some author activity: Tynes, Farina, Cone, Brockwell, Unsworth, Weaver, Christie, Shafer, Houbolt + Armantrout,

Jen Tynes, Laura Farina, Jon Cone, Stephen Brockwell (for Jason Christie), Lydia Unsworth and forthcoming author Emily Shafer all have poems on the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month; Brockwell also has new work up at The Pi Review, as does Andy Weaver; Kyla Houbolt has work in eunoia review; and Rae Armantrout has a poem up at The New Yorker.

Adrian Slatcher reviews an above/ground press launch: Tom Jenks, Lydia Unsworth + David Gaffney,

Adrian Slatcher was good enough to offer his thoughts on a recent above/ground press launch in Manchester, England by Tom Jenks (launching Chimneys), Lydia Unsworth (launching Gag) and David Gaffney (launching Lakes of Titan). Thanks so much! You can see his original post here, or excerpted, below:

The Scene that Celebrates Itself

In the post-Xmas quiet there isn’t much going on literature wise, which may explain the packed house for the above/ground press launch on Thursday. Most of the literary folks in Manchester that I know were at Saul Hay Gallery for David Gaffney, Tom Jenks and Lydia Unsworth. I arrived on time, yet was one of the last ones there, which prompted an early start.

above/ground is a Canadian press publishes small pamphlets, and via some transatlantic links, reminiscent of the old mail-art networks of the sixties and seventies, has found a home for a number of Manchester-adjacent writers. David Gaffney’s stories lean into his earlier “sawn-off tales” but began as explorations of the similarities/differences between prose poetry and flash fiction. If there’s a difference between these, and his earlier work, I think its that it is in the ever-more deadpan absurdity, and embracing of surrealism. In some ways, it was as much a Dada-esque happening as a reading, though without the silly hats. (Maybe, next time.) Despite the humour of the pieces, there’s always a nugget of dark truth in David’s work. The first story, about a next generation of Arts Council staff being grown as clones, was a perfect example. In David’s work the mundane, is never mundane - whether a train journey across a Lincolnshire landscape that looks as if its been “photocopied”, or the absurdity of office politics. The book “Lakes of Titan” is available here.

Tom Jenks can sometimes seem like a P.T. Barnum of contemporary writing, and all he needs is a big coat with his bric-a-brac for sale to complete the image. The “badge” he was flogging for those of us who spend too much time in pointless meetings, “i’m an artist and you’re lucky i’m even here” sold like hotcakes. Tom’s work veers between the minimal (the badges, his posters of famous literary works) and the durational (projects mapping everything he has done in a year around a particular theme.) Yet here he engages with a range of pithy word-pictures, poignant yet funny.

Lydia Unsworth has slightly different tone than the other two. She has four pamphlets from above/ground and a recent publication just out from Knives, Forks and Spoons. It is a free spirited observational poetry that is probably at its best in the longer piece where she lists all the mundane but beautiful things that she experiences with her children on the everyday walk to school. Her books can be bought here.

The Factory Reading Series @ VERSeFest: Nada Gordon + Lydia Unsworth, March 29, 2026!

The Factory Reading Series
as part of the sixteenth annual VERSeFest poetry festival presents: 
The Factory Reading Series Lecture Series; two talks/readings by:

Nada Gordon (Brooklyn NY)
+
Lydia Unsworth (Manchester UK)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Sunday, March 29, 2026
3-4pm, Arts Court Black Box Studio
A FREE EVENT / check link for info on tickets/passes: https://verseottawa.ca/en/versefest
as well as for the full schedule of readers and events!
March 24-30, 2026

Nada Gordon: [see a new interview here] I live in Brooklyn and work too hard and too much, teaching courses like “Tyranny and the Absurd” and “The Glamour of Language.” Actually, they are just comp, but isn’t that what all art is, actually? I have two Siberian cats. I make things besides poems: garments, baubles, toys. My Etsy shop is https://www.etsy.com/shop/ScentedRushes. I’ve published nine books and lots of chapbooks besides. My selected, The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985-2015 found its way into the world last year by way of SubPress. “The Sound Princess” is a literal translation from the Japanese of “Otohime,” the button you push in a toilet stall to make the sound of rushing water so that others don’t hear you pee. It does sound grand, doesn’t it? I was in the hysterico-transgressive poetry movement called Flarf in the 2000s. Before that, I lived in Japan for over a decade. Before Japan, I wrote a thesis on Bernadette Mayer’s work. I studied with Language Poets in Bay Area in the 80s. I was a hardcore punk after I was a flower child. As an actual child I sometimes wrote poems. I was born in Oakland in 1964.

Lydia Unsworth [see a new interview here] is a poet from Manchester, UK. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Place Writing in Manchester, looking at kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. She has 6 poetry collections and 4 above / ground chapbooks, and has two new poetry collections coming out in 2026, Stay Awhile (April, Knives Forks and Spoons Press) and This Now Extends to My Daughter (May, Blue Diode Press).

some author activity: Coulton, Aube, Kaplan, mclennan, Hausner + Unsworth,

Valerie Coulton has a new poem at the arts fuse; Gwen Aube is announced as one of the 2026 Writers-in-Residence at the Al Purdy A-Frame; both Genevieve Kaplan and rob mclennan have new work up at Posit; Beatriz Hausner has a poem in Paul Vermeersch's "In the Third Sleep" series; and Lydia Unsworth is interviewed by rob mclennan to help promote her upcoming participation in VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival.

above/ground press author spotlights : substack : Trivedi, Houglum, Tierney, Christie, Gray, Reid, Unsworth, Ballard, O’Reilly, Ladouceur, Sikkema, Siklosi, Norris, Nećakov, Saklikar, Fagan, Earl + Downs,

Since building my above/ground press substack last spring, I've started posting a series of interviews with above/ground press authors (new platform, new project, after all), focusing on authors published through the press with a new/recent chapbook, as well as multiple publications with the press, to give each interview a bit more heft. Since May, I've posted interviews with Amish Trivedi, Brook Houglum, Orchid Tierney, Jason Christie, Steph Gray, Monty Reid, Lydia Unsworth, Micah Ballard, Nathanael O’Reilly, Ben Ladouceur, Michael Sikkema, Kate Siklosi, Ken Norris, Lillian Nećakov, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Cary Fagan, Amanda Earl and Buck Downs, with forthcoming interviews still to post with poets including russell carisse, Pearl Pirie, Guy Birchard, Jill Stengel, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, N.W. Lea and Gary Barwin, among others. Otherwise, I do post a round-up of new publications every two months or so, as well as a round-up of the weekly "author activity" posts, also every two months or so (but I didn't want the substack to simply be a replication of the blog, right?) Free to sign up! And lands as an email, direct to your in-box. Huzzah! And can you believe the press turns thirty-three years old this summer? Gadzooks!

Alina Stefanescu : Above/groundings.

American poet, critic and subscriber Alina Stefanescu was kind enough to highlight the press over at her blog, pointing out a whole swath of 2025 titles that caught her attention: Against Perfectionism & Other Poems by John Cone, Spamtoum by Noah Berlatsky, whittle gristle by Lori Anderson Moseman, Bibliomancy by Leah Souffrant, Studies by Micah Anthony Cavaleri, Chimneys by Tom Jenks, My Life as a Notebook by Jason Heroux, The Sun Will Bleach It Away by Rebecca Comay and Cary Fagan, Angel Dust by Micah Ballard, The Oh Oh by Beatriz Hausner, The Man: Micro Poems by Benjamin Niespodziany, The World Is Beautiful by Lillian Necakov, Never Saw It Coming by Steph Gray, pedagogies for the planthroposcene by Orchid Tierney, Lydia Unsworth’s GAG and even a poem by Austin Miles from Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] #44 [see their TtD interview here]. Thanks so much! You can see her original post here.

some author activity: Unsworth, Kolewe, mclennan, Ursuliak, Kratz + Straumsvåg,

[photo by Dag T. Straumsvåg] Lydia Unsworth has two new poems up at The Manchester Review; R. Kolewe has a poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series; rob mclennan has some new work up at Noir Sauna; Emily Ursuliak has an essay up at The Goose; and Al Kratz is interviewed by Constance Malloy.

new from above/ground press: Gag, by Lydia Unsworth

GAG
Lydia Unsworth
$5

And My Body and Your Body Were Shaking Gently With the Laughter That Does Not Stop

He’s fighting with me, trying to return to what it was. It can’t be done. The lid won’t go back on. He says tussle to make it okay, this subtle lack, this distant punching. He says cross. In his world, no one is angry. Life is set up to coil around the children. He can’t process his behaviour midweek. People let each other down. No one is awestruck, horny, devastated. Nothing salubrious in the way the dishes are laid on the table. There are excuses – practical matters get in the way. We don’t understand why we don’t have love, but on the other hand, looking at the calendar, it’s obvious. We work late through the night, feel fury like groundswell. Injustice rises like a trapped vein. There is slowness, which is presented differently to being afraid. There is no cowardice, this is merely convention. I am the wild one. I am the one who has gone wrong. I am the emotional terrorist. It is I who slipped out of the frame. You will ruin my entire life, he says.

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

cover image: Cay

Lydia Unsworth is a poet based in Greater Manchester, whose recent collections include Mortar (Osmosis), These Steady Bulbs (above / ground) and cement, terraces (Red Ceilings). Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Oxford Poetry and Shearsman Magazine. She is currently undergoing a PhD exploring kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. Her latest book is called Arthropod and is published by Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers.

This is Unsworth’s fourth above/ground press poetry title, after I Have Not Led a Serious Life (2019), Residue (2022) and These Steady Bulbs (2024).

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

Alan Parry reviews Lydia Unsworth's Residue (2022)

Merseyside-based writer, editor and lecturer Alan Parry was good enough to provide the first review for Lydia Unsworth's Residue (2022) over at The Broken Spine. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here. As Parry writes:

Lydia Unsworth’s Residue is not here to tuck you in with neat resolutions or let you bask in warm nostalgia. This is a book that drags you through the wreckage of past homes, past selves, and forces you to confront what’s left behind. It’s restless. It’s jagged. It doesn’t give a fuck about linearity or easy sentimentality. Instead, it builds a geography of dislocation: places that don’t fit, memories that won’t sit still, identities that keep shifting under your feet.

It reads like a poetic fever dream, a history of homes unravelled in snapshots, from childhood to now. Each poem is tethered to a location, but don’t expect stable ground. These spaces are in flux, warped by time, distorted by memory. Think of it less like a roadmap and more like a ghost tour – each stop marked by what is caught in liminal spaces, what stains, what refuses to be scrubbed away.

Place as a Wound, Memory as the Scar
Unsworth knows that home is never just bricks and mortar. No, it’s a psychological battlefield! Manchester Road (formative years) puts you right in the thick of it, in a house ‘up against a long main road’ – where privacy is a joke and exposure is constant. There’s a hole – literal or metaphorical – ‘like a hole through the middle of me’, an image so blunt it leaves a bruise. This is what Residue does best: it turns domestic space into something unstable, something that betrays and consumes.

Then there’s Castle Irwell (a messy escape), which captures the chaos of shared living, where bodies blur into each other and solitude is a luxury. ‘Eleven is a team but what I needed was confessional.’ That line alone is a gut punch. Because what’s lonelier than being surrounded by people and still feeling like a ghost?

The Poetry of Fragmentation: Syntax as Architecture
Unsworth doesn’t write neat, tidy verse. Her poetry is fractured, staccato, broken (like our spines) in all the right places. It mirrors the instability of memory, how it skips, erases, distorts. In Brook Drive (including the day that cherry tree was planted), she captures the fluidity of perception in clipped, surreal bursts:

‘spaces are ill-defined / corners become whatever you like / a scurry of ants in a decked-out butter tub.’

Objects lose their meaning. Boundaries shift. Reality is whatever your mind decides it is. And the form of the poem reflects that, refusing to sit still, refusing to behave.

Then there’s Furnesses (tiny fires), where short, rapid-fire lines create a breathless momentum. ‘A ceiling high above a hide of eyes / settle into complete knot of two and hi-fi.’ It’s claustrophobic, relentless, like trying to get comfortable in a room that keeps shrinking around you.

The Emotional Aftershock: What Residue Leaves Behind
The real power of Residue is how it lingers. These poems aren’t just recollections. They haunt! Riverbank (it ended badly) takes something as mundane as a pigeon and turns it into an omen:

‘a pigeon billows through the curtains / disorder of cloth and stifled wing.’

The weight of absence, the ache of something lost, it’s all there, stripped bare. And then it hits you with: ‘only so much can be held / only so much can be held in.’ That’s the punchline of life, right? We try to hold onto places, people, versions of ourselves, but in the end, most of it slips through.

Heald Place (I begin to show my age) lays it out in brutal clarity. The walls of the house are ‘smashed to bits on a Saturday night by drunken younghards.’ Decay isn’t poetic here. It’s inevitable, ugly, and unceremonious. The past doesn’t crumble beautifully. Rather it gets kicked in, pissed on, and left behind.

Final Verdict: Read This Before You Move Again
Without doubt, Lydia Unsworth has written something that refuses to settle. Residue is what happens when you put a stethoscope to the walls of every place you’ve ever lived and listen to what’s still breathing inside. It’s fragmented, disorienting, sometimes even messy. Here’s the kicker, that’s the point! Memory isn’t a straight line. Neither is belonging.

So, if you like your poetry neat and polished, this might not be for you. But if you want something raw, something that gets under your skin, something that reminds you what it feels like to stand in the doorway of an old home and realise you don’t quite fit there anymore… this is it!.

Unsworth doesn’t just write about places. She writes about what places do to us. And Residue makes damn sure you don’t forget it.

Cary Fagan reviews Lydia Unsworth's These Steady Bulbs (2024) at Word Music

Toronto writer (and above/ground press author) Cary Fagan was good enough to provide the first review for Lydia Unsworth's These Steady Bulbs (2024) over at his Word Music blog. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

When I was a kid, so long ago now, we played unsupervised from evening into dark. We hid in back yards, ran from garden to garden, picked up fallen pears from a neighbour’s tree and hurled them at the rare passing car. That time came back to me as I read These Steady Bulbs, a text that both offers and withholds meaning–somewhat in the manner of childhood itself.

The English poet Lydia Unsworth (above/ground is a rare Canadian chapbook press to have an international list of authors) has an interesting premise here. Her book, as she explains in a note, is a response to Ian Waite’s Middlefield: A postwar council estate in time, which I gather is a sociological/cultural study of British subsidized housing. She tells us that “the concerns and nostalgia are in part abstracted,” although I admit to being uncertain as to what exactly this means. The sequence of prose poemns is presented as a looking backwards into childhood, as a visit to places once intimately known, as an attempt to find and understand the past. It is certainly nostalgic, if not warmly so. It is as much exhumation as recollection.

Can anyone else see these streets, their buried gods, the blood from our shins like shadows in gravel, these graves?

Somewhere out-of-focus were the adults, uninterested in such spaces as the empty lot that drew them:

And the adults, they didn’t disobey the signage or peek over walls designed expressly to keep them out. Nothing for them to see but their imagination, creased and left to rot. Wild fear, rumour, grey flowing capes half-seen and blinked away. We lied and camped wherever it looked soft enough. Metal bridges, leftover streams, fat wet furniture, mossy and bright. We wanted rain in our shoes, we wanted to smell damp like the soil of the planet.

This is rather overwrought language, appropriate for an adult reliving the intensity of collective childhood experience. These were places were the dangers were felt, if vague and unnamed, making them all the more exciting. When the poet says “We didn’t want to go home (we never wanted to go home)” it isn’t hard to wonder whether home is now, for the adult looking back, a place that simply can’t be entered anymore.

The voice of these poems is oddly passionate and alienated at the same time. It isn’t always easy to say why one sentences follows another. Near the end we are told that “Everything is here for the taking” but this feels more like a past, a memory, a fiction that has us in its grip whether we like it or not.

new from above/ground press: These Steady Bulbs, by Lydia Unsworth

These Steady Bulbs
Lydia Unsworth
$5

The poems that follow are a direct response to Ian Waite’s Middlefield: A postwar council estate in time, published by Uniform Books. The setting and timeline is transposed, the concerns and nostalgia in part abstracted.


A Field Remains

 
Perhaps you wouldn’t call it a field, but at that time it hadn’t quite morphed into anything else. It wasn’t being used, though our childhoods were skimming through it. Those open spaces were erasures, and, like us, ill-defined. Grass stretched for miles, interrupted by fences, private land, electricity boxes, containers far from any kind of workplace. Blackberries and hyacinth balsam with their Parma Violet cloth-to-nose stink. We’d slip down ginnels behind rows of houses and this space that wasn’t any longer where we lived but wasn’t yet the motorway would open out. The motorway couldn’t see us because it never was anywhere, was only ever a going, a driving-toward-death. And the adults, they didn’t disobey the signage or peek over walls designed expressly to keep them out. Nothing for them to see but their imagination, creased and left to rot. Wild fear, rumour, grey flowing capes half-seen and blinked away. We lied and camped wherever it looked soft enough. Metal bridges, leftover streams, fat wet furniture, mossy and bright. We wanted rain in our shoes, we wanted to smell damp like the soil of the planet.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Lydia Unsworth’s latest collections are Arthropod (Death of Workers) and Mortar (Osmosis). Pamphlets include Residue (above/ground), cement, terraces (Red Ceilings), and YIELD (KFS). Poems in places like Ambit, Banshee, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, Oxford Poetry, PERVERSE, and Shearsman.

This is Unsworth’s third above/ground press poetry title, after I Have Not Led a Serious Life (2019) and Residue (2022).

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: Unsworth, Weaver, Bell, Morton, Bowering, Hogg + mclennan,

Lydia Unsworth has a poem up as part of the Tuesday poem series; Andy Weaver is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Wade Bell, Colin Morton, George Bowering and others all have new pieces as part of the "Remembering Bob Hogg" feature at The Typescript; and rob mclennan answers one question for Hollay Ghadery at River Street Writing.

some author activity: Niespodziany, Brown, Unsworth, Melançon, Mody + Eleftherion,

Benjamin Niespodziany is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Simon Brown has some work in the eleventh and final issue of antilang; Lydia Unsworth has new work online at Pamenar Press; Jérôme Melançon is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Monica Mody is interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; and Melissa Eleftherion has new work up at The Hunger, hot pink mag and The Hopper.

new from above/ground press: RESIDUE, by Lydia Unsworth

RESIDUE
Lydia Unsworth
$5

South Lane (so I’ve been told)

you left the babies
out front on the pavement
for a spell of fresh air
let them sleep
dream of a world
without cars
whole streets of babies
weeping at the strollers rolling by
a wave of depression
passed over you     you said
it’s okay
it’s fine

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2022
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover image originally published by Manchester : Mancunium Velveteen

Lydia Unsworth’s latest collections are Some Murmur (Beir Bua Press) and Mortar (Osmosis). Her most recent pamphlets are YIELD (KFS) and cement, terraces (Red Ceilings). Work can be found in places like Ambit, Banshee, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, Shearsman, Tentacular, and The Interpreter’s House.

This is Unsworth’s second above/ground press title, after I Have Not Led a Serious Life (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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Graf, Unsworth, Young, Turnbull, Saklikar + Solomon,

Adele Graf is interviewed in the "Six Questions" series over at Chaudiere Books; Lydia Unsworth has two poems up at The Pi Review; Geoffrey Young has some new work in Hello Goodbye Apocalypse; Chris Turnbull has posted the first installment of a series, interviewing Renée Sarojini Saklikar at the ottawa poetry newsletter; and Misha Solomon opens this year's array of poetry posting for National Poetry Month via the Chaudiere Books blog!

some author activity: Unsworth, Earl, Tierney, mclennan + Spinosa/Siklosi,

Lydia Unsworth has some new work up at Tentacular; Amanda Earl offers some nice words for the above/ground press anniversary (and a visual poem!) over at her blog; Orchid Tierney has some recent work up at Ethel; Jenya Stashkov asked rob mclennan for an interview and a poem, both of which appear here in English, as well as translated into Russian; Dani Spinosa and Kate Siklosi answer the "ottawa small press book fair : home editions" questions over at the ottawa poetry newsletter.

some author activity: Pirie, Archer, Aigen, Boyle + Unsworth,

Pearl Pirie is interviewed over at talking about strawberries all of the time, as is Sacha Archer, and Razielle Aigen; Frances Boyle participates in the litter i see project; Lydia Unsworth has a new poem on the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month; and Razielle Aigen also has an essay in the "On Writing" series newly online on the ottawa poetry newsletter.

some author activity: Clayton, hanna, Unsworth, Claxton + Johnson,

Conyer Clayton recommends five books (including natalie hanna's above/ground press debut) as part of the TPQ5 over at The Poetry Question; Lydia Unsworth has a new essay in the Talking Poetics series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; a portrait of 2020 Governor General's Arts Award-winner Dana Claxton is now online; and Chris Johnson is interviewed in the Six Questions series at the Chaudiere Books blog.

some author activity: Dolman, Eleftherion, Ross, Unsworth + Flemmer,

Anita Dolman is interviewed in the "Six Questions" interview series via Chaudiere Books; Melissa Eleftherion has new work up at Rogue Agent Journal; Stuart Ross is interviewed over at Neon Pajamas; Lydia Unsworth is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Kyle Flemmer is interviewed over at Train : a poetry journal.

some author activity: Caple, mclennan, McCulloch, Robinson, Unsworth + hanna,

Natalee Caple has a new essay in the my (small press) writing day series; Tim Atkins has recent work in Tentacular; rob mclennan has composed a poem for the late Ian McCulloch; forthcoming author Ben Robinson has some new work up at Train : a poetry journal; Lydia Unsworth is interviewed over at talking about strawberries all of the time; and natalie hanna has a poem included in the Poetry Pause series via The League of Canadian Poets (reprinted from Canthius).