above/ground press

donor to the AngelHousePress 2023 Caring Imagination Crowd Funding Campaign

i am pleased that above/ground press is one of the presses donating work for the AngelHousePress Crowd Funding Campaign again this year.

above/ground press is donating the following chapbooks:

Praamsma, Wanda. aversions   //   nothing special. February 2022.

Mody, Monica. Ordinary Annals. July 2021.

MacEachern, Jessi. Television Poems. August 2021.

Gray, Stephanie. Go Under The Surface. March 2018.

Bolster, Stephanie. Three Bloody Words. May 2016. Twentieth anniversary edition.

Report from the Earl Society. Vol. 1 No. 1. February 2022.

Simpson, Natalie. Small Print. January 2022.

Gurton-Wachter, Anna. MOTHER OF ALL. January 2018.

Notley, Alice. UNDO. March 2018.

Hanna, Natalie. dark ecologies. October 2017.

You can pick up the 10 chapbooks through our campaign here. And check out all the great above/ground press publications here.

above/ground press is 30 years old this year. here’s a snippet of a great interview on the Toronto International Festival of Authors site with rob mclennan, instigator, founder and publisher: “above/ground press launched its first couple of titles in July, 1993, and spent the first decade-plus focused almost exclusively on Canadian poets, producing both single-author chapbooks and more than forty issues of the long poem journal STANZAS. The press is basically me, with whatever access I’ve had over the years to photocopiers, five different long-arm staplers and one larger stapler, and a whole array of cut-and-paste templates. Early influences included bill bissett’s blewointment, bpNichol’s Gronk/ganglia, George Bowering’s IMAGO and Maggie Helwig’s Lowlife Publishing.

The mission is to produce and widely distribute relatively inexpensive chapbooks of quality, engaged writing that I am personally excited by. The press is fueled by my enthusiasms.

Since those early years, the press seems to have expanded exponentially, from producing a half-dozen titles over the space of a calendar year to nearly eighty, including issues of at least three different journals (The Peter F. Yacht Club, Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] and G U E S T [a journal of guest editors]). Knowing I have a good amount of subscribers, people who clearly trust my judgement enough to want copies of everything I produce, is certainly an encouragement for me to keep going. But my current publication rate might just be ridiculous. Who knows what I might start next?”

Thank you to above/ground press for supporting our campaign and thanks to you! You can help us by picking up one of the great perks or donating money not associated with the perk, or simply sharing the campaign on social media and letting your friends know. The money we raise will pay AngelHousePress contributors in 2023. We’re publishing our annual online magazines: NationalPoetryMonth.ca, a daily celebration that transcends the borders of poetry, and Experiment-O, a celebration of the art of risk. Visit the campaign here.