Showing posts with label Tom Jenks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Jenks. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

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.

Sunday, May 18, 2025

above/ground press zoom launch! Tierney, Quartermain, Houglum, Doller + Jenks, May 28 2025

Check out the above/ground press ZOOM launch we’re doing on Wednesday, May 28, 7pm EDT, with myself reading alongside:
Orchid Tierney (OH)
Meredith Quartermain (BC)
Brook Houglum (BC)
Sandra Doller (NY)
and
Tom Jenks (UK)
, all of whom have recent above/ground press titles. Join via the link, here.


Author biographies:

Orchid Tierney
is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her collections include this abattoir is a college (Calamari Archive, 2025) and a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System 2019). She is the author of several chapbooks including looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023), my beatrice (Ottawa: above/ground, 2020), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX, 2019), and blue doors (Belladonna* Press, 2018). Tierney is the coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, and her scholarship has appeared in SubStance, Jacket2, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry, Teaching the Literature of Climate Change, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900. She is a senior editor at The Kenyon Review.

She is launching her second above/ground press title, pedagogies for the planthroposcene (May 2025), following my beatrice (2020)

Brook Houglum published the chapbook Anthronoise with above/ground press in 2024. She teaches at Capilano University and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia on unceded Skwxwú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ lands.

She is launching her second above/ground press title, INVENTORY (April 2025)

Meredith Quartermain’s most recent book is Lullabies in the Real World (shortlisted for an Alberta Book Publishers’ award). Vancouver Walking won a BC Book Award for Poetry, and Nightmarker was a finalist for a Vancouver Book Award. She is also the author of two novels and two books of short fiction: Recipes from the Red Planet (BC fiction award finalist) and I, Bartleby. From 2014-2016, she served as Poetry Mentor in the SFU Writer’s Studio program. Her work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Prism International, The Dalhousie Review, Event Magazine, The Capilano Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, and many other magazines.

She is launching Things Musing (April 2025), her fourth publication but first chapbook through above/ground press, following the broadsides “December 4” (#168, April 2003) and “Geography” (#225, 2005), and “Highway 99,” produced as issue #35 of STANZAS magazine (October 2003)

Tom Jenks is a writer and text artist living in Manchester, UK. His books include The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions), Melamine (The Red Ceilings Press) and Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs (Penteract Press), a pangrammatical novel with Catherine Vidler. He edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects. More at https://tomjenks.uk/

He is launching his above/ground press debut, Chimneys (May 2025)

Sandra Doller is the author of several books of poetry, prose, translation, and the in-between from the most valiant and precarious small presses—Les Figues, Ahsahta, Subito, and Sidebrow Books. Her newest book, Not Now Now, is forthcoming from Rescue Press. Doller is the founder of an international literary arts journal and independent press, 1913 a journal of forms/1913 Press, where she remains éditrice-in-chief, publishing poetry, poetics, prose, and all else by emerging and established writers. She lives in the USA, for now.

She is launching her above/ground press debut, I’ll try this hour (March 2025)

Thursday, May 8, 2025

new from above/ground press: Chimneys, by Tom Jenks

Chimneys
Tom Jenks
$5

syrup

“I have built a complete and immaculate world”, sighed the Baron, resting a white gloved hand on the green baize table; “but I do not have the time to inhabit it.” Plum trees in jars, marzipan churches, mountains dusted with the rarest of sugars. No, dear Baron, we must remain in this imperfect version, with its leaning trees and crooked rivers, its damp parks and rickety iron bridges. Dogs roam the lanes and find their way into houses. They sit at the table and help themselves to porridge with spoonful after spoonful of dense golden syrup.

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

Tom Jenks
is a writer and text artist living in Manchester, UK. His books include The Philosopher (Sublunary Editions), Melamine (The Red Ceilings Press) and Pack My Box with Five Dozen Liquor Jugs (Penteract Press), a pangrammatical novel with Catherine Vidler. He edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects. More at https://tomjenks.uk/

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