some author activity: Mangold, Carr, Hall, Dennis, Robertson + O'Connor,

Sarah Mangold has a new poem up in the Tuesday poem series at dusie; Emily Carr wraps up her OSU-Cascades residency with a final blog post, "Back From The Woods!"; Phil Hall has a new poem up on Susan Gillis' Concrete & River blog, as well as a short interview; Amy Dennis has new work in the sixth issue of Amanda Earl's experiment-o; Lisa Robertson responds to Rachel Levitsky's The Story of My Accident Is Ours over at Futurepost; and Wanda O'Connor has a new poem in the The Puritan: Issue XXIII.

Ryan Pratt reviews Marcus McCann's Labradoodle, An Essay on David McGimpsey (2013) and rob mclennan and Christine McNair's The Laurentian Book of Movement (2013)

Our pal Ryan Pratt was good enough to review Marcus McCann's Labradoodle, An Essay on David McGimpsey (2013) and rob mclennan and Christine McNair's The Laurentian Book of Movement (2013) over at the ottawa poetry newsletter. Thanks, Ryan! This is the second review for The Laurentian Book of Movement, after Pearl Pirie's write-up here. Both chapbooks are still very much available.

"poem" broadside #322: The Key of N, by rob mclennan

Dividends, bewildered powers. Stretch-marks, nursery. Secondary heart-beat. Listen: blood pools, pulse, the powdered structure. Spilling forth. Grammatic, slowness. Slowness of the ground, the passage, seasons’ fall. Belonging to. Fragments, disappear. The sun sometimes divides, a music. Pressure points. Take pleasure in, a run-on, run-off. Sentenced. Is the theme of voice. Montage, a vessel. What, you hold her. Listen, pulse. Attention, all. As if to recognize.

The Key of N
from Glossary of Musical Terms
by rob mclennan
above/ground press broadside #322
produced as above/ground press’
700th publication, October 2013

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the forthcoming notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014) and The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), as well as the poetry collection Songs for little sleep, (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

some author activity: Earl, Brockwell, Pirie, Reid, Ladouceur + Prevost,

Ottawa videographer Liana Vioa conducts a comprehensive interview with poet, editor and blogger Amanda Earl on, as she says, "my poetry, her VERSeOttawa Hall of Honours, my erotica, death & the colour grey"; an interview with Stephen Brockwell, conducted by Pearl Pirie on CKCU's Literary Landscapes, is now online as well; Pearl Pirie discusses Garden: November Unit (Sidereal Press, 2013), the most recent (published) installment of Monty Reid's "garden" series over at her blog (above/ground press produced the September unit back in 2011); the poem "Gran Vals" by Ben Ladouceur wins the Earle Birney Poetry Prize, hosted by PRISM International; and Roland Prevost has a new essay posted on the ottawa poetry newsletter blog as part of the ongoing "On Writing" series.

The Reading Series Presents Amanda Earl, Wednesday, November 27, 2013

above/ground press author and AngelHousePress (as well as Bywords.ca) editor/publisher Amanda Earl [to be inducted into the 2014 VERSeFest Hall of Honour] (photo credit: Charles Earl) reads this month as the feature at The Reading Series (the reading series of In/Words), hosted by Chris Johnson. Earl has published a small handful of chapbooks, including three with above/ground press: E l e a n o r (2007), The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (2008), and Sex First & Then A Sandwich (2012), all of which are possibly (most likely) still available. She may even have a new small item for this reading as well (sometimes she produces small publications for readings).

The Reading Series Presents: Amanda Earl
Wednesday, November 27 at 9:00pm
Clock Tower Brew Pub (basement), 575 Bank Street, Ottawa, Ontario

See the facebook event here:

Joseph LaBine reviews Brecken Hancock's The Art of Plumbing (2013), Rae Armantrout's Rituals (2013) and Carrie Olivia Adams' An Overture in the Key of F (2013)

Our pal Joseph LaBine reviews Brecken Hancock's The Art of Plumbing (2013), Rae Armantrout's Rituals (2013) and Carrie Olivia Adams' An Overture in the Key of F (2013) over at the Flat Singles Press blog. Thanks, Joseph! This is actually the fourth review of Brecken's chapbook, after recent reviews by JM Francheteau (here), Michael Dennis (here) and Ryan Pratt (here). All three chapbooks are very available.

book launch! Ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013

Produced to begin the re-launch of Ottawa literary publisher Chaudiere Books, co-publishers rob mclennan and Christine McNair invite you to the launch of Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013.

Co-sponsored by our friends at the Ottawa International Writers Festival and The Manx Pub, the event will feature readings by three of the book’s contributors: Sharon Harris (Toronto), Marilyn Irwin (Ottawa) and Stephen Brockwell (Ottawa). The event will be (lovingly) hosted by Chaudiere Books co-founder, editor and co-publisher rob mclennan.

5pm, Saturday, December 7, 2013

The Manx Pub

370 Elgin Street, Ottawa

Sharon Harris is a Toronto artist/writer whose poems have been anthologized in The Broadview Introduction to Literature, The Last Vispo, and Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. She is the author of chapbooks from bookthug, In Case of Emergency Press, and above/ground, and her first full-length collection, Avatar, was published by The Mercury Press. She has written articles for Geist, The Globe & Mail, and Open Book Toronto;  is a past contributor to Torontoist and Word Magazine; and her work has been published in The National Post, dANDelion, The Capilano Review, Drunken Boat, The Volta, broken pencil, and Vallum. I Love You Toronto, her exhibition of photographs, appeared in newspapers, magazines, and on radio and television across Canada.

Marilyn Irwin’s work has been published by above/ground press, Arc, Bywords, and New American Writing. A graduate of Algonquin College’s Creative Writing program, she has three chapbooks: for when you pick daisies (2010), flicker (2012), and little nothings (2012). She won Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize this year.

Stephen Brockwell cut his writing teeth in the eighties in Montreal, appearing on French and English CBC Radio and in the anthologies Cross/cut: Contemporary English Quebec Poetry and The Insecurity of Art (both VéhiculePress, 1982). George Woodcock described Brockwell's first book, The Wire in Fences (Balmuir, 1987) as having an extraordinary range of empathies and perceptions. Harold Bloom wrote that Brockwell's second book, Cometology (ECW Press, 2001), held rare and authentic promise. Fruitfly Geographic won the Archibald Lampman award for best book of poetry in Ottawa in 2005. His Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books is newly out from Mansfield Press. Brockwell currently operates a small IT consulting company from the 7th floor of the Chateau Laurier and lives in a house perpetually under construction.

Working out of Ottawa, poet and publisher rob mclennan’s baby, above/ground press, marks a second decade of the production of broadsheets, chapbooks, magazines, and anthologies that trace out the best shapes of the best of contemporary Canadian (and, increasingly, international) poetry. From the span of that second ten of years, he has compiled this book of traceries: a selection of work by writers ranging from the likes of the late Artie Gold, and Robert Kroetsch, to the living derek beaulieu, Rachel Zolf, Eric Folsom, Natalie Simpson, etc., all collected here as representative of a decade’s aesthetic count.

                        from Gil McElroy’s “Introduction: An Integral”

Edited by rob mclennan, with an introduction by Gil McElroy, Ground Rules features writing from the second decade of one of the most active micro publishers in Canada, selected from a series of hundreds of publications lovingly edited, produced and distributed by editor/publisher rob mclennan. A follow-up to Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Ground Rules includes a wide range of work by Artie Gold, Mark Cochrane, Suzanne Zelazo, derek beaulieu, Stephanie Bolster, Amanda Earl, Nathanaël, Lisa Samuels, Rachel Zolf, Sharon Harris, D. G. Jones, Julia Williams, Eric Folsom, Gregory Betts, Natalie Simpson, Aaron Tucker, Monty Reid, William Hawkins, Emily Carr, Cameron Anstee, Helen Hajnoczky, Marilyn Irwin, Stephen Brockwell, Robert Kroetsch and rob mclennan.

Copies of the book will be available at the event. See the OIWF link to the event here.