Alice Burdick and Gary Barwin's above/ground press collaboration translated into French!

Alice Burdick and Gary Barwin's 2018 above/ground press collaboration, PLEASURE BRISTLES, has been translated into French by Canadian translator Simon Brown, and has been published in France! You can order a copy directly from the publisher, Editions Vanloo, and of course, the original English edition is still very much available.

some author activity: Dolman, Eleftherion, Ross, Unsworth + Flemmer,

Anita Dolman is interviewed in the "Six Questions" interview series via Chaudiere Books; Melissa Eleftherion has new work up at Rogue Agent Journal; Stuart Ross is interviewed over at Neon Pajamas; Lydia Unsworth is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Kyle Flemmer is interviewed over at Train : a poetry journal.

John C. Goodman reviews Mary Kasimor's disrobing iris (2019)

John C. Goodman was good enough to provide the first review of Mary Kasimor's disrobing iris (2019) over at Otoliths; thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

In disrobing iris, Mary Kasimor engages us in a continuing dance of connection and alienation combined in a dazzling balance of control and abandon. The book is intensely personal, exploring a sense of “the ownership of loss”, lost beauty (“she was once beautiful”), lost opportunity (“possibility/doesn’t know what it is missing”), and struggling to find an inner place in a world of fragments and memories, searching for a fearless grace in a fractured reality.

These poems are about interconnectedness, especially the interconnectedness of the natural world contrasted with our alienation from it. There is a tension between fragmentation and connection reflected in the interplay between words and emotions. Kasimor uses the techniques of post-modernism to create a deeply emotional landscape, similar to the way Sylvia Plath used the techniques of Modernism to express her inner world. These poems fill out the relentless intellectualism of post-modernism with searing emotion. Although criticized for lack of feeling (“I am intellectual and cold”), Kasimor’s insensitive external persona is a cover for a chasm of emotional depth too painful to acknowledge (“I left my loss in the room/with gray walls – it slept with the rain”).

In disrobing iris, we haven’t created a human world so much as deconstructed the natural world, which makes us question ourselves and search for the meaning in what we have done (“forcing/the eye/to find itself”). Nature tries to heal through ancient and eternal patterns, but finds the world too disfigured (“trembling     without a radius/in the     diagram     of broken lines”).

Sewing, a traditionally feminine occupation, is a recurring theme as a way of threading things together (“ants restring broken air”), but also as a way of making boundaries (“of stitched culture”) and as a means of repression (“she knew all the stitches to close her mouth”). The feminine is lost in mirrors, make-up, dresses of spun sugar and fractured reflections (“girl babies in the window/the de-feminization of them”). The feminine is prevented from healing the world because women are culturally reduced to commodities (“the mass of little men/digging up my fingers—two for a dollar”, “to market love and atmosphere/for the impulses of men”).

Sewing both connects us to and alienates us from meaning (“God’s life sewn shut”). The act of sewing becomes a means of revolt, making connections in a new way (“a new language of dropped stitches”) that disrupts the cultural rhetoric of oppression (“secrets/of cross stitch draw blood”), a revolution accomplished through small acts of reconnection with the natural world, achieved, not by the flamboyant ego (“I have an intuitive self-importance), but by the quiet small “i” persona (“i Sew/together the edges/to keep the Broken air/restrung”).

disrobing iris shows how our emotional identity is bound to the physical and that alienation from the natural world (“I cannot locate myself/outside”) brings alienation from the self resulting in objectification (“a thing/shaped image. a talking device”). In the end, we need to listen to the natural world and participate the endless cycle of life (“logic grips the ceaseless”), for new beginnings always start with the mundane (life squatted giving birth./I wiped off the blood,/spent the evening watching television.”).

some author activity: Kearney, Earl, Spinosa, Robinson + mclennan,

forthcoming author Rachel Kearney has a new essay in the "On Writing" series, via the ottawa poetry newsletter; Amanda Earl is interviewed at Train : a poetry journal; Dani Spinosa has a new essay celebrating 40-plus years of Stuart Ross' Proper Tales Press; Ben Robinson is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and rob mclennan's 'writing is hard' interview from 2016 is back online.

audio from the peter f yacht club christmas/reading/regatta is now up on soundcloud!

As promised, Craig Carpenter was good enough to post the audio from our most recent Christmas party/reading/regatta over at Soundcloud! Take a wee listen, if you like. And you can see my report from the event here.

new from above/ground press: The Desert of Itabira, by Leesa Dean

The Desert of Itabira
Leesa Dean
$5

In the desert of Itabira
time gnaws ruined houses
these walls know nothing of rain
nor hail the size of pearls
       no grass
no bromelias or ferns
      only sand
more sand

Of course Carlos would live here
a village lost in time
where servant girls patter
like birds between market stalls

He has two himself
bloodshot beauties
who call him master

There is a party to welcome us—
      hens
            cuchaca
meat cloaked in herbs
from some other kingdom
where soil allows life
           to flourish

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover art: Matty Kakes

Leesa Dean is a graduate of the University of Guelph's MFA program and a creative writing instructor at Selkirk College. Her first book, Waiting for the Cyclone (Brindle and Glass) was nominated for the 2017 Trillium and Relit Awards and her fiction, essays, poetry and interviews have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. She is a co-founder of the literary journal Black Bear Review and has served as the interviews editor of the Humber Literary Review in the past. She lives on an acreage in Krestova, BC with her artist husband Matty Kakes and daughter Scarlett Heart, surrounded by crashed cars and fruit trees.

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 at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: Euphorbia, by Eric Baus

Euphorbia
Eric Baus
$5
 

Commandeered mirror

In the afterlife of pumas, in the green hovering slightly above a branch, in the antique wings of an ostrich covering your mouth, the film of a woman framing a fading tree between her hands is not a mindless river, knowable as the lowest cloud, but the top of a small hill between pages wounded by a spool of blue thread, patiently printing fire beyond the door. When I am finally lifted over the bed, the branch, the quiet, the absent cats, the little cloud, the fire’s involuntary embroidery, two or three figures, at least, hold hands beneath my back. But who has placed my arms like this, misspelled, where I am suddenly a swimmer near the ceiling, learning to rain in a room, on a book?

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Eric Baus is the author of five books of poetry: How I Became a Hum (Octopus 2019), The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights 2014), Scared Text (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009), and The To Sound (Wave Books, 2004). He teaches literature and creative writing at Regis University’s Mile High MFA program in Denver, where he is assistant director and core faculty in poetry.

This is Baus’ second chapbook with above/ground press chapbooks, after THE RAIN OF THE ICE (2014).

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 at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com