

Back at the dock, we children cheer, clamour.
Mother gets the camera, makes us pose
with father as he holds her up by the hook,
knot-tight, two thumbs up next to the split form,
eggs spilling
                        and spilling
                                               and spilling,

orange pricks of light.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover image: 
To Sea Agin I Won’t, 2025 by Kym Greeley https://www.kymgreeley.com

Christina Wells (she/her) is a multi-genre writer from Northern Arm, NL/Ktaqmkuk. Her award-winning work, which explores memory and place, has appeared in The New Quarterly, ROOM, Riddle Fence, Horseshoe Magazine, The Newfoundland Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Yolk. She holds an MA from Memorial University and is now a PhD student at MUN. She currently lives in St. John’s, NL.

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

Kevin Spenst reviews Hope Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land (2024) via subterrain #102

our pal Kevin Spenst was good enough to provide a first review for Hope Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land (2024), as part of his regular column of chapbook reviews, in a round-up assemblage in subterrain #102! Thanks so much! As Spenst writes:

    Two different dimensions of aging are explored in Monty Reid's Vertebrata (Turret House) and Hope Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land (above/ground press). In the former, the poet writes in the poem "CV5": "The long string of bones I hang from / was never right according to doctors / who looked at the scans." The series of poems takes us from the top of the vertebrae down, reflecting on the physiological construction of the body, the Latinate and Germanic naming of parts, and Reid's own history with spinal issues. The tone and divergent subject matter are stunning fluid and touching. Hinging less on physiology, Anderson's Family Chronicles from Muffin Land are poems of family lore and slipstream lullabies dedicated to the author's grandchildren and family written from his new home in "that town, hermetically / Known as Muffin Land" (known to the rest of us as Victoria, BC). What I love in this unique blend of myths and fables is how I'd often finish a poem with a sense that the last line rhymed, only to  look back and see it didn't. (What is the secret to Hope's ghost rhymes?) My favourite poem in the collection, "The Rolling Calf", reads as a lullaby that simultaneously presents danger and the promise of safety to the poet's granddaughter Nadja. 
    In a photo taken in Victoria in 1984, Hope Anderson is in a group of poets that include Amiri Baraka, George Bowering and bpNichol. The event was organised by Hope Anderson and in a recent interview with Wayde Compton for the Capilano Review, Anderson explains the context of Sunfest and how "Poetry always comes back to us."

 

some author activity: Wells, Myles, Barwin, Sawyer, Solomon + Macdonald,

forthcoming author Christina Wells has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series; Eileen Myles has a new poem up at Discordia Review; a new interview with Gary Barwin is now up at the above/ground press substack; the late Larry Sawyer has a poem up at Poets.org; Misha Solomon has a wee essay, "Finding the Form," in The New Quarterly; and Dawn Macdonald has new work in -ette, as well as in the first issue of Journal of Experimental Practice.

new from above/ground press: AN ACCURATE CIGARETTE: Poetry & Prompts, by Sarah Burgoyne

AN ACCURATE CIGARETTE
Poetry & Prompts
Sarah Burgoyne
$6

Go outside and record what happens or occurs to you for 15 minutes. Make it into a poem. 

 
THE SOUND OF WATER RUNNING

The sound of water is running. It trickles over the balcony, across the alley, into another sound. A child’s voice through a downstairs shutter says, tell me now. Possibly, possibly, says Nana. The wind creates the ivy’s hair which dangles in the breeze. The next plant folds its hands to make a bird. A letter appears, containing a yes or no while closed. The downstairs voices sing beneath the sound of a plane. The plant’s bamboo crutch stabs into the sky. Finish your banana, nana. Child’s voice judders into song. It’s time for bed. Door creak. Am I in or outside of my head? The plane continues not to land. The child protests. The little table, stained under heat and duress, will last the winter. Pom-pom plant. Bird call: a long trilled note. Night’s morse code. Howling dog. Car honk. Trill, again, and bow-wow. 


ADD WARRIORS : AN INTRODUCTION

I have been leading a little group called Poetry Studio, usually in the colder, lonelier months of Montréal winter, on and off for some years now. I had this idea that writing in real time (as opposed to bringing in pre-written work… sometimes already dead in the water) would help us to preserve the energy in a first draft that can be easily stamped out for fear of the poem being “too weird” or “not making sense.” The formula of our meetings is simple. We discuss poetry and poetics from something we read together that week, I provide a related prompt, we part and write for 45 minutes, we return and share what we wrote. (It is scary but people are kind.) Everything, no matter how raw or random, is taken as poetry. As Wittgenstein points out, “To say, ‘This combination of words makes no sense’ excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason.” Yes, let us ponder, enumerate and celebrate the reasons! I have encountered many stupendous, “non-sense” poems this way. When I was a youngsome poet, in Tim Lilburn’s workshop at the University of Victoria, he wrote “add warriors” on one of my submissions, and nothing else. I took this into my most haunted and blue insomniac hours. What could this mean. Many years later, I wonder if this was his attempt to preserve and foster a strangeness in my early work, what Shklovsky calls “defamiliarization.” What other comment was I expecting? What other comment, now that I think of it, is even possible? In this weird little chapbook, I thought to share some of the prompts behind the poems as a way of fostering some strangeness in your own poetry, if you so happen to write it. Maybe you have never written poetry before. The corresponding poems were written in the span of 30-45 minutes, and if there is any editing, it is very light. Of course, they reflect but one way forward in the infinite paths that branch from a writing prompt. As I tell participants in Poetry Studio, use the prompt as a starting off point, but go where the poem wants to go. And if the poem is too obedient, add warriors. 

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover art by Paige Cooper.

Sarah Burgoyne is the author of Because the Sun (Coach House: 2021), Saint Twin (Mansfield: 2016) and Mechanophilia (Anvil: 2023), an infinite collaboration with American poet Vi Khi Nao.

This is Sarah Burgoyne’s fourth above/ground press title, after A Precarious Life on the Sea (2016), TENTACULUM SONNETS (2020) and the collaborative WHERE FORTH ART THOUGH (with Susan Burgoyne; 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

Kevin Spenst reviews Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024) via subterrain #102

our pal Kevin Spenst was good enough to review Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024), as part of his regular column of chapbook reviews, in a round-up assemblage in subterrain #102! Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of Tracy's Gnomics, after Daniel Barbiero reviewed such via Arteidolia. As Spenst writes:

     Dale Tracy's Gnomics (above/ground press) is astonishing in how much can be crafted within two- or three-line poems. Tracy's collection is replete with prophecies ("Those who drink the oil of ancient beasts / become the dragons who breathe fire"), persona poems ("Edging Stones // Since I am a garden, / I grow to a limit") and sylloisms ("Sounds bounce into distance. I hear sounds from a distance. Distance lives inside my ear.) This later poem strikes me in its compression of thought, touching as it does on a central argument in Tracy's 2017 book With the Witness: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience, where she theorizes poetry outside the cloying embrace of empathy as understanding another's experience. Instead, Tracy argues "literature helps one to know what it is to encounter another." I hear this nuanced argument again in "Distance lives inside my ear." We hear another person's story but that story only lives within us always at a certain remove.

  

some author activity: Coulton, Aube, Kaplan, mclennan, Hausner + Unsworth,

Valerie Coulton has a new poem at the arts fuse; Gwen Aube is announced as one of the 2026 Writers-in-Residence at the Al Purdy A-Frame; both Genevieve Kaplan and rob mclennan have new work up at Posit; Beatriz Hausner has a poem in Paul Vermeersch's "In the Third Sleep" series; and Lydia Unsworth is interviewed by rob mclennan to help promote her upcoming participation in VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival.

new from above/ground press: 310 Consecutive Life Sentences, by Ken Sparling

310 Consecutive Life Sentences
Ken Sparling
$6

Sitting On A Blue Curb

Me and Kitty were sitting on the sofa trying to decide if this guy in the movie we were watching was hot or not. I paused the movie when Kitty started asking what I thought about this guy. Nowadays, whenever you paused a movie on Netflix, they had this thing where a static ad came onto the screen and stayed there till you unpaused your show. So there was this ad for an insurance company up there and we had to keep unpausing it to see if this guy in the movie was hot. Then we had to re-pause it while we continued our discussion based on what we had seen while the movie was unpaused. The character we were discussing wasn’t the star of the movie, but he had a pretty big role. We’d seen him in other movies, but he looked quite different in this one. His hair was a lot shorter, and he was dressed in period costume. To tell the truth, I thought he was pretty hot, and that is what I told Kitty, but she didn’t agree. “He’s sort of pretty,” she told me, “but I’d never say he was hot.” “What’s the difference between pretty and hot?” I asked her. She looked away from me, back at the tv. “I hate this new thing with the ads when you pause a show,” she said. “Unpause it for a second, would you. I need to look at the guy again.”

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the thirty-second title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
February 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover image by Mary Sparling

More Ken Sparling
- Not Anywhere, Just Not (Coach House, 2023)
- the girl arrived (above/ground, 2021)
- This Poem is a House (Coach House, 2016)

Available from the author at dadsayshesawyou@gmail.com:
- Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall
- [untitled novel]
- For Those Whom God Has Blessed With Fingers
- Book
- Intention, Implication, Wind

Online:
kensparling.github.io
instagram: @kensparling 
kensparling.ca

This is Sparling's second title with above/ground press, after the girl arrived (2021).

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: LONG SPEECH FROM MY FATHER AS MY FATHER AS WU TAO TZU ET AL, by Jake Kennedy

LONG SPEECH FROM MY FATHER AS MY FATHER AS WU TAO TZU ET AL
Jake Kennedy
$6

Oh my son my son it’s cold without proper clothes on 
-colder than a witch’s tit – colder than the balls on a brass 
monkey – colder than a well-digger’s ass 

with my little gods hereabouts: watch and keys and wallet
– shit, just look at them – very dutiful –calm and sincere – I 
look away and quickly look back and they’re still here 

jellyfish exist – crazy debutantes –twirling in their electric 
ball gowns through the old seascape– wow – such 
splendours – they exist my son – wow wow

tiny windows on the backs of ants – so bright - oh my son 
inside their lacquered bodies it’s pure light - the gods 
rattling in the attic and the gods shushing in the trees –

but seriously my son come in come in how are you? – I 
think it’s time to admit them – I’ve been so afraid – I might 
admit them– come in! – 

another patient said to me, George we’re just dreams sent 
into a world of brute material – no wonder it’s tricky out 
there my son- rocks know how to be and we don’t

son son my son – like you I’m at home with the plain old 
typical nouns – trying to find the one word (Knife! 
Cigarette! Car!) that splits the hour open – 

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover image: “Baudelaire,” 1911
Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918)

Jake Kennedy does not know if it’s real or artificial or even intelligence at all therefore he appreciates the three squirrels this season that play maniacal tag on his front lawn. Every morning he tells them that he respects their speed / that he is in awe of their purposeless play. Every morning they retreat to the high branches and they perch above him and they go, “clickclickclick hisshisshiss booboo tryagainhuman” which is only right.

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: Armantrout, Maloukis, Heroux, Cannon, Bolster + Nećakov,

Rae Armantrout has a new poem up at the London Review of Books; Rose Maloukis offers a list of what she's been reading lately over at The New Quarterly; Jason Heroux has work up in the Spotlight series; Frances Cannon is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Stephanie Bolster is included in the "Canadian Poets Series" via Peripety and/or Tronies; and Lillian Nećakov has a new poem up in Paul Vermeersch's "In the Third Sleep" series.

The Nelson Ball Prize: Margaret Christakos wins! and Peter Jaeger's shortlist write-up,

Congratulations to Toronto poet Margaret Christakos, who recently won The Nelson Ball Prize for That Audible Slippage (University of Alberta Press, 2024)! 2025 judges Bev Daurio and James McDonald included, as you might already know, Peter Jaeger's Selected Memoirs (above/ground press, 2024) on their shortlist, so here's the judge's citations for such (you can see the citations for all five of the shortlist titles, including Christakos', as well as a short interview with Christakos, here):

Selected Memoirs (above/ground press)
by Peter Jaeger

Peter Jaeger is the author of several books and has written on a wide variety of topics, from ecology to John Cage. His chapbook Selected Memoirs addresses six and a half decades of one life, in thirty passages varying in length from twenty-five words to a couple of pages. Some passages cover several years, some only one. Much is missing; most of the life under consideration; yet the book feels complete and open at the same time. Its observations are as much by omission as by what they state; there are great gaps of time and context between some sections, between years, between sentences within entries. The passages and the spaces between them combine to create a perfect broken mashed-together record of existence, implying that much is forgotten.

Jaeger touches on the intellectual, the mundane, sweetness and regret, the greater world, the inner world, worlds imagined. There is a tipping between the real, and memory. Jaeger touches on horror (2001), a puzzling comment by a colleague (1997-98), unique experiences in the real world, "Scuba drift in the Red Sea" (2002-03) and times of want: "That winter Frank and I wore our heavy coats inside the house and clutched empty whiskey bottles filled with hot water to keep our hands warm." (1983).

Listing topics and descrying polarities and their subtle tensions, however, does not do the book justice, because so much of its joy is contained in its delicate, startling details and striking, unexpected shifts. The entry for 1966 reads: "Meditating in Bellwoods Park on a sunny afternoon in Toronto, I saw myself and the world as a continuous field of subatomic particles. I still remained deeply interested in the alphabet."

Although written in seemingly straightforward prose, Selected Memoirs is replete with moments of incredible writing, and a participatory poetics, where gaps and leaps ask the reader to consider all that is not there and what is hidden. Jaeger creates a small world of serenity, by turns warm, winsome, vulnerable, and quietly profound.