above/ground press at the ottawa small press book fair!

We will once again be participating in the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which will be held on Saturday, November 8, 2014 at the Jack Purcell Community Centre with plenty of items we haven't even told you about yet! (why miss out? subscribe!) Also, our own Jennifer Baker will be launching her chapbook, Abject Lessons (2014), as part of The Factory Reading Series' pre-fair event on the evening of November 7th!

some author activity: mclennan, Anstee, Simpson, Earl + Christie,

rob mclennan participates in the "Blog Hop" self-interview; Cameron Anstee and Rachael Simpson, along with Jeff Blackman, Justin Million and jesslyn delia smith, are interviewed over at Open Book: Ontario on their "An Accords of Poets" tour; Amanda Earl responds to Susan M. Toy's book-meme questions over at Reading Recommendations; and Jason Christie has an essay in the "On Writing" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter.

Ryan Pratt reviews Megan Kaminski's Wintering Prairie (2014)

Ryan Pratt was good enough to review Megan Kaminski's Wintering Prairie (2014) over at the ottawa poetry newsletter. Thanks, Ryan!

some author activity: Dyckman, beaulieu, Betts + Armantrout,

Audio of Susanne Dyckman--along with Joseph Noble, Tiff Dresden, Todd Melicker and Steven Seidenberg, among others--reading as part of the memorial for the late Colleen Lookingbill that occurred in May, 2014 in California is now online; derek beaulieu has visual poems featured on digital billboards around Calgary; Gregory Betts receives the Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence over at Brock University for a variety of projects on and around bpNichol; and PoemTalk #81, in which Rae Armantrout, Laynie Browne, Kerry Sherin Wright and Al Filreis discuss two short poems by Fanny Howe is now online at Jacket2.

new from above/ground press: Abject Lessons, by Jennifer Baker

Abject Lessons
Jennifer Baker
$4

Pilgrim

I

barn swallow barrel rolls

and phonemic slippages

chase cloud-shadow yokelisms

back to the bush

II

until I was 15

I believed a crick was different

from a creek

stretched thinner

scraping itself under roads

through aluminum tunnels

populated with turtles

a crick snapped

III

olfactory archeology

of sawdust, oil and earth

reveals a sitting-room with wood panelling

and that John Wayne clock

his legs tick-tocking

Whaddayasay Pilgrim

IV

the ghost I never met, but imagined

wading among the bones of drowned horses

down by the crick

is missing half his face

he reaches out to me

through his brother's ruined life

& my mother's anxious vigilance

he once followed me to Montreal

and came back to life

he still grips me by the diaphragm

and mocks my unshakeable belief

that I can be ready for anything 

V

since 10^th grade

Del Jordan has been whispering in my ear

forget the lurking idyll

it all comes out gothic

no unicorns but horse bones

swallowed by the quick sand

at the edge of the field

VI

my grandfather's accounts of this

are unconfirmed but by the fact

that I sank thigh-deep in sewage

in the recently harvested field

on Thanksgiving Day when I was 7

my older brother

like so many times since

pulled that screaming child

from the stinking earth

that threatened to swallow her

wholeness

seepage:

this is a photograph of me

VII

don't tell my mother

it all comes out gothic

despite the lurking idyll

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

Jennifer Baker was raised in Exeter, Ontario, where she divided her time between town and her grandparents’ farm. She is currently a part-time professor and PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa.

[Jennifer Baker launches Abject Lessons as part of the pre-ottawa small press book fair reading on November 7, 2014 at The Carleton Tavern, alongside Dave Currie, Frances Boyle, Anita Dolman and Stuart Ross]

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

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.