founded July 1993 : CELEBRATING THIRTY-PLUS YEARS OF CONTINUOUS ACTIVITY + MORE THAN 1400 PUBLICATIONS TO DATE! Ottawa-based poetry chapbook + broadside publisher; publisher of The Peter F. Yacht Club (a writer's group magazine) + Touch the Donkey (a small poetry magazine) + G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] + periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, as well as home of The Factory Reading Series (founded January 1993); edited/published/curated by rob mclennan
Speech Difficulty When I think of you, I think of me–– how clumsily my absence snogs your presence, how a pillar of salt squirms where my tongue used to be, how a bespoke dictionary abruptly replaces itself on your shelf, as the room undresses unfit mirrors revealing the wake a moon who yields its time and fucks off into the hollering cloud beds we crafted upon the rust of golems.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press October 2025 a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Moral: MLA Chernoff (@sickass_sicko) is a slick, sick, and sappy writer based out of Toronto. Their debut poetry collection, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in 2021 to very little acclaim. Oh well! They are the author of seven poetry chapbooks, including TERSE THIRSTY, I'M LIKE THE GREAT GRANDCHILD OF MARX & COCA-COLA (BUT NON-BINEY), and ESTRO FLUNKY. Get it through your thick and juicy skull: they will never stop. MLA’s work has been featured in numerous journals, such as PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan, and Peach Mag. Their poetry was longlisted for the 2024 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. MLA has won no awards, but not for lack of trying. Oh well! Get in touch at mlachernoff.com.
Sincerely and with kind regards, Your humble and obedient servant,
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
In case you’re new to MLA Chernoff, they’re a Toronto-based poet, performance artist, meme enthusiast and recovering academic. Their debut full-length poetry collection, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in 2021. MLA is also the author of several chapbooks, including delet this (Bad Books, 2018), TERSE THIRSTY (Gap Riot Press, 2019), I'M LIKE THE GREAT GRANDCHILD OF MARX & COCA-COLA (BUT NON-BINEY) (845 Press, 2022) and ESTRO FLUNKY (above/ground press, 2023).
I completely loved [SQUELCH PROCEDURES] and was delighted to read ESTRO FLUNKY.
I delight in the workings of MLA Chernoff’s wondrous mind as they deftly juggle words, images, emotions, sights and sounds.
Sharply insightful, citrus and crackling, ESTRO FLUNKY is a reader’s delight. Political, sexual, life-affirming, life-analyzing, brilliantly insightful and incredibly, unfathomably clever, ESTRO FLUNKY’s “pomes” are woven with the minutiae of life’s tragedies and the overwhelming challenges of life:
“Seasonal Repressive”
Because feelings are H=A=R=D and all games inevitably stop short.
Or from “Soyjacking”
Lusting prosaic, actually: if anything. If things must be hushed to the extreme, this is a tomato timer, a political fiction, a fear of the self, keying futurity, slashing its tires.
A collection I will repeatedly return to, to plumb the depths of MLA Chernoff’s most wondrous mind.
Alright, fuck. You got me. I’m tired, I don’t have enough Vitamin D to project my verse. I’m much more inclined to projectile vomit into otherworldly girths. No methodology can alchemize my moors out from these got dang obscurantist stores. You know why? Because feelings are H=A=R=D and all games inevitably stop short.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press October 2023 as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
MLA Chernoff (@estroflunky) is a writer and recovering academic. Their debut full-length poetry collection, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in 2021. MLA is also the author of several chapbooks, including delet this (Bad Books, 2018), TERSE THIRSTY (Gap Riot Press, 2019), and I'M LIKE THE GREAT GRANDCHILD OF MARX & COCA-COLA (BUT NON-BINEY) (845 Press, 2022). They worked really hard on their website – mlachernoff.com – so please go and check it out right now, right this second. Thanks! Stay safe and keep masking xo xo
This is Chernoff’s second above/ground press title, after SCRIED FUNDAMENTS (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
As part of the above/ground press thirtieth anniversary, I
thought it would be both interesting and amusing to host a virtual (and
unaffiliated) offsite reding as part of this year’s Association of Writers
and Writing Programs annual Conference and Bookfair. While I’ve never
actually attended myself (being unaffiliated with any organization that might
assist with funds to attend such a thing), it does seem like a pretty cool
destination. An Ottawa one would be cool; should they just host an Ottawa one? Until
then, I suppose, something like this might have to suffice.
US poet Terri Witek (terriwitek.com) and Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco
Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) have collaborated since 2005--their works together
include museum and gallery shows, performance and site-specific projects
featured internationally in New York, Seoul, Miami, Crete, Manchester, Lisbon,
Rio de Janeiro, and Valencia. Witek holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative
Writing at Stetson University in Florida, and Lopes is an art professor at CUNY
John Jay in New York City. Together they teach Poetry in the Expanded Field in
Stetson’s low-residency MFA of the Americas. Their collaborative projects are
represented by the liminal (Valencia Spain).
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana
kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s
Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent
poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He
has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre
tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one
book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018).
He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles
that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimeson Instagram, both at @lethejerome.
Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent
publication is Without Form from The Blasted Tree and knife | fork |
book. The Book of Benjamin is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in the
fall of 2023. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional
territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas.
You can find him online at benrobinson.work.
Melanie Dennis Unrau is a poet of mixed European ancestry living on
Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg. A Research Affiliate and Visiting Fellow at the
University of Manitoba, also a sessional instructor at the University of
Winnipeg, Melanie studies oil poetry and the poetics of just transition. She is
the author of the poetry collection Happiness Threads (Muses’ Company,
2013) and the poetry chapbook The Goose (above/ground, 2023), a
co-editor of Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat (Palgrave,
2014), and a former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine.
Her forthcoming book “The Rough Poets: Petropoetics and the Tradition of
Canadian Oil-Worker Poetry” is on contract with McGill-Queen's University
Press. She is working on a poetry collection, “The Goose,” a literary-critical
reading of “father of the tar sands” S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails. She
recently co-edited a forthcoming issue of Canadian Literature journal on
“Poetics and Extraction.” Melanie was a long-time participant in the Artist
Mothers’ Collective at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art in Winnipeg; she loves
collaborating with visual artists and poets. This reading was first prepared
for the Late Winter Writers Online Residency at the Banff Centre in February
2023.
MLA Chernoff is a poet, performance artist, meme enthusiast,
and recovering academic. Their debut full-length poetry collection, [SQUELCH
PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in Fall 2021. MLA is also
the author of several chapbooks, including delet this, TERSE THIRSTY,
SCRIED FUNDAMENTS, and I'M LIKE THE GREAT GRANDCHILD OF MARX &
COCA-COLA (BUT NON-BINEY). They hope you are having a real nice day xo xo
The poems in this collection defy conclusive interpretation, but they appear to record a reality that’s now very familiar to most of us: life in lockdown, trapped at home, adrift in thought.
As the “SCRIED” of the title suggests (future-telling via reflective surface), we get a distorted view of this narrative. It’s bent by the crystal ball we’re peering into as much as by the off-kilter discourse of the person who’s speaking. There are enough instances of “our,” “we” and allusions to sex in these poems to suggest that someone is there with Chernoff (assuming Chernoff is the speaking “I”), though we don’t hear from or about this other — only of their shared role in these circumstances.
Chernoff’s mood is somehow both manic and dour, sometimes feverish: “six long months of constant clickery… Every day rides the mucus of a snail… every night is Friday night and Monday / morning put together, burnt out and without end.” Compound words are regularly invented (“hornyscared,” “givingspread”) and a complex vocabulary is employed — you’ll find plenty of obscure terms to look up. A lone snippet of text is repeated here, in the first poem and the last: “I gotta make a decision / leave tonight or live and die this way.” It’s the plainest bit of speech Chernoff uses — a recurring moment of lucidity that never resolves.
SCRIED FUNDAMENTS is attention-grabbing, clever and regularly baffling. It’s sometimes recognizable and sometimes foreign, and though it often seems impossible to decipher, there’s never a dull moment.
I’ve got a fast car. Am I qualified or is this the essence of comedy, desire, plutonium? Perhaps a predilection for losslessness and knee-scraped cataracts lugging askance at a mirror going wah-wah. Because we are on time today, we thumb suckers are puckering in such lonesome and discursive light. I will start by melting down a pome which, in actual fact, has no relation to what I am about to say.
To the face of our ticked-back clock hack, let it be noted–– as far as the fundamentals of lockdown are concerned, look to your nausea, smell it through the floor of your mouth and sneer at the way your teeth are cut and let them drape themselves along the flits and wrists of your jaw’s little superhighway: clockwork every hour on the hour, chomping jaunty qualms about the platonic fun our small weather enjoys with dear old romance: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel, luv, said 1.2 trillion Lex-lulls in respirate reflections–– well-pardoned flexes and reveries of messes so global, so hexed, so quirked up and blessed.
∞
published in Ottawa by above/ground press March 2022 a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
MLA Chernoff (they/them/@squelch_bb) is a non-binary Jewish pome [sic] machine and a perpetual PhD candidate at The Neoliberal University of York University. They are the author of [SQUELCH PROCEDURES] (Gordon Hill Press, 2021), delet this (Bad Books, 2018), TERSE THIRSTY (Gap Riot Press, 2019), and executive dysfunction (nOIR:Z, 2021). They live, laugh, and love in Tkaronto (Treaty 13 territory).
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
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