Tuesday, May 31, 2016

new from above/ground press: King Kong, by rob mclennan

King Kong
rob mclennan
$4

Eleven ways of tracking space debris,
for Christine,

1.

Transform an underlying idea. A swarm of man-made hazards. Sequences, aglow. Discarded bits from separation. Articulations. Detailed, like the snow. She sits down on the front step, mystified. Cohesion: orbit of a written voice.

2.

Fugue particles in a distance; recurrent, rhythmic elements. Inevitable. The irritation of style.

3.

Multiplied collision rate. Embrace the atmosphere, emotional worlds. Poised, from solid rocket motors. Guided. Spheres from boosters, butter. Parts of bodies used. Dramatization. The incoherent argument of utterance.

4.

Never far from thought: the earth rotates, tumbles, turns. A sequence of geometry. Too small to maintain its velocity. We say out loud. Crossroads, meteors, a flux in space. A reader who knows the comet’s tail. Rubble: which constitutes a cadence of modest dimension.

5.

If the moon has its own sub-moons.

6.

Concave: we would perish, like a weed. The same depth of analysis. Dissolve, manipulation. The weight of light to me, is. False sense of the contemporary. A destructive tiny fleck of paint. Proliferate. A connection: which would clean house.

7.

Fashionistas, fusionists. What comparisons. Bodily things, animated fluid. We stare out into space, know not the colour dark. Count how many times the moon has nearly drowned. The other has to stand aside.

8.

Thicken, blaze. A fragmentation, lyric speed. Human dignity. Re-sequenced. Cobwebs, stretch by number, weight. A cosmic slipstream; idiom, the invisible path of mood. A paired kiss: preposition. Such glorious sky: the translations are mine.

9.

Populated, garbage. A sunspot, glare into suspense.

10.

Morose of virtue, shielded. Dust motes, in a catch of spotlight. Withers. Unconscious, shifting forms. Hypervelocity. A trick of reflected light, refracted. Solids, hurtling through space; a body, falls. It skids across the atmosphere.

11.

Compounding legion, intimate. I want this not to matter. Matter.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2016
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy


Originally published by Apostrophe Press as a handout for rob mclennan’s induction into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour as part of VERSeFest 2016, March 20, 2016.

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). In 2015, he was named “Interviews Editor” for the online journal Queen Mob’s Teahouse. 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 robmclennan.blogspot.com

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

new from above/ground press: Three Bloody Words : Twentieth Anniversary Edition, by Stephanie Bolster

Three Bloody Words : Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Stephanie Bolster
with a new afterword by the author
$5



my name is rose red blood
                                                             dark lips it’s all the same negation of everything my sister is they knew all along when we were born i was lesser more susceptible to lust less likely to reward them with golden grandchildren so she got the bear when he turned prince
                                                  i wish he had stayed dark & furry his skin thick as rugs smelling of musk wilted roses the inside of caves our new castle never a home not dark enough for me to steal away to him always his fair brother dozing beside me & him too far away in the next room with her dreaming of ripe berries



published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2016
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy


Three Bloody Words was originally produced through above/ground press in an edition of 300 copies, May 1996. It subsequently appeared in the anthology Groundswell: the best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press / cauldron books, 2003), edited by rob mclennan.

Stephanie Bolster is the author of four books of poetry, the first of which, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Signal/Véhicule, 1998), won the Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Awards. Her latest book, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth (Brick Books, 2011) was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award and more recent work was a finalist for the Canada Writes/CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal, where she also coordinates the writing program.

This is Stephanie Bolster’s third above/ground press chapbook, after the original Three Bloody Words (1996) and Biodome (2006).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Friday, May 20, 2016

new from above/ground press: A New Love/ An Aching Stone, Pete Smith

A New Love/ An Aching Stone
A double-cento out of Yehuda Amichai & Mahmoud Darwish
Pete Smith
$4


Let's go as we are:
wills patched with many patches
and my song needs to breathe:  poetry isn't poetry
because of the wall.
Which exile do you want?
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2016
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy


Pete Smith: Born mid-century in middle of England. Became an ex-non-pat in 1974. Has lived in Kamloops area of BC since then. Is almost ready to write from that place, meanwhile writes from meetingplaces with poets, artists, photographers, composers, rogues & rascules of different ethnicities, genders, aesthetics, eras etc to discover who else he might be. Has published in USA, Ireland, Canada, England & in the wherever of on-line. A scatter of chapbooks, essays, interviews & reviews plus one preposthumous book, Bindings with Discords, 2015, from Shearsman (UK). No academic record of his existence. A New Love/ An Aching Stone may be his most important & is certainly his most impotent work. Thanks for asking, rob mclennan.

A New Love/ An Aching Stone is Smith’s second chapbook with above/ground press, after STRUM OF UNSEEN (2008).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

new from above/ground press: Vesper Vigil, by Bronwen Tate

Vesper Vigil
Bronwen Tate
$4



What can be closer than my own body?
Known in sensation: heat, pain, and desire —
new furrows, grey hairs, unnoticed freckles,
apprehended in mirrors’ strange angles.
Presence began with the counting of days,
with each ultrasound’s fear and relief,
grew with sickness I delayed meals to know,
then reassured by that nausea, ate toast.
Legible bodies prompt declaration —
I said “due at the end of July.”
Fingers now join silent conversation,
limbs pushing taut skin in reply.
Beloved, still abstraction, I confess,
how can I know you till I see your face?


published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2016
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy


Cover image: V. Caleb Anderson

Bronwen Tate is the author of the chapbooks Souvenirs (Dusie 2007), Like the Native Tongue the Vanquished (Cannibal Books 2008), Scaffolding (Dusie 2009), if a thermometer (dancing girl press 2011) and The Loss Letters (Dusie 2011). She has taught courses in literature, aesthetics, creative writing, and composition at Brown University, Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Stanford University, where she is currently a lecturer and fellow in the Thinking Matters Program.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Friday, May 13, 2016