Happy 30th, above/ground press

thanks rob mclennan!

Happy 30^th anniversary to above/ground press, a press that has been here now for half my lifetime. I became aware of rob and above/ground press in the early aughts when I was at the beginning of my journey of sharing my poetry. I took several workshops with rob over the years and have been an above/ground press subscriber for a long time. whether it’s the chapbooks, broadsides, various print magazines, interviews with writers, spotlights and reviews rob continues to keep the literary conversation going.

In the days when rob used to live near me, I would often see him trundling along on a bicycle, a huge stack of chapbooks slung in a bag across his shoulder.

He somehow manages to pay attention to everyone he’s published and to promote our work. He sends us e-mails all the time to ask for more. above/ground press has spent thirty years investigating the form of the chapbook, multiple chapbooks, an avalanche of chapbooks, keeping Staples in business.

through above/ground, I have learned about visual poetry, long poems, minimalist poems, fragments, prose poems, poetic statements, hybrid forms and styles of work I seldom see in literary magazines. I have responded to these works in my own way, making weird poems and prose that rob has seen fit to publish, somehow and that’s a rarity for me. rob sees things in writers that many publishers don’t seem to get. he’s eager for us to push narrative, break open spaces, and risk failure or even celebrate it, to rebel against perfectionism.

Here are all 10 of the chapbooks of mine that have been published by above/ground press, all of which you are likely able to still obtain because rob generously makes a lot of copies.

1. Eleanor, 2007; 2. The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman, 2008; 3. Sex First Then A Sandwich, 2012; 4. A Book of Saints, an Excerpt from Saint Ursula’s Commonplace Book, 2015; 5. LADY LAZARUS REDUX, 2017; 6. The Vispo Bible: The Book of Mark, 2018 (not pictured); 7. Aftermath, or Scenes of a Woman Convalescing, 2019; excerpt from Beast Body Epic (forthcoming from AngelHousePress, 2023); 8. Sessions from the DreamHouse Aria, from the above/ground press prose/naut imprint, 2020; 9. a field guide to fanciful bugs, 2021; 10. The Before, an excerpt from Welcome to Upper Zygonia, 2022.

And here is the wonderful homage anthology, Report from the Earl Society, Volume 1, No. 1, 2022, with text and images from Sacha Archer, Gary Barwin, Gregory Betts, Richard Capener, Johanna Drucker, Kyle Flemmer, rob mclennan, Christine McNair, Joakim Norling, Imogen Reid, Sandra Ridley, Petra Schultz-Wollgast, Kate Siklosi, Dani Spinosa, Eileen Tabios and Terri Witek. I can’t tell you what an utter delight and surprise it was to receive this work, made with love.

Through above/ground press rob has cultivated a community of writers, and helped readers to expand our horizons,. Here’s to another 30 years!

For those of you in Ottawa, or visiting Ottawa, please join in the above/ground press celebration where I will be reading with Jennifer Baker, Nina Jane Drystek, Adrienne Ho Rose, Sophia Magliocca, Karen Massey, Jérôme Melançon, Monty Reid, and Grant Wilkins. The celebration/reading/launch will take place on Saturday, August 12, 2023 at the Clocktower Pub, 575 Bank. Doors, 7pm. $10 gets you entrance plus an above/ground press chapbook.

pictured: the elephant popcorn in The Nervous Energy (from the Twenty-Six) as interpreted by Adobe Firefly

I will be reading an excerpt from a poem-suite entitled the Twenty-Six, a series that engages with my grapheme synaesthesia and the alphabet. A few of the poems were published in the latest issue of Touch the Donkey (above/ground press, 2023).

I hope to see you there!