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

new from above/ground press: My Little Sister, by Elena Zhang

My Little Sister
Elena Zhang
$6

Lemons

I lost my little sister near 
a lemon tree. The morning clouds 
shuddered 
and made a life. 
I patted my pockets for hours 
before giving up. 
The lemons 
were as big as throats. 
It’s easier to say sister than god. 
It’s easier to desire than pray.

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

Cover image: Aoife McLennan

Elena Zhang is a Chinese American writer and mother living in Chicago. She is the author of the micro-chapbook The Moon, My Heart (tiny wren lit, 2025), and her work can be found in HAD, Wigleaf, and X-R-A-Y, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and was selected for Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, and 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

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: Origin stories, by rob mclennan

Origin stories
rob mclennan
$6

005 : “Origin Story”


My mother said very little. I came gift-wrapped, delivered. An empty chamber. By the waters of Babylon. They had to collect me. Entangled, form after form. From a stranger’s womb. I was nameless, swaddled. Between names. Frightened shoulders, a wish. They say, to descend from steps, from anything. To descend from the moon. I could not explain it. For eternity, my mentions were silence, what all they could offer. A wandering hand. Some tales remain, unfinished. A plot-line. I emerged from the ash, I came out of the ground. I was formless, formed. I was there, suddenly. After having not been.

Note: In January 2025, Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany begun a weekly substack, “Sunday Poem + Prompt,” in which he began to offer exactly that. I took it upon myself to respond to his weekly prompts as best as I could, as they came.

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

cover artwork: Aoife Lydia Judith McLennan, 
“family portrait,” February 2025

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 sixty-ninth above/ground press chapbook, following recent titles including 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

some author activity: Robinson, Solomon, mclennan, Smith, Boyle + Adams,

Ben Robinson has a poem up at NewPoetry; Misha Solomon has a poem in carte blanche; rob mclennan has new poems up at jagged edge; Mahaila Smith has a new poem up at penumbric; Frances Boyle has a poem in Great Lakes Review; and Carrie Olivia Adams has new work in Tupelo Quarterly, not once but twice.

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.

new from above/ground press: from What If I Sang “Flower of Scotland”?, by Catriona Strang

from What If I Sang “Flower of Scotland”?
Catriona Strang
$5

Crash-tackle

Descendant of the last man
in the scrum, I would not
act alone along
the lines of this
well-rucked blood bin where
the Wolf finds his interests
under the pressure of ritualized
aggression: tenants and taxes
rocked, stung, yet still
at odds over the porridge oats
barrelling their way over
the line of touch. What if
the enclosing fences sang, almost as
venerable as waves
of complaint pouring
out of trains, an ungrounding
pulse-over on a mud heap
in heavy rain, this knock-on that
begins to permeate the working
class, sealed by the extraordinary
wealth accrued in the maul – tweed,
hosiery, knitwear, linen – passionate
and intense in the face of
a forward rush of toil
and fatigue, hunger and
peril: “Feet, Scotland,
Feet!”

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

cover artwork: Aoife McLennan

Catriona Strang is a first-generation settler of primarily Scottish heritage who lives on stolen xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands. Her most recent publication is Unfuckable Lardass (Talonbooks, 2022). She is the author of five other books of poetry, several written in collaboration with the late Nancy Shaw, whose selected works, The Gorge, she edited (Talonbooks, 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

some author activity: Radmore, Eleftherion, Niespodziany, Ross, mclennan + Armantrout,

Claudia Coutu Radmore has two new poems up at The Pi Review; Melissa Eleftherion has a new poem up at The Citron Review, and a further poem up at Verse Daily; Benjamin Niespodziany has begun a substack to post weekly poems and prompts every Sunday ; Stuart Ross has posted his annual poem for New Year's; a further section of rob mclennan's work-in-progress "the green notebook" is online at Community Mausoleum, and he has posted a couple of videos reading short stories via substack; and Rae Armantrout has two new poems and commentary up at Plume.

above/ground press: 2023 (THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY) subscriptions now available!

THIRTY YEARS! The race to the half-century continues! And with more than TWELVE HUNDRED TITLES produced to date, there’s been a ton of above/ground press activity over the past year, including some THIRTY-FOUR CHAPBOOKS (so far) produced in 2022 alone (including poetry chapbooks by Geoffrey Nilson, Genevieve Kaplan, Melissa Spohr Weiss, Lori Anderson Moseman, Christopher Patton, Leigh Chadwick, Ken Norris, Grant Wilkins (with a further forthcoming!), N.W. Lea, Jed Munson, David Miller, Matthew Gwathmey, Michael Boughn, Laura Kelsey, Russell Carisse, Saba Pakdel, Jérôme Melançon, Marita Dachsel (with a further forthcoming!), Anne Tardos, Vivan Lewin, MLA Chernoff, Wade Bell, Joanna Arnott, Rob Manery, Lillian Nećakov, Amanda Earl, Karl Jirgens, df parizeau, Wanda Praamsma, Lydia Unsworth, Michael Schuffler, rob mclennan, Natalie Simpson and Nate Logan, all of which are still in print), as well as a chapbook anthology guest edited by Stephen Collis, Calling to the Sun: Poems for Isabella Wang, issues of the poetry journals Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] (with recent issues guest-edited by David Dowker, Kyle Flemmer and Castle Guestskull, edited by Micah Ballard and Garrett Caples, with an issue forthcoming guest-edited by Sara Lefsyk) and a virtual issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club (there hasn’t been as many print issues of this since pandemic began, but expect a new issue in early 2023, as the world begins to properly open up again). Usually I’m producing more individual chapbooks throughout the year, but 2022 also saw the introduction of the Report from the Society series, produced as individual festschrifts (as this period could use some more positive) celebrating the work of Stephen Brockwell, Amanda Earl, Stuart Ross, Kate Siklosi (two volumes!), Elizabeth Robinson, Monty Reid, Cameron Anstee, Phil Hall, Gregory Betts and Sarah Mangold. And there are plenty more coming! Part of the fun is that none of the subjects have a clue the projects are even happening until finished copies land on their doorstep.

The Factory Reading Series is gearing up for some events again soon (I have yet to get on that), but have you seen the virtual reading series over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (with new monthly online content, by the way; the pandemic-era extension of above/ground press). And at least we’ve the ottawa small press fair opening up again, with our next fair scheduled for Saturday, November 12.

Oh, and did you see that above/ground press announced a new prose chapbook series during the pandemic? With titles by Amanda Earl, Jane Eaton Hamilton, rob mclennan, Keith Waldrop, Kristjana Gunnars, Al Kratz, Anik See, Adam Thomlison, M.A.C. Farrant, Summer Brenner, Ken Sparling, Gary Barwin, Sarah Rosenthal, Karl Jirgens, Wade Bell and David Miller; what else might come?

Forthcoming items through the press also include individual chapbooks by Julia Drescher, Robert van Vliet, Brad Vogler, Derek Beaulieu, Samuel Ace, Nathanael O'Reilly, George Bowering, Joseph Donato, Chris Johnson, Ben Jahn, Leesa Dean, Lindsey Webb, Jason Heroux, Nick Chhoeun, Grant Wilkins, Isabel Sobral Campos, Mark Scroggins, Laura Walker, Adrienne Adams, Jordan Davis, Jason Christie, Andrew Gorin, Marita Dachsel, Stuart Ross, Angela Caporaso and Isabella Wang, as well as a whole slew of publications that haven't even been decided on yet (probably a new one by myself as well, which shouldn’t shock anyone).

Anniversaries are the best. Remember that stack of essays by above/ground press authors to help celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary, or the anthology to help celebrate the twentieth? There’s already work underway on the third anthology, celebrating the third decade of the press, scheduled for next year with Invisible Publishing! (and I still have a couple of copies of the first anthology available, if anyone is interested)

2023 annual subscriptions (and resubscriptions) are now available: $75 (CAN; American subscribers, $75 US; $100 international) for everything above/ground press makes from the moment you subscribe through to the end of 2023, including chapbooks, broadsheets, The Peter F. Yacht Club and G U E S T and quarterly poetry journal Touch the Donkey (have you been keeping track of the dozens of interviews posted to the Touch the Donkey site?). Honestly: if I’m making sixty or seventy titles per calendar year, wouldn’t you call that a good deal? I mean, it all does seem ridiculous.

Anyone who subscribes on or by November 1st will also receive the last above/ground press package (or two or three) of 2022, including those exciting new titles by all of those folk listed above, plus whatever else the press happens to produce before the turn of the new year, as well as Touch the Donkey #35 (scheduled to release on October 15), featuring new work by Garrett Caples, Sheila Murphy, Stuart Ross and Brenda Coultas, as well as a fantastic new collaboration between Chris Turnbull and Elee Kraljii Gardiner. Can you believe the journal turns nine years old next spring?

Why wait? You can either send a cheque (payable to rob mclennan) to 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K1H 7M9, or send money via PayPal or e-transfer to rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com (or through the PayPal button at robmclennan.blogspot.com).

Stay safe! Stay home! Wear a mask! Wash your damned hands!