new from above/ground press:

STRUM OF UNSEEN

by Pete Smith (Kamloops BC)

$4

[after Fred Douglas’ book Menu For Sunset: An Apparent Story Illustrated With Pictures and his photo/text exhibition Menu For Sunset.]

publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

Pete Smith: Unlettered & unfettered. Migrated from England to Kamloops in 1974. Is a retired psychiatric nurse. Chapbooks include 20/20 Vision and cross of green hollow (Wild Honey Press, Eire), Harm's Length (Cambridge, UK). Long poem sequences, Mother Tongue: Father Silence (Tinfish, Hawaii); CLIV (Alterran Poetry Assemblage); Evacuation Procedures & Second Horace (Great Works). Poems in W, The Gig, The Capilano Review (forthcoming). Essays & reviews in Agenda (London, UK); The Gig (Toronto); The Paper (Sheffield, UK); at jacket #9; & forthcoming in Crayon (USA), The Gig 19 (improvisations on the works of Deanna Ferguson) & a chapter in The Salt Companion to John James (Cambridge, UK).

new from above/ground press:

The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman
by Amanda Earl
$4

"a response to The Sad Phoenician by Robert Kroetsch, Completed Field Notes, The University of Alberta Press, 2000

italicized phrases are taken directly from the above long poem, which i loved and the rest is written in the spirit of the poem in the voice of a woman who developed a thing for adverbs"

also still available:
E l e a n o r (2007)
by Amanda Earl
$4

publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

Amanda Earl's poetry is forthcoming in Rampike, The New Chief Tongue and Van Gogh's Ear. above/ground press published her second chapbook Eleanor in 2007. Her poetry has also been recently featured in ottawater.com, Ditchpoetry.com and Unlikelystories.org and published by Vancouver's pooka press, Ottawa's Peter F. Yacht Club and in Calgary's Holy Beep! Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal. You can read about Ottawa's literary shenanigans on her blog: amandaearl.blogspot.com.

new from above/ground press:

Samuel Hearne 1745-1792

Even at this hour I cannot
reflect on the transactions
of that horrid day
Without shedding tears

curse of canada
by Gregory Betts (St. Catharines ON)
$4

also still available:
The Cult of David Thompson (2005)
by Gregory Betts
$4

publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

Gregory Betts [see his 12 or 20 questions here] is the author of If Language (2005), and Haikube (2006). He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he edits PRECIPICe magazine, curates The Grey Borders Reading Series, and teaches Canadian and Avant-Garde Literature at Brock University.

new from above/ground press:

map of edmonton (rossdale flats)

1.

a thin blue line, eight thousand
itinerant turns

of the sun featured earth

spark, a long heat of fiction

its not a discovery
if they knew

drunk, cross
the high level bridge

festooned in air

vacant lot between building
& dance club

we dance, & we dance

just cause we have to

more than we want

map of edmonton (rossdale flats)
by rob mclennan (Ottawa)
$2

publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, even though he was born there, once. The author of over a dozen books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, most recently Ottawa: The Unknown City (Arsenal Pulp Press), subverting the lyric: essays (ECW Press) and white (The Mercury Press), he is currently spending the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. He regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other bits of nonsense on his increasingly clever blog: robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press:

sink in, your oath in the boathouse

to attend, float
a Kootenay-protection

blue sticker glint
connote blue o sh

unenergy is in set
of shoulders

loss is: the sighs up
and down the situ

float where you loathe
in a personal verboten

be the ignored goatherd
wolf spines are every bough

fine. at the promontory of speech
the shifty-footed lengthening line

the cash
sheers

do a task
to a table, pardon –

mean the counter
gruel-cruel the inkless pen

hotel mortifica
shun panic

oath in the boathouse
by Pearl Pirie (Ottawa)
$4

publisht in Edmonton by above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, March 2008. a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy. To order, add $1 for postage, & in Canadian currency; if sending from outside Canada, send in American, payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1R 6R7; above/ground press subscribers receive (honest!) a complimentary copy; calendar year subscriptions available for $40, & include chapbooks, broadsides, STANZAS magazine & The Peter F. Yacht Club.

Pearl Pirie has been published in Womb, 1cent, ottawater 4.0, Best of MiPo Cafe Cafe, by Pooka Press and at culturalshifts.com. Her poetry is generally forthcoming, except when it isn't.
She blogs. This is her 6th chapbook, the 1st not self-published.

new from above/ground press

Forcing Bloom

Jenna Butler

ALBERTA SERIES #6

24 pages, 8 1/2 x 11

produced in an edition of 200 numbered copies in Edmonton, Alberta by above/ground press a part of above/ground press’ ALBERTA SERIES, February 2008.

designed by mdesnoyers

Jenna Butler [see her 12 or 20 questions here] was born in Norwich, England in 1980, but has spent most of her life on the prairies of western Canada. The landscapes of the prairies and mountains – their severity and incredible richness – feature prominently in her poetry and fiction.

Butler’s work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, journals and anthologies in Canada and abroad. Her poetry has garnered, among others, the James Patrick Folinsbee Prize, and has been produced by the CBC. She is the editor of more than twenty collections of poetry in Canada and Europe, and is the founding editor of Rubicon Press.

She currently makes her home in Edmonton, Alberta, where she lives with her husband, and works as a teacher, editor, and book reviewer.

Mail all your money (payable to rob mclennan) to:

rob mclennan, writer in residence

Department of English and Film Studies

University of Alberta3-5 Humanities Centre

Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5

$6 (+ $2 for postage; outside Canada, $6+2$ US)

(while supplies last; produced in a numbered run of 200 copies)

above/ground press subscribers rec' a complimentary copy;

2008 subscriptions still available

some above/ground press author activity (Ottawa)

A B Series #6:
Ottawa Night in The A B Series

7:30pm
14 March 2008

Ottawa City Hall
Art Gallery
Main Floor
110 Laurier Avenue West

Rhonda Douglas (If Time Exists: The Cassandra Poem)
Jacqueline Lawrence
Janice Tokar
Amanda Earl (e l e a n o r)
Marcus McCann (heteroskeptical)
Sandra Ridley (The Peter F. Yacht Club)
Pearl Pirie (The Peter F. Yacht Club)
Sean Dowd

for further info, click here;