some author activity: Stebner, Martin, Berlatsky, Banks, Mohammadi, Moure + Solomon,

Kevin Stebner answers the '12 or 20 questions' interview; Camille Martin has a series of photographs newly posted online; Noah Berlatsky has new work up at dadakuku; Chris Banks has an essay forthcoming in Best Canadian Essays 2026, and Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi, Erín Moure and Misha Solomon have poems forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2026.

some author activity: Cadsby, Swensen, Martin, Solomon + Williams,

Heather Cadsby is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Cole Swensen has two new poems in Big Other; Camille Martin's work is featured in the latest issue of Of Poets & Poetry; Misha Solomon has a new poem up at Plenitude magazine; and an excerpt of Evan Williams' new chapbook is now online at Cleveland Review of Books.

some author activity: Notley, Martin, Waldrop, Collis, Trivedi, Olsen + Iijima,

Alice Notley has a new poem up at Harper's magazine; Camille Martin has been posting further to her blog lately; obituary for Keith Waldrop in The New York Times; Stephen Collis is featured up at Etcetera; Amish Trivedi has some new poems up at Tupelo Quarterly; and Geoffrey Olsen and Brenda Iijima have new work in the debut issue of The Call Center Collective.

some author activity: Robinson, Shea, Trivedi, Hyland, Greenstreet, Nilson, Gray, Iijima, Young + Martin,

Elizabeth Robinson, Michael Martin Shea, Amish Trivedi, MC Hyland, Kate Greenstreet and others all have new work in TYPO 34; Geoffrey Nilson, Stephanie Gray (a poem for Brenda Iijima) and Geoffrey Young each have new poems up at the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month; and Camille Martin has been working on a number of collages lately, over at her blog.

some author activity: Martin, Burdick, Earl, Notley + Witek,

Camille Martin has posted "My Evangeline (an illustrated personal essay)" over at her Rogue Embryo blog; Alice Burdick is featured on Catherine Owen's Ms. Lyric's Poetry Outlaws podcast; and Amanda Earl writes about above/ground press, Alice Notley and forthcoming author Terri Witek as part of her AngelHousePress Caring Imagination Crowd Funding Campaign.

some author activity: mclennan, Poe, Barwin, fitzpatrick + Martin,

rob mclennan is interviewed on his first collection of short stories; Deborah Poe writes on Jen Currin over at Jacket2; Gary Barwin has a new poem posted at h&; ryan fitzpatrick has a short essay on 2 Works, 3 Talks, 6 Questions by Eric Moschopedis (with Keyede Osuntokun and Bryce Krynski), a recent show at The New Gallery in Calgary; and Camille Martin's work is discussed in an essay by Kristina Marie Darling at Tupelo Quarterly.

some author activity: Schmaltz, Kaminski, Martin + mclennan,

Eric Schmaltz writes a report on the Avant-Canada conference recently held at Brock U; Megan Kaminski is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Camille Martin is nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her work in Posit; and rob mclennan has ten new poems in the second issue of Pallaksch.Pallaksch., edited by Elizabeth Robinson and Steven Seidenberg.

Amanda Earl reviews Sarah Rosenthal's Estelle Morning Star (2014), Hugh Thomas' Albanian Suite (2014), N.W. Lea's Present! (2014), Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014), Eric Baus' THE RAIN OF THE ICE (2014) and Rachel Moritz' Many forms in water (2014)

Amanda Earl was good enough to review Sarah Rosenthal's Estelle Morning Star (2014), Hugh Thomas' Albanian Suite (2014), N.W. Lea's Present! (2014), Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014), Eric Baus' THE RAIN OF THE ICE (2014) and Rachel Moritz' Many forms in water (2014) as a group post on a variety of above/ground press in 2014 so far over at her enormously clever blog (might this be a time to remind you about the 2015 subscriptions?). Thanks, Amanda! See her original post here, and all of the titles she mentioned are still available (so far). And, for those keeping track, there are three previous reviews of Martin's chapbook here and here and here, a previous review of Baus' chapbook here, a previous review of Lea's chapbook here, and two previous group reviews that include Lea and Thomas here and even here.

hunting for the dark: above/ground press...2014 so far...

on an unseasonably rainy & cold night in mid-August I had an appetite for the above. I wanted to look in less obvious places. I have a stack of above/ground press chapbooks published in 2014, since i am a subscriber…i was curious to see if any of the authors had a penchant for the Gothic, etc. what i found primarily was an overriding tone of anxiety concerning the monotony of 21st century existence. seems scary enough to me...

Sarah Rosenthal’s "Estelle Morning Star" fits the bill nicely with descriptions of women carrying “dying dead things” “emaciated/mangled/animals” I love her turns of phrase & odd juxtapositions, a sense of the macabre amongst business like celebration: “hard core birds in the / ballroom throw themselves/at convention windows/clatter to the table      their/colours running out.” she paints a vivid picture. Estelle wears mary janes.

Hugh Thomas gives us absurd portraits of anxious composers pursued by fierce demons in "Albanian Suite."“When I was with you, the ravens/and milktrucks made such music.” a fun use of black & white. in “Epithalamion” there are bite-marked necks, the monotony of waiting. “It misunderstands today’s poetry/overgrown with wildflowers to forget these sojourners.”  “Poetry is a pagoda, built of friendly embracings, like a square dance complicating society” … a ticket to days of radishes/and saliva” not to discount the beauty in these poems. it’s there between ice-cold moments: “Time, you murderous sun fills my lungs with honey,” there’s something sweetly chilling about that image. & another from “Selfportrait Unwilling to Sit”: “a tramcar apocalypse/on the move/dragging behind dissonance, divine regret.” there’s something Gothic about that image. & in “Metropolitan”: “The two sicknesses frequent in this epoch are heat and isolation.” Thomas’ poems alternate between the tiniest, spot on observations to elaborate, absurd images. I have to say, this is one of my favourite chapbooks this year so far. some of the poems are translations.

In "Present!" N.W. Lea opens with a gangster with rubber extendable arms holding someone up like a baby. an absurd image & not without its horrifying effect…followed later in the next poem in the sequence by “the swans of hurt/burn circles in the snow” there’s lots here about the terror of mundanity, of the burbs…even a littered cough candy is menacing: “a pale pink/half-sucked lozenge/on the pavement/glinting//plus us//have to contend with the teeth of the neighbourhood” you are “snug in your death-sweater.” there are “great swarms/of dusk-bats” "Present!" is a sequence of estrangement.

there are some menacing animals & a kind of helplessness, a monotony in Camille Martin’s "Sugar Beach:" “A leap of leopards under a crescent moon/happens without us, but we’re there/just the same.” “Newfangleness” Sharpshooters are juxtaposed with picnics in “Blind Engine.” In “No Such Identical Horses,” Martin writes, “I was counting on my favourite superstition/to endow the mirage with authority.” There are rotted leaves, wormy fruit, a beast stampeding down a trail, “the chitinous exoskeleton of a locust” & in the title poem a feeling of wasted extravagance in an image of a rusty tanker scooping “mounds of raw sugar.”  “Machine in the Ghost” evokes a cemetery scene. The poems in this chapbook are sound & image collages.

Eric Baus gives us fanciful nightmares of octopi with burned tentacles, ghosts, insects in “The Rain of Ice.” I loved how imaginative & unusual these prose poems were.

In “Many forms in water,” Rachel Moritz gives us white coffins, bitter flowers, gathering storms, “the ribbon of heat rising past digits black in air.” In “The finished forms in the sand record movement that has ceased,” this is a particularly grotesque image: “I carried her through the woods, slept in waterlogged leaves with her body on my chest.” This poem & the others manage to create a tone of melancholy, grief, poignant emotions. I’m quite enamoured of these poems, especially imagery like “How we carried the bell down irrevocable stairs, passed our sentence of doubt and kept moving.” in “Flowing water encounters a widely submerged outside.”

some author activity: Rogal, Abel, Martin, Stewart + mclennan,

Stan Rogal has a poem up as part of the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; Mercedes Eng writes on Jordan Abel over at Jacket2; Camille Martin has some new work in the third issue of Posit: a journal of literature and art; both Jordan Abel and Fenn Stewart have new work in the new issue of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada; rob mclennan has a new poem and corresponding short interview online at Canadian Literature; and has three tiny poem-chapbooks reprinted/reissued by Poems-For-All.

some author activity: Martin, Pirie, beaulieu, Smith, Browning + Baus,

Camille Martin has curated a small "Robert Zend Sampler" of visual poetry over at Coldfront magazine; Pearl Pirie is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; derek beaulieu's "Game of Life: A User's Manual" is now online at NewPoetry; Jessica Smith has new work up in The Volta, guest-edited by Sommer Browning; and Eric Baus has some new poems up in Wag's Revue.

some author activity: Martin, Baus, Hajnoczky, Smith + Robertson,

Camille Martin is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey, as is Eric Baus; Helen Hajnoczky reads every page of Jordan Scott's blert (Coach House Books, 2008) all at once; Camille Martin has twenty poems from a work-in-progress appear online in Stride magazine; Jessica Smith writes on Ron Silliman over at Jacket2; and Maria Lind writes on Lisa Robertson in ArtReview.

Edric Mesmer discusses (briefly) six recent above/ground press chapbooks;

Edric Mesmer was good enough to mention six recent above/ground press titles in the new issue of YELLOW FIELD (#nine; spring 2014): An Overture in the Key of F by Carrie Olivia Adams; The State of Which by Hailey Higdon; Sugar Beach by Camille Martin; from Hark: a journal by rob mclennan; Overheard While Hiding from the Sun: post-notebook poems by Kate Schapira; and Albanian Suite by Hugh Thomas). Thanks, Edric! There are two previous reviews of Adams' title here and here, a previous review of Higdon's title here, two previous reviews of Martin's title here and here, two previous reviews of mclennan's title here and here, and a previous review of Thomas' title here, and copies of all are very much available! Also, you can pick up a copy of the new issue of YELLOW FIELD through: yellowedenwaldfield [at] yahoo [dot] com or by writing to 1217 Delaware Avenue, Apt. 802, Buffalo, New York 14209. For those who haven’t been able to pick up an issue yet, I reprint such here:

6 more from above/ground press        2013-2014

I love a small press, what it can say through its poetics—in this case, chapbooks answering the call of a contemporary lea. Consider a cache of birds, a quintet of strings; but the trope may or mayn’t be limited to birdsong, string, or color-tone…Sometimes there’s a poem in which Buffalo poet emeritus Bill Sylvester writes: “pepper linen incense lobster / lutes viols and ambergris […] what a messy party that would be!” And so we messily hear a great party of Darwinian diversity: “The formalist of formant when our lips make the vowel, it I the act of giving somewhere shape” (An Overture in the Key of F by Carrie Olivia Adams); “I did some trying to voice the regional things –accents and whatnot / I even tried to find that series of hybridized creatures, part person / part place that exist in the park” (The State of Which by Hailey Higdon); “viewing creation / / from a precisely-gauged periphery, clock ticking” (Sugar Beach by Camille Martin); “A stone made out of stone. The dream of people you can’t know. Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, Bay. We know you, myth. What lifestyle will not allow” (from Hark: a journal by rob mclennan); “Anyone can submit / a video to the Free Me Library. Can find / purchase for brilliance, can be avenged sevenfold or / touched relevantly. All that can be shelved in me” (Overheard While Hiding from the Sun: post-notebook poems by Kate Schapira); “cadence address catch dreams / pays and agree, chlorate of poems, / empathic, the old epidemic / things themselves” (Albanian Suite by Hugh Thomas).

some author activity: Brockwell, McElroy, mclennan, Martin, Higdon, Betts, Cain + Poe,

Stephen Brockwell facilitates a TREE Seed Workshop on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 from 6:45 to 7:45pm on French Canadian Poetry; Gil McElroy, rob mclennan, Camille Martin and Hailey Higdon (among others) have new work in the first issue of Touch the Donkey; Gregory Betts writes on M. NourbeSe Philip over at Jacket 2, "Not against expression"; Stephen Cain responds as part of the "At the desk" series at Open Book: Ontario, as does rob mclennan; and Deborah Poe and Megan Burns posted a reading of part of their Poetry Month collaboration-in-progress over on SoundCloud.

National Poetry Month: mclennan, hastain, Pirie, Barwin, Martin + Betts,

In case you missed it, Amanda Earl's National Poetry Month featured a number of new poems by above/ground press authors, including rob mclennan, j/j hastain, Pearl Pirie, Gary Barwin, Camille Martin, Gregory Betts, Karen Massey and Gil McElroy, as well as a number of other incredible works by poets (predominantly working with visuals) from around the world.

Ryan Pratt reviews Dennis Tourbin's THE STREAM and other poems (2014) and Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014)

Ryan Pratt was good enough to review Dennis Tourbin's THE STREAM and other poems (2014) and Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014) over at the ottawa poetry newsletter. Thanks, Ryan! This is the second review of Martin's Sugar Beach, after Jack Goodall's review over at the Flat Singles Press blog.

Brecken Hancock and Camille Martin at The TREE Reading Series, Ottawa;

above/ground press authors Brecken Hancock and Camille Martin feature at Ottawa's TREE Reading Series on Tuesday, April 22, 2014 at 8pm! Admission is free, and there's even an open set.

Martin will be launching her new above/ground press chapbook, Sugar Beach, and Brecken Hancock (author of The Art of Plumbing) will be launching her first trade poetry collection, Broom Broom (Coach House Books, 2014). See the link at the TREE Reading Series website for more details. Might we see you there?

and: Brecken is also reading on Sunday, April 27th with Aisha Saint John as part of the Plan 99 Reading Series at the ottawa international writers festival!

various above/ground press authors (and others) in a month-long display of visual poetry : beaulieu, Martin, Hajnoczky, Schmaltz, Betts, Pirie, Smith, Harris + Barwin,

T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivi
a month-long display of * visual poetry *
Official Opening / Reception / poetry reading / open mike
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
7:30 p.m. - doors open 7 p.m.
The Human Bean, King Street, downtown Cobourg, Ontario
FREE admission
T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivi
April is National Poetry Month
"lay your WORD down!"
moves to Tuesday from our usual Thursday
for April only because {poetry in Cobourg spaces}
opens this month-long display of * visual poetry *
our poetry open mike is part of this * official opening *
T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivi
Usually poetry is delivered by reading but
this is a *poetry show*
it is an art show.
It is a collection of graphics meant for wall display.
However, the show is all about reading.
Each piece is based on text.
T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivi
Angela Rawlings, Derek Beaulieu, Camille Martin, Bill Bissett, Helen Hajnoczky, Robert Zend, Lindsay Cahill, Mark Laliberte, Jenny Sampirisi, Eric Schmaltz, Angela Szczepaniak, Gregory Betts & Neil Hennessy, Pearl Pirie, Eric Winter, Jessica Smith, Ted Amsden, Sharon Harris, Cliff Bell-Smith, Mary McKenzie, Wally Keeler, Katriona Dean, Gary Barwin, Judith Copithorne, michael j. casteels, Alixandra Bamford, Em Lawrence and Dan Waber
T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivity T E X T ual A R T ivi

see the facebook invitation here.

some author activity: Martin, Lea, Barwin, Schmaltz, Reed + Jones,

Part seven of Camille Martin's Robert Zend essay focuses on the late Toronto poet bpNichol; profile on N.W. Lea now online at Open Book: Ontario; Gary Barwin wrote on Eric Schmaltz's typewriter poems for Paul Dutton, his recent chapbook, last summer (I'm just finding out about this now, myself) for Jacket2; Marthe Reed responds to Jennifer K. Dick's "what is YOUR fragment"; and D.G. Jones has a new poem posted as part of the Tuesday poem series.

Jack Goodall reviews Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014)

Jack Goodall was good enough to review Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014) over at the Flat Singles Press blog. Thanks, Jack!

some author activity: Robertson, Reed, Landman, beaulieu, Martin,

Lisa Robertson now the 2013-2014 Allen Ginsberg Visiting Fellow at the Jack Kerouac School, and will be doing a lecture in Boulder, CO on Monday, February 10; Marthe Reed has a new poem posted as part of the dusie "Tuesday poem" series; Seth Landman will soon be leading a course on reading Moby Dick; derek beaulieu has a new collection of visual work out soon with les figues; and the fourth part of Camille Martin's essay on Robert Zend is now up on her blog.