new from above/ground press: LIKE, by Sharon Harris

LIKE

Sharon Harris

$4

TWITTER LOVE SONG

I Will Follow

Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

Follow You Down

I Will Follow You Tonight

I Will Follow You in the Dark

Hell of an Act to Follow

Follow You, Follow Me

I’ll Follow my Secret Heart

No Mythologies to Follow

Follow Me

Follow Me Back Home

Follow My Mind

Follow Blind

published in Ottawa by above/ground press

May 2014

a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Sharon Harris is a Person You May Know. She’s a Toronto artist/writer whose poems have been anthologized in The Broadview Introduction to Literature, Ground Rules, The Last Vispo, and Shift & Switch. 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.

Website :: sharonharris.ca

Twitter :: @hnitheuniverse

FB :: Sharon Harris and facebook.com/iloveyouworldgraffiti

This is Sharon Harris’ second above/ground press chapbook, after “More Fun With ‘Pataphysics” STANZAS #43 (2006).

[Sharon Harris launches LIKE in Ottawa at the A B Series on Sunday, May 11, 2014 with Christian Bök]

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

National Poetry Month: Earl, McElroy, Dolman, McCann, Douglas, Irwin, Pirie, Lea, mclennan + Hajnoczky

In case you missed it, the Chaudiere Books blog featured a number of new works by above/ground press authors for National Poetry Month this year, including Amanda Earl, Gil McElroy, Anita Dolman, Marcus McCann, Rhonda Douglas, Marilyn Irwin, Pearl Pirie, derek beaulieu, Roland Prevost, N.W. Lea, rob mclennan and Helen Hajnoczky, as well as whole bunch of others.

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 6, 2014: Reed, Menear, Eaton, Power + Saklikar

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series
pre-small press book fair reading

featuring readings by:

Marthe Reed (NY State)
David Menear (Toronto/Montreal)
Chris Eaton (Toronto)
Nicholas Power (Toronto)
+ Renée Sarojini Saklikar (Vancouver)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, June 6, 2014;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern, 
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

as a preview for the following day’s ottawa small press book fair!

Marthe Reed is the author of four books: Pleth, a collaboration with j hastain (Unlikely Books 2013), (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books 2013), Gaze (Black Radish Books 2010) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink 2007). A fifth book of poems will be published by Lavender Ink (2014). She has also published six chapbooks (Dusie Kollektiv, above/ground press, and Shirt Pocket Press). Her collaborative chapbook thrown, text by j hastain with Reed’s collages, won the 2013 Smoking Glue Gun contest and will appear in 2014. An essay on Claudia Rankine’s The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue appears in American Letters and Commentary. She is Co-Publisher of Black Radish Books.

David Menear has spent most of his life between Toronto and Montreal, but has also lived in both London, U.K. & Divonne, France. Schooled in NYC. A father of four he is back in Toronto at ‘The Beach’ writing hard and playing tennis with enthusiasm and mediocrity. His short stories have been published in QWF/Carte Blanche & The Danforth Review. Poetry included in The International Nelson Mandela Tribute Anthology & Ditch. He will be launching a new chapbook produced by Amanda Earl’s DevilHouse!

Chris Eaton is the author of four books of fiction, most recently Chris Eaton, a Biography, and occasionally writes and performs music under the name Rock Plaza Central. He lives in Toronto but his heart still resides in New Brunswick.

Nicholas Power [pictured] is a founding member of the Meet the Presses literary collective, and has performed with the storytelling duo The Wordweavers and the sound poetry ensemble Alexander’s Dark Band. He works as a psychotherapist in private practice. He has been published by Underwhich Editions (wells), The Writing Space (a modest device), and Battered Press (No Poems). Poems have appeared in Rampike, Descant, bywords.ca, leafpress.ca and ottawater.com. He has been editing and publishing with his own Gesture Press for 30 years. His new book just out from Tekst Editions is called Melancholy Scientist.

Educated at the University of British Columbia (B.A., LL.B) and a graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio, Renée Sarojini Saklikar writes thecanadaproject, a life-long poem chronicle. Work from thecanadaproject appears in literary journals and newspapers, including The Vancouver Review, Geist, SubTerrain, Poetry is Dead, CV2, and Arc Poetry Magazine and in the anthologies, Alive at the Center, Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest, and Force Field, 77 Women Poets of British Columbia. Renée’s elegiac sequence, children of air india, un/authorized exhibits and interjections, (Nightwood Editions, 2013) is the first book length poetic examination of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 to be published in North America. Renée serves as a mentor for SFU’s Southbank Writers Program and is the co-founder of a new poetry reading series, Lunch Poems at SFU. http://thecanadaproject.wordpress.com Twitter: @reneesarojini     

Edric Mesmer reviews Lary Timewell’s tones employed as loss (2013)

Edric Mesmer was good enough to review Lary Timewell’s tones employed as loss (2013) in the new issue of YELLOW FIELD (#nine; spring 2014). Thanks, Edric! This is the second review of Timewell’s chapbook, after Rebecca Anne Banks reviewed such over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. You can pick up a copy of the new issue through: yellowedenwaldfield [at] yahoo [dot] com or by writing to 1217 Delaware Avenue, Apt. 802, Buffalo, New York 14209. For those who haven’t been able to pick up an issue yet, I reprint such here:

tones employed as loss

Lary Timewell

above/ground

2013

Of poetry concerned with the nature of poetry, add to that list this title. Unthrough as we should be with Modernism, Timewell is well traveled in the space-time canonicity, “setting / The Way-Back Machine to conjure / / to conjure-up the serious business / of fiscal harps and apotheoses” ([19]). Canonical titles are satirized via pop culture slipups [i.e. Pound’s Cannelloni], and soon we breeze by geographical allusion via Stein and Tolkas’s address. If “the answer is here, but the message turns / out to be a grocery list” ([15]), how now the medium? We may be in a state of serial thought—defied if not also reified by an illusory fixity of the digital—nowhere better exemplified than by Timewell’s loudly mutable slices of poetry defined, from “an echo losing insistence” to “living in the lap of lechery” to “kinetic seed.”

some author activity: Brockwell, McElroy, mclennan, Martin, Higdon, Betts, Cain + Poe,

Stephen Brockwell facilitates a TREE Seed Workshop on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 from 6:45 to 7:45pm on French Canadian Poetry; Gil McElroy, rob mclennan, Camille Martin and Hailey Higdon (among others) have new work in the first issue of Touch the Donkey; Gregory Betts writes on M. NourbeSe Philip over at Jacket 2, "Not against expression"; Stephen Cain responds as part of the "At the desk" series at Open Book: Ontario, as does rob mclennan; and Deborah Poe and Megan Burns posted a reading of part of their Poetry Month collaboration-in-progress over on SoundCloud.

Cam Gordon reviews Aaron Tucker's Punchlines (2013) in Broken Pencil #63

Cam Gordon reviews Aaron Tucker's Punchlines (2013) in Broken Pencil #63. Thanks, Cam! A relatively positive review, I'm still a bit baffled in how the reviewer, through misunderstanding what is happening (which is completely fine) somehow comes to the conclusion that the poems within therefore are meant to make no sense and have no purpose other than nonsense. Note how the reviewer, mid-review, also starts referring to Tucker as "Taylor" for some reason (I corrected this and a couple of other typos in the original review in square brackets).

This is actually the second review of Adams' book, after Ryan Pratt discussed such over at the ottawa poetry newsletter, a review that puts far more effort into attempting to understand Tucker's work on its own terms.

Poetry in the purest sense, Punchlines collects a dozen or so works by young Aaron Tucker of (somewhere) Ontario and binds them into a tidy, no-frills package. I suppose the central theme i "poetry as the punchline" since each piece is titled with a joke-y moniker. For example, there is "Did you hear about the elephant on the crash diet?," "What did the cowboy say when he found his dog was missing?" and the post-millen[n]ial favourite "What did the Twitter say to the Facebook?" The titles' correlation with the prose is entirely indirect in the obvious sense. Accordingly, the most engaging element of this collection is its attempt to make the connection between title and words. The reader's task is to look for clues to Tucker's M.O. for naming these poems as he did. The challenge is he may have a reason, or he may not. And that's OK, because while a lot of these poems are massively abstract, Taylor [Tucker] harvests his words in an unexplanably easy fashion. Accordingly, the reader is never left with the impression of an artist who is being wilfully obscure in an attempt to be -- well, wilful. Taylor [Tucker] simply is matching up and manoeuvering the language in a good-natured manner, using a play-on-words here and a bit of misplaced punctuation there. The ultimate reward may be the fact that there isn't any sense to be made -- and that's oddly satisfying as Punchlines is clearly making zero effort to be something it's not. Seriously.

National Poetry Month: mclennan, hastain, Pirie, Barwin, Martin + Betts,

In case you missed it, Amanda Earl's National Poetry Month featured a number of new poems by above/ground press authors, including rob mclennan, j/j hastain, Pearl Pirie, Gary Barwin, Camille Martin, Gregory Betts, Karen Massey and Gil McElroy, as well as a number of other incredible works by poets (predominantly working with visuals) from around the world.