some author activity: Burdick, Nećakov, Schmaltz + Henning,

Alice Burdick has a new essay up at The New Quarterly; Lillian Nećakov is interviewed alongside Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag for the podcast Meat for Teacast; Eric Schmaltz is interviewed by Myra Bloom at ASAP Review; and Barbara Henning has new work up at Long News.

new from above/ground press: NO VIBRATO HARD TRANSCENDENCE, by Jon Cone

NO VIBRATO HARD TRANSCENDENCE
Jon Cone
$6

AFTER MY TYPEWRTIER GOT STOLE
 
To be young
to have nothing nothing! 
to be drunk and in love 
kissing on a street corner
where light is derelict
laughing with the municipal workers 
waiting for the first bus 
as if for a new invention

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

Jon Cone is a Canadian writer who lives in Iowa City. He grew up in Richmond Hill, Ontario. He saw the Three Stooges perform live at the Canadian National Exhibition. He watched George Chuvalo fight Muhammad Ali on a black-and-white tv.  He saw the Toronto Maple Leafs play at Maple Leaf Gardens. He went to Seneca College in Toronto for one year before attending the University of Western Ontario in London. 

This is Cone’s third title through above/ground press, after Against Perfectionism & other poems (2025) and the collaborative AN ACCELERATION & A CALM / A SHEAF BY THE LATE P. M. SAMSON / COMMENTARY BY BARNARD SWALLOW (with K.Lipschutz, 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

Billy Mills reviews Jon Cone's Against Perfectionism & Other Poems and John Levy's Vast Spaces

Irish poet Billy Mills was good enough to provide first reviews of Jon Cone's Against Perfectionism & Other Poems (2025) and John Levy's Vast Spaces (2026) as part of an omnibus review (alongside Chris Turnbull's If/Then and Henry Gould's Mirror Lake) via Elliptical Movements. Thanks so much! Mills was even nice enough to review Levy's prior above/ground press title, which we also appreciate very much. You can see the full review here, or this excerpt, below:

Jon Cone is a Canadian poet living in Iowa and, if the work in Against Perfectionism & Other Poems is anything to go by, influenced by the New York School, a thought that came to me as I encountered poem titles like ‘The Stationary Engineer at Rest Ponders the World as an Inscrutable Theology of Material Influence’ and ‘The Exile Alive to the Etching of an Hour’, so I was pleased to encounter ‘A Poem for Frank O’Hara’ almost halfway in. To my surprise, it is the shortest poem in the pamphlet:

A Poem for Frank O’Hara

For I shall drink a warm Coke at noon
and trace lovingly
the cracked egg of the world.

Short as it is, this poem captures the humour and the sense of luminous triviality that suffuses much of the work gathered here. And that humour can be self-deprecating, as in ‘A Poem for Mother and Dather (after Tomaž Šalamun)’:

He’s ugly! His face is ugly! His body is ugly!
Ugly! Ugly! Ugly! Jonathan Cone is an awful poet
because he is an awful person and
when he goes for a sprightly march about
the compound of a summer’s dawn
mongrels will stand on hind legs to salute him
and feral cats will trail at acute angles behind.

This absurdist strain melds perfectly with what I called the luminous triviality at the heart of so much of the work here:

A Caffeinated Dream of Spring

The waitress brought us these beautiful white mugs.
They each had a single blue stripe just below the lip.
I mean the simplicity of that singular blue trail upon
that immaculate occasion of white. Then the waitress
poured lucidly from the coffee pot filling our mugs.
And the sound the coffee made was easy and so gentle.
Like the world was home and unsteady on our behalf.

This is one of the things poetry does; it takes the ordinary things and makes them extraordinary, if only the poet is willing to take a chance on seeming mundane. Cone takes that leap with gusto. The pamphlet’s title poem consists in the main of a recipe for a simple meal, salad and dessert. The poem then ends:

I don’t know if this would win any culinary awards. OK I admit
               I know it would not. But I don’t care. It tastes good to me,
& that is ultimately what matters because the world
might come crashing down any second now,
we don’t have time to be perfectionists in all we attempt or do.

Which strikes me as the perfect way to go about poetry in these insane times. Forget about the prizegivers, avoid the overly polished, make something that tastes good. And in these poems, Cone follows his own advice to perfect imperfection.

John Levy’s Vast Spaces is his second pamphlet from the prolific and always interesting Above/Ground Press. Like Cone, Levy has a fine eye for the everyday, but he is primarily a poet of community, and many of his poems are in the form of notes addressed to named friends and/or fellow poets, while others carry dedications. Here’s an example

Sky

for John Phillips

The turkey buzzard that circled above me twice this morning had
beautiful white on the underside of its black wings and a vividly red
beak and if it had been me up there I know I would have loved gliding
like that, not having to move my wings and not caring about the old
man below me looking up as if in the church without a roof that I’d
never enter.

Here, as so often in Levy’s work, close observation of the world opens out to a kind of social sense of what it is to live in that world, a set of interactions between the thing seen, the observing poet, the dedicatee and the reader that is redolent with a quiet sense of illumination. This is conversation raised to the level of art.

Some of the interactions are with strangers, others involve pets, and there’s a thread that runs through several of the poems concerning Levy’s learning to play the piano in his 70s, as in this note to another poet:

Note to Robyn Scheienz (August 9, 2025)

Bunny, our excitable little rescue terrier, barks
and barks, apparently furious at me
for stopping playing over and over
“Claire de Lune,” practicing

the sustain pedal, making mistakes and
correcting them, all of which maybe
he not only silently tolerated but
which intrigued him as much

as when he sits on one side of our French door
watching a lizard or, if he’s even luckier, a rabbit
or small bird, and yesterday that long black snake
like a living middle C elongated by a sustain pedal.

The almost casually conversational surface here serves to conceal the technical craft at work, the repetitions (barks and barks / over and over) enacting the practice, the forward propulsion created by line and stanza endings, the threads of assonance and alliteration that bind those same lines and stanzas together (read it aloud if you don’t believe me). All of which gently serves to convey the ‘meaning’, that to be human is to create, to make mistakes and learn from them, and create better, and that what we make well is as much a part of the world as a bird, rabbit or snake is.

This soft-spoken humanity is what Levy is about, in both senses of the word. His poetry is difficult to write about because the poems are so definitively what they are, complete and in no real need of comment. Read him.

new from above/ground press: I found looking, by Emily Shafer

I found looking
Emily Shafer
$6

I found                                   looking outside
  found you there
  listening
  listing
  my nute

 

I found four swallows instead of three 

   found a blank party is all worth an email slice

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

cover artwork: Aoife McLennan

Emily Shafer is a poet and photographer. She is an incoming MFA candidate in Image Text at Cornell University, holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Brooklyn College, and teaches first-year writing at CUNY. She is the author of it’s too early for poetry from Proper Tales Press and publications in poets.org, The Brooklyn Review, periodicities, and more. Born and raised in Rochester, N.Y., she lives and works in New York City. @emilyshaferwrites / www.emilyshaferwrites.com

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: Aube, Kemp, Kronovet, Earl, Wells + MacEachern,

Gwen Aube has new work up at Maisonneuve; Penn Kemp has a new poem up at Centred.ca, and there's an article on her work in the London Free Press and new work in The Typescript; Arlington poet laureate Jennifer Kronovet took part in a recent event in the county; Amanda Earl has a long poem up at Canto; Christina Wells offers reading recommendations via The Fiddlehead; and a poem by Jessi MacEachern lands on the Room Magazine 2026 Poetry Contest Longlist.

Publishing-in-Transit: Cole Swensen zoom-interviewed Jennifer Baker, rob mclennan + Misha Solomon on above/ground press for Brooklyn Rail: recording now online,

It was such a good conversation! Check out the full hour-plus conversation with myself, Misha Solomon and Jennifer Baker on and around above/ground press, conducted by the brilliant Cole Swensen and hosted by Brooklyn Rail, either here through their site or via their YouTube channel. We talked about VERSeFest, we talked a brief history of above/ground press, we talked about Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] (and hear the legend of how the donkey got its name) and even the “Tuesday poem” series. You can order Misha Solomon’s above/ground press titles here (and his new book over here), Jennifer Baker’s above/ground press titles here, and my above/ground press titles here (or the chapbook I read from, even). Cole Swensen even has an above/ground press title! But you know she has a new book as well, yes? Thanks to everyone who made this thing happen!

report: Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase : Abel, Marlatt, Wah, mclennan, Carpenter, fitzpatrick, etc

In case you hadn't heard, above/ground press was well represented this past week at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, as part of the University of Alberta's Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase, held near the end of a full week when a slew of us prior writers-in-residence got to spend time together at the Banff Centre, up in them mountains (there was a full two days of snowfall, if you can imagine).

Hosted by Jordan Abel [who currently runs the w-i-r program], Jason Purcell and Julianna Wager [above, who organized the entire week as well], the event had opening remarks on a (very) brief history of the University of Alberta writer-in-residence program [remember when I conducted all those interviews for the fortieth, with every still-living uAlberta writer-in-residence I could find?] by Thomas Wharton, and readings by Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, Marilyn Dumont, Makda Mulatu, rob mclennan, Joshua Whitehead, January Rogers, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick, Cody Caetano, Jana Pruden, Kaitlyn Purcell and Hiromi Goto. There was a livestream that one can catch here, which unfortunately missed Wharton, picking up only mid-point through Marlatt's reading, but the full event was recorded, and should be up soon.

[J.R. Carpenter, above] With everyone reading roughly five minutes each, it truly was a remarkable event overall, including singing, staccato, lyric, chanting and prose, and even some tears. As you already know, the event was also a kind of launch for a handful of recent above/ground press titles specifically made for the event, by myself, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick and Derek Beaulieu (Director of the Literary Arts at Banff, but not actually reading, although in the audience), although Wah was the only one of the group that actually read from his new title (I mean, I didn't even do that, so I've no business throwing shade). There were a handful of copies of all of these titles on site for free distribution, both through the event specifically and across the whole week, with a mound of copies still available gratis through the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (just prod at Jordan Abel, if you are up that way), or just order direct from the press, of course. And did you hear I'm even back at the Banff Centre this November? I've already got a new slew of above/ground press publications in the works, just you wait.

[ryan fitzpatrick, above] It was good, also, to see various audience I hadn't been expecting (amid our packed house), including poet and former Tsunami Editions publisher Michael Barnholden, driving in from Edmonton with his wife, or poet Ryanne Kap, driving in from Calgary with a friend. Separately, Winnipeg poet Sharanpal Ruprai was actually at Banff as part of a playwriting retreat, and Vancouver poet Adèle Barclay was there as well, working a couple of weeks in one of the Leighton cabins, retreating. Edmonton writer Conor Kerr, who teaches at the University of Alberta, was also part of our group for most of the week. It still doesn't feel real, how good it all was.

Cole Swensen zoom-interviews rob mclennan, Misha Solomon + Jennifer Baker May 20th on above/ground press for Brooklyn Rail,

Publishing-in-Transit: above/ground
Featuring Jennifer Baker, rob mclennan, Misha Solomon

Wednesday, May 20, 2026
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

REGISTER HERE

Poets Jennifer Baker, rob mclennan, and Misha Solomon join Rail contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation on Zoom on above/ground press (which turns thirty-three years old this summer, by the way). 

Jennifer Baker is a poet and Teaching Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of four chapbooks: Abject Lessons (above/ground press, 2014), Groundling (Trainwreck Press, 2021/reissued by above/ground press, 2023), Memento Mishka (co-authored with David Currie, Apt. 9 Press, 2023), and Wee Walk (above/ground press, 2026). Her work has been featured in Groundwork: Best of above/ground press (2023), Arc Poetry Magazine, Canthius, The Journal of Canadian Poetry, Canadian Literature, Dusie, and the Delisted project. 

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 founded above/ground press, a publisher of chapbooks, journals and other ephemera, way back in July 1993. He also spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has appeared in journals across Canada and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, 2026, and 2027 (Biblioasis) and in On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House Books). He is the author of three chapbooks, including FLORALS and Misha Solomon's BIODÔME: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster (above/ground press), and one full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet (Brick Books). He has a BA from Columbia University, an MA from Concordia University, and he is currently a student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program.

Cole Swensen [see her above/ground press title here] is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.

some author activity: Tynes, O'Reilly + Robertson,

Jen Tynes was offering nearly-daily poems as part of National Poetry Month over at the Bloof Books blog; Nathanael O'Reilly has new work up at Cordite; and there is a new interview with Lisa Robertson up at minor literature[s], as conducted by Christina Politano.

some author activity: Armantrout, mclennan, fitzpatrick, Smith, Saklikar, Kemp-Gee, Bolster + Solomon,

Rae Armantrout has four poems up at Granta; rob mclennan is interviewed via Coach House for the On Occasion anthology; there's also a hefty interview with mclennan conducted by ryan fitzpatrick; Mahaila Smith is interviewed via the National Poetry Month "POETS RESIST" interview series at All Lit Up, as is Renée Sarojini Saklikar and Meghan Kemp-Gee, and Stephanie Bolster and Misha Solomon's recent chapbooks even get mentioned via the Wikipedia page for Montreal's Biodome, which is cool.

new from above/ground press: Sparky and Squire, by Derek Beaulieu

Sparky and Squire
Derek Beaulieu
$6

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2026
produced in part for activity at Banff Centre, May 11-18, 2026, as part of the 50th anniversary of the University of Alberta Writer-in-Residence program
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Dr. Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent book, Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the 21st Century, was published by Assembly Press in the Spring of 2026. Beaulieu has received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for his dedication to Albertan literature and CCWWP Robert Kroetsch Award for excellence in innovative pedagogy and teaching practice. He is the only graduate from the University of Calgary’s Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts ‘Celebrated Alumni Award’ and the only graduate in creative writing to receive Roehampton University’s Chancellor’s Alumni Award. Beaulieu has served as Poet Laureate of both Calgary and Banff and is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He can be found online at www.derekbeaulieu.ca

This is Derek Beaulieu’s twelfth above/ground press chapbook, after an issue of the long poem magazine STANZAS (“calcite gours 1-19,” issue no. 38), the interview chapbook ECONOMIES OF SCALE: rob mclennan interviews derek beaulieu on NO PRESS / derek beaulieu interviews rob mclennan on above/ground press (2012) and single-author chapbooks “A? any questions? (1998), [Dear Fred] (2004), HOW TO EDIT, Chapter A. (ALBERTA SERIES #8; 2008), transcend transcribe transfigure transform transgress (2014), a a novel: 1-20 (2017), tattered sails (after un coup de des) (2018), CABARET (2020), ONTARIO HYDRO (2023) and tattered sails (after un coup de des) (second printing, 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: Crosby, Naughton, Davis, Betts + mclennan,

Gregory Crosby has a poem up at Stone Circle Review; Katie Naughton has two new poems up at The Rumpus; Jordan Davis has new work up at the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month; Gregory Betts has a poem up in the Niagara Falls Poetry Project; and a poem by rob mclennan gets mentioned in Paul Pearson's Slow Poetry Reading Project.

new from above/ground press: from the green notebook, by rob mclennan

from the green notebook :
, a writing vigil,
rob mclennan
$6

I’m rereading notes sketched out last November, responding to the death of Prince George, British Columbia poet Barry McKinnon. Christine and I, along with our young ladies and mother-in-law, headed to Florida for the sake of finally taking the children to Disney, a trip delayed due to the onset of the Covid era. Apparently the goal was to catch the trip before Rose turned ten, which would then have her charged as an adult. I carried my Red Deer College Press reissue of McKinnon’s I wanted to say something (1990) across Universal Studios, suburban Orlando and Walt Disney World, capturing photos of his book from our hotel deck, in the Cantina, by the Millennial Falcon, a Tie-Fighter, by a fire-breathing dragon in Harry Potter’s Hogsmeade. I amused myself by carrying a book by my late friend across a ridiculous series of outings, mere days after he’d died.

Working through my many pages of rough drafts, I’m realizing my poem-sketches are closer in tone and structure to the late John Newlove’s 1964 poem “Ride Off Any Horizon,” a poem that first appeared in book-form in his Black Night Window (1968); how I utilize variations of the phrase “I wanted to say something” as a repetition, from which poem-fragments might return to leap from. As Newlove once said of his own poem, originally using his phrase as a compositional tool that he’d remove from later drafts, which he ended up being unable to strike out. “Ride off any horizon / and let the measure fall / where it may— [.]”

In his Paris Review interview (1968), Robert Creeley responds: “I’m really speaking of my own sense of place.” This is the sensibility that Barry McKinnon brought to Prince George when they moved there, what I also absorbed across my twenties and into my thirties from those British Columbia poets. The very notion of Robert Creeley invited up north to read, into McKinnon’s local. What might that have sounded like.

*

The earth moves, through parts of New England. A rare New York earthquake. Come Monday, the solar eclipse. Some say we’re in end-times. Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival (2024) speaks to wildfires, the British Columbia interior, the coast. Matt Rader’s FINE (2024). The poetry, that makes nothing happen.

I spend half an hour tweaking three short stories at RedBird, a music venue in Old Ottawa South, as Aoife attends her weekly ukulele lessons. She couldn’t find her pink ukulele, so she has borrowed my lime green model, the one Sharon Harris gifted me during their move from apartment to house, back in 2010. I am working on stories.

There is a certain point of the editing/copy editing process that is less improving upon and is simply changing. This story isn’t any better, but it sure is shorter, or longer. Or different. The idea of spending thirty years working a self-portrait in oil to keep up with the changes. It might never be finished.

There were tales of the late Steven Heighton (1961-2022), attending revisions and reworks of his prose to the point of checking in with the printers of his books, which his publishers and editors were not necessarily happy about. At some point, one has to let go. Or pull it back.

I had hoped also to look at poems this morning, but naturally, they remain in my office, freshly printed. And I am here, instead.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2026
as the thirty-fourth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
produced in part for activity at Banff Centre, May 11-18, 
2026, as part of the 50th anniversary of the University of 
Alberta Writer-in-Residence program
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

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.

This is mclennan’s seventieth above/ground press chapbook, following recent titles including Origin stories (2026), the collaborative river / estuaries (with Julie Carr; 2023), edgeless : letters, (2023), The Alta Vista Improvements (2023), Autobiography (2022), the collaborative SOME LEAVES (with Gary Barwin; 2020), Twenty-one stories, (2020), Poems for Lunch Poems for SFU (2020), Somewhere in-between / cloud (2019), Study of a fox (2018), snow day (2018) and It’s still winter (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

Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase: mclennan, fitzpatrick, Wah, Marlatt, Carpenter, etc;

May 15, 2026 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Clvb 33, St. Julien Way, Banff, AB and online

REGISTER HERE;

The Writer-in-Residence program in the Department of English and Film Studies is delighted to invite you to attend our 50th anniversary Writer-in-Residence Alumni Showcase at the Banff Centre's Clvb 33. All are welcome to attend either in person or virtually.

There will be readings from Thomas Wharton, Fred Wah, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Cody Caetano, JR Carpenter, rob mclennan, Daphne Marlatt, Jana Pruden, Hiromi Goto, and Marilyn Dumont.

new from above/ground press: Shanzai, by Fred Wah

Shanzai
Fred Wah
$6

CALL OF DUTY
            (sub for Fleetwood Mac “Dreamin”)


Is this the Dream?
Mm…
Mm…
Now here we go again
I say I want my freedom
So what’s the fuss to keep me down?
It wasn’t right I had to pay
my way you know it.
But listen carefully
to the sounds of my loneliness,
like the boat that brought me here
In the sadness of remembering what I’d left,
and what I dream for, and what I’d left
and what I dream for.

This shallow life is not what I was dreaming
Deep down inside the emptiness is screaming
Other dreams will come and they will go
If the mountain turns to gold
I’ll know, I’ll know.

Now here I go again, my trans Pacific vision
American as railroad pie
It’s not just me
who looks for freedom in a dream, that
liberating dream I’ll have to buy.

Days of loneliness
Empty dreaming drives me mad
In the sadness of remembering what I had,
and what I lost, and what I had,
ooh what I dream for.

This shallow life is not what I was dreaming
Deep down inside the emptiness is screaming
Other dreams they will come and they will go
If the mountain turns to gold, I’ll know.


Oh yes, I’ll know.


ABOUT:

On Labour Day weekend in 1988 I became the Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta. My wife, Pauline Butling and I, had arrived in Edmonton from South Slocan in southeastern B.C. I had a sore back which prevented me from joining Pauline and our friend Pamela Banting on a hike that weekend, just before the school term started. Earlier that summer, I had been teaching with bpNichol at a workshop in Red Deer and bp had encouraged me to try my hand at the 3-day novel writing contest put on annually by Arsenal Pulp Press. While Pauline and Pamela went off hiking, I stayed home and decided to try writing a 3-day novel. I managed about 60 pages of anecdotal biotext. On Tuesday morning at school when Rudy Wiebe asked me what I’d done for the weekend I told him I had written a novel. I had never felt very comfortable writing prose (which was really the reason bp had urged me to try this contest; his novel Still had won it in 1983) and the results of my marathon writing weekend reflected this. I put that effort aside, though I pecked at it a little. A few years later my colleague and editor Aritha Van Herk helped me shape the manuscript into a book of short fiction, Diamond Grill. 

Over the past twenty years the discourse generated for me by writing Diamond Grill extended into other writing. A major project for me was a collaboration titled High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese (https://highmuckamuck.ca/), a multimedia project involving video, music, oral history, performance, and text.

The text for this chapbook, Shanzai, is some of my writing salvaged from that project. Suitably, for this 50th Anniversary of the U of A’s Writer-in-Residence program, it was seeded during my residency of 1988-89.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2026
produced in part for activity at Banff Centre, May 11-18, 2026, as part of the 50th anniversary of the University of Alberta Writer-in-Residence program
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan and lives in Vancouver and the West Kootenays. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a former Parliamentary Poet Laureate. His writing includes Diamond Grill, a biofiction about growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café, Sentenced to Light, collaborations with visual artists, is a door, a series of poems about hybridity. More recent books are beholden: a poem as long as the river with Rita Wong and Music at the Heart of Thinking: Improvisations.

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