some author activity: Ross, Nećakov, Earl, Kemp-Gee, Crosby + Marlatt,

Stuart Ross has a new poem up at NewPoetry.ca; Lillian Nećakov has new work up at The Galway Review; Amanda Earl has a piece in the "poetry pause" series, via The League of Canadian Poets; Meghan Kemp-Gee has a poem in Paul Vermeersch’s “In the Third Sleep” series; Gregory Crosby is working an online workshop, "Speaking Through A Mask: Persona & Dramatic Monologue"; and did you see that forthcoming author Daphne Marlatt is receiving an honorary degree through the University of British Columbia this spring?

new from above/ground press: Misha Solomon’s BIODÔME: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster, by Misha Solomon

Misha Solomon’s BIODÔME: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster
Misha Solomon
$6

Southern Two-Toed Sloth

Everyone represents the self’s less attractive
features with words that seek to distract, to deflect,
to scapegoat. You may think me slow, they try to say,
or lazy, but I’m so much better than the sign
to which this sinful word now points. And here I am,
and yes I’m slow, but the effort that it takes me
to go about my selfsame days is of a scale,
a magnitude, that far exceeds the limits placed
by semantics. There is no animal called lust,
called pride, called wrath, called greed. And if there were a beast
called gluttony, I’d envy them their liberty.
Nature rewards profligacy, in the short term.
I know not what it rewards in the long—my pace
implies perdurance, but I live no more for it.

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

This title is literally a response to Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster's chapbook BIODÔME (above/ground press 2006). A twentieth anniversary edition of BIODÔME, with a new introduction by Misha Solomon (above/ground press), appeared earlier this week.

cover credit: Naomie Hadida

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has twice appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and in journals across Canada. He is a student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary PhD program. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, appeared with Brick Books in March 2026. Misha Solomon’s Biodôme: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster is his third chapbook.

This is Solomon’s second above/ground press title, after FLORALS (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

new from above/ground press: BIODÔME: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, by Stephanie Bolster

BIODÔME: Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Stephanie Bolster
with an introduction by Misha Solomon
and new afterword by the author
$6

HOUSING THE GREAT AUK

Masses of glass, rocks at the back,
craggy, like the outcroppings in illustrations.
To think they thought the last had snuffed it!
Water at the front, so its splash
will make the gawkers flinch.
Can’t take long or journalists will catch
the squawks and then our coup
will cool. Remember the coelacanth?
Give it eels, beetles, chocolate ices
if it wants. Keep each lost feather
for the shop – a transparent envelope,
ten pounds, twenty? At night when they go home
we can ask it about the nineteenth century.
The sea teeming with ships! We were a marvel.

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

Stephanie Bolster’s latest book of poetry, Long Exposure, appeared with Palimpsest Press in fall 2025. Excerpts from the book were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2019. Bolster’s first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award and was translated into French as Pierre Blanche. Her poems have also been translated into Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby, BC. She has been a professor of creative writing at Concordia University since 2000 and lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec, on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti.

Many of the poems from this chapbook were later incorporated into and published as part of Stephanie Bolster’s A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (London ON: Brick Books, 2011), a book shortlisted for the 2012 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Thanks to Brick Books for the permission to reprint this anniversary edition.

This is Stephanie Bolster’s fifth above/ground press chapbook, after Three Bloody Words (1996), BIODÔME (2006), Three Bloody Words: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2016) and GHOSTS (2017).

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