new from above/ground press: REFRAMING PAUL CADMUS, by John Barton

REFRAMING PAUL CADMUS
John Barton
$5 

DANCER

Egg tempera on pressed wood panel, 1945
1.5 x 1.25 inches

Sprawled in tights
On floorboards in a tiny

Square of time drafted between
Rehearsals near the end       

Of the war, the page
After page he browses so

Distracting from start
To finish, the spine

Of his book broken
His shoulders exhausted

Foreshortened by the score
He has all morning bent

His essence to, the music’s dark
Harmonies without

Remorse forcing his world in
To step with its own, as

No longer lithe, he removes
Himself, gives in, pas

À pas, to oblivion
Reading himself beyond

Men yet to return and others
He loves who never shall

The precise squares
Of time he borrows

So necessary
So seldom spared.

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

John Barton has published eleven collections of poetry, including West of Darkness: Emily Carr, a Self-Portrait; Designs from the Interior; Hypothesis; Hymn; For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems; and Polari. He has also published six previous chapbooks. Coeditor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, he has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, an Ottawa Book Award, a CBC Literary Award, and a National Magazine Award. Since 1980, his poems have appeared in anthologies, magazines, and newspapers across Canada and in Australia, China, India, Romania, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. From 1985 to 2003, he worked as a librarian, a production manager, a publications coordinator, and an editor for five national museums in Ottawa, where he also edited Vernissage: The Magazine of the National Gallery of Canada for two years and co-edited Arc Poetry Magazine for thirteen years. He has taught or given workshops at the Banff Centre, Sage Hill Writing Experience, Tree, the New Brunswick Writers Federation, and the University of Victoria. He has been writer in residence at the Saskatoon Public Library, the University of New Brunswick, and Memorial. He makes his home in Victoria where, since 2004, he has edited The Malahat Review.

This is his third chapbook with above/ground press, after DESTINATIONS, LEAVING THE MAP (1995) and Oxygen (1999).

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

some author activity: Higdon, mclennan, Downs + Braune,

did you know that Hailey Higdon has a blog? ; rob mclennan is now a monthly blogger for Ploughshares; Buck Downs is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Sean Braune has a new poem posted as part of the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog.

new from above/ground press: GRAPPLE, by Carrie Olivia Adams

GRAPPLE
Carrie Olivia Adams
$4

Come back to the space
where we were so close

Tell us again how you know

how you submerged us
how we re-wrote the movement of sidewalk and street
how it bent up to meet us
how our cries made a body an earthquake
What was that chain reaction?

Notes on the Composition

“Grapple” was written as a multidisciplinary poetry-dance work in collaboration with the Coincidentals, Chicago choreographers and dancers Jamie Corliss and Lydia Feuerhelm. Initially the dancers drew inspiration from a photo by Shayna Stacy of an arrest of a young African American man during a protest as part of Moral Mondays Illinois in Chicago in November of 2015. The text then incorporated ideas from the image alongside source material and videos provided by the dancers. Together, we adapted the structure of the poem to inform the building of the dance, so that the two work with and against each other. Using spoken text and movement, the resulting piece evokes the complex physicality of the act of protest where intimacy and aggression overlap. Street protest occupies a unique space in contemporary society, where strangers are fueled by a shared urgency, where limpness and release take the form of strength, where people defy norms by being so close. Rather than address the politics of protest, the piece in performance addresses the energy and feeling of these movements in a corporeal sense. It examines how physicality in protest exists in seemingly contradictory ways: bodily weakness can be an act of strength and physical closeness can unify or it can assert power hierarchies. 

“Grapple” was first performed in Chicago as part of the Mess Hall series in August 2016.

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

Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she is a book publicist for the University of Chicago Press and the poetry editor for Black Ocean. She is the author of Operating Theater (Noctuary Press 2015), Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and companion DVD, Ahsahta 2013) and Intervening Absence (Ahsahta 2009) as well as the chapbooks An Overture in the Key of F (above/ground press 2013) and A Useless Window (Black Ocean 2006).

This is her second chapbook with above/ground press, after An Overture in the Key of F (2013).

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

Scott Bryson reviews Elizabeth Robinson's Simplified Holy Passage (2015) in Broken Pencil

Scott Bryson was good enough to review Elizabeth Robinson's Simplified Holy Passage (2015) in Broken Pencil. Thanks so much! You can see the review here. This is actually the second review of Robinson's chapbook, after Pearl Pirie wrote about such here. As Bryson writes:

A pleasant continuity inhabits these poems — like a snowball rolling downhill, collecting and growing. Themes and explicit notions resurface frequently, often deliberately, but sometimes surreptitiously.

When you catch those veiled recurrences, it’s like Elizabeth Robinson is giving you a knowing wink — you’re in on her scheme. She even drops in round-about references to her methods: “The question is how one can pick up a process and continue it after / an interruption. If that is even possible.”

Robinson’s tone is reliably confessional and conversational. Most of this reads like a journal — poems are titled “Day 1,” “Day 2,” etc. — though it often comes across as a letter. She’s directly addressing a particular person that she’s imagining reading it.

Structurally, these poems are succinct. They consist of small stanzas that are usually no more than one to three lines. There’s little need for embellishment; Robinson’s phrases read like they have weight behind them — like she’s close to uncovering something profound.

She also possesses some inexplicable means of drawing investment out of a reader. In short order, you begin to care about her experiences. The final poem, “Unnumbered days later,” works like the epilogue of a film, when you’re shown — for your own peace of mind — that after the trials and tribulations, lessons were learned and everything worked out.

Jeff Low reviews Pete Smith's A New Love/ An Aching Stone (2016) in Broken Pencil

Jeff Low was good enough to provide the first review of Pete Smith's A New Love/ An Aching Stone (2016) in Broken Pencil. Thanks so much! You can see the review here. As he writes:

A New Love/ An Aching Stone is, contextually, pretty clear from the get go. The cover introduces the text as a somewhat fractured spirit: partial photos of two men are arranged side by side, yet separated by a triangular wedge of negative space. Their half-smiles align but do not meet in the middle. The dialogue is frustrated and I haven’t even flipped the thing open yet. The title page reads: “A double-cento out of Yehuda Amichai Mahmoud Darwish.” The former was an Israeli poet and the latter, a Palestinian poet. And so, the text’s political backbone surfaces. Throughout the text, Pete Smith examines the correspondence of Israeli-Palestinian art and identity with a whisper of futility. “Poetry isn’t poetry / because of the wall. / Which exile do you want?”

A New Love/ An Aching Stone is quick to set up circumstantial boundaries. But there is plenty of poetic ambiguity throughout, rest assured. The speaker laments the loss of identity both individual and collective: “The dust is my conscious, the stone my subconscious: / a heavenly horizon … and a hidden chasm / which wasn’t even good for thorns and thistles / in the emigrant’s night.” History is clouded by dust and dark convictions: “Perhaps I’ve been here once before, / the road of invaders who want to renovate their history, / make again a new love / over an aching stone.”

Pete Smith’s writing is strong and produces a clear poetic vision — a vision of fragmented political and cultural histories. And, in doing so, A New Love/ An Aching Stone remains wholeheartedly empathetic.

some author activity: beaulieu, Barwin, Ladouceur, Beaulieu, mclennan + Brockwell,

derek beaulieu has some new work up at NewPoetry, and he is interviewed over at the Chaudiere Books blog for The Calgary Renaissance (Chaudiere Books, 2016); Gary Barwin gets a nice write-up in Maclean's; Ben Ladouceur has a new poem up at Crap Orgasm; Braydon Beaulieu is also interviewed over at the Chaudiere Books blog for The Calgary Renaissance; and rob mclennan and Stephen Brockwell read November 8 at Edmonton's Olive Reading Series.

How to keep a small chapbook press alive for twenty-three years (a primer, at Open Book,

My short piece, "How to keep a small chapbook press alive for twenty-three years (a primer," is now online at Open Book. And, have you thought of subscribing?