some author activity: Hawes, Burdick, Paige, Kemp + Crosby,

James Hawes has new work up at carte blanche; Alice Burdick is included in the Canadian Poets Series via peripety and/or tronies; Salem Paige is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Penn Kemp has a new poem in the "Tuesday poem" series; and did you know that Gregory Crosby has a newsletter?

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.

some author activity: fitzpatrick, Smith, Mody, mclennan, Burdick, Aube + Solomon,

ryan fitzpatrick has work up at NewPoetry; Dale Martin Smith has a new piece up at Annulet; Monica Mody has two poems up at Art of the Commune; rob mclennan has some new work up at North of Oxford; Alice Burdick also has new work up at NewPoetry; Gwen Aube is interviewed in the "12 or 20 questions" series; and Misha Solomon has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series.

Jay Miller reviews Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025)

Montreal poet, translator and reviewer Jay Miller was good enough to review Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025) over at Bibelotages. Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of this particular title, after Pearl Pirie reviewed such via The Miramichi Reader. You can read Miller's original post here. As Miller writes:

From Holler (2012):

    Snow

    Every tree
    a birch
    in winter.

I read my old review of Holler in Literatured’s archives and find allusive words such as Whitmanian, Plathian and Plath-like, and the worst offender among them, housewifery, repulsive to the ear, eye, and sense.

What did I know, at the ripe young age of 19, about Whitman, Plath, or the domesticity (or absurdity) of being a hausfrau?

Whitman, arguably, sure, and Plath, I had certainly run into amongst the university shelves if not the public library. But it’s that last one that really did me in.

I find one salvageable morsel from this more-than-decade-old review, the excerpt I used from her work that still haunts me, (above; a Nelson Ball-like joke that smiles upon the competence porn of botanical poetics) and move on to flipping through Alessandro Porco’s introduction, in Deportment (2018), to her selected works, to get my bearings for this review.

And what do I see in Porco? Whitmanesque, Plath, and housewife.

I can’t help but disagree. Carl Watts had a review in rob mclennan’s periodicities a few years after Deportment was published and wrote something to the effect that on several grounds, Porco doesn’t seem to demonstrate what he says he appreciates about Burdick’s past or current work:

“2016’s Chore Choir, with Kingston’s Puddles of Sky Press, for instance, is a pocket-sized, two-page poetic-prose offering that seems like a more clipped and yet more irreverent iteration of the poetics of Holler’s “Mahone Bay rhapsody.” Pleasure Bristles, a chapbook coauthored with Gary Barwin and published by above/ground in the same year as Deportment, disperses Burdick’s tactics further, raising questions about Porco’s conception of a gradual move toward accessibility while also justifying the editor’s selections by further permuting Burdick’s recognizable forms and splicing them Barwin’s.”

And I published her poems in my 2022 zine, poets against fascism:

    Honking bodies

    Honk once if a homunculus

    is jamming in the city core

    yelling freedom into the feathered

    bodies of city birds. The central

    premise of the vaunted naifs

    is immunity bleeds out the weak,

    as if that’s a good thing. Pillows

    plump up in cardinals’ mouths.

    A crested red bird catches light

    as she flies past stained glass.

    I open a door and an eye peers in,

    a warning to scale down

    expectations, accept the dome

    of the golden mean, tunnel

    below the yellow brick road.

I’m sitting here with a tower of books looming over me, remembering how earlier today, I had experienced a lapse in judgment. I thought Alice Burdick had a book out with Gaspereau Press, because Nova Scotia, and I couldn’t find it in my Gaspereau pile. It’s because it was underneath her 2025 publication with no name or title on the cover, just a line drawing of El Yucateco hot sauce, A Holiday for Molecules (2019).

But I’m only as smart as my reviews make me out to be. I see in Porco something that reminds me of what John Metcalf said of critics echoing one another on In The Village of Viger. Just because you repeat something doesn’t make it so.

So today, I want to veer away from repeating what others and my younger self have said for want of more original reflection and approach Alice Burdick’s poetry for the first time again after so many years: no pretense, no comparison, no assumptions, no garbage.

Let’s just get into it.

The first poem is dedicated to Mary Pratt. Pratt is a painter, who lived with her painter husband Christopher Pratt, according to Wikipedia, very much framing their relationship in rural Newfoundland as part of her paintings, which also included many everyday household objects, to paint a scene.

Let’s not get sidetracked, let’s read part of the poem together (it’s a three-parter):

    It’s a wonderful pain
    for Mary Pratt

    1)

    A window in my arm,
    blood and jello. Jar on
    the windowsill, fat red light.
    Mirror is a little bit of help,
    rather unacceptable.
    A lush, expensive decor -
    I could barely wade through
    the carpet. [...]

In the acknowledgements section of this chapbook, she writes that this poem (a two-parter) and the one after it (the other-parter, but actually a second poem) came after watching documentaries on Mary and Christopher (also a painter).

The first half of the Mary poems ends with this assertion: “[...] Here, in this place, / I’m the only one who can rule.”

The second half opens with a courageous tone:

    2)

    There’s an ease in the beginning.
    I will always be who I was,
    but I don’t know what that will be.
    Life is a self-portrait - it is interested
    in being done. [...]

I have thoughts I don’t know whether I’m as courageous as these resounding lines sound to say aloud. But I refuse to repeat. And no need anyways, for what she says is very straightforward: life is a self-portrait, as in, every person is a painter in front of the easel of their own existence. It is interested in being done, and forgive me, Alice, and other readers, because I can’t help but hearken back to what Porco mentioned in his introduction about the painful event of her mother’s tragic passing (her mother was visual artist Mary Paisley who, after enduring years of several, severe illnesses, took her own life in ‘94).

So she sees this documentary about Mary Pratt and finds affirmation for life in her portrayal, as though suicide were not a rankling heirloom of a notion but merely something that happens to other people. Alice Burdick’s poetry can be very frank.

But I don’t want to err into the territory of assumption by assuming that, despite acknowledging the inspiration for this poem, the poet herself is the speaker of the poem. It sounds much likelier that it is Mary, in fact: “[...] Life is a violent affair / of primrose paths. I’ll shuffle off / with those who worked. Maybe / one day I’ll be seen. I cannot hope / beyond my own satisfaction. / I hope I reach, but will not care / about your joy.”

Isn’t that a marvellous way to say a thing? “I hope I reach” beyond her own satisfaction; “but will not care” about the joy of her artwork’s viewers. Their joy is beyond her satisfaction; she paints for herself alone. It is a bold statement and unique to her person—a fantastic first poem.

Then, the second poem begins:

    You did it my way
    after Christopher

    Aesthetics are managed by direction -
    put this here and it is much better.
    A tunnel of disturbing balance.
    Amused contribution -
    a control that always asserts.
    Truth and fiction work together.
    Especially the fiction, because truth
    is never believed. [...]

I hope you sense the tension in my expression and my hesitation to overquote her poems, because they so clearly speak for themselves with an effect I can neither emulate or deconstruct. But Burdick here is self-aware of her relation to the subject and the speaker of the poem, slightly different from the Mary ones before, where it was Mary all the way.

Then, the end, to not leave readers hanging, but not give away the middle of the poem:

    [...] I’m not suicidal - bing bang, wharf.
    Sleep, however, forever -
    that is that, left, fine.
    We’ll leave it there.
    It doesn’t bother me.

It’s hard to tell who the speaker of the poem is talking to, because it feels like she is embodying his persona. Meanwhile, he is simultaneously talking to himself in front of a listener, Mary, but as a way to prove his point, opposite the effect of hers: you can totally commit suicide, he says, “bing bang, wharf.” But he doesn’t see it as an existential threat. He wants to avoid the discomfort I didn’t cite above, but occurs between start and finish: “A wheel turns, and we don’t / take each other seriously. [...]” He wants to resolve conflict; he doesn’t want to talk about suicide.

You know that meme, “there are two wolves inside you”? Christopher and Mary Pratt are two such wolves for Alice Burdick. These poems make such a great opening to this latest batch of her poetry, because any dialogue between two opposite characters, to me, borders on the infinite in possibility. It is borderline mythological. I may also be a bit of a sucker for inspired verse, especially when the inspiration is a wife-husband duo of Canadian painters.

You may also be relieved to hear they divorced in 2005.

What’s the rest of I Am So Calm about? Where did the title come from? Is it unassuming or all-encompassing, neither or both?

There is a poem in here that she describes in the back of the book as being written after she and her younger brother met their older brother for the first time (“On the end of the first reunion”). It's touching. The poem captures a delicate bouquet of emotions: closure, hope, excitement, mundanity, unexpectedness, gratitude, and a whimsically familiar sense of solidarity. As a would-be enjoyer, I’ll leave it to you, reader, to acquire a copy if you’d like to check it out at your local library or through above/ground press.

I continue reading and am humbled by the lassosnap wit she corrals words with. In general, critics overcompare, but Alice Burdick is simply masterful.

There is a poem in here that riffs off of Lorine Niedecker’s “Thomas Jefferson” that’s very good, but I won’t get into here to make myself scarce on comparison, as well as to leave some joys unusurped for those inclined to seek it out on their own. It would make an excellent subject for a future review, too (I never said I would eschew speculation).

Finally, there is a poem about ham: “Spiced ham street party.” It’s five stanzas and concludes the collection but it follows two other poems I could readily call my favourites of the bunch (“Reaction time” and “The bed book”). Read the middle stanza with me:

    The best way to prepare for the apocalypse is to lasso
    the pantry. Imagine the taste of cold war meat. Imagine
    that. The hard ham of dollhouses, chipping teeth.
    Develop your project more, ham, to be considered
    for the grant. Form wings to fly closer to the heat
    lamps. Fly the fondue pot to the edge of the volcano.

Funny, uncanny, brilliant, bizarre. What’s not to love?

some author activity: Rogal, mclennan, Burdick, Jirgens, Browne, Berlatsky + Boyle,

Stan Rogal is interviewed for National Poetry Month at All Lit Up, and a poem by rob mclennan is posted as part of such; rob mclennan has a new poem up at Oatleaf; Alice Burdick is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Karl Jirgens is included in a feature dedicated to the life and work of Lyn Hejinian at Jacket2, as co-edited by forthcoming author Laynie Browne; Noah Berlatsky has a poem up at Oatleaf; and Frances Boyle has a new poem up at Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

Pearl Pirie reviews Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025)

Quebec poet, editor, writer, reviewer, editor, publisher etcetera (and above/ground press author) Pearl Pirie was good enough to provide the first review for Alice Burdick's I Am So Calm (2025) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Pirie writes:

I Am So Calm by Alice Burdick (above/ground press, 2025) is the latest from a poet who has been putting  out surreal books since at least 2002. Her most recent full collection is Ox Lost, Snow Deep (A Feed Dog book/Anvil Press, 2024).  

From what I’ve read this chapbook seems consistent in style, although I won’t offer a title by title comparison. I Am So Calm sets mid-field in surreal. The poems feel like disorienting lists of non-sequiturs or axiomatic koans. That said, “non-sequitur” presumes one thing should follow from the previous when that sort of linkages is a construct and her objects and awarenesses are discrete and independent, explicitly “a tapas of small moments.” (p. 17). Line progressions outright refuse cis-het military industrial late-capitalist hierarchical culture of How Sense is Conveyed.  

Grounding phrases break in and flit away. Marginalia is welcomed into the body. What does it matter for, as she concludes with admission of ephemerality of both grief and grace, “Our bodies take everything in, then dispose/ of the everything, gradually.”  

Because the sentences and semantics in each line are simple, short and small it seems to instruct the reader to move quickly, but the collective run of sentences confound a quick reading. How does anything fit?  One needs to squint or look at middle distance to not see so literally a pattern or progression. We get permission to not have authorial authority over all we see, whether we read of speak. See the foci  captures chosen in the last fifth of “The Bed Book”, (p. 14-15)  

Floorboards creak, heels of a bouncing child  
smash down from above. That  
was a successful quesadilla.  
I like the idea of beginning  
in the middle. Then please,  
don’t worry about the fog.  
Aureola? Or corona?  
What is the light  
that carries us all?  
What is the light that embalms?  

It is the barely differentiated everything, the chaotic flourishing that carries us, illuminates us, not the still profundity of interstitial reflection. Rather than staid and proper it’s vivid and irreverent urging to live, live, live, “bounce meaty bellies off each other, dance.” (p. 20)  

In “A Real Success”, Burdick writes, “To not speak is to succeed” and continues,  

"Let concerts happen with more air  
about them. The audience  
a required entity."  

It echoes the absurdist play In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (Grove  Weldenfeld, 1967) when the Player said, “the single assumption that makes our existence viable—  that somebody is watching…every gesture and pose vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds.” What matters is the sharing, the joining of focus, not the  containing, elevating and perfecting on plinths a historically inaccurate construction of calm order.  If the poetry were to have a theme song it might be “Chicks Dig It”, (“pain hurts, but only for a  minute. All you’re left is with the memories you made. Life is short. Best live it.” I hope I’m nailing that and not paraphrasing).  

It may be a different form but as with artistic expression, it wrestles with how to live well. Towards the last 10% of “If you do this, honour will result” we have an index of values of sorts:

"...We’re all  
just doing the best we can. Graft a tree onto another tree,  
a wedge to reanimate flowers. Shelter your loved ones’ bodies  
and listen when they tell you who they are, what makes them  
feel safe, what they need, what they notice. Instruct destruction  
to fold its retractable blade. Hold me, my own arms.  
Upend honour and drain the rigid globules."  

Destruction as a switchblade, grafting to another as resurrection to blooms, flush the parts that clot your flow. Yet said fresh and to be confoundingly slow so it can’t be quickly glossed over. There is something toward a profound lesson and closure at the end of poems and something of a flotsam, jetsam swirl around a theme that prevents it from being random and more towards bastard ghazal. It is a hyperactive sort of mind but one that insists on kindness and accepting in what is and asks what could be if we think without the usual blinders, partitions, rules and boundaries?

some author activity: Logan, Burdick, Brenner, Barwin + Strang,

Nate Logan has new work up at The Pi Review, as does Alice Burdick; Summer Brenner is interviewed by Jane Rosenberg LaForge for Rain Taxi; Gary Barwin has posted a new poem-video online; Nate Logan also has new work up at The Under Review; and Catriona Strang joins the faculty at Banff Writing Studios as part of their summer program.

new from above/ground press: I Am So Calm, by Alice Burdick

I Am So Calm
Alice Burdick
$5

You did it my way
after Christopher Pratt

Aesthetics are managed by direction -
put this here and it is much better.
A tunnel of disturbing balance.
Amused contribution -
a control that always asserts.
Truth and fiction work together.
Especially the fiction, because truth
is never believed. A lie
with a spark gets things done.
A memory flips over and here
we are, driving down the shore.
Hang a left into the tea cup.
A wheel turns, and we don’t
take each other seriously. Dirt
roads a buzz, nostalgic spare tire.
This work is about something,
maybe only the formality of rack
and ruin. I take away character,
the things that fall, stain, pigeon poop -
symmetry, that is what I make.
Rectangles continue, a road
curves and straightens, strangeness
descends into pristine correction.
This longing for order will clean
that which won’t be tidied. Is that
what you want? I want to understand,
to flatten, like these remains
of a seagull, a military symbol.
I’m not suicidal - bing bang, wharf.
Sleep, however, forever -
that is that, left, fine.
We’ll leave it there.
It doesn’t bother me.

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

Alice Burdick writes poetry, essays, and cookbooks in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. She is the author most recently of Ox Lost, Snow Deep (a feed dog book/Anvil Press), and of Deportment, 2018, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Book of Short Sentences, 2016, Mansfield Press, Holler, 2012, Mansfield Press, Flutter, 2008, Mansfield Press, and Simple Master, 2002, Pedlar Press. Her practice often includes collaboration, and recently her poetry has been used in Woodlight, a series of three films created by Hear Here and Erin Donovan. Her poems have appeared in Aubade: Poetry and Prose from Nova Scotian Writers (Boularderie Island Press, 2018), GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time (Frontenac House, 2018), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), as well as other anthologies. She is the author of many chapbooks, folios, and broadsides since 1991. Her essays have appeared in Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) and My Nova Scotia Home: Nova Scotia’s best writers riff on the place they call home (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc., 2019). She has authored three cookbooks for local publisher Formac Publishing. From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair, and has been a judge for various awards, including the bpNichol Chapbook Award.  She is also a freelance editor, manuscript assessor, and workshop leader.

This is Alice Burdick’s third above/ground press chapbook after A Holiday for Molecules (2019) and PLEASURE BRISTLES (with Gary Barwin, 2018).

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: Witek, Armantrout, Burdick, Dardis + Campos,

forthcoming author Terri Witek has a new poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series; Rae Armantrout has five new poems up at The Brooklyn Rail; Alice Burdick has two new poems and a statement in the Spotlight series; forthcoming author Colin Dardis also has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series; and Isabel Sobral Campos has new work up at Black Sun Lit.

report: Fisher Small and Fine Press Fair 2022

So: this past Saturday above/ground press was in Toronto as part of the Fisher Small and Fine Press Fair, an event that has returned after a three-year (covid) hiatus! Plenty of (masked, mostly) fun was had by all, and I was even able to introduce the chapbook rack that Christine found a while back on one of her buy-nothing groups (honestly, it worked far more effectively than I might have considered, so expect to see it returning for future fairs). It was good to get the whole top row-plus of the festschrifts I've been putting together over the past year, able to actually sell copies of some of them, which is nice (oh, so that's what these are).

This was actually the fourth curated fair in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto (and a limited curation, given the physical limitations of the space), as librarian John Shoesmith originally founded the event around an exhibit of small press items from their collection that above/ground press happened to have items as part of (which is how I got invited). I was there for the first event (which Ryan Pratt was good enough to recap over at his blog), and even the second! Apparently the hopes is to curate a new version of the event every two years, so hopefully they can get back on that particular schedule for future events.

Ken Norris

Bruce Whiteman and Ken Norris

Christopher Patton (right) with his new above/ground press chapbook

Kirby, who radiates joy

And I was able to see so many folk I hadn't seen in moons! Why does Ken Norris (who lives in Toronto these days) look no different now than he did twenty years ago, when I last saw him? I mean, I've done numerous chapbooks of his lately (his tenth above/ground press title landed this past July), so it isn't like we haven't been in touch, but odd to think how long it's been since anything in-person. It was also good to see folk such as Aaron Tucker (with a new knife fork book title), Ralph Kolewe (who has a forthcoming Talonbook, the manuscript of which expands upon his above/ground press title), Christopher Patton (who I met for the first time, coming by to collect his copies of his new above/ground press title), Drew McEwen (should we do another chapbook? we should probably do another chapbook), Lindsay Zier-Vogel (honestly, I simply presumed we'd met years earlier at something, so it was good to finally correct that), Cary Fagan (who mentioned I'd published his stepson in an issue of Touch the Donkey, a connection I wasn't aware of), Bruce Whiteman, etcetera. So many people!

Should I mention I spent the afternoon pretending not to eat an egg and bacon English muffin? Probably not, given it was in a library, after all. Fortunately, I am very effective in my pretending. Other exhibitors included Aliquando Press, Alan Stein/Church Street Press, Art Metropole, Book*hug, Coach House Books, George A. Walker, Greyweather’s Press, JackPine Press, k|f|b, Liz Menard, Massey College Press, Natalie Draz, Nietzsche’s Brolly, Porcupine's Quill/DA, Shanty Bay Press and Wesley Bates.

Given the hour it took to drive in from Andy Weaver's house out in Burlington on Saturday morning, I secured the "final table" in the space, set between JackPine (doing some neat things I hadn't seen physical copies of for some time) and Massey College Press (college printer Kit MacNeil is clearly doing some interesting things worth paying attention to), who were doing some very cool things, including allowing the public to letterpress print upon wee postcards! I collected a small handful of publications, although not terribly much (Kirby exclaimed, when I went to check out the k|f|b table: Why are you looking? You have everything!), and even managed issue five of JUST LIKE CREAM BUT WORST that Daniel F. Bradley handed over when he wandered by (we traded publications, naturally), which includes a new interview he conducted with Alice Burdick (email him at fdriveshesaid (at) gmail.com if you might be interested in attempting a copy).

Tim Inkster explaining something to Jay MillAr, as the Right Honourable Marshall Hryciuk
prepares his own table in silence

And: sales were good enough, audience was good enough, most folk were masked, so that was all good.

Stephen Cain and Andy Weaver

And after: I even got to hang out with Andy Weaver and Stephen Cain. And the drive home? Hitting the Big Apple, of course, to collect nonsense as wee gifts for the children. I think I got them pens with different coloured inks, and some Pez. Who doesn't love the Big Apple? Scream until your mother stops the car, I say. Oh, and there's another small press fair I'm returning to Toronto for on the 24th, curated by Kate Siklosi as part of TIFA; and of course, the ottawa small press book fair in November. Might we see you at either of those?

some author activity: Perry, Pirie, Ross, La Rocque, mclennan, Burdick, Dennis + Hogg,

Paul Perry has a new essay in the "On Writing" series at the ottawa poetry newsletter; Pearl Pirie writes on her writing space for The New Quarterly; Jenya Stashkov asked Stuart Ross to gather poems by fifteen Canadian poets to translate those poems into Russian, and to create a drawing inspired by them, which are now online, including translated poems by Lance La Rocque, rob mclennan, Alice Burdick, Michael Dennis, Robert Hogg and Ross himself; Robert Hogg has two further poems posted as part of the "Robert Kroetsch 2020" up at The Typescript; and Lance La Rocque is being interviewed over at poetry mini interviews.

some author activity: Aigen, Tierney, Carpenter, mclennan + Burdick,

Razielle Aigen has new work up at IceFloe Press; forthcoming author Orchid Tierney has new work in Alligatorzine; J.R. Carpenter has a new essay in The Digital Review; Claire Kelly reads from rob mclennan's chapbook snow day as part of her #StuckAtHomeBookClub (copies are still available, by the by); and Alice Burdick is currently being interviewed over at poetry mini interviews.

some author activity: Atkins, Burdick, Boyle + Ross,

Tim Atkins has some new work up at The Abandoned Playground; Alice Burdick has some new poems up at The Brooklyn Rail; Frances Boyle has a new poem up at Train : a poetry journal; and Stuart Ross has posted an essay on death on his blog.

some author activity: Aigen, Burdick, Clayton, Barwin + Cooley,

Razielle Aigen is interviewed over at Train : a poetry journal; Alice Burdick has a new poem up at The Miramichi Reader; Conyer Clayton has a poem reprinted up at Concrete&River, and has new work up at Long Con magazine; Gary Barwin has an essay on the CBC website on living through the pandemic; and there are new poems online by Dennis Cooley!

Alice Burdick and Gary Barwin's above/ground press collaboration translated into French!

Alice Burdick and Gary Barwin's 2018 above/ground press collaboration, PLEASURE BRISTLES, has been translated into French by Canadian translator Simon Brown, and has been published in France! You can order a copy directly from the publisher, Editions Vanloo, and of course, the original English edition is still very much available.

some author activity: Tracy, Kronovet, Banu, Beaulieu + Notley,

Dale Tracy has an essay in the "Talking Poetics" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; Jennifer Kronovet has a new poem in The New York Times; Simina Banu has new work and a statement up in the Spotlight series; Derek Beaulieu has a new visual poem up at Train : a poetry journal; and Alice Notley has a new poem in the "Tuesday poem" series via the dusie blog.

Fucking Poetry : guest edited by rob mclennan,

The British e-newsletter Fucking Poetry solicited me as a guest-editor recently, and I thought it would be interesting to include, as my issue, poems from five recent above/ground press titles: Natalie Lyalin's Short Cloud (2019), Alice Burdick's A Holiday for Molecules (2019), Jane Virginia Rohrer's Fake Floating (2019), Stuart Ross' 10 TINY POEMS (2019) and John Newlove's THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2019). You can find a web version of the issue here, with the five poems, as well as an excerpt of my needlessly-long introduction, which I include in full, below (why would you include that? ugh):

Given my chapbook press, above/ground press, recently celebrated twenty-six years, I thought it would be interesting to select five poems from titles that have appeared with the press throughout this year. This was tricky, given I’ve already produced some three dozen titles or more since January. For the length and breadth of the press, it has run entirely around my enthusiasms as a reader, with new titles appearing as often as my energies and cash-flow might allow. I produce works that excite me, so I can then distribute them to others, in the hopes that they, too, will become excited.

2018, the press’ twenty-fifth year, saw the publication of sixty-seven chapbooks, as well as four issues of the quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], an issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, and the debut issue of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] (a new issue of which appears every two months), as well as further bits of ephemera. With the press some three dozen titles away from an accumulated one thousand titles, I would offer that my enthusiasms are more than most, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to produce numerous first chapbooks by now well-known writers, as well as new publications by an array of established poets, with half the titles any given year by Canadian authors, and the remaining by American authors (with the occasional further-flung poet appearing as well).

In 2019, alone, I’ve felt incredibly fortunate to be able to produce chapbooks by poets such as Natalie Lyalin, Zane Koss, Michael Dennis, Jane Virginia Rohrer, Pearl Pirie, Stuart Ross, Marilyn Irwin, Conyer Clayton, Michael Sikkema, Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Gary Barwin, Kate Siklosi, Mairéad Byrne, Kimberly Campanello, Stephen Cain, Kyle Kinaschuk, Paul Perry, Gregory Betts, Gil McElroy, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Stephanie Gray, Billy Mavreas, Alice Burdick, Heather Sweeney, Franco Cortese, Dale Smith, Virginia Konchan and Laura Farina, with forthcoming titles soon by John Newlove, Jessica Smith, Ben Robinson, N.W. Lea, Lydia Unsworth, Allyson Paty, Guy Birchard, Simina Banu, Hawad (trans. Jake Syersak), Susanne Dyckman, Dennis Cooley, Ben Meyerson, Isabel Sobral Campos, Mary Kasimor, Amanda Earl and Andrew K Peterson.

There is an incredible amount of great writing that exists out there in the world. Is it any wonder I’m enthused?

some author activity: mclennan, Schmaltz, Burdick, Ross, Ball + Smith,

rob mclennan has a new essay in the "(Not) My Writing Desk" series over at Queen Mob's Teahouse, and a new poem up at his blog, for Vancouver poet Rita Wong; Eric Schmaltz is interviewed over at Train : a poetry journal; Alice Burdick is interviewed over at Poetry in Voice (and now available for writing workshops in schools across Nova Scotia); Stuart Ross writes a moving post on Nelson Ball's last day, and days; and Jessica Smith has won the 2019 Betty Jane Abrahams Memorial Prize.

some author activity: Burdick, hanna, Campanello, Atkins + Radmore,

Alice Burdick has a new poem up as part of National Poetry Month on the Chaudiere Blog, as does natalie hanna; Kimberly Campanello has an essay in the my (small press) writing day series; Tim Atkins has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; and Claudia Coutu Radmore has a poem in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets.

new from above/ground press: A Holiday for Molecules, by Alice Burdick

A Holiday for Molecules
Alice Burdick
$5

Apple blossom time

Beneath the apple blossoms, people

stand and enjoy falling light and colour.

Also there’s a smell, a scent of future nasal

light tunnels, all open in beams of sound.

It’s a delusion or illusion of opal nausea.

We’ll put it on the bill

of the pecking sandpiper,  a groupie

in the flight patterns of drifting dunes.

Tipping the produce in big fields -

ecstatic ents with beautiful tresses.

I own this road - I won it in a contest.

You don’t get it. Nothing is familiar,

but I get it. I get it right in the ass of light

fixtures. Future perfect lack of conversation.

The one thing I ask for is words.

I just want those fucking words.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2019
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover image by the author

Alice Burdick is the author of four full-length poetry collections, Simple Master, Flutter, Holler, and Book of Short Sentences. Deportment, a book of selected poems, came out in November 2018 from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Her work has also appeared in many chapbooks, broadsides, magazines, journals, and anthologies. She has been a judge for various awards, including the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize. She also visits high school English classes as a “Poet In Your Class” through Poetry in Voice/les Voix de la Poésie. She co-owns an independent bookstore in Lunenburg called Lexicon Books.

This is Burdick’s second above/ground press title, after the collaborative PLEASURE BRISTLES (with Gary Barwin, 2018). A French translation of PLEASURE BRISTLES, by Canadian translator Simon Brown, is scheduled to appear later this year with Les Éditions Vanloo, France.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com