above/ground press authors Sarah Mangold and Laura Walker are Saturnalia Books Award Winners!

Congratulations to above/ground press authors Sarah Mangold and Laura Walker, who were announced as two of three 2025 Book Prize winners over at Saturnalia Books! Sarah Mangold's manuscript, In the Service of the Mysteries, was chosen for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize by guest judge Hadara Bar-Nadav, and Laura Walker's manuscript red was chosen by Saturnalia Books' staff as one of two Alma Book Awards (alongside the manuscript Agape by Patrick Kindig; it would be impolite to not mention him as well). You can see their announcement for such, as well as further information on their book prizes, here.

As you most likely already know, Sarah Mangold is the author of five chapbooks with above/ground press, including two editions of Cupcake Royale (2012; second edition, 2018), as well as Parlor (2012), A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (2016) and BIRDS I RECALL (2018). She also had a poem as part of the 25th anniversary above/ground press broadside project, and a festschrift on her work, Report from the Mangold Society, Vol 1. No. 1, appeared through above/ground press in 2022. You can find her 2015 Touch the Donkey interview here. Laura Walker, on her part, is the author of the above/ground press title, genesis (2023). They have both published a bunch of other things you should get your hands on, also, so you should probably get caught up before their new books land. Congrats to all three! I am very excited to see these books appear.

some author activity: Burgoyne, Houbolt, Downs + Mangold,

Kevin Heslop interviewed Sarah Burgoyne for The Miramichi Reader; Kyla Houbolt is interviewed via the Of Poetry Podcast; Buck Downs has a new poem up at HillRag; and Sarah Mangold has new poems up at Ghost Proposal, and is interviewed by Shriram Sivaramakrishnan for Poetry Northwest.

some author activity: Mangold, Saklikar, Hogg + mclennan,

Sarah Mangold has new work up at 128 Lit; Renée Sarojini Saklikar has a poem up in the poetry pause series via The League of Canadian Poets; and Robert Hogg has a poem up at Pamenar Press; and did I mention I now have a substack that focuses on in-progress prose?

new from above/ground press: Report from the Mangold Society. Vol. 1 No. 1

Report from the Mangold Society
Vol 1. No. 1
edited by rob mclennan
$7

an assemblage of writing in response
to the work of Sarah Mangold

including
poems, critical writings
and
philosophical transactions

with contributions by:
Greg Bem
Julia Bloch
Malcolm Curtis
Susana Gardner
Carrie Hunter
Genevieve Kaplan
rob mclennan
Lori Anderson Moseman
Denise Newman
Joanna Piechura
Meredith Stricker
Mark Tardi

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
August 2022
full list of published reports here
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Report on the Society logo by C. McNair, editor’s devil (retired)

Sarah Mangold has published five chapbooks with above/ground press: Cupcake Royale (2012), Parlor (2012), A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (2016), BIRDS I RECALL (2018) and Cupcake Royale (second edition, 2018). She also edited G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] #6 (September 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 robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Mangold, Smith, Clayton, o'brien, Solomon + O'Reilly,

Sarah Mangold has a new poem up on the Chaudiere blog as part of National Poetry Month (who also has a short write-up she did on her most recent title at the Poetry Society of America site), as does Dale Martin Smith, Conyer Clayton, and katie o'brien; Misha Solomon has a new poem up in the Poetry Pause series via The League of Canadian Poets; and Nathanael O'Reilly has new work in The Elevation Review.

some author activity: Mangold, Burgoyne, Cantrell + Aigen,

Sarah Mangold is interviewed at talking about strawberries all of the time; Sarah Burgoyne has a poem in the Poetry Pause series via The League of Canadian Poets; Andrew Cantrell has a new poem in the Tuesday poem series via the dusie blog; and Razielle Aigen has new work up at Terse Journal.

new from above/ground press: G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] #6, edited by Sarah Mangold

NOW AVAILABLE: G U E ST #6

edited by Sarah Mangold

see here for Sarah Mangold’s introduction and biography

the sixth issue features new work by:

Rae Armantrout

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Stefania Heim

Anna Maria Hong

Carrie Hunter

Michael Leong

erica lewis

Melanie Noel

Bronka Nowicka

Meredith Stricker

Katarzyna Szuster

Mark Tardi

Elizabeth Clark Wessel

Angela Veronica Wong

5 + postage / + $1 for Canadian orders; + $2 for US; + $6 outside of North America

Canadian/American/International rates (including shipping

Canadian orders $6.00 CAD American orders $7.00 CAD International orders $11.00 CAD

Author biographies:

Rae Armantrout’s most recent books, Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, Itself, Partly: New and Selected Poems, Entanglements, (a chapbook selection of poems in conversation with physics), and Wobble were published by Wesleyan University Press. Wobble, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award, was selected by Library Journal as one of the seven best poetry books of 2018. In 2010 her book Versed won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, Bomb, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, etc.   She is recently retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. She lives in the Seattle area.

Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She's the author of five books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the SFPA's Elgin Award. Her work appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review and Prairie Schooner. Her web site is www.webbish6.com. Twitter and Instagram: @webbish6.

Stefania Heim is author of the poetry collections HOUR BOOK (Ahsahta Press, 2019) and A Table That Goes On for Miles (Switchback Books, 2014). The recipient of a 2019 NEA Translation Fellowship, her book of translations of metaphysical artist Giorgio de Chirico's Italian poems, Geometry of Shadows, is forthcoming with A Public Space Books. She teaches at Western Washington University.

Anna Maria Hong is the author of the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Age of Glass, winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America’s 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in June 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published work in The Nation, The Iowa Review, Ecotone, amberflora, jubilat, Fence, New Delta Review, Jet Fuel Review, Jacket2, American Book Review, Poetry Daily, The Best American Poetry, and many other publications.

Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, is on the editorial board of Black Radish Books, and edited the chapbook press, ypolita press, for 11 years. She has two books out with Black Radish Books, The Incompossible and Orphan Machines, and has published around 15 chapbooks, the most recent, Series out of Sequence, from above/ground press. Her third full length book, Vibratory Milieu, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2020. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.

Michael Leong teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. His most recent books are Who Unfolded My Origami Brain? (Fence Digital, 2017) and Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018).

erica lewis lives in San Francisco. In addition to mary wants to be a superwoman, her books include the precipice of jupiter, camera obscura (both collaborations with artist Mark Stephen Finein), murmur in the inventory, daryl hall is my boyfriend, and mary wants to be a superwoman. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Melanie Noel is the author of The Monarchs (Stockport Flats, 2013) and a Ringing (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2019). Her poems have also appeared in THERMOS, Weekday, La Norda Especialo, Seattle Review of Books, and The Arcadia Project.

Bronka Nowicka is a Polish theatre and TV director, screenwriter, poet and interdisciplinary artist. She is a graduate of the National Film School in Lodz, Poland, and the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts. Her literary debut, Nakarmic kamien [To Feed the Stone] was awarded the 2016 Nike Literary Award and the Zloty Srodek Poezji Award [“Golden Mean of Poetry”]. In 2017, she was a laureate of the New Voices from Europe project. The English-language debut of To Feed The Stone is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in 2020.

Meredith Stricker is a visual artist and poet working in cross-genre media. She is the author of Our Animal, Omnidawn Open Book Prize; Tenderness Shore which received the National Poetry Series Award; Alphabet Theater, mixed-media performance poetry from Wesleyan University Press; Mistake, Caketrain Chapbook Award and anemochore selected for the Gloria Anzaldúa chapbook prize, Newfound Press. She was short-listed for the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T.S. Eliot Foundation for anemochore. Her work will appear in the 2019 Best American Experimental Writing anthology from Wesleyan. She co-directs visual poetry studio, a collaborative that focuses on architecture in Big Sur, California and projects to bring together artists, writers, musicians and experimental forms. https://www.meredithstricker.com.

Katarzyna Szuster earned her MA in English studies from the University of Lodz, Poland and was a lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages, University of Nizwa in Oman. She has translated various Polish poets into English, such as Miron Białoszewski, Justyna Bargielska, and Bronka Nowicka. Her translations have been published in Aufgabe, Free Over Blood, Moria, Biweekly, Words without Borders, diode, Toad Press and Tripwire. Her translation of Bronka Nowicka’s To Feed The Stone is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in 2020.

Mark Tardi is originally from Chicago and earned his MFA from Brown University. His publications include the books The Circus of Trust, Airport music, and Euclid Shudders. He has guest-curated a selection of contemporary Polish poetry for the international journals Aufgabe and Berlin Quarterly, and recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, The Continental Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Jet Fuel Review, textsound and Tammy. He has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony for the Arts, the Djerassi Foundation, and Brown University. A former Fulbright scholar, he now lives with his family and two dogs in a village in central Poland and is on faculty at the University of Łódź.

Elizabeth Clark Wessel is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, a founding editor at Argos Book, and the translator of numerous novels from the Swedish, including most recently What We Owe by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde. Originally from rural Nebraska, she spent many years living in New York and Connecticut, and these days calls Stockholm, Sweden home. She has translated a chapbook of poems called Seeking an Older, Well-Educated Gentleman by Kristina Lugn that is forthcoming from Bloof in 2019.

Angela Veronica Wong is a writer, artist, and educator living in New York City. She is the author of Elsa: An Unauthorized Autobiography (Black Radish Books, 2017), the full-length How to Survive a Hotel Fire (Coconut Books) and the chapbook Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter, a winner of the Poetry Society of America New York Fellowship. Her poetry has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry (with Amy Lawless) and Please Excuse This Poem.

some author activity: Campos, Cortese, Earl, Mangold, fitzpatrick + Etherin,

forthcoming above/ground press author Isabel Sobral Campos has an essay up at my (small press) writing day; Franco Cortese has new poems and a statement as part of rob mclennan's Spotlight series; Amanda Earl has new work in talking about strawberries all of the time, as do Sarah Mangold and ryan fitzpatrick, where Anthony Etherin is also interviewed.

new from above/ground press: Cupcake Royale (second edition), by Sarah Mangold

Cupcake Royale
second edition
Sarah Mangold
$5
 

tell them she is baking you a cake

a special cake

chocolate with purple icing

the place decorates itself

all white cakes

and showering flowers

one day the language goes

and one day the spatial

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
December 2018
originally published by above/ground press in March 2012
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Sarah Mangold is the author of the poetry collections Household Mechanics (New Issues, selected by C. D. Wright), Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish Books) and Giraffes of Devotion (Kore), as well as many chapbooks. She is the recipient of fellowships and supported residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Willapa Bay AiR and Artist Trust. She founded and edited Bird Dog: a journal of innovative writing and art, which featured longer poems and emerging women poets. She lives and works in Seattle.

This is Mangold’s fifth above/ground press chapbook, after the first edition of Cupcake Royale (2012), as well as Parlor (2012), A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (2016) and BIRDS I RECALL (2018). She also had a poem as part of the recent 25th anniversary above/ground press broadside project.

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

new from above/ground press: BIRDS I RECALL, by Sarah Mangold

BIRDS I RECALL
Sarah Mangold
$5

In the Department of Birds we welcome the possible. Accuracy is more-or-less proposition. Low down and close up. An architect in need of work. During the next five years Mrs. Morrill painted African landscapes never seen. To create a message for the future. To prepare for her coming tasks.

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

Sarah Mangold is the author of the poetry collections Household Mechanics (New Issues, selected by C. D. Wright), Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish Books) and Giraffes of Devotion (Kore), as well as many chapbooks. She is the recipient of fellowships and supported residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Willapa Bay AiR and Artist Trust. She founded and edited Bird Dog: a journal of innovative writing and art, which featured longer poems and emerging women poets. She lives and works in Seattle.

This is Mangold’s fourth above/ground press chapbook, after Cupcake Royale (2012), Parlor (2012) and A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (2016).

[Mangold launches this chapbook in Ottawa as part of the above/ground press 25th anniversary broadside launch event with Gil McElroy and Sandra Ridley on Tuesday, October 30, 2018 as part of the ottawa international writers festival]

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

25th Anniversary of above/ground press at OIWF: w Ridley, McElroy + Mangold

25th Anniversary of above/ground press
with Sandra Ridley, Gil McElroy and Sarah Mangold
Hosted by Stephen Brockwell
as part of the ottawa international writers festival

"The impact of above/ground press has been so great, some authors can’t remember a time without it."
— Apt. 613

Tuesday, October 30, 2018
FREE EVENT
7pm, Christ Church Cathedral • 414 Sparks Street Ottawa

As part of its silver anniversary year, the above/ground press has produced a limited edition set of single-poem broadsides by an array of above/ground press authors.

Curated by publisher/editor rob mclennan and designed by Christine McNair, the series will be launched by Sarah Mangold, Gil McElroy and Sandra Ridley, who will be joined on-stage by rob mclennan for a conversation on the press’s twenty-fifth year. Moderated by Stephen Brockwell.

More details on the broadsides to be announced very soon! Copies will, of course, be available at the event;

See Sandra Ridley's bio here ; Gil McElroy's bio here ; Sarah Mangold's bio here

for further information on the event and the festival, check out the link here

some author activity: Mangold, Ladouceur, beaulieu, Graham + Betts,

Sarah Mangold is featured over at Drunken Boat; Ben Ladouceur has some new work up at The Rusty Toque; derek beaulieu posts his "Most Engaging Books of 2016" list; Lea Graham is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Gregory Betts has a new poem up at h&.

Kimberly Ann Southwick reviews Sarah Mangold's A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (2016)

Kimberly Ann Southwick reviewed three recent chapbooks over at the Ploughshares blog, including Sarah Mangold's A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (above/ground press, 2016), a chapbook still very much available. Thanks so much! This is the second review of Mangold's latest, after Greg Bem reviewed such over at Queen Mob's Teahouse. You can see Southwick's full review here.

In A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (above/ground press, March 2016), Sarah Mangold deals mainly with landscape: clouds, mountains, trees, and how these, though so different from state to state, country to country, render themselves similar in ways that help connect, particularly to each other but also to art, as in “:Originality Is a Working Assumption:” when she writes, “cloud a punctuation / mark torn apart by a miracle: extract saint from common space.” The saint here is birthed by the mark of something common (a cloud) but simultaneously extraordinary (the miracle).

Mangold’s universals are most often found in nature and the idea of it as a system. In “Speak and I shall baptize you,” the poem containing the line that is the chapbook’s title, she writes: “the history of the system is itself a system / rent in human space / liberated from all lawns.” These lines help lead a reader to the understanding that when we look at and try to understand the earth and its creatures—including humans—no matter our expertise, education, or career choice, we can only ever do so from our own present reality.

Greg Bem reviews Sarah Mangold's A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (2016)

Greg Bem reviews four Sarah Mangold titles, including her A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (above/ground press, 2016), a chapbook still very much available, over at Queen Mob's Teahouse. Thanks so much! This is the first review of Mangold's latest, and you can see his full review here.

Within the chapbook in front of you is a realm of logic. This realm provides ifs and subsequently thens. There are statements. There are truths. This sturdy poetics may appear as sturdy poetics, as straightforward, but Mangold’s image craft here is potent and affects bluntness elementally. The image, then, is additive and though the truth and the beauty within often reach excessive heights, an apparently intentional concentration on image is hardly decorative. Mangold’s utilization of the image is a space to channel feeling. Pools of emotions. Laborious. The laboratory. The nearly alchemical in a very subtle but very harmonious (a la sober meets drunk, to use an analogy the book inspired within me as the reader) experimental process of discovery and offerings.

Makes us feel weight of mountains/ / Float of a cloud/ (3)

This is not the medieval experimentation of dragon’s breath and spider’s silk. Mangold provides in this chapbook the hallucinogenic expression of the pastoral. A 21st century nod to a transcendental escape of exploration: clouds and mountains reoccurring. The imagery a phantasmagoria, a sequence of sets of spaces and descriptions. And that which can be seen: how do we see it? Less tension and more conjoining, more bridge, is present in the metalogic Mangold uses as fixative, as binding agent, as lubricant for her condensed collection of works: “There is in it no place for / individuality     Prevalent emotion    progressive tints    horizon” (4).

As a supplement to the grand and the total that can be seen in her other works, this book has its place as an incision, as a compass, as a guide. It offers insights into how Mangold’s work as a poet is combinatory, serialized. Writing as ethereal and whispering as Robin Blaser, to use an example poet whose tones find their own mirrors here, in ways, sets itself out in front of the reader and is gentle, meditative, open to be found, open to be applied. Mangold has provided us with a treasure here. How much it will glisten in the firelight going forward is yet to be seen, known, understood, acknowledged.

Sarah Mangold interviewed at Speaking of Marvels

American poet Sarah Mangold was interviewed over at Speaking of Marvels on her third above/ground press title (which is, of course, still available), A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert (2016).

Sarah Mangold etc at AWP, Los Angeles CA, March 31, 2016

above/ground press author Sarah Mangold reads in Los Angeles, Thursday, March 31, 2016 as part of this year's Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference.

Poetic Research Bureau, 951 Chung King Rd., Los Angeles, CA 90012
7:00 pm to 8:45 pm

Publishers involved: Black Radish, Tinfish, eohippus labs, Staging Ground 
Cost: Free

A reading at the Poetic Research Bureau with: Black Radish Books, Tinfish Press, eohippus labs and Staging Ground, Featuring: Carrie Hunter, Sarah Mangold, Valerie Witte, David James Miller, Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Eireene Nealand, Janice Lee, Michelle Detorie, Allison Carter, Tim Dyke, Deborah Meadows, Julia Wieting, Daniel Tiffany and Will Alexander.

Organization: Small Press Distribution and Poetic Research Bureau

new from above/ground press: A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert, Sarah Mangold

A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert
Sarah Mangold
$4

Frame as if faith

Transient unicorn

emphasize the whiteness

seek from chance

what nature dispenses

operate as indicator

by no means fortuitous

a place comparable

held by draperies 

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2016
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Sarah Mangold is the author of the forthcoming Boxer Rebellion (Kore Press), Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish Books), and Household Mechanics (New Issues), selected by C.D. Wright for the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her most recent chapbooks include The Goddess Can Be Recognized By Her Step (dusie kollektiv) and Parlor (above/ground). She is the recipient of a NEA Poetry Fellowship and lives near Seattle. www.sarahmangold.com

This is her third chapbook with above/ground press, after Parlor (2012) and Cupcake Royale (2012).

Produced, in part, for appearance at the 2016 AWP Conference & Bookfair, Los Angeles Convention Center and JW Marriott Los Angeles CA, March 30-April 2, 2016.

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