new poems, a chapbook and prompt and a short story,

An update, to keep you in the loop (of course): I've poems from the manuscript "Fair bodies of unseen prose" over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (as part of a folio of Ottawa poets) and delicate emissions zine; a poem from my "dream logic" manuscript sits as a prompt via Benjamin Niespodziany's Sunday poem and prompt substack, and there was even a chapbook from that particular work-in-progress recently through above/ground press; and I've a short story up at The Temz Review. I get quoted in this article over at Apartment613 about this week's VERSeFest. And apparently my spring poetry title with Caitlin is anticipated by the CBC! So, that's cool.

new from above/ground press: Cahill, Earl, Cavaleri, Niespodziany, Comay/Fagan, Birchard, Chernoff, la Rocque, carisse, Hill, Nećakov, Siklosi + Bjerg/Jung,

BAD TEMPOR, Jimmy T Cahill $6 ; SOCIALLY AWKWARD GHOST, Amanda Earl $6 ; Studies, Micah Anthony Cavaleri $6 ; The Man, a sequence of foolish men, Benjamin Niespodziany $6 ; The Sun Will Bleach It Away, Rebecca Comay / Cary Fagan $6 ; DIDIKUY, Guy Birchard $6 ; SLOPTIMISM of the WILL, MLA Chernoff $6 ; Circling the Black Sun, Lance La Rocque $6 ; That H uman E ffluence A nd P lastic, russell carisse $6 ; a nest, a burrow, a lea stone, Jeremy Luke Hill $6 ; The World is Beautiful, Lillian Nećakov $6 ; household: meadow, Kate Siklosi $6 ; eyesore, Johannes S.H. Bjerg and Charlotte Jung $6

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
October-November 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

And did you see my report on this past summer's above/ground press 32nd anniversary event?

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). See the prior list of recent titles here, scroll down here to see a further list of various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; and you know above/ground press has a substack now? sign up (for free!) for announcements, and even new features! catch recent/forthcoming interviews with Guy Birchard, Jill Stengal, Lillian Nećakov, Cary Fagan, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ken Norris, Michael Sikkema, Ben Ladouceur, Nathanael O'Reilly, Micah Ballard, Lydia Unsworth, Amanda Earl, Buck Downs, russell carisse etc.

With forthcoming chapbooks by: Glenn Bach, Travis Sharp, Sonja Greckol, Frances Cannon, Stuart Ross and Jason Camlot, David Gaffney, Kevin Spenst, Jill Stengel, Mrityunjay Mohan, Buck Downs, Salem Paige, Robert van Vliet, David Phillips and probably others! (yes: others,

AND 2026 SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE NOW AVAILABLE (but you probably already know that,

Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Disintegration Made Plain and Easy

 

another day another

Another day another 

Soup god I

Am simple I 

Will dunk my

Bread into the 

Rain whatever juices

In the nightbowl 

I make love

My mouth is 

Full of bread

The moon stops 

Like a clock

Overhead god how

I fall how 

Must I eat

Twice my weight 

In salt

I’m really enjoying the narrative connections, disconnects and accumulations of the poems in Bellingham, Washington poet Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi’s Disintegration Made Plain and Easy (Chicago IL: Piżama Press, 2025). This is the first volume in a new press founded and run by Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany, “dedicated to showcasing and uplifting the voices of the strange, the uncanny, the absurd, and the surreal.” I’ve been aware for some time that Niespodziany has quite a good eye for such work, his social media and substack long offering remarkably good examples of poems and poets I might otherwise have not been aware, from the contemporary to the historical, working the surreal short, condensed and/or prose poem. 

Disintegration Made Plain and Easy is set in two cluster-sections of poems, interspersed with illustrations (as well as an “INTERMISSION” between the two sections of poems) by Los Angeles-based illustrator, animator and interaction designer Gautam Rangan. “I like to get naked // I guess because it makes // Me think about death,” Araki-Kawaguchi writes, to open the first poem in the collection, “i like to get naked,” which stretches across three pages in a monologue reminiscent of the classic “Sex at 31” series (a series I’m sure no one actually recalls anymore), around death, sex and moving through time. The accumulative rhythms of Araki-Kawaguchi’s poems I find quite fascinating, as they suggest themselves as purely self-contained phrases piled atop each other, offering, instead, real subtle twists and turns connecting phrases and rhythms as much between the lines as through. And then, of course, there are the incredible “about the author” poems, six of which are sprinkled through the collection, the second of which, a prose poem, begins: “The most striking thing of Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi’s poetry is he is so damn FINE. The words combining on his page aren’t great. But as a reader you can imagine him freaking GOOD in his cutoff shorts. Tan as lobster. At a rectangle in starbucks. Implement between writing claws. Gazing moronically into the blank page.”

Araki-Kawaguchi’s poems are surreal, funny, dark and odd, composed via direct statements that accumulate across distances, even through the prose poem structure, writing sentences that pile atop each other to form shapes. His use of the double-space between statements and phrases, for example, even provides a kind of pause for the reader, holding back what otherwise might seem propulsive through other poems, including those set as more direct prose-stanzas. There is something quite remarkable in the way he twists and turns expectation, offering from the offset a point from which one couldn’t even begin to suspect, once you’ve read one or two examples of his work; he offers establishing direction almost as red herring, playing with expectation, and rushing off into completely unique and unknown realms. “Devil devil in my heart,” the poem “devil devil in my heart” begins, “I created earth and heaven / In my own image yes / It is all extremely poor indeed / None of the horses have heads / How terrifying they are to ride / And feed I must pulverize / Their grass in my mouth [.]” His work provides a fine balance between laughter and horror, surrealism and whimsy in a series of poems that can’t help but delight. “You know what a man needs,” he writes, to open the poem “what a man needs,” “I think we can all guess what he needs // The power to see himself clearly [.]”If the father of the American prose poem,Russell Edson, worked against expectation in his work, Araki-Kawaguchi’s Disintegration Made Plain and Easy is working at a whole other level of surprise, whimsy and surreal twists. This is an incredible collection.

he is going to have to take it

I am not throwing a party
No I am not throwing a party 

But I would like to hire a clown
Yes I would still like to have a clown today 

I will enjoy him even if I am alone
I will enjoy him more if we are left alone 

I do not like the pressure to laugh
It is like being strangled 

With an invisible twine
I will only laugh when it is true 

I will only laugh when my body feels
Like it would otherwise disintegrate 

Because of the clown’s movement
Because what he does for my amusement 

In the quiet empty room
In exchange for a lot of money 

I put into the hands of him
I will only laugh when he earns it 

I will put a lot of money no matter what
No I am not throwing anything 

He is going to have to take it from me

Benjamin Niespodziany, no farther than the end of the street

 

First Date

You bought a plot of land and you dug a hole. You filled the hole with seasoned meat and cedar and silk. You covered the hole and you waited. It was supposed to take nine months, but I arrived in seven. When I appeared I was grown and vocal. You held me like a science finalist. The floor plan was stamped to my chest.

The full-length debut by Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany, following chapbooks through above/ground press and Dark Hour Books, is no farther than the end of the street (Los Angeles CA: Okay Donkey Press, 2022), a collection predominantly constructed out of short, single-stanza prose poems that float the realm between lyric, short story and lullaby. “I wrote you a poem,” he writes, to open the poem “Publicity Stunt,” “called ‘Planet Earth.’ / It’s a ghost / poem or maybe a poem // I ghost wrote. It’s an / X-ray I pass around / the neighborhood.” Holding echoes of myth and fable, Niespodziany’s poems offer a selection of prose openings into whole worlds that might even exist between the curved narratives of Lydia Davis and the surrealisms of Stuart Ross. “You can’t / take my call.” he writes, to open the poem “The Silence That Finds Us,” “You’re busy // making volcanoes / out of swamp products // and ketchup packets.”

Organized across five numbered sections—“Yardmouth,” “Baffling Scaffolding,” “The Flimsy Chimney,” “Front Lawn Songs” and “Partial Architectures”—there is such a sense of whimsy and narrative play throughout these poems, writing magical elements of hearts lost and ghosts on the tongue, blended in and around direct statements. “With a pitcher of water,” he writes, to open the poem “In Our Backyard Garden,” “I stood next to a neighbor / who had dying flowers for a face.” He writes a lyric minimalism of layering and accumulation, one that understands both pause and pivot, narrative structures and a scaffolding deliberately playing with what to suggest, what to exclude and what to offer directly. He evokes small lyric scenes, crafting realities built out of concrete and smoke. “We could no longer afford our gardener.” he writes, to open the prose poem “The Harmless Gardener.” “I asked / him over to talk. He arrived hanging onto his / cane. I looked and his cane became a sword. I / looked again, his sword was a mailbox. The flag / was raised.”

There is such a delight to these pieces, and there are moments throughout this collection that I almost see echoes of the short stories of Richard Brautigan, offering insights into daily interactions and simply being and living in and moving through the world, tinged with a wistful surrealism simultaneously playful and dark, moving in, out and through focus, from sentence to sentence. there is such a delight, even across such dark foundations of loss, death and distance, as connections are established, demolished or never quite connect. Across eighty-four poems, Niespodziany writes of first dates, first loves, weddings, streetscapes and neighbours, suggesting a lyric set entirely within the focus of a small geography, even one centred on the domestic, with not one poem set beyond a boundary set just down Niespodziany’s imaginary or actual street. One imagines a cul-de-sac, just down from an urban setting of shops and what-have-you; a small tucked-aside corner of residencial space, not far from everything else in the world. One imagines a set of boundaries established to attempt to keep the narrator and his household safe, from whatever dangers might exist beyond.

Neighbor

You witnessed her death on our street. Your feet were in the street, but your body was in the lawn. I was inside our home, crouched like a cloud. “Now he’s a widow,” you said, pointing to the grieving husband across the street as he sleepily watched his wife being carted away. The next day, we went to the funeral in their backyard. Everyone was there, even the dead wife. She was floating over her coffin like some type of goblin we wanted to trust. An antelope leaned against their fence. After the funeral, authorities ended up taking your mug shot. Now you cough without a bonnet. Now you claw at the attic’s moon. Too soon, the body was gone and we were back to talking about lawn darts and starter homes. I was alone. You were alone. We held hands.

As part of his statement on the prose poem, included in a folio on the contemporary prose poem at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, Niespodziany wrote: “The prose poem does not demand an ending. It does not demand an explanation. It does not need a resolution. It contains none of these things and all of these things. Anything can happen inside of such a boxed-in paragraph. A pair of wings catches fire and turns into a frog. I fell in love with the prose poem because it felt like a contained commercial break, a parable in interlude form. Enough to chew on while eating lunch, while walking around the neighborhood. A world within a wink.”

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Stuart, Niespodziany, Melançon, LaPierre, Pinder, Kaplan + Win,

Anticipating the release later next week of the thirty-fourth of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the thirty-third issue: Cecilia Stuart, Benjamin Niespodziany, Jérôme Melançon, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder, Genevieve Kaplan and Maw Shein Win.

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-three issues (more than two hundred interviews to date) remain online, including: Carrie Hunter, Lillian Nećakov, Nate Logan, Hugh Thomas, Emily Brandt, David Buuck, Jessi MacEachern, Sue Bracken, Melissa Eleftherion, Valerie Witte, Brandon Brown, Yoyo Comay, Stephen Brockwell, Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax, Cat Tyc, Michael Turner, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Tom Prime, Bill Carty, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Robert Hogg, Simina Banu, MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty, Lisa Fishman, Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming thirty-fourth issue features new writing by: Jade Wallace, Katie Naughton, Nathan Austin, Barry McKinnon, Monica Mody, T. Best and Leah Sandals.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-three issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press 2022 subscriptions! We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.