Thursday, January 31, 2013

new from above/ground press: Other Brief Discourses, by Abby Paige



Other Brief Discourses
Abby Paige
$4

I. Embarking

Should my point of departure be the dust
to which I will return? Or the water of which
I am composed? Or

I’m told the poet asked, are birds free
from the chains of the skyway?
So I depart from air.

One accustomed to the sea takes not long
to trust air’s buoyancy.
So let breath be

the place we start from. Let the sun
rise in our wake and our ship shudder
as we descend through cloud.

The river below, a forked black tongue
darting through the snow, I named
for the patron of cooks, put to death on a grill.

The maps I drew four centuries ago
I compare with land from the vantage of birds
and am not dissatisfied.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2013
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy


Abby Paige is a poet, performer, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in the United States and Canada, most recently in ottawater #9. Her solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, has toured in New England and Quebec. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a former Fulbright scholar.



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

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

new from above/ground press: ZOOM, by Stephen Cain



ZOOM
Stephen Cain
$4

Crowds

hello men hello men left it liminal
women you scale it out
bomb ball a bungle
a chasm glass toll a fire of film flimsy

hello minuscule Pluto crash
rally an adagio

Andre man sax as a flu men float boat at all
feel abashed fall jade a folly die
flu emboss

zero bad add rad day
gray lewd gig load a god dash
glue glad men Golgotha road a gland rib-eye

hello men hello men left it liminal
women you scale it out
bomb ball bungle
a chasm glass toll a fire of film blister
hello minuscule Pluto crash
rally an adagio

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2013
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Zoom is a reverse-homophonic translation of sound poems by Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Paul Scheerbart, and Claude Gauvreau.

Stephen Cain is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent being I Can Say Interpellation (Bookthug, 2011).

This is Stephen Cain's third above/ground press chapbook, after CIRCA DIEM (1997) and the collaborative  Hijinks: A Sequence from Double Helix (with Jay MillAr; 2003).

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

Monday, January 28, 2013

new from above/ground press: The Art of Plumbing, by Brecken Hancock



The Art of Plumbing

Brecken Hancock

$4

Beforetimes. Uranus culls his gilded camels and bathes in the Baikal, the Zaysan, the Lanao. He wades in low-lying planes; spas in every rain-filled meteor crater. Sixty-fourth parallel, March. Sunlight fires a salvo off his lover’s collarbone. Gaia’s slums hoard water, asmat mud and patches of pubic forest. Her valleys are aqueducts feeding antechambers of lakes: caravans of bathtubs clawing overland talon by talon according to deep time, glacial wake, geochemistry. Lake Agassiz Basin. Morass hollow, calderas. Gathering my hair off the pillow, I rise from the spill on our sheets to bathe.

Oceanus—Titan of the brackish Atlantic, master of Ketos and Kraken, conductor of sky to land. Half man, half serpent; horizon marks the fix. Biceps of accumulated cloud ceiling the sea. He’ll rip your ship apart for a violin. His tail’s a woman’s braid dropped deep. And over its mucus and muscled carbuncles, legions of mollusc princes ascend, knot by knot by octopus tapis—crabs’ pincers and half-spumed clams—through bergs of cloying oil slick, plagues of dross, black-blooming purple, and a drowned Cassiopeia of phosphor. Abyssss. Germs fermenting in the kegs of their slow-moving shells. Up through the punch holes of Poseidon’s belt, out through the tunnels of his prosthetic manifold, svelte pipelines, immaculate taps—an invertebrate army comes to kiss the slit where my tail splits, two legs.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2013
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy


Brecken Hancock’s poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in CV2, Grain, Arc, The Fiddlehead, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Originally from Middle Lake, Saskatchewan, she’s since lived in Fredericton, Reykjavik, and Kyoto, but she’s also been home to hold residencies at The Bruno Arts Bank, a converted historical building in rural Saskatchewan. Her first full-length manuscript of poems, Broom Broom, is forthcoming with Coach House Books. She has work in the latest issue of ottawater and poems in an upcoming issue of Event. Brecken lives and walks dogs in Ottawa


[Brecken Hancock launches The Art of Plumbing in Ottawa at The Factory Reading Series on February 22 alongside Abby Paige, Hugh Thomas and Michael Blouin]


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

Friday, January 25, 2013

new from above/ground press: Scientia, by Jordan Abel



Scientia
Jordan Abel
$4

Oecanthus ladon


All colour terms are reduced, cut short, not the usual
length. Acephalous: without a head. Those muscid ad-
ditions that give the glandular structure that branching
apex. Abrupt or hidden. Rubbed or scraped. The third
abductor extending past the honeycomb of the op-tic tract.
The tapering surface made white like a siphon.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2013
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Jordan Abel is a First Nations writer whose work has been published in CV2, Grain and Canadian Literature. He is a contributing editor for Geist and a former editor for PRISM international. His first collection of poetry is forthcoming from Talonbooks. Visit him at www.jordanabel.ca.

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.

Monday, January 14, 2013

The Factory Reading Series presents: Hugh Thomas, Michael Blouin, Brecken Hancock + Abby Paige,

The Factory Reading Series presents:
Hugh Thomas (Fredericton)
Michael Blouin (Kemptville)

Brecken Hancock (Ottawa)
+ Abby Paige (Ottawa)
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, February 22, 2013;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern (upstairs)
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale)


Hugh Thomas lives in Fredericton, where he is a professor of mathematics at the University of New Brunswick. Chapbooks of his poetry have been published by Paper Kite Press (Heart badly buried by five shovels, 2009), BookThug (Mutations, 2004), and above/ground press (Opening the Dictionary, 2011), which was shortlisted for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Franzlations, the imaginary Kafka parables, a book of variations on Kafka texts, a joint project with Gary Barwin and Craig Conley, was published by New star Books in 2011.

Michael Blouin‘s critically acclaimed first novel Chase and Haven (Coach House) was a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and won the 2009 ReLit Award. In 2007 his first collected poetry I’m not going to lie to you (Pedlar Press) was a finalist for the Lampman Scott Award. In 2011 Pedlar Press released Wore Down Trust, which won the Lampman Poetry Award in 2012. He was a finalist for the 2010 CBC Literary Awards and his work has been published in many literary magazines includingDescant, Arc, The Antigonish Review, Event, Queen’s Quarterly, The New Quarterly, and The Fiddlehead. He is currently completing work on his second novel and is represented internationally by Westwood Creative Artists. His collaborative chapbook with Elizabeth Rainer, let lie/ (above/ground press, 2011), was shortlisted for the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Brecken Hancock's [pictured, above] poetry and essays have appeared in Grain, CV2, The Fiddlehead, PRISM, Arc, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Originally from Middle Lake, Saskatchewan, she's since lived in Fredericton, Reykjavik, and Kyoto, but she's also been home to hold residencies at The Bruno Arts Bank, a converted historical building in rural Saskatchewan. Her first full-length manuscript of poems, Broom Broom, is forthcoming with Coach House Books. She lives and walks dogs in Ottawa.

She will be launching her chapbook The Art of Plumbing (above/ground press).

Abby Paige is a poet, performer, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in the United States and Canada, most recently in ottawater #9. Her solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, has toured in New England and Quebec. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a former Fulbright scholar.

She will be launching her chapbook Other Brief Discourses (above/ground press).

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Mark Frutkin reviews Clarke, Brockwell, Burke+Hall and Kroetsch over at the ottawa poetry newsletter,


Ottawa writer Mark Frutkin was good enough to review four recent above/ground press titles over at the ottawa poetry newsletter [see the original post here]. Thanks!
Review of Four Chapbooks from above/ground press

by Mark Frutkin

Selected Canticles by George Elliott Clarke
The Crawdad Cantos (Excerpts from Impossible Books) by Stephen Brockwell
Shikibu Shuffle by Andrew Burke and Phil Hall
Further to Our Conversation – Poems by Robert Kroetsch


A chapbook is by necessity a diminutive taste of poetry. A morsel of a poet’s work – a good introduction to someone you have not previously read or perhaps a reacqaintance, a revisiting with old friends.

I would consider George Elliott Clarke in the ‘old friend’ category, not literally but in the sense that I’ve read much of his poetry over the years (almost all of it, I think) and reviewed previous collections here and there (See http://markfrutkin.blogspot.ca/2011/08/book-review-17-blue-by-george-elliott.html). I would rank his book, Whylah Falls, in my list of top five Canadian collections of poetry, all-time. No other Canadian poet is so lavish with sensual detail and so bold about the physical world and the human body. And in Selected Canticles he delivers again, as he always does, giving us a marvelous slumgullion of a miniature feast, like a serving of appetizers so rich you don’t need to eat the impending meal.

Of course, Clarke always goes for the ear as well as the eye: “not even the squeal of a squall / as waves whacked rock,” or “blossoms blaze a branch.” And he can be humorous too. In ‘À Cristophe Colombe,’ he calls the Spain of Columbus’ day, “a comic-opera Empire”. One can almost picture a Gilbert and Sullivan musical based on Queen Isabella and her famous explorer. 

Of course, no one in Canada comes anywhere near Clarke’s ability to write frankly about sex – raw, graphic and straight-up as home-distilled whiskey. He doesn’t scruple to use the good old Anglo-Saxon sex words: fuck, cunt and anus appear liberally throughout these poems, several of which address the black man’s role as hard-driving lover of white women. In a sense, this becomes a trope of the payback for or escape from slavery. Clarke is always conscious of the black man’s position in our world and in history but these poems are not the least bit didactic. They’re the real thing.

No one joins poetry and science as fluidly as Stephen Brockwell. The Crawdad Cantos contains what has become one of my favourite Canadian poems. ‘A Primer for Drainage’ is from The Evangelical Handbook for Engineers, a wonderful conceit to pull together the world of the spirit and the material world of the engineer, builder, scientist. You could be an atheist and still delight in his take on God as inherent in platinum-iridium bars and krypton-86 emissions. The last few lines are so striking, I must quote them in full: “Among time and distances, he is the absolute constant, / the being that lets being be – and every culvert, / aqueduct, conduit, sluice, grate, trench and duct / merely drains the ephemeral projection of his eternal tears.” I think including the word ‘duct’ in that list is a sure sign of poetic brilliance as it resonates with the last word of the poem, ‘tears’.

There are other excellent poems here, especially ‘Parrots not in Cleveland’ (from Cantos of the 1%). Besides the fact that Cleveland, my birthplace, hardly ever appears in a Canadian poem, this poem has a humorous tone that I very much appreciate. Drinking banana daiquiris in Cleveland in March is odd enough as the subject for a poem but the poet also says he can imitate a parrot’s voice: “I’ll need a trumpet, / a trunk full of Hawaiian shirts, a pair / of holey sneakers spattered with blue paint, / a month of sunlight to give this snow the shaft”. ‘Sunlight’ and ‘shaft’ – once again, a brilliant juxtaposition that plays on the two definitions for ‘shaft’. And again, this poem ends with a striking image. But I urge you to pick up this chapbook to learn what it is.

In Shikibu Shuffle, two poets, Andrew Burke from Australia and Phil Hall from Perth, (who won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his fascinating book, Killdeer) have collaborated to produce a collection of fifteen poems based on the five-line form used by the Japanese poet, Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014). Each poem here is ten lines long (with a few variations). It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine who wrote what, and exactly how the process worked. In any case, the result is a kind of medieval Japanese jazz with a flowing series of riffs that sometimes connect and sometimes don’t. The musical play here reminds me somewhat of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues (which was influenced more by hardcore jazz than what we now consider the blues). There’s a vibrancy and freedom to the images and their links here, in this back and forth ‘shuffle’, and sometimes the results are striking: “a Chinese dragon of smoke / wearing my dead friend’s clothes / above the marina” or “pale cuticle” (for the moon), or the exceedingly strange and suggestive “to weave submerged antlers / breathing blue at their tips”. This is a collection that can be read more than twice.

The very fine poet (and novelist), Robert Kroetsch, died in 2011. This small chapbook, Further to Our Conversation, consists of three letter-poems to friends, interspersed with three very short poems. The first letter-poem, ‘Dear John Lent’, reveals the wonderful line, “Our first cry is a poem that contains everything” and the intriguing phrase “Icarus in a car...” These actually do feel like thoughts that came to Kroetsch after a late-night conversation with a friend, a kind of soliloquy inspired by a dialogue. Kroetsch’s poetry was always wonderfully experimental and refused to hew to the straight and narrow furrows that characterize much of mainstream Canadian verse. I see him running his plough in all sorts of mad geometries across those prairie fields: ovals within ovals, spirals, secret divinatory crop circles of poetry. His sense of the comic is excellent: “Punctuation is a middle-class pretension. So is a toothache. In heaven you have to sit eternally staring at a bright light, so be sure to take your dark glasses.” (‘Dear Jeff Carpenter’) He ends the same poem with the wonderful lines: “I once travelled halfway across Spain to see St Teresa’s bent left elbow safe in a glass jar. We each write poems as we see fit. But then, what poem isn’t a relic?” (It makes me want to ask if St Teresa wrote left-handed!)

Another line in ‘Dear Jeff Carpenter’ makes light of the inevitable, and probably tells us much about what kind of person and poet Robert Kroetsch was. In four words that embody a kind of simplicity, acceptance and peace, he writes: “Death, that necessary pest.”