The Robert Kroetsch Award Shortlist: Lea Graham + Laurie Fuhr

Congratulations to above/ground press authors Lea Graham and Laurie Fuhr, included on the 2016 shortlist for The Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry!

Calgary poet and musician Laurie Fuhr is the author of the above/ground press chapbook accident: a chain reaction (1999), and Lea Graham, originally from Arkansas, is the author of the above/ground press chapbook Calendar Girls (2006) and co-author (with rob mclennan) of the collaboration metric (2011).

Graham's chapbook, This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch (Apt. 9 Press), is forthcoming in April.

Judged this year by George Elliott Clarke, the current Parliamentary Poet Laureate, the complete shortlist reads:

Micheline Maylor
Diandre Prendimano
Lea Graham
Ian Kinney
Geoffrey Babbitt
Paul Zits
Laurie Fuhr

The winner will be announced mid-March! See here for the full press release.

new from above/ground press: A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert, Sarah Mangold

A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert
Sarah Mangold
$4

Frame as if faith

Transient unicorn

emphasize the whiteness

seek from chance

what nature dispenses

operate as indicator

by no means fortuitous

a place comparable

held by draperies 

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

Sarah Mangold is the author of the forthcoming Boxer Rebellion (Kore Press), Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish Books), and Household Mechanics (New Issues), selected by C.D. Wright for the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her most recent chapbooks include The Goddess Can Be Recognized By Her Step (dusie kollektiv) and Parlor (above/ground). She is the recipient of a NEA Poetry Fellowship and lives near Seattle. www.sarahmangold.com

This is her third chapbook with above/ground press, after Parlor (2012) and Cupcake Royale (2012).

Produced, in part, for appearance at the 2016 AWP Conference & Bookfair, Los Angeles Convention Center and JW Marriott Los Angeles CA, March 30-April 2, 2016.

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, Armantrout, Smith + Ladouceur,

The audio of a 2009 Philadelphia reading at Chapter & Verse by Hailey Higdon, alongside Jenn McCreary and Ethan Fugate, is now online; Rae Armantrout has two new poems online at Granta; Jessica Smith writes on her desk over at Real Pants; and Thomas March provides a very close reading of a poem by Ben Ladouceur over at Lambda Literary.

Rebecca Anne Banks reviews Pearl Pirie's vertigoheel for the dilly (2014)

Rebecca Anne Banks was good enough to review Pearl Pirie's vertigoheel for the dilly (2014) over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. Thanks, Rebecca! See the original review here.

vertigoheel for the dilly is a fantastical Chapbook by Pearl Pirie that is a revelation of the Canadian fascist undertoad of the New Age. Poet Pirie has published 2 books of poetry with a third volume coming from BookThug in 2015. She lives in Ottawa and has launched chapbooks, blogs, a micro press and is a radio host, occasionally teaching poetry workshops.

As if howlin’ and howlin’ big at the moon, the enigmatic often dislocated wordscapes present a game, to see behind the curtain, what is being said, not said, what is happening, not happening, a truncated presentation, of the life and times in 21st century N.A. The seemingly disembodied thoughts brought together for a couple of lines, a free flowing Zen of creativity and landscape within very broken places.

The themes presented include ill health/growing old, the state of the ecology/the 21st century, a missing father, sex and conflicted love lives.

“polyps in the colon complement the diverticulosis./ a sort of spilled lego in the digestion.”

“Living La Vida Ibuprofen. Neutral sparrows/ are not imbued with mites.”

and the long poem goes on to mention the ecology of the oceans,

“the seas are emptying, the only choice left/ is the fish in the barrel. breed, fish, breed.”

About ¾ of the way through the long poem there is presentation of a missing father:

“the poem takes the sidewalk chalk “welcome home dad”/ powerwashes off the “wel”, or adds a chalk outline of a child.”

“in the market, rows of bouquets/ father is gone, doesn’t care which colour.”

In the background as if in dialogue with the Reader is the unfolding of a story of conflicted love perhaps the product poetry the manifestation of an underground war. It begins slowly,

"it's as romantic as the attachment of a couple's/ cuddle-bed-sores, growing into one scab."

“for all its 7,200 square kilometers it’s a small country really and time’s a bullet train across it. our time? oh, not ours.”

“look at the lupines, inhale the hummingbird. these are the panacea, the cancellation of everything short of Auschwitz.”

“‘hyperlogalia medical’. Did you mean hyperlocal paralegal? um,/ no. I mean stories overflow any social container or contentment./ only lack of mutual is pathological. otherwise, all glows.”

and like a dirge, the dance, the long poem heats up:

“frost-slapped cheeks applied via Avon, ‘talk to him’ you instructed,/ rub his hands, keep him with us. (we never had touched.)"

“sanguine sans glum, stand-up, wipe sebum, beach bum,/ I’ve been dead to you for 4 changes of addresses.”

As if drawing from the tradition of poetry influenced by war, perhaps T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, the introspective and disconnected thoughts in vertigoheel for the dilly are a distinctly Canadian take on a Western world bound by war.

Often poems work on different levels, something about the poem, draws you in, becomes somehow about you or about anyone that reads it, it becomes about us. vertigoheel for the dilly, a very powerful read from The People’s Poet, Pearl Pirie.

bpNichol Award Call for Submissions‏

❡ Call for submissions to the 2016 bpNichol Chapbook Award ❡

The bpNichol Chapbook Award recognizes excellence in Canadian poetry in English published in chapbook form within Canada. The prize is awarded to a poetry chapbook judged to be the best submitted. The author receives $4,000 and the publisher receives $500. Awarded continuously since 1986, the bpNichol Chapbook Award is currently administered by the Meet the Presses collective.

Chapbooks should be not less than 10 pages and not more than 48 pages. The chapbooks must have been published between January 1st and December 31st of the previous year (2015), and the poet must be Canadian.

Interested authors or publishers should submit three copies of eligible chapbooks. Translations into English from other languages are eligible.

Submissions must be sent by Canada Post or courier (and not hand-delivered to a Meet The Presses collective member) and include a completed submission form or accurate facsimile (download the 2016 Submission Form from our web site: https://meetthepresses.wordpress.com/bpnichol-chapbook-award/), a brief C.V. of the author, including address, telephone number, and email address. Publisher contact information (contact person, mailing address, e-mail address, telephone contact) must also be included. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

The closing date for the 2016 bpNichol Chapbook Award is May 31, 2016. Submissions must be received by this date. If submission confirmation has not been received by e-mail by June 30, 2016, please send a query to Beth Follett at: feralgrl@interlog.com.

Send submissions to:
Meet the Presses / bpNichol Chapbook Award
113 Bond Street, St John’s NL A1C 1T6

Eleni Zisimatos reviews Kristjana Gunnars' snake charmers : a cycle of twenty poems (2016)

Eleni Zisimatos reviews Kristjana Gunnars' snake charmers : a cycle of twenty poems (2016) over at the Vallum blog. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. Come out to hear Gunnars launch the chapbook tomorrow night in Edmonton!

Kristjana Gunnars’, “snake charmers: a cycle of twenty poems” is a rich body of poems strongly evocative of place and mysticism. Her writing style is fluid, with colourful description and emotional tenor:

There is that empty chair, forever.
I can almost hear it whisper:

alone in the middle of the ceramic
tile floor, the herringbone blue, white,
crossing forever, a tossing sea of earth
and a garden table with no cups
and no utensils or flowers, fanning
round in royal blue mosaic, a red
cushion slightly off center on the brown
wicker chair.

This is our courtyard
of existence: these are the things in it,

this dark chair, the pillow
askance, the warm air, heavy, still thick
with the trace of your shadow.

The entire book resonates with lines like these, and the reader is able to enter into an exotic landscape where not everything is as it seems. It is well-worth the read. /ez

Scott Bryson reviews rob mclennan’s The Rose Concordance (2015) in Broken Pencil #71

Scott Bryson was good enough to provide the first review of rob mclennan’s The Rose Concordance (2015) online, forthcoming in Broken Pencil #71 (with the review itself online here). Thanks so much! Although, by the by, this is not an ode to new parenthood in the way he suggests (he does presume a bit, I think); my daughter Kate arrived twenty-three years earlier...

Children are a disruptive force, as rob mclennan recently discovered. After the birth of his daughter, Rose, he found he rarely had time to write anything more than an “occasional stand-alone line” of poetry. Undeterred, he gathered some of those fragments for this chapbook. The Rose Concordance is mclennan’s ode to his daughter, and a meditation on his first few months as a parent, which were predominantly consumed by the study of Rose’s napping patterns (“sleep: her daily nemesis”), and his own futile quest for “u((n)in)t(e)rr((u)pte)d )s(l))ee)p.” The fragments mclennan included may have disjointed origins, but he’s married them into a focused (though sometimes abstract) commentary on new-parenthood. There’s a 2009 poetry collection by Angela Carr that’s also named The Rose Concordance, but the two books appear to be unrelated. Carr’s work was influenced by the 13th century poem, “The Romance of the Rose,” by Guillaume de Lorris. If you want to draw a parallel, however, mclennan is engaging in the stated purpose of “The Romance of the Rose,” to a degree: to teach others about the Art of Love. This collection is a love affair, though it’s the love of a parent for a child, rather than the saucier 13th century sort. is brief, but memorable. It’ll elicit both giggles — “When baby spits up supplement, it makes the / formula cows cry” — and a knowing nod from anyone who’s had children.