some author activity: Davis, Flemmer, Armantrout, Bartczak + Tardi,

Jordan Davis has ten poems posted at The Fortnightly Review; Kyle Flemmer is interviewed via The Miramichi Reader; Rae Armantrout writes on Fanny Howe for The Fortnightly Review, and has four new poems up at Granta, and a further poem via the website for the Poetry Foundation; and Kacper Bartczak has a new poem up at Poetry Northwest, as translated into English by Mark Tardi.

some author activity: Crosby, Naughton, Davis, Betts + mclennan,

Gregory Crosby has a poem up at Stone Circle Review; Katie Naughton has two new poems up at The Rumpus; Jordan Davis has new work up at the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month; Gregory Betts has a poem up in the Niagara Falls Poetry Project; and a poem by rob mclennan gets mentioned in Paul Pearson's Slow Poetry Reading Project.

some author activity: Davis, Norris, Ladouceur, Doller, Maloukis, Trivedi + Boyle,

Jordan Davis has some new poems up at A Poet in Mexico; part five of Ken Norris' Confessions is now online; Ben Ladouceur has a poem up at NewPoetry; Sandra Doller writes on Fanny Howe's "The Witness" for Poetry Daily; Rose Maloukis has a poem in print and online at The New Quarterly; Amish Trivedi has a piece on C.D. Wright as part of a curated "cluster" on her work at Post45; and Frances Boyle has new work up at Public Reverie.

some author activity: Davis, Pakdel, mclennan, Beaulieu + Meyerson,

Jordan Davis has a poem up at The Pi Review, as does Saba Pakdel; rob mclennan has a poem up at Common House Magazine; Tony Trehy mentions a title by Derek Beaulieu as his book of the year, just as Beaulieu offers his "most engaging books of 2024" list; and Ben Meyerson is interviewed by Fan Wu over at Torben Robertson's Common Measure substack.

some author activity: Davis, Robinson, Eleftherion, Mohammadi, Earl + Boyle,

Jordan Davis has a new poem up at the arts fuse; Kevin Heslop interviews Ben Robinson over at The Miramichi Reader; Melissa Eleftherion has new work up at Barren Magazine; both Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi and Amanda Earl have new work in the ex-puritan; and Frances Boyle has a poem in the new issue of consilience.

new from above/ground press: But Then I Thought, by Kyla Houbolt

But Then I Thought
Kyla Houbolt
$5

Ethics

Is it ethical to be a frog when the snow is on the ground? To be a frog in winter, in a sound mind and body of amphibious elegance? It isn't right! sing the bugs in their dens, we never got a chance to have amphibious elegance, we only got chitinous chic which is far far less groovy. The bugs grouse among themselves, crowding the rotting tree trunks, clicking and whirring and taking committee votes. But the unconcerned frog, who is not hungry for bug at the moment, casts no stones. There is no call to fiddle with all them bugs! thinks the frog to itself, preening in its winter mudhole. Meanwhile, Creator, in the form of Raven, listens in with amusement. None of these creatures know what's to come, or how blessed their lives are. Though that smug frog might need to be taken down a peg or two, he thinks. Maybe it's time to send in the crows. And of course the poets are listening to all this, and each one is writing notes, and all the notes are different. This is the blessing and the curse of poetry: that it never agrees and that it never agrees. Ethics? Maybe in the spaces between.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

I read Kyla Houbolt’s poems with excitement — where else am I going to hear about spam farms, heron language, wish onions, and other statistically improbable but poetically inevitable concepts? Who else can find complete and shapely stories to go with those words? What happens next? Something we wouldn’t guess, I think.
        Jordan Davis, author of Noise and Yeah, No

cover artwork by the author

Kyla Houbolt has been writing poems all her life, and began publishing in 2019.  Her first chapbook, Dawn's Fool, was published by Ice Floe press and is sold out; her second, Tuned, was published by CCCP Chapbooks + Subpress. Surviving Death, from Broken Spine, is her third. But Then I Thought is her fourth.  Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Sublunary Review, Barren, Janus, Juke Joint, Moist, Neologism, Ghost City Review, and Saginaw. Most of her online work can be found on her Linktree: @luaz_poet | Linktree Her current social media presence is on BlueSky Social (still in beta as of this writing), here: @luaz.bsky.social, facebook.com/kyla.houbolt/ and on Instagram @kyla_luaz. https://kylahoubolt.us/

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

Billy Mills reviews Jordan Davis' NOISE (2023)

Billy Mills was good enough to provide a first review of Jordan Davis' recent NOISE (2023) over at his blog, alongside a slew of other reviews (including a non-above/ground press title by above/ground press author Buck Downs). Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. As he writes:

Davis’ own Noise is published in Ottawa by Rob McLennan’s above/ground press. Davis is a New York poet, which is to say that he is a poet of hard surfaces, with he shades of Ashbery and O’Hara floating around somewhere beneath them, which is intended as praise; we all have our forebears. Where the comparison is most true is that everything you need to read a Davis poem is in the poem you’re reading.

In many of the poems here, Davis’ language reflects the somewhat random nature of reality as a source of delight:

The Ultimate Team Chart

Given how much of time pearls.
Now, take a walk from the subway
to your last place of residence.
The changes to the roster of local retail.
A couple you always noticed
with a new dog, facial scars.
The thick light of a humid day,
swelling of the river. Love the car
comparing subwoofers. I love
the givens of a neighborhood,
the opportunities (declined) to become jaded.
My art is what’s eating your shoes.

This is a kind of quantum Heraclitus; you both can and cannot enter the same neighbourhood twice, but what marks Davis out as a poet is that refusal to become jaded, an ability both to see and to articulate the extraordinary in the everyday, the aliveness of things. Which is not to deny an innate scepticism that also informs his work:

What separates us from the animals?
I’ll answer with the animals: a fence.
[from ‘Think Tank Girl’]

But then again you cannot celebrate the messy totality of the world without including the warts. It is this acceptance of complexity that drives these poems:

I keep thinking I have something
to show you, like noticing
what I was thinking when I wasn’t thinking
which was partly what you were saying,
something about happiness and sex and something
you wouldn’t think I would think, noticing
how quickly once around the park was becoming
sunrise flickering on the edge of your collar.

The interweaving of the personal and what, for want of a better word, we might call the philosophical, is made possible by the syntax and rhythm of the lines. In particular, the stop/start stress patterns frame the process of thinking through:

I keep thinking I have something

to show you, like noticing

what I was thinking when I wasn’t thinking

which was partly what you were saying,

Of course, others may read differently, but however you parse it, the language of prosody, of metrical feet and regular patterns, is inadequate to the movement of these lines, with long runs of unstressed syllable bumping up against paired stresses. And his musical range is wide, as evident in these taut lines from ‘The Moon Outshined by Cigars’:

Two arcs joined at the ends
a thin scree. The sink
gills up Bromeliad
unabridged

Or these more relaxed, but no less intricately patterned, ones from ‘Periphrase’, one of the longer poems here:

People are like plants; I’m trying to get you to propagate,
But I can’t do it with just poetry –
And by the way unless you have a child nobody’s going to believe how beautiful I say you are.

But enough. He’s a poet. Go read him.

new from above/ground press: NOISE, by Jordan Davis

NOISE
Jordan Davis
$5

SHOOTING FOR THE LAST DAYS IN MAY
(2ND TAKE)

Selfsame trawling the wholecloth expense
barging for the too-long roiling quick
documentary’s earned orchestral maundy
song or something somehow this furnished
azure attitude destroyed untotally
by miracle of overhearing chamomile
to soothe the interest and witch
a tan upon my friends so gifted
at having friends, o lug me
into your cherry-dawdled spanking
as a wish wants to be a person but is a wish.
It wants to be female DNA
having lived long enough
as geometric proofs of the identity
of my fear of thought
which produces litter (aye!
Undo your hearing aid) out
of love again, a speedy amaryllis.


AFTERWORD

Reading Noise, I kept wanting to ask something facile like “Is this what it would be like if Frank O’Hara raised kids?,” but that might only be because I know its author has: they don’t have unmistakable walk-on roles in many of these poems, though I might not be looking hard enough. What I mean is, roughly: what becomes of the (mostly) urban flaneur when the project of self-creation comes under pressure from what an earlier bohemia might have viewed as the mundane imposition of commitments to care? Even that makes it sounds like I think O’Hara didn’t care about his family of choice, which is another reason the thought is facile. I don’t know that Jordan Davis thinks of his poems in these terms at all: asking, after all, isn’t the done thing. But I have my suspicions: one commends procreation to the beloved. But even that poem, persuasive and apparently plainspoken, is called “Periphrase,” and it’s no accident that “steganography,” which I had to look up, appears elsewhere. Whether a given poem foregrounds a readily legible mise en scene (“The Coke Machine at the Time Share”) or the play of image, aphorism, and knockabout sonics (“The mime and the gnome trade memes”), something here – or someone, and not necessarily the poet – needs and deserves protection. Either way, this noise is mostly signal.    --Franklin Bruno

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Jordan Davis’s second collection, Shell Game, was published by Edge Books in 2018; his third book, Yeah, No, will be published by MadHat in 2023. Recent work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, The Canary, and American Poetry Review. He lives in Brooklyn and works in the financial services industry.

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: Schapira, Deutch, Davis + Jarvis,

Kate Schapira reads "Questions and Practice For Your Origin Story" for Ours Poetica; Amanda Deutch has some new work up at GASHER; forthcoming author Jordan Davis has a new essay on Ted Berrigan up via The Poetry Foundation; and Jenna Jarvis is interviewed over at poetry mini interviews.