some author activity: Blades, mclennan, Dyckman, Robinson, Townsend + Pakdel,

Catherine Owen podcasts a commemoration for the late Joe Blades as episode #34; rob mclennan, Susanne Dyckman, Elizabeth Robinson and Jamie Townsend, among others, have work in the new issue of Trilobite; and Saba Pakdel has a poem in the Poetry Pause series via The League of Canadian Poets.

new from above/ground press: WORM HOLES, After Cao Fei’s La Town, by Jamie Townsend

WORM     HOLES
After Cao Fei’s La Town
Jamie Townsend
$5

Five years ago I stumbled into Cao Fei’s La Town installation while wandering PS1, MOMA's satellite location in Queens. The exhibit seemed to glow in the too bright light of day after a seamless nocturnal slip into extinction, reemerging into a city that spat me out just a few months previous. Cao’s nightmare models scattered around the gallery—crumbling cityscapes, pastoral wastes, vast yet claustrophobic galleries, airline hangers packed with featureless crowds and escaped zoo animals—equal parts Through the Looking Glass and Escape from New York. Dozens of display cases featuring tiny railway figurines, distressed by hand, fluxes of hardened gel obscuring flames or plasticine waterlines rising to envelope train platforms—a wormhole metropolis, a city on fire, a night museum, a biblical deluge.

Having lived in at least a dozen apartments over the last decade, guided in part by economic and emotional ground zero, death, illness, depersonalization and creeping debt, Cao’s looped film with it’s Hiroshima Mon Amor narration panning over motionless, apocalyptic stagesets matched a pervasive, libidinal fear I had carried with me out of a strict evangelic childhood. A non-linear continuum blossomed in my mind like the germ of Satanic panic, globally gone to seed. Or a sudden point of connection—reading Dhalgren on a fainting couch in another city, another relationship I escaped from almost too late. No rapture at the end of my portrait of an artist but something new, inscrutable, dangerous, liberating.

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

cover image: Sunbathing on the Edge, Pier 52, (Matta-Clark's
Day's End), ca. 1977 Shelley Seccombe

Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer/transfemme poet and editor living in Oakland, CA. They are the author of 6 chapbooks as well as 2 longer collections Shade (Elis Press) and Sex Machines (speCt!). They are also the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone). With Nick DeBoer they curate Elderly.

This is Townsend's second above/ground press chapbook, after Pyramid Song (2018).

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: Townsend, Olsen, Hofmann + Blouin,

Jamie Townsend is being interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; Geoffrey Olsen is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Ava Hofmann has some new work online via the Action Books blog; and Michael Blouin has a book heading to the moon!

some author activity: McElroy, Nilson, Cortese + Townsend,

Gil McElroy has a new essay in the "Talking Poetics" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; Geoffrey Nilson reviews Sonnet L'Abbé's Sonnet's Shakespeare over at the Hamilton Review of Books; Franco Cortese is interviewed at Touch the Donkey; and Jamie Townsend is interviewed on Steve Abbott over at FULL STOP.

some author activity: Hall, Landman, mclennan, Gray + Townsend,

University of New Brunswick writer-in-residence Phil Hall is written up in in the brunswickan; Seth Landman has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; rob mclennan answers the "12 or 20 questions," via Vallum magazine, and has a new poem up at his clever blog; forthcoming author Evan Gray has an essay in the "my (small press) writing day" series; and Jamie Townsend has new work in the second issue of baest : a journal of queer forms & affects.

some author activity: Gray, Gurton-Wachter, Saklikar, Townsend + Beaulieu,

Stephanie Gray is featured in rob mclennan's Spotlight series over at Medium; Anna Gurton-Wachter has a poem online in the newly-posted archive of the 1981 Feminist Reading Group; Renée Sarojini Saklikar is interviewed for the blog of the Federation of BC Writers; Jamie Townsend has a new poem up at Sink Review; and Derek Beaulieu writes on the best gift he ever received.

new from above/ground press: Pyramid Song, by Jamie Townsend

Pyramid Song
Jamie Townsend
$5

    as knowledge builds
    up with physical
    experience to touch
    the earth is a version
    of time impressed
    on us a totem
    stuffed inside his jock
    Nature is operating
    in ways that, at least
    to our conception,
    are unchanged
    naïve dreams
    we switch bodies
    & I lose my self
    consciousness I
    fall in love with
    the young
    dead shape
    shifters
    who provide
    possibility for
    a future I
    couldn’t possibly
    imagine
    each form
    now bound together in
    the brilliant seclusion of
    a stellar nursery
    another life when
    I fall asleep
    inside the belly of
    a fiberglass creature
    on the outskirts
    of Knokke &
    feel beams lift
    from my chest
    glowing radiant
    as a drag
    on American Spirit
    or inversion of
    Patrick Bateman’s
    psychotic avatar
    split apart by the terror
    of boredom a new pattern
    washed in the refrain
    HOW DEEP
    IS YOUR LOVE
    this well of bonhomie
    to sustain the dream
    & shore up
    barricades against
    doubt & this morning
    on the train
    the apparition of a thin
    furred hand latched
    to the grab bar
    appears assailed
    by the workaday
    my blush ripens
    into fever wherein
    a magic or
    as Genet says deliberate
    predisposition
    might register – I could not
    take lightly the idea
    that people made love
    without me
    I plant a kiss
    there as reminder
    living just enough
    for the city
    though most often
    I doubt
    my real feelings

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
November 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover/Design by Nicholas DeBoer

Jamie Townsend is a poet, publisher, and editor living in Oakland, California. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and persistent hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of several chapbooks from Portable Press@YoYo Labs, Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, and Ixnay Press, among others. Their first the full-length collection, Shade (Elis Press), was released in 2015. An essay on the history of the New Narrative magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (Wolfman Books, 2017). They are currently editing a forthcoming volume of Steve Abbott's writings (Nightboat, 2019).

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

some author activity: Mavreas, Tucker, Townsend + Dennis,

Billy Mavreas is discussed briefly by Al Filreis over at Jacket2; Aaron Tucker is interviewed over at Train : a poetry journal; Jamie Townsend has a new poem up in the Tuesday poem series; and Michael Dennis and Kirsty Jackson are interviewed on their art collection.

some author activity: mclennan, Coulton, Townsend + dueck,

rob mclennan has a new poem posted on the Chaudiere Books blog for the end of National Poetry Month, and is interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; Valerie Coulton and forthcoming author Jamie Townsend have new work in where is the river ; Townsend is also featured in rob mclennan's monthly Spotlight series ; and nathan dueck is interviewed by Ian Whistle at the ottawa poetry newsletter.