some author activity: Carisse, Mohammadi, Logan, Hyland, Moritz + Barwin,

Russell Carisse is featured over at IceFloe Press; Khashayar Mohammadi has new work in the latest issue of the ex-puritan; Nate Logan, MC Hyland and Rachel Moritz have new work up at Concision; and Gary Barwin has donated his chapbook collection (including a whole slew of above/ground press stuff) to McMaster University.

some author activity: Earl, Moritz, Smith + Gunnars,

Amanda Earl has a new poem up at The Steel Chisel; Rachel Moritz is interviewed over at Speaking of Marvels; Pete Smith is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Kristjana Gunnars is interviewed as part of a series of interview with former writers-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

some author activity: Pirie, Robertson, Earl + Moritz,

Pearl Pirie writes on her phafours over at Brick Books' ongoing Celebration of Canadian Poetry, where Christine Stewart also writes on Lisa Robertson; Amanda Earl is interviewed by Volodymyr Bilyk for Zouch Magazine; and Rachel Moritz is running "The Poem As Time Machine" as part of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival from July 9-10, 2016.

some author activity: Moritz, mclennan, McElroy, hastain, Pirie + Stewart,

Rachel Moritz is interviewed over at the website for the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation; rob mclennan's short 'commentary' on Gil McElroy is now up at Jacket2; a new interview with j/j hastain is now up at Touch the Donkey; Pearl Pirie answers the "Canadian Poetries Questionnaire"; and Christine Stewart has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog.

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: Schapira, Earl, Abel, Dyckman + Moritz,

Kate Schapira has a new poem posted as part of the dusie "Tuesday poem" series; Amanda Earl's "when love blooms, a visual poetry suite for Tom & Charles" is now online at Creative Thresholds; a short article on Jordan Abel appears at The Source; Susanne Dyckman has a new poem, "Hearing Loss," posted at the Kelsey Street Press Blog; and there's an audio interview with Rachel Moritz on her above/ground press chapbook over at New Books in Poetry.

some author activity: Reed, mclennan, Moritz, Quartermain + Hall,

Marthe Reed's "Drawing Louisiana" essay is posted as part of the "On Writing" series on the ottawa poetry newsletter; rob mclennan has two new poems up at Konundrum Engine Literary Review; Rachel Moritz has some new poems up at La Vague Journal; Meredith Quartermain has a new piece up as part of the "Tuesday poem" at the dusie blog; and Phil Hall had a poem on Forget Magazine for Canada Day.

new from above/ground press: Many forms in water, by Rachel Moritz

Many forms in water
Rachel Moritz
$4

Many forms in water may also be found in clouds


In the turning season, your one clay divided from hers. Like swans, riding a tourniquet of wind. Winter’s aureole, cleft before a fallen oak whose breath is your only explanation. Whose path yields the cabin doorway, hard of hand on burnished leaves. And whose water gathers from the pump, the dark maker. Glued to a world your senses decided, as when millions of years earlier the silence of nature broke.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
June 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Rachel Moritz is the author of three chapbooks: Elementary Rituals (Albion Books, 2013) Night-Sea (New Michigan Press, 2008) and The Winchester Monologues (New Michigan Press, 2005). Her poems have been published in American Letters and Commentary, Aufgabe, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, 26, TYPO, dusie and VOLT. She lives in Minneapolis, where she edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review and publishes a chaplet series from WinteRed Press.

She also has work in the first issue of Touch the Donkey.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com