above/ground press: Benjamin Niespodziany

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

The Man
a sequence of foolish men
Benjamin Niespodziany
$6

The Man with the Tail

When he argued
with his doctor
it wandered.

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

Benjamin Niespodziany's writing has appeared in Fence, Conduit, Fairy Tale Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. He has previously released two chapbooks (one with above/ground press, one with Dark Hour Books) and two full-length books (one with Okay Donkey and one with X-R-A-Y). He also hosts the Neon Night Mic reading series in Chicago and recently launched the indie publication Piżama Press. You can find more at neonpajamas.com.

This is Niespodziany's second above/ground press chapbook, after The Northerners (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