some author activity: Graham, Hogg, Blouin, Carr, Henning + Niespodziany,

Lea Graham has a poem for Bob Hogg up at The Typescript, as does Michael Blouin; Julie Carr has new work in the first issue of atsmospheric quarterly; Barbara Henning now has an author page at Poets.org; and Benjamin Niespodziany has new work up at JMWW.

Jérôme Melançon reviews Lori Anderson Moseman's OKAY? (2022) and too many words (2022) at The Ampersand Review

I'm not sure how I missed posting this, but our pal (and above/ground press author) Jérôme Melançon, poet, translator and critic, provided first reviews for two different Lori Anderson Moseman above/ground press titles--OKAY? (2022) and too many words (2022)--over at The Ampersand Review. Thanks so much! You should go here to see the whole review. Why didn't I post this earlier?

new from above/ground press: The Green Rose, by Phil Hall and Steven Ross Smith

The Green Rose
in collaboration
Steven Ross Smith
Phil Hall
$6

Morning performance poem
rattles & whistles & gaaaks

great-tailed grackle verse
howler monkeys & Frank Sinatra

the bird that isn’t there
has a name

the swinging howler chorus
is missing here this week

to be frank
a lesson in the line

collapsing form as foam
leaves a crockery bit

of green rose
then takes it back out

then in as noise
all day no one

watching or listening
the horizon erased by rain

never makes landfall
what lifts is dirty & pushes

what collapses
is clear & pulls free

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Phil Hall has a new book out this spring: Vallejo’s Marrow (Beautiful Outlaw, 2024). Other recent books are: The Ash Bell (Beautiful Outlaw, 2022); Toward a Blacker Ardour (Beautiful Outlaw, 2021); and Niagara & Government (Pedlar, 2020).

Steven Ross Smith loves music, practices yoga, and is fascinated by moss. Disparate threads weave through his seven-book poetic series fluttertongue. A new book is Glimmer: Short Fictions (Radiant Press, 2022). He writes in Victoria, BC.

This is Phil Hall’s fifth above/ground press chapbook (not including the secret chapbook), after Verulam (2009) and A Wolf Lake Chorus (2021), and the collaborations Shikibu Shuffle (with Andrew Burke; 2012) and Alternative Girders (with Stuart Kinmond; 2018). The festschrift Report from the [Phil] Hall Society, Vol. 1 No. 1 appeared in 2022.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) 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

Jaclyn Desforges reviews nina jane drystek's Missing Matrilineal (2023) and Sophia Magliocca's Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self-Portrait (2023) in Hamilton Review of Books

Hamilton writer Jaclyn Desforges offers first reviews for nina jane drystek's Missing Matrilineal (2023) and Sophia Magliocca's Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self-Portrait (2023) as part of a three-title review (alongside Ben Robinson's The Book of Benjamin), "The Presence of Absence," over at Hamilton Review of Books. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here, or excerpted below. As Desforges writes:

When I chose the collections to juxtapose for this review, I absolutely did not look for connections in advance. I chose two chapbooks that appealed to me: Missing Matrilineal by nina jane drystek and Girl Gives Long-Fingered Self Portrait by Sophia Magliocca, both published in 2023 by above/ground press. But I was immediately struck by the pervasive feeling of absence in drystek’s collection: The first poem, “i haven’t found the ladle yet,” begins with the image of an empty bowl. drystek creates a portrait of memory, loss and grief by focusing on what remains after a beloved person’s death: “the row of cedars he planted,” she writes. “the quilts she sewed.” drystek’s poems are spacious and vivid, dancing between English, Polish and French. We see wallpaper curls and cupboard-aged whiskey, imagine borscht on our tongues.

In the final and longest poem, “my second sister makes her apparition,” the speaker addresses her sister Isabelle who, as we learn later in the acknowledgements, “lived for the briefest of moments.” Still reeling from The Book of Benjamin, I was struck by the lines “a girl unborn / est une femme fantôme,” “surely there is dust that remembers,” “a body that wasn’t,” and “name that is.” This collection is intimate and tender – full of grief and bittersweetness. It’s about death, which is another way of saying it’s about love.  

While drystek’s chapbook is a collage of objects left behind, Magliocca’s is, as the title indicates, a self-portrait. In the first movement of the collection, the speaker lists details about herself – “I’m a fast talker slow walker average daughter,” Magliocca writes. “I’m a good swimmer for three strokes.” The first poem, “Note,” is made up of a single stanza, but as Magliocca goes on, the poems begin to break apart – the next three contain four quatrains, and as the speaker goes on, revealing increasingly vulnerable details, Magliocca adds white space and staggered line breaks. “I spend my evenings in the bathroom / staring at that face / stretched across the chrome drain,” she writes. By page 11 of the chapbook, the repeated word “memories” snakes across the page, and on page 17, the second movement of the collection begins with what the speaker is afraid to carry: “big boxes up / narrow staircases / rusty knives on flat trays.” Then, after a long gap, the word babies appears neatly in the centre of the page. The final poem begins, “I know nine months is 274 days.” It appears on the page like a series of waves, or the curves of a body, and goes on to explore the complex feelings surrounding the speaker’s abortion. “I know your would-be birthday,” Magliocca writes. “fire sign like your father / imagine soft curls / auburn.” And there again, the immovable presence of absence – that blank space of might-have-been.

some author activity: Mohammadi, Robinson, carisse, Campanello + Williams,

Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi is interviewed with Klara du Plessis in the latest issue of The Temz Review, where Ben Robinson is also interviewed, and russell carisse also has new work; Kimberly Campanello and Wayne A. Gilbert's 2023 conversation "Moving Nowhere Here" is up on YouTube; and Evan Williams has some new work up at Tyger Quarterly.

new from above/ground press: The Peter F Yacht Club #33 : 2024 VERSeFest Special,

The Peter F Yacht Club #33
2024 VERSeFest Special
lovingly hand-crafted, folded, stapled, edited and carried around in bags of envelopes by rob mclennan,
$6

With new writing by a host of Peter F Yacht Club regulars, irregulars and VERSeFest 2024 participants, including Jennifer Baker, Manahil Bandukwala, Frances Boyle, Jason Christie, nina jane drystek, Klara du Plessis, Amanda Earl, Anita Lahey, IAN MARTIN, rob mclennan, James Moran, Pearl Pirie, Jaclyn Piudik, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley, Marjorie Silverman, Madeleine Stratford, D.S. Stymeist, Derek Webster and Grant Wilkins,

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
[a small stack of copies will be distributed free as part of the fourteenth annual VERSeFest, March 21-24, 2023]

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) 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

new from above/ground press: abject sutures, by Melissa Eleftherion

abject sutures
melissa eleftherion
$5

SHELL

six little explosions
“under a glass bell”
how we’re taught
to contain
the abject
little burst sutures
in ammonite

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Melissa Eleftherion (she/they) is a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. Born & raised in Brooklyn, she holds degrees from Brooklyn College, Mills College, and San Jose State University. They are the author of the full-length poetry collections, field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & gutter rainbows (Querencia Press, 2024), as well as twelve chapbooks including trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020), & sunflower spell (poems-for-all, 2022).  Her work has been widely published & featured in venues like Quarter after Eight, Sixth Finch, Entropy, & Barren Magazine. Melissa now lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Branch Library, curates the LOBA Reading Series, and serves as Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Ukiah. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

This is Eleftherion’s third chapbook with above/ground press, after little ditch (2018) and trauma suture (2020).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) 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