Poetry Month chapbooks by Lisa Robertson + George Elliott Clarke available during April through Mother Tongue Books and Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar

Poetry Month chapbooks by Lisa Robertson + George Elliott Clarke available during April through Mother Tongue Books and Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar

Ottawa chapbook publisher above/ground is pre-releasing two poetry chapbooks for poetry month at two Ottawa bookstores: mother tongue books in Old Ottawa South, and Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar in Parkdale. Fifty copies of each title, normally sold for four dollars each, will be pre-released at one of two Ottawa bookstores gratis, with bookstore purchase only. Given the plight of independent bookstores the past few years, this project hopes to highlight the importance of the independent, community bookseller by encouraging the public to explore just what these businesses provide, not just for readers, but for writers, in the city.

Lisa Robertson’s On Physical Real Beginning and What Happens Next will be available free (with purchase) starting April 1, 2012 at mother tongue books, 1067 Bank Street, Ottawa.

One of Canada’s most engaged poets, Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto and lives in France. Bookthug has just published her new book of essays, Nilling.

George Elliott Clarke’s Selected Canticles will be available free (with purchase) starting April 15, 2012 at Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar, 1242 Wellington Street West, Ottawa.

Poet, playwright, novelist and literary critic George Elliott Clarke won the Governor General's Award for Poetry for Execution Poems (Gaspereau Press, 2001). His most recent book is Red (Gaspereau Press, 2011). He is currently the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.

Fifty copies of each title will be distributed free through the respective bookstores, and will be made publicly available through the above/ground press site two weeks after their bookstore release date.

Edited and published by Ottawa writer rob mclennan, above/ground press was founded in August, 1993 in Ottawa, and has produced over six hundred publications, including works by George Elliott Clarke, Stephen Brockwell, George Bowering, Deanna Young, Monty Reid, Max Middle, Patrick Lane, Christine McNair, John Lavery, Pearl Pirie, Robert Hogg, derek beaulieu, Marcus McCann, Amanda Earl, Sandra Ridley, Louis Cabri, Shane Rhodes, Marilyn Irwin, John Newlove, Rae Armantrout, Barry McKinnon, Cameron Anstee, Phil Hall, Robert Kroetsch and Gwendolyn Guth. A list of recent titles can be accessed through the above/ground press website.

An anthology of the first decade of the press’ operations, Groundswell: the best of above/ground press 1993-2003, edited by rob mclennan, with an introduction by Stephen Cain, appeared in 2003 with Fredericton publisher Broken Jaw Press. A second volume is currently in production.

For more information, contact rob mclennan at 613 239 0337 or rob_mclennan@hotmail.com

new from above/ground press: Entropic Suite, by Kathryn MacLeod

Entropic Suite
Kathryn MacLeod
$4

Out of Sequence (4)

Warmth sinks into hunger
form into formlessness

children into enemies
clouds into sand

(I carry stories, memories
I’ve lost as many as the next guy

Some days I barely know
my own small history)

Our lives implacably
deteriorate

(I’ve made a lot of
bad decisions, I’ve been

bankrupt, hungry, faceless
without a hat, forgot

to speak out, truth
to power, all my ideals

well-formed, crumbling)

The facts, the laws, the documents
enforce

(and so the world escapes us)

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Kathryn MacLeod [see her 12 or 20 questions here] lives in Victoria, BC and works at the University of Victoria. Much of Entropic Suite was written as part of her dissertation: Transgressing Words and Silence: Aesthetics, Ethics and Education (UBC, 2011), which explores the relationship between ethics, aesthetics and education using the limit case of art created in response to the Holocaust. Her previous books and chapbooks include mouthpiece (Tsunami Editions, 1996) and How Two (Tsunami Editions, 1987). Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Companions and Horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry (2005), Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (1999), and East of Main (1989).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: An OK Organ Man, by Fenn Stewart

An OK Organ Man
Fenn Stewart
$4

polonius

give thy furrows no fatigue
nor any charming king his march
be thou clever, but by no means five feet high
the blows thou hast, and their remonstrance tried
compact them to thy palm with  venison
but do not dew thy dog with common law
for each malignant, unrepentant fish
doth know: that every grief remains in common yet.
give every woman’s ear thy question voice
beware the ambergrise, that it beware of thee
take each man’s acre of inclosed land
reserve thy wild, uncultivated wastes
costly thy nations as thy purse can buy
but not expressed in quarrels, fancy, hums
for oft it is delight proclaims the ban
& the fleetest part of all’s the baker’s sweat.
neither abundance nor a husband be.
supply my defects: this is thy chief end
and thou, my proper fee.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Fenn Stewart reads and writes in Toronto, Ontario. Her work has previously appeared in The Capilano Review, Peter F. Yacht Club, and Open Letter. She is currently writing a dissertation on de/colonization and literature, and reading Daniel Deronda.

cover artwork by reed stewart

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Some author activity: Pirie, Armantrout, Ladouceur, Earl and Kroetsch,

Pearl Pirie answers some questions over at Open Book; Rae Armantrout has some new poems posted at Jacket2; and Ben Ladouceur has won second prize in the Carleton University Writing Competition (see his poem here). Congratulations, Ben! Amanda Earl has posted another Poetry Talk on her blog, and the University of Alberta Press report on the recent Robert Kroetsch: A Celebration event in Edmonton.

Cassie Leigh reviews Rae Armantrout's Custom (above/ground) on the dead (g)end(er) blog;

St. Catharine's, Ontario writer Cassie Leigh was good enough to review Rae Armantrout's Custom (above/ground press). See the original review here.

Language is a tricky thing. It can be used to tell us with a point-blank simplicity how things really are, or it can be used to envelope the truth in irony and elegant words that force a deeper look into what is between the lines. Rae Armantrout, part of the first generation of Language poets on the West Coast and 2010 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, finds a way to give us both in her chapbook Custom.

At first read, Armantrout’s presentation is simple and graceful. The words fall into perfect place in the four poems (pulled from the scheduled 2013 release of a manuscript titled Just Saying), and we are lulled by the methodic and flowing nature of her poetic voice. There is something just below the surface, though, that begs for interpretation. Something past the beauty in her words calls out with a darker irony. I found myself reading and rereading these four poems, overwhelmed with what came out of each different examination.

Specifically, Armantrout’s title poem ‘Custom’ uses the everyday speech that she is best known for, but we are presented with a deeper question that is loosely hidden behind the simplicity. We are given an airport, a hotel, a plaid duvet and constant movement from terminal to terminal – and they are all regular, simple proclamations that sit on the surface of her words, in plain view. But with her last lines, Armantrout states that,

We are almost money. / We can wait at high speed.

The image of moving between terminals becomes the representation of people as nothing more than a transaction for big corporations, and any personality that could be represented from person to person fades away as quickly as the stripes of an old, plaid duvet.

The language of Rae Armantrout’s Custom remains vast and open. I find that there are so many layers to her writing that there will always be more that you can pull out from the grace of her words. From a simplicity to a complexity that begs for fight or flight, the journey that she takes you on in four short poems is overwhelming, subversive, and completely worth the trip.

new from above/ground press: This, circular tower by rob mclennan

This, circular tower
rob mclennan
$4

we uncover an assortment of clues, the task of sorting
after Lise Downe’s This Way (2012)


the difficulties of precision: you

what multitudes left, some generations back

Victorian, spoke (these qualities, reversed



not to say the stretch of line was ever lacking, thus

(a conjecture, politely arranged in single lines)

questioning what might be



a signpost, regiment of flightless birds

might consider, in proportion

useless, and aesthetic



your notebook, my omissions



Toronto Island trees

, a stem

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

This chapbook is a translation of Deborah Poe’s Keep (2012) [see my review of such here].

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and kate street (Moira, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (www.ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (www.ottawater.com). 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 www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: we / cum ::: come / in the yield fields / amongst statues with interior arms, by j/j hastain

we / cum ::: come / in the yield fields / amongst statues with interior arms
j/j hastain
$4

Innervations of post-threshold threshing. Wanted all of your tattoos to be of wanting. Wanted you to come in my eyes so I could see. This dependency on ether-lipids. It matters to note that since then, we have never washed our sheets.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2012
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

j/j hastain is the author of several cross-genre books including long past the presence of common (Say it with Stones Press), trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press) and anti-memoir a vigorous (Black Coffee Press/ Eight Ball Press (forthcoming)). j/j has poetry, prose, reviews, articles, mini-essays and mixed genre work published in many places on line and in print.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com