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
Showing posts with label The Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Show all posts
As it all winds down. Do you remember where you were? Here we are,
already, on the final day of this stretch of virtual readings as an adjunct to
this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual Conference and Bookfair. There are lots of other upcoming schemes, by the way, to help
celebrate above/ground press’ thirtieth year. You’ll hear about them
soon enough. After today, I think you’ve earned a few days off, yes? Well,
before Ottawa’s VERSeFest begins next week, obviously.
Zane Kossis a poet, translator, teacher, and scholar from
the East Kootenays, currently living in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of Harbour
Grids (Invisible, 2022) and co-translator of Commonplace by Hugo
García Manríquez (Cardboard House, 2022), along with several poetry chapbooks,
most recently Kitchen Table (Model, 2023).
Robert van Vliet is a poet and teacher who lives in St Paul,
Minnesota. His above/ground chapbook is This Folded Path (2023), and his
first book will be published by Unsolicited Press in 2024.
Mother of many, master of none, Joanne Arnott is a writer,
editor, arts activist on the west coast. Reading a selection from A Night
for the Lady (Ronsdale) and pandemic friendship (above/ground
press). She’s published ten poetry books/chapbooks, among other titles, and
edited a dozen volumes by others. Poetry Mentor (The Writers Studio), Poetry
Editor (EVENT Magazine), and Shadbolt Fellow (2021-2).
Furthering this week’s thread as part of the above/ground press
thirtieth anniversary as an adjunct to this year’s Association of
Writers and Writing Programs annual Conference and Bookfair, today’s
penultimate post wonders if anyone is even catching these? I hear these events are
pretty exciting, albeit expensive. Is everyone at home simply pretending that
none of this exists? It’s nearly spring, you know. Isn’t my birthday coming up
as well?
Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of
poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent volume of fiction, Silence,
is forthcoming from Sweden’s Timglaset Books, his most recent volume of poetry,
Surface Tension, was published by Toronto’s Coach House Books. Beaulieu
has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to
students, the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for this dedication to
literature, and is the only graduate from the University of Calgary’s
Department of English to receive the Faculty of Arts ‘Celebrated Alumni Award.’
Beaulieu holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University, is Banff’s
Poet Laureate, and the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and
Creativity.
Nathanael O’Reilly is an Irish-Australian poet; he teaches creative
writing at The University of Texas at Arlington. His nine collections include Selected
Poems of Ned Kelly (Beir Bua Press, 2023), Boulevard (Beir Bua
Press, 2021), (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), BLUE
(above/ground press, 2020) and Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017).
His poetry appears in over one hundred journals and anthologies published in
fourteen countries, including Another Chicago Magazine, Anthropocene,
Cordite, The Elevation Review, Identity Theory, The
Madrigal, New World Writing Quarterly, Trasna, Westerly
and Wisconsin Review. He is the poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global
Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.
Emily Izsak lives and writes in Toronto, ON. Her poetry tends
to combine surreal imagery, linguistic play, and formal experimentation. Her
work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Puritan, House
Organ, Cough, The Steel Chisel, The Doris, and CV2.
In 2014 she was selected as PEN Canada’s New Voices Award nominee. Her first
full-length collection, Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem, was
published by Signature Editions in April 2017. She has published two chapbooks
with above/ground press: Twenty-five and Never Have I Ever.
Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books
Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times,
The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She has received support
from organizations such as Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the
San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she
grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed
her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She has been translating her late mother’s memoirs
of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S. and is working
on more essays and poems in conversation with this work.
“Note: Focal Point came out in October 2021, but Jenny is
aggressively bad at making videos (in her own words) and sent this one from
earlier that year.”
Pete
Smith.
Born in the English Midlands, then moved to Kamloops in 1974. Spent a working
life supporting folk with intellectual plus psychiatric disability to find a
place in the world and trying to help the rest of the world see the person in
each of them – a task each generation must take up anew. Poetry published in a
dozen chapbooks (above/ground, Oystercatcher, Wild Honey, Poetical Histories,
and other fine presses), sundry magazines, and Bindings with Discords, 2015,
fromShearsman. Reviews and essays on writers such as Alice
Notley, Lisa Robertson, Lissa Wolsak, W D Snodgass, Keston Sutherland, Sharon
Thesen, Barry MacSweeney, Trevor Joyce, John James can be found in such places
as Agenda, TheGig, Crayon, Capilano Review,
The Salt Companion to John James.Recently preoccupied with translating Osip Mandelstam’s poems from the
winter of 1933-34: some published in Snow 9 and 10. First of a series
called Translation Suites appeared in Guest No. 23, edited by David
Dowker.
Furthering this week’s thread as part of the above/ground press
thirtieth anniversary as an adjunct to this year’s Association of
Writers and Writing Programs annual Conference and Bookfair, one might
begin to ask: just how offsite is offsite? What does it mean, exactly? One
suspects that, in the end, we might discover that the true meaning of #AWP was
actually inside of us this whole time.
Lillian Nećakov is the
author many chapbooks, including The Lake
Contains and Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol
Chapbook Award), as well as the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial
Award), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn).
Her new book, Midnight Glossolalia, a
collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag was
published in February, 2023 (Meat for Tea Press). Her other new book, duck eats yeast, quacks, explodes; man loses
eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin is forthcoming in May 2023 from
Guernica Editions.She
has also published in many print and online journals in Canada and the U.S.
Lillian lives in Toronto.
Amish Trivedi is the author of three books, most recently FuturePanic
(Co•Im•Press). He has poems in American Poetry Review, Bennington
Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. He has an MFA from Brown, a
Ph.D. from Illinois State, and is a Post Doctoral Researcher at the University
of Delaware.
Jason Christie lives and writes in Ottawa. He is the author of Canada
Post (Invisible), i-ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract), Unknown Actor
(Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). His most recent chapbooks
are: Glass Language Untitled Exaltation (excerpt) (above/ground) and Heavy
Metal Litany (Model press). He is looking for a home for a new manuscript
of poetry he wrote with the help of several Python scripts.
Laura Kelsey is a poet and performer living in Nanaimo, B.C.,
which is on Snuneymuxw First Nations Territory. Her poems have appeared in
publications including the New Chief Tongue, the Carnegie Newsletter,
Stone Pacific Zine and Sea & Cedar Magazine; and her debut
chapbook west coast shorts was published by above/ground press in May
2022. Her four-song debut EP Hunting Season is out April 29.
Angela Rebrec lives and works on the unceeded, ancestral lands
of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, scəw̓aθən, Stó:lō, and qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ peoples. Her most recent
writing has appeared in Vallum, Prairie Fire, GRAIN, The
Dalhousie Review, as well as the anthology Voicing Suicide (Ekstasis
Editions, 2020). Angela’s poetry films have been
recognized at the Barcelona International Film Festival, FilmmakerLife Awards,
and Santa Barbara International Shortfest, among others. Her 2020 collaboration
with composer Mickie Wadsworth for ART SONG LAB has been included in
NewMusicShelf’s Anthology of New Music for Trans & Nonbinary Voices,
vol.1. Angela is active in her community supporting the arts by
facilitating writing and expressive arts workshops for kids and adults of all
age. She is the founding and current president of the Delta Literary Arts
Society (DLAS).
Furthering yesterday’s post, 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. I mean, offsite
means offsite, right?
Jessi MacEachern (she/her) is the author of the poetry collection A
Number of Stunning Attacks, as well as the chapbooks Television Poems,
You Do Not Like Animal Sounds, and Ravishing the Sex into the Hold.
Her new chapbook When a Folk, When a Sprawl is forthcoming with above/ground
press in 2023 and her new poetry collection Cut Side Down is forthcoming
with Invisible in 2025. She is the 2022–24 reviewer of Poetics for Oxford
University Press’s This Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and is
currently working as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at
Bishop’s University.
Jason Heroux was the Poet Laureate for the City of Kingston
from 2019 to 2022. He is the author of four books of poetry: Memoirs of an
Alias (2004); Emergency Hallelujah (2008); Natural Capital (2012)
and Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines (2016). His recent books include
a short fiction collection Survivors of the Hive (Radiant Press) and two
poetry chapbooks: New and Selected Days (Origami Poems Project) and Something
or Other (above/ground press).
William Vallières is a Montreal poet. His work has appeared in The
Walrus, Best Canadian Poetry, Grain, and Event, among
other places. His chapbook Poor Rutebeuf, a translation of the French
medieval poet Rutebeuf, just appeared through above/ground press. His first
book of poems, Versus, is out with Véhicule Press.
Lindsey Webb is the author of the chapbooks House (Ghost
Proposal, 2020) and Perfumer’s Organ (above/ground press, 2023). Her
writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat,
and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is
a Steffensen Cannon fellow in the PhD program in Literature and Creative
Writing at the University of Utah.
Julia Drescher is the author of OPEN EPIC (Delete Press,
2017). Her above/ground chapbooks are BLATTA & Metastatic Flower
(2020). She lives in Colorado.
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
As of now, I can’t confirm that, and I have
no reason to. Which confirmation was in?
Whichout was confirmed? Whose
Catholic confirmation was destroyed by the band? Who confirmed that Catholicism
as cultural? Whose cultural was it? What confirmations did the city reveal?
What part of the city confirmed? Who reasoned why not? Who reasoned why? Who
did not reason? Who clarified the city’s confirmations? Whose confirmations
were clarified? Who had no reasons? Whose reasons had none? What no were the
confirms in?Who knew that? Who
confirmed the circuitry? Whose street hadn’t been confirmed to be plowed? What
plow was confirmed? Who confirmed the plows? Which san men confirmed the snow?
What snow confirmed the san man? Who said they have no reasons? Who said they
have no confirmations? What city said we failed? What failure equaled what
city? Who confirmed the lonely girl in South Detroit? Who confirmed the
midnight train?Who asked if you were
talking to me?Who said the fall out, I
don’t know what it will be? Whose surface went under? What surface went where?
Whose surface was which? Who confirmed the surface? Tell me again, under what
surface.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press March 2018 celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
In Under the Surface, Stephanie Gray's newest chapbook, the author plays (tears apart? dissects? deconstructs? sic) with the seemingly innocuous phrase "under the surface". In her poetic exploration of this phrase and others, Gray opens up what we think we see and know. Everyday occurrences sift through the minutiae of those momentary philosophical thoughts we have while gliding through our days. What makes us so sure we know what we know? Mostly in prose poems, the works incur a sort of internal rhythm that marches through the density, like the best air-conditioners when you are tired of the noise, but when you hear it long enough, you start to hear the music in the fuzz, despite your best efforts to shut it off.
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
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
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
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
