some author activity: Tynes, Farina, Cone, Brockwell, Unsworth, Weaver, Christie, Shafer, Houbolt + Armantrout,

Jen Tynes, Laura Farina, Jon Cone, Stephen Brockwell (for Jason Christie), Lydia Unsworth and forthcoming author Emily Shafer all have poems on the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month; Brockwell also has new work up at The Pi Review, as does Andy Weaver; Kyla Houbolt has work in eunoia review; and Rae Armantrout has a poem up at The New Yorker.

some author activity: Sandhu, Sawyer, Vitkauskas, Weaver, Marlatt, Pirie, Logan + Shirley,

Mandy Sandhu has some poems up at talking about strawberries all of the time, as do Larry Sawyer and Lina Ramona Vitkauskas; Andy Weaver has a new poem up as part of National Poetry Month on the Chaudiere Books blog, as does forthcoming author Daphne Marlatt, and even Pearl Pirie; Nate Logan has new work up at Some Words; and Vik Shirley has new work up at And Other Poems.

VERSeFest 2025 : Andy Weaver, Phil Hall + Eileen Myles

above/ground press authors Andy Weaver, Phil Hall and Eileen Myles read in Ottawa this week as part of VERSeFest 2025! Tickets are still available! And Myles even reads at Carleton on Friday at noon at a free event! Might we see you there?

some author activity: Robinson, Banks, Ross, Hall, mclennan, Weaver + Boyle,

Ben Robinson has some new poems up at the temz review; Chris Banks posts an essay over at The Woodlot, on how he still believes in National Poetry Month; Stuart Ross has a bunch of new poems up at Mercurius; Phil Hall is interviewed by rob mclennan for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, as is Andy Weaver; and Frances Boyle has a new poem up at Concision.

Pearl Pirie reviews Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (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 Andy Weaver's Robert Duncan at Disney World (2025) at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Pirie writes:

Andy Weaver teaches poetry and creative writing at York University and has published three books of poetry, most recently this (Chaudiere, 2015). I feel I’ve read Andy Weaver before, or maybe I only saw him perform. Or I’ve read so many reviews with excerpts by rob mclennan that I am familiar his work that way. From what I’ve seen his form of poetry makes use of the whole page, not as in scattered individual words but as metrical spacing of phrases.

I recently reread ligament/ ligature by Andy Weaver (Model Press, 2022). ligament/ligature, his previous and longer chapbook, used space and line breaks enact the physical space and the leaves in the mental tree turning, and controls pacing.

That chapbook is a poetry not much more of quotidian observations but meditating on our individual responsibility to create love and tenderness and connection. They don’t feel didactic so much as being let into a secret room of the head without social filters, some showmanship caper. The reader is given a chair as an equal, rather than a back seat in the lecture hall.

The Robert Duncan at Disney World has something of the same convention of adding space to the poem. The poems take up the amount of page it needs rather than be tidily obedient to the left margin. They are not built up as a prose argument of a stone house but more of a metal framed glass structure. The air in the poems signal the reader to slow down but the ideas being digested are heavier but on a comparable tack.

The poems are starting with a thesis of what-if to explore if Robert Duncan were dropped into the commercial epicentre of branding, what would he think and by extension, what might we if we paused long enough.

The precise word choices makes it akin to a haiku series. That aesthetic may be an influence given his references to other Japanese practices throughout the work. In section 4 of 10 (p.4) the imagist of “childhood snow/forts to escape/into blazing sunlight” with the volta that surprises, not to escape into snow forts, but what is built is escaped by returning to sunlight.

He floats interesting concepts, such as in the same section above, abundance as the blind spot with the continuity effect perhaps bridging gaps between negative content.

In a way, I’d like poetry to be transmitted like a Ted Lasso script hyperlinked to all embedded references so I could chase every tangent, to lazily help me unpack a phrase such as “a fordist/ assemblage of hope” but I guess I know what he means of the shallowness of modernist capitalism doing pre-fab assembly line work for identity, like Ford’s practice aimed at Manifest Destiny of patriotism. We are in a system we can’t control.

His criticism of the distraction/entertainment era, the rides (literal and figurative) that make for a collective screaming, “terror’s new grace note” has not so much cynicism as a call to do better as individuals and as a society, to dig deeper. He does so in lovely language and with a love for language “the ichor oozing from heel blisters/an anchor”. Who knew there was a word for that translucent stuff in blisters except water?

To chime it off anchor is rather sublime. Our pain is what can ground us to meaningfulness, to a sense of significance. If it is not a threat, or trauma, if it floats without repercussions, we can safely turn off our critical faculty. When amusement dominates, that evasion becomes a Trojan Horse, he seems to say earlier but by section 8 makes more explicit.

Overall the chapbook is thoughtful and considered and makes space for us to interrogate what a considered life of our own would look like, rather than let ourselves be railroaded by urgency of marketing and frenetic clickbait of news and the Muchness of Paying Attention to Everyone.

The poetry demonstrates a slowing down, a coming around to make the world we would choose to live in.

new from above/ground press: Robert Duncan at Disney World, by Andy Weaver

Robert Duncan at Disney World
Andy Weaver
$5

On       the third      night
I dreamt      of you, even
though       it was the wrong
        occasion,      wrong
coast,          wrong           specifics,
wrong           colour cape
                                     for this
stark meadow
                   larked into
hieroglyphic occlusion.
                  But location        is a life
long
         mistake,        a torchy        ballad
sang         too slow,         a swan
song sawn      into          the day’s fabric

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

Andy Weaver’s fourth book of poetry, The Loom (University of Calgary), was published in 2024. He was a finalist for the 2024 Vallum Chapbook Award, and his chapbook So/I (above/ground) was longlisted for the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. He teaches English and Creative Writing at York University.

This is Andy Weaver’s fifth above/ground press chapbook after Three Ghazals to the constellation Corvus (The Crow) (2001), Other Work for your Hands (2004), Concatenations (2014) and So/I (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

some author activity: Reid, Mohammadi, Weaver + Kemp,

Monty Reid has new work up at The Pi Review; Khashayar Mohammadi is interviewed over at The Mahalat Review; Andy Weaver has a small essay up at The Woodlot; and Harold Rhenisch and forthcoming author Penn Kemp have a collaborative poem and new interviews online at Canadian Literature.

new from above/ground press: A Mean, Mean Thirst, by Dani Spinosa

A Mean, Mean Thirst
poems for my friends and their books
Dani Spinosa
$5

like--
  most of us
    never even
      o-
         penned it
      quietude letting us
    rest finally
   sleep as if being awake was
    trivial as the closed captions reading
     unalive in some
      video
    we’ve both seen
  x times on
youtube or else me explaining
   zaddy
     after one or several
        beers && ok
     ciders for stephen && vodka sodas for
   dani && kate &&
      each of us wandering wondering what it’s been
         for, these
      gifts we carry
         here again and again
            in case in
                           jest in
                                    kin

(from "sequence dress," for andy weaver)

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

digital illustrations by the author

Dani Spinosa is a poet of digital and print media. She is sometimes a professor, sometimes a web developer, and all the time a co-founding editor of the feminist micropress Gap Riot. She has published several chapbooks of poetry, several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry, one long scholarly book, and one pink poetry book. She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario.

This is Spinosa’s third chapbook with above/ground press, after Glosas for Tired Eyes Volume 2 (2018) and Civilization (2020).

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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Unsworth, Weaver, Bell, Morton, Bowering, Hogg + mclennan,

Lydia Unsworth has a poem up as part of the Tuesday poem series; Andy Weaver is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Wade Bell, Colin Morton, George Bowering and others all have new pieces as part of the "Remembering Bob Hogg" feature at The Typescript; and rob mclennan answers one question for Hollay Ghadery at River Street Writing.

2022 NELSON BALL PRIZE LONG LIST : Hajnoczky, Harder, McKinnon + Weaver!

It is exciting to see four above/ground press titles (and three further above/ground press authors) on this year's longlist for the Nelson Ball Prize! Congratulations to all! Oh, and be aware that all four above/ground press titles on this list are still totally in print, yes? As the press release offers:

We're pleased to announce the Long List for the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize, as selected by our dedicated judges, Beverley Daurio and James McDonald. The judges read about 100 submissions of books, chapbooks, and ephemera, looking for the best in "poetry of observation" by a Canadian poet.

Stay tuned for the Short List! The winner will receive $1,000, thanks to our generous donors.

Here is the Long List of 10 titles, in alphabetical order by the poets' names:

Lines – Cameron Anstee (St. Andrew Books)

Undoing Hours – Selina Boan (Nightwood Editions)

wind – Guy Ewing (Puddles of Sky Press)

a grain of sand – Helen Hajnoczky (above/ground press)

Zero Dawn – Shelly Harder (above/ground press)

A Number of Stunning Attacks – Jessi MacEachern (Invisible Publishing)

Gone South – Barry McKinnon (above/ground press)

Rain's Small Gestures – Pearl Pirie (Apt. 9 Press)

Ghosthawk – Matt Rader (Nightwood Editions)

So/I – Andy Weaver (above/ground press)

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?

new from above/ground press: So/I, by Andy Weaver

So/I
Andy Weaver
$5

So,
shipwrecked alone
by language
on an unknown
shore, gasping
for breath,
bereft, cleaved,
and cleft,
the charts
and logbooks
floating away
in the sea foam,
I am left merely
words
—but what
is so “mere”
when a word
is a tireless
messenger
of the cultural
archive
of the possible,
eternally
dragging
its weight,
changing nothing
less
than content
and meaning,
the way
a single page
might recall
with a dazzling
un-clarity
the two minutes
one morning
centuries ago

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Andy Weaver has been called, by his favourite small press publisher, the most glorious of bastards. Both parties consider this a compliment.

This is Weaver’s fourth above/ground press chapbook after Three Ghazals to the constellation Corvus (The Crow) (2001), Other Work for your Hands (2004) and Concatenations (2014).

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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Coulton, Smallfield, Downs, Stuart, O'Reilly, Weaver + Solomon,

Valerie Coulton is interviewed over at talking about strawberries all of the time, as is Edward Smallfield, Buck Downs, and Cecilia Stuart; Nathanael O'Reilly has a new poem up at Crow of Minerva; and National Poetry Month has begun over at the Chaudiere Books blog, with new poems by, among others, Andy Weaver and Misha Solomon!

some author activity: hanna, Thomas, Trivedi, Maguire, Barton, Aigen, Spinosa + Weaver,

natalie hanna has a new poem on the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month, as do Hugh Thomas, Amish Trivedi and Shannon Maguire; John Barton is interviewed for the Chaudiere Books blog in the "Six Questions" series; Razielle Aigen is interviewed at Train : a poetry journal; and Dani Spinosa writes on Andy Weaver for Open Book.

some author activity: beaulieu, mclennan, Weaver + Earl,

derek beaulieu has new work and a short statement up at The Found Poetry Review, he also reflects in a short piece on his two years as Calgary's Poet Laureate; rob mclennan has a new poem up on the Chaudiere Books blog to close off National Poetry Month, as does Andy Weaver; and rob mclennan's profile of Amanda Earl's NationalPoetryMonth.ca is now online at Open Book: Ontario.

2016 Battle of the Bards: Best, Maguire, Pinder and Weaver

above/ground press authors Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Pinder and Andy Weaver participate in the 2016 Battle of the Bards alongside Lara Bozabalian, Chris Chambers, Warren Clements, Michael Fraser, Marty Gervais, Susan Glickman, Maureen Hynes, James Lindsay, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Ruth Roach Pierson, Vanessa Shields, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes, Blair Trewartha, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Katerina Vaughan Fretwell and Bänoo Zan!

Poetry NOW: 8th annual Battle of the Bards

Wednesday, March 30, 2016 - 7:30 PM
Special Event: IFOA Weekly
Brigantine Room
235 Queens Quay West
Toronto M5J 2G8
Cost: $10/FREE supporters, students & youth 25 and under
http://ifoa.org/events/poetry-now-8th-annual-battle-of-the-bards

1 stage. 20 poets. 1 winner.

Our popular poetry competition returns in 2016 to feature readings by 20 of Canada’s upcoming and established poets. Judges Geoffrey E. Taylor (IFOA’s Director), Jen Tindall (IFOA’s Artistic Associate) and Andy McGuire (winner of 2015 IFOA Poetry Games) will select one winner, who will receive an automatic invitation to read at the 37th edition of the International Festival of Authors AND an ad for their book in NOW Magazine!

The event will be hosted by NOW’s Susan G. Cole.

Poetry NOW is presented in partnership with NOW Magazine.

some author activity: Hall, Smith, Hajnoczky, Weaver + Schmaltz,

Phil Hall has a new poem up at the Flat Singles Press blog; Pete Smith has a new poem up at "A Festschrift for Tony Frazer"; Helen Hajnoczky is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Andy Weaver guest-posts over at generic pronoun with the essay "Robert Duncan: Reading as Divine Insurrection"; and Eric Schmaltz has a new essay in the "On Writing" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter.

some author activity: Landman, Pearl, mclennan, Weaver, Robertson + Quartermain,

Seth Landman has a new poem up at Incessant Pipe; Pearl Pirie has a 'featured poem' up at the Matrix magazine site; rob mclennan has a new short story up at Hippo Reads; Andy Weaver is interviewed by rob mclennan over at Queen Mob's Teahouse; Lisa Robertson writes on Ian Hamilton Finlay; and Meredith Quartermain is also interviewed over at Queen Mob's Teahouse.

The Factory Reading Series: A Night of Too Many Poets, May 31, 2015

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series presents: A Night of Too Many Poets

featuring readings by:

Eric Schmaltz (Toronto)
Julia Polyck-O'Neill (St Catharines)
Dale Tracy (Kingston)
Andy Weaver (Toronto)
Carl Watts (Kingston)
ryan fitzpatrick (Vancouver)
Deanna Fong (Vancouver)
Cameron Anstee (Ottawa)
Jessi MacEachern (Montreal)
Jason Camlot (Montreal)
+ philip miletic (Waterloo)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Sunday, May 31, 2015;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

Eric Schmaltz is an artist who works with text & sound.

Julia Polyck-O'Neill is a curator, visual artist, writer, and co-curator of the Borderblur Reading Series in St Catharines, ON. She is a currently doctoral student in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program, and holds an MA in Studies in Comparative Literatures and Arts from Brock University as well a BFA in Visual Art and English Concentration from the University of Ottawa. Her research examines historic and contemporary conceptualisms in Vancouver visual arts and literature.

Dale Tracy has her doctorate from Queen’s University, where she studied contemporary poetry. Currently teaching contemporary literature at the Royal Military College of Canada, she is engaged in Kingston’s arts community, reading at poetry events and arts festivals and collaborating in community theatre productions.

Andy Weaver's third book of poetry, titled this, will be published by Chaudiere Books this Fall. His two previous books, Were the Bees and gangson, were nominated for Alberta Book Awards. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at York University.

Carl Watts is a PhD candidate at Queen's University, where he is writing his dissertation on national and ethnic identities in twentieth-century Canadian literature. His poetry has most recently appeared in The Dalhousie Review and The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2014. He is looking forward to riding the Megabus all the way to New York City next month, when he will join the Canadian Poetry contingent at the Bryant Park Word for Word festival.

ryan fitzpatrick is a poet and critic living in Vancouver. He is the author of two books of poetry: Fortified Castles (Talonbooks, 2014) and Fake Math (Snare, 2007). With Jonathan Ball, he is co-editor of Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry (Insomniac, 2014). With Deanna Fong and Janey Dodd, he works on the second iteration of the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca), originally spearheaded by Susan Rudy. He is a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University where he works on contemporary poetics and the social production of space.

Deanna Fong is the author of Butcher's Block (Pistol, 2008). She is also PhD student at Simon Fraser University, where she sifts through the recorded conversations of other poets from 1959 to 1989, so ask her if you want some dirt on your favourite authors.

Cameron Anstee lives and writes in Ottawa ON where he runs Apt. 9 Press and is pursuing a PhD studying Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa. He is the editor of The Collected Poems of William Hawkins (Chaudiere Books, 2015).

Jessi MacEachern is a PhD student at the Unversite de Montreal, where she studies the feminist poetics of modernist and contemporary writers. She received her MA from Concordia University in Creative Writing. Her poetry and criticism has previously been published in CV2, Lemonhound and Matrix.

Jason Camlot is the author of four collections of poetry: The Animal Library, Attention All Typewriters, The Debaucher, and most recently, What The World Said. His critical works include Language Acts (co-edited with Todd Swift) and Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic: Sincere Mannerisms. His poems and critical essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies including New American Writing, Postmodern Culture and English Literary History. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford. Camlot is poetry editor of the Punchy Writers Series (DC Books), and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University.

philip miletic is a writer, dabbling in a little bit of vispo, and is currently in his second year of his English PhD at the University of Waterloo. His work includes the pamphlet silver, the chapbook world 1-1 co-written with Craig Dodman, a short story chapbook and the birds sing, and a forthcoming chapbook from wordsonpages called mother2earth. He lives in Kitchener, ON.