above/ground press

founded July 1993 : CELEBRATING THIRTY-PLUS YEARS OF CONTINUOUS ACTIVITY + MORE THAN 1400 PUBLICATIONS TO DATE! Ottawa-based poetry chapbook + broadside publisher; publisher of The Peter F. Yacht Club (a writer's group magazine) + Touch the Donkey (a small poetry magazine) + G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] + periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, as well as home of The Factory Reading Series (founded January 1993); edited/published/curated by rob mclennan

Friday, January 31, 2025

new from above/ground press: H IS THE LETTER OF THE DOOR, by Maxwell Gontarek

Maxwell Gontarek
H IS THE LETTER OF THE DOOR
$5

We shivered for the sinister flatness of the momentous
There’s no dawn
Iris loads the lake with its scent
It’s where the silicas wake up at the cloud ends
It’s where the ground nerve superimposes its stakes
on the routs of which we all are is a part
It’s what amasses as history under the heels of our heels rigid
and coruscant we feel ourselves stiffening with
The passage in landscape
Who pays
The carnage in soil
And that that carnage disappoints above below with such height
“For instants sometimes I cry” is the prime grammar of song
The “I” is a bell
The horizon is a showy diaphragmatic eye
To sow is to ex
True act the avenue

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Maxwell Gontarek has poems out in Grotto, Lana Turner, Coma, La Lancha, Tagvverk, and elsewhere, and his pamphlet, A Perfect Donkey, is forthcoming from Creative Writing Department. With Léa Fougerolle, he runs the translation project verseant. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, LA.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

new from above/ground press: TERMINALS, by Nathanael O'Reilly

TERMINALS
Nathanael O'Reilly
$5

Equinox

When you sit by the fireplace alone
reading Yeats, stare into the black night,
remember the summer evening when you
placed your right hand on my forearm out-
side the cinema, removed your mask,
declared your love, kissed me in the shadows.
Parked taxi-drivers watched like sentinels
as we caressed, kissed in orange lamplight.
Parakeets tucked heads under their wings,
settled down for the night in the cool air.
A brushtail possum scampered over a fence,
up a tree trunk to the shelter of leaves.
A rummaging in a bin, perhaps a rat,
disturbed our carefully cultivated poise.
We held each other beneath southern stars,
embraced the autumnal equinox.
I remember your sharp white teeth,
distant heels ticking across pavements,
trying to slow down, savour every last
second of our spontaneous self-indulgence.
We did not foresee our undoing
years later in a disintegrating foreign city.
We had no idea how we would feel
in the future, didn’t think about the hour
of passion as existing beyond the now.
As you sit by the fire in your snug house
stare into the black night outside and wonder
if my arms are lovelier than aloneness.

Note: A terminal utilizing the end-words from Denise O’Hagan’s “A World in Waiting.”

Note on the Form
The terminal form was invented by the Australian poet John Tranter (1943-2023). The final word of each line in a source poem is used as the end-word for each line of a new poem. For more on the terminal form and Tranter’s work, see Brian Henry’s article, “John Tranter’s New Form(alism): The Terminal,” Antipodes, volume 18, issue 1 (June 2004), pages 36-43.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Nathanael O’Reilly is an Irish-Australian poet residing in Texas. His collections include Separation Blues: Poems 1994-2024 (Flying Islands Books, 2024), Dublin Wandering (Recent Work Press, 2024), Landmarks (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024), Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (Downingfield Press, 2024), Boulevard (Downingfield Press, 2024), (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), and Preparations for Departure (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017). His work appears in journals and anthologies published in fifteen countries, including Anthropocene, Cordite, The Honest Ulsterman, Mascara, Meanjin, New World Writing Quarterly, Rabbit, Southword, Trasna and Westerly. He is poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.

This is O’Reilly’s third above/ground press title, after Dear Nostalgia (2023) and Blue (2020).

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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

Saturday, January 25, 2025

some author activity: Boughn, Schapira, Levy, Ross, Clayton, Barton + The Peter F Yacht Club,

Michael Boughn has a YouTube channel, by the way, in which he's been posting a variety of reading videos, including himself and Victor Coleman, etcetera; Kate Schapira writes about the LA wildfires; John Levy has a poem for Stuart Ross up at International Times; Simon Brown has translated poems by Conyer Clayton into French for Revue Watts; John Barton has a new poem up at Identity Theory; and a stranger recently sent me a photograph of this Peter F Yacht Club hat he picked up in Montreal, asking if know where the real yacht club might be. I have no idea! I would love to know,

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

the above/ground press postal increase sale,

above/ground press (b. 1993) doesn’t usually offer any sales during this time of the year, but with the thirty percent increase recently via Canada Post, and a couple of substantial printing increases over the past three years, it puts the press at even more of a loss, so I thought it would be worth offering a series of discounted bundles from the wealth of the above/ground press backlist/frontlist to help with cashflow:

ANY FOUR TITLES FOR $20 (postage included)
ANY TEN TITLES FOR $40 + shipping / Canada add $25 / US add $30 / International add $32
ANY TWENTY-FOUR TITLES FOR $80 + shipping / Canada add $30 / US add $33 / International add $35
ANY FORTY-FIVE TITLES FOR $160 (postage included)
/ all prices in Canadian dollars ; “any” is subject to availability,

normally single author chapbooks (mostly poetry but some prose) titles are $5 each (with issues of G U E ST [a journal of guest editors] $6 each and issues of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] $8 each and copies of the Report from the Society festschrift series anywhere from $6 to $8). 2025 subscriptions, also, are still available as well [$75 Canadian in Canada/$75 US in United States; further info here], in case that appeals instead (I might have to actually increase my subscription rates for next year, but it is too late for 2025). I’ll keep this sale going until July 9, 2025 [which will be above/ground press’ thirty-second birthday, by the way]. I mean, if it helps get further books out into the hands of interested readers, this is a good thing. and remember, above/ground press is entirely unfunded, but for sales and subscriptions and sheer optimism (and my own pocket). there isn’t funding available for this kind of activity.

Make your own bundles! Many authors even have multiple titles across the press, with the link below to their most recent (and links within to their prior). Want all four titles by Amish Trivedi, for example, or a handful of Amanda Earl chapbooks? Why not both natalie hanna offerings, or two of three chapbooks by Julia Polyck-O’Neill? Other authors with multiple titles in print include Jessica Smith, Pearl Pirie, Gil McElroy, Stephen Collis, Brenda Iijima, Jason Christie, Rae Armantrout, Kyle Flemmer, rob mclennan, Stephanie Gray, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Hugh Thomas, Jérôme Melançon, Alice Burdick, Melissa Eleftherion, Ben Robinson, MLA Chernoff, Grant Wilkins, Leesa Dean, Nathanael O’Reilly, Sacha Archer, Lori Anderson Moseman, Ken Norris, Emily Izsak, ryan fitzpatrick and a whole stack of others. Maybe you want a stack of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] issues? Maybe you want a whole slew of the prose series, issues of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] or the Report from the Society festschrift titles? Try me! If I still have copies, it totally works. While supplies last on individual titles, obviously.

To order, send cheques 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 ; questions? shoot me an email,

Friday, January 17, 2025

new from above/ground press: the suitcase poem, ed. Amanda Earl

the suitcase poem
Marie-Andrée Auclair * Gregory Betts * Jeff Blackman * Amanda Earl * Ellen Chang-Richardson * AJ Dolman * Doris Fiszer * Gwendolyn Guth * Jenna Jarvis * Chris Johnson * Tanis MacDonald * Roz Toner * MW
$5

Afterword
Since hearing about Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction on David Naimon’s Between the Covers podcast as part of the show’s “Crafting with Ursula” series, I have contemplated its potential for poem-making. The basic idea is that while stories in Western narrative are usually told from the point of view of a hero, centering conflict and violence, a lot goes missing in such a telling. Le Guin images stories as holding living beings, as a way to nurture and gather. I invited poets I know, first in Ottawa and then further afield, to take part in a collaborative poem about a suitcase to see what its contents might be and where we might go. I shared a Google document and invited people to add lines and words to the text. No one individual is the centre of this poem, the author of the story. In fact, there are many suitcases here, many containers. I love being part of this thriving and creative literary community. I thank all the contributors for taking this journey with me. Gratitude, as always, to rob mclennan for agreeing to publish the poem as an above/ground press chapbook.
~ Amanda Earl

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

In Lieu of Biographies, Suitcases

Before Marie-Andrée Auclair packs their suitcase, they ask: Who will we be there, could we be a better version of us? Are we ready for all kinds of weather? Readiness takes up space. But there is always room to bring back intangibles. It was years before Gregory Betts owned a suitcase with wheels, great lugs of things heavy with resistance to travel. The sheer weight of them was the inertia against which all destinations, Vancouver to Toronto, Toronto to Halifax, and all points in between, were measured. Was the sweat worth the burden? With elbows firmly locked against hips, and a damp brow, this was how he once set out into the world. Jeff Blackman's first suitcase had green stripes and two metal latches. He filled it with toys to take to his grandparents' house on the Mountain. Ellen Chang-Richardson found their favourite suitcase buried in a vintage shop in Covent Garden, London, England. They toted it around the world for years until its untimely demise. AJ Dolman's suitcase is currently filling with other people's memories as they move family members into care: a Delft candy dish, red leather pocket book of playing cards, Russian tea box, distinct treasures aching for new meaning, the outsized absence of everything declined. Amanda Earl used her first suitcase to run away from home. She packed dolls & dinky toys & hid w/ tiger lilies on the outside of the wrought iron & stone fence that divided the red brick house from Brock Road in Wilfrid, Ontario. Doris Fiszer frequently dreams of an oversized suitcase that she is hurriedly packing with lint brushes, flip-flops, cooking utensils and purple hoodies. In these nocturnal adventures, she usually travels to bustling cities with her departed. Gwendolyn Guth's retro suitcase contains grains of sand from a former life. The grains remind her of an unimaginable shade of turquoise. They summon and they abandon. Snow continues to fall in rural Quebec and all is well. Jenna Jarvis has a habit of shoving her worldly possessions into a suitcase or two. Chris Johnson's favourite suitcase was bought at Goodwill, and was irreparably damaged by WestJet in 2012. Chris got $150 to purchase a replacement suitcase. Tanis MacDonald's suitcase is packed full of holes. Every time she travels, she brings back a little more nothing. Roz Toner stores all of their zines in a monogrammed suitcase. To be clear, they haven't a clue who A.E.M. is or was. MW had a blue suitcase that housed a unicorn that loved the dark and loved glow sticks. You could see the shine from the glow sticks even when the suitcase was completely shut like a mouth with nothing to say.

Amanda Earl is the author of ten chapbooks with above/ground press: Eleanor (2007), The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (2008), Sex First & Then A Sandwich (2012), A Book of Saints (2015), Lady Lazarus Redux (2017), The Book of Mark (2018), Aftermath or Scenes of a Woman Convalescing (2019), Sessions from the DreamHouse Aria (2020), a field guide to fanciful bugs (2021) and THE BEFORE, an excerpt from Welcome to Upper Zygonia (2022). She edited the first issue of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] (2018), and above/ground press produced Report from the Earl Society, Vol. 1 No. 1 as a festschrift on her ongoing work in 2022.

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

new from above/ground press: from What If I Sang “Flower of Scotland”?, by Catriona Strang

from What If I Sang “Flower of Scotland”?
Catriona Strang
$5

Crash-tackle

Descendant of the last man
in the scrum, I would not
act alone along
the lines of this
well-rucked blood bin where
the Wolf finds his interests
under the pressure of ritualized
aggression: tenants and taxes
rocked, stung, yet still
at odds over the porridge oats
barrelling their way over
the line of touch. What if
the enclosing fences sang, almost as
venerable as waves
of complaint pouring
out of trains, an ungrounding
pulse-over on a mud heap
in heavy rain, this knock-on that
begins to permeate the working
class, sealed by the extraordinary
wealth accrued in the maul – tweed,
hosiery, knitwear, linen – passionate
and intense in the face of
a forward rush of toil
and fatigue, hunger and
peril: “Feet, Scotland,
Feet!”

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover artwork: Aoife McLennan

Catriona Strang is a first-generation settler of primarily Scottish heritage who lives on stolen xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands. Her most recent publication is Unfuckable Lardass (Talonbooks, 2022). She is the author of five other books of poetry, several written in collaboration with the late Nancy Shaw, whose selected works, The Gorge, she edited (Talonbooks, 2017).

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) 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