new from above/ground press: po po poems, by Kate Siklosi

po po poems
Kate Siklosi
$5

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Kate Siklosi lives, writes, and thinks in Toronto. Her poetry has been featured in ditch, and is forthcoming in Nod Magazine. This is her first chapbook of poetry. She is the cofounding editor of Gap Riot Press.

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

above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: Marthe Reed

This is the fourteenth in a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors and friends of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground. See links to the whole series here.

Out of the blue, rob mclennan queries whether he could publish a second chap of mine with above / ground press. Let’s put out the work, see how it flies, comes his email. A constant current of activity out of Ottawa, asking, publishing, promoting: what are you up to, what’s new, what have you published, updating the above / ground blog for all of his many published poets, following their work, getting the word out. This is the singular joy of above / ground, of perhaps the most industrious publisher in the poetry business—the gifts of appreciation, of shared endeavor in poetry, of an open and generous spirit.

At above / ground, one finds oneself in-the-midst of an unfolding “conversation” with poets from across Canada, the United States, and beyond. New discoveries—from N.W. Lea, “everything is second-hand, a pedestrian/ bargain. Rummage// in the pitch/ toque” to Rachel Mindell, “Sometimes the only sane answer/ to a senseless world is paranoia./ New clothes, mascara. A wig maybe”; and familiar loves, Alice Notely’s new Undo, "The century or year or night one might bloom a miracle/ A night-blooming cereus white   this could heal you/ Or decorate the new abyss turn the year backwards”—all gathered in a single sweep through above /ground press. Twenty-five years along, rob’s chapbook press delight for its invitations, inclusions, and ambitious reach. How does rob do it all? Chapbooks of both poems and short essays, perfect-bound books, magazines, blogs, Dusie’s poem-a-week, a reading series, book reviews, at least two interview series. He gives us a sense of that creative tumult in his own new chap above / ground chap, snow day:

Anna Gurton-Wachter responds to my email. Monty Reid responds to my email. Nikki Sheppy responds to my email. Stephen Brockwell responds to my email. Neil Flowers responds to my email. Pearl Pirie responds to my email. David O’Meara responds to my email. Annick MacAskill responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Sarah Burgoyne responds to my email. Shazia Hafiz Ramji responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. natalie hanna responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email.
 

Ian Williams responds to a photograph of my home office: “Don’t you feel perpetually overwhelmed?” 

“I saw the photo of your writing desk and wanted to close the door.”

rob’s query to me this time round came in the midst of finalizing a manuscript I had been working on for 10 years, as well as planning for a reading at the New Orleans poetry festival. Could he have the chap ready by then? Of course, he could and did, coastal geographies, an excerpt from my forthcoming Ark Hive: a memoir of South Louisiana (The Operating System, 2019)—bringing the work home to the ground which inspirited it. How lucky to find that email in my inbox, how lucky to be asked for work, how many pleasures and encounters along the way. Gifts and gratitude from/to all the poets, and, most of all, to that “hardest working man in po-biz”, rob mclennan.

Marthe Reed has published five books: Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014); Pleth, with j hastain (Unlikely Books, 2013); (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books, 2013); Gaze (Black Radish Books, 2010); Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink, 2007). A sixth collection, ARK HIVE will be published by The Operating System (2019). The author of six chapbooks, her collaborative chapbook thrown, text by j hastain with Reed's collages, won the 2013 Smoking Glue Gun contest (2016). Her poetry has been published in BAX2014, New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, Entropy, New Orleans Review, Jacket2, Fairy Tale Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Volta, and The Offending Adam, among others. Desperation: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene, co-edited with Linda Russo, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2018. Reed is co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books and lives in Syracuse, NY.

Marthe Reed is the author of two above/ground press titles, including After Swann (2013), and coastal geometries, out later this month.

The Factory Reading Series: Tucker, Hancock, McNair + mclennan, April 29, 2018

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:
The Factory Reading Series:

with readings by:

Aaron Tucker (Toronto)
Brecken Hancock (Ottawa)
Christine McNair (Ottawa)
+ rob mclennan (Ottawa)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Sunday, April 29, 2017
doors 2pm; reading 2:45pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

Aaron Tucker is the author of the novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) as well as two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and his latest chapbook with above/ground press Catalogue d'oiseaux. His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com).

Currently, he is an uninvited guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, where he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University (Toronto), teaching creative and academic writing. You can reach him atucker[at]ryerson[dot]ca

Brecken Hancock's poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Puritan, Arc, Best Canadian Poetry in English, Best American Experimental Writing, The Globe & Mail and Hazlitt. Her first book of poems, Broom Broom (Coach House, 2014), was shortlisted for the ReLit Award and won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. It was also named by The Globe & Mail's Jared Bland as a debut of the year, and appeared on a number of year-end best-book lists, including the National Post, All Lit Up, and BookThug's Best Reads. She lives in Ottawa.

Ottawa poet Christine McNair's second poetry collection Charm came out from BookThug in 2017. Her first book Conflict (BookThug, 2012) was a finalist for the City of Ottawa Book Award, the Archibald Lampman Award, and the ReLit Award, and shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her chapbook pleasantries and other misdemeanours (2013) was shortlisted for the bpNichol chapbook award. McNair lives in Ottawa, where she works as a book doctor.

rob mclennan’s most recent titles include The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), the poetry collection A perimeter (New Star Books, 2016) and the chapbook snow day (above/ground press, 2018). His poetry title Household items (Salmon Poetry, 2018) should be out soon, hopefully. 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. He also runs a reading series (this one!) three blocks away from where he was born.

new from above/ground press: americana, by Edward Smallfield

americana
Edward Smallfield
$5

higher education

bent sentences. open
windows breathe spring
scents. eucalyptus, rhodo
dendron. syllables. morph
emes, phonemes. taste
& texture, selected
for. on the fifth
floor of life a distant
music, the bruised
brass of a marching
band. in the base
ment, under the table,
spilled DNA stains
silken thighs & lips
& nights. ‘spooky
action at a distance”
hasn’t been invented
or discovered yet.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2018
celebrating twenty-five years of above/ground press
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Edward Smallfield is the author of The Pleasures of C and equinox, and the co-author of several collaborative projects, One Hundred Views of Edo (with Doug MacPherson), locate (with Miriam Pirone), and lirio and anonymous (both with Valerie Coulton). His poems have appeared in alice blue, Barcelona INK, bird dog, Calibanonline, Touch the Donkey, e-poema.eu, New American Writing, Five Fingers Review, Páginas Rojas, Parthenon West Review, Spotlight, 26, Wicked Alice, and many other magazines and websites. He lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.

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

Julie Mannell reviews Dana Claxton’s The Patient Storm (2016) and Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees (2016) in Arc Poetry Magazine #85

Writer and critic Julie Mannell was good enough to review Dana Claxton’s The Patient Storm (2016) and Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees (2016) as part of an omnibus bpNichol Chapbook Award 2017 shortlist review in Arc Poetry Magazine #85 (why, yes, copies are still available of both of these chapbooks; why do you ask?). Thanks so much! While this is the first review of Claxton’s chapbook, this is actually the third review of Saklikar’s chapbook, after Nikki Sheppy was good enough to discuss it in filling Station magazine, and Scott Bryson was good enough to discuss it over at Broken Pencil. Hooray!

Dana Claxton’s The Patient Storm is an anarchic and playful book of musical dialogue-poetry that is wholly original. It can be read as containing one or a series of rambunctious speakers—through unmetered short paragraphs that are set in the top of the page and are distinguished by a characteristically bouncy tone: “Calm. Still. Quiet and such. Ohhhhhhhh Stormy Storm… when they arrive and when they do… turbulency baby for me and you.” The poems read like Heather Christle had a baby and then let Steve Roggenbuck raise it. The tone is also reminiscent of a kind of new voice that is arising in Canada—one that is quick, punchy, and has a self-aware sense of humour—I would turn to Toronto-based MLA Chernoff as an author who embraces similar linguistic play in their work, as well as several of the authors publishing through Montreal’s Metatron Press.

[…]

After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees by Renée Sarojini Saklikar offers an anatomization of what could maybe be considered a relationship or perhaps a series of interactions as they relate to space. There are at least four central characters whose relationship to each other and the speaker is left ambiguous—as well as several others who play supporting roles. This book is perhaps best described as a poetic experiment in world creation as the poems themselves exist in a hive all their own while continuing the very Canadian tradition of incorporating a voluminous expanse of nature symbolism. Though, it must be mentioned, in the fictionalized Battle of Kingsway, the natural world is almost a character in itself and lines like: “She calls them Finds. Her teeth, bones, unexamined. Afternoons the heat: dust, that acrid curtain, wind whips red” occasion a foreboding tone that mystifies each text and imbues an overall enchanting effect on the chapbook as a whole.

some author activity: Brockwell, Anstee, Earl + mclennan,

Stephen Brockwell has a new poem up at Politics/Letters live; Cameron Anstee is interviewed for the Invisible Publishing blog; Amanda Earl has a new poem up at Unlikely Stories; and rob mclennan is being interviewed over at poetry mini interviews.

above/ground press 25th anniversary essay: Gil McElroy

This is the thirteenth in a series of short essays/reminiscences by a variety of authors and friends of the press to help mark the quarter century mark of above/ground. See links to the whole series here.

above/ground press, in the guise of a magazine entitled Stanzas, came into my life in the mid-1990s when I was living in Halifax, and of course this was my introduction to rob (whom I wouldn’t actually meet until 2001 when we did a poetry reading together at York University).

Here’s where I might embrace one of the most overused and hackneyed clichés and tell you that it changed my life. But the thing is: it did, actually.

This, of course, was in the days before the advent of social media, and connecting with other writers, others of your own ilk, was more difficult, especially if you’re an introvert with a penchant for aloneness who still wants some kind of connection.

(ahem)

rob and above/ground became that for me. To say he and it were supportive doesn’t quite capture it. At the time of our introduction I was on a bit of precipice, finding myself nearing the literary edge where I was going to call it quits, though not sure at all how that would happen when the need to put the words together was such a fundamental part of who I was (and am). Difficult times.

above/ground and rob ensured I wouldn’t have to figure out what going over the edge would actually feel like. They gave me community, and community, as I learned, is everything. Here was a world of others, the like-minded, the bloody-minded… the minded, all shaping worlds I was given access to, no questions asked. And rob generously fed me into that cauldron of shape-shifting, publishing my work in magazines, chapbooks and broadsheets, and recommending it to others. The myriad forms of what he was doing changed my life.

Can’t of course speak for anyone else, but for me it was akin to a miracle. And each package of newly shape-shifted pieces I find stuffed in my mailbox continues to push the margins of what I know and sometimes become overly comfortable with. Social media now (virtually) connects me, but rob and above/ground materially included me, a fistful of chapbooks and broadsheets in my greedy little hands giving me entry unto other worlds that bump and collide with mine own, reshaping and reconfiguring things.

Sometimes that’s not comfortable, and sometimes it’s even unwanted. But it’s always necessary.

-Gil McElroy, March 2018

Gil McElroy is a writer living in Colborne, Ontario.

Gil McElroy is the author of six above/ground press chapbooks, including “Echolocations” (½ of STANZAS #5, April 1995), Some Julian Days (March, 1999) “Meteor Showers” (STANZAS #31, 2002), (The Work of Art) In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (November, 2005), Twentieth (February, 2013) and The Doxologies (2014). His Some Julian Days is scheduled for a reissue in 2019 as a “Twentieth Anniversary Edition.”