above/ground press author spotlights : substack,

Since building my above/ground press substack last spring, I've started posting a series of interviews with above/ground press authors (new platform, new project, after all), focusing on authors published through the press with a new/recent chapbook, as well as multiple publications with the press, to give each interview a bit more heft. Since May of last year, I've posted nineteen interviews, the full list including Amish Trivedi, Brook Houglum, Orchid Tierney, Jason Christie, Steph Gray, Monty Reid, Lydia Unsworth, Micah Ballard, Nathanael O’Reilly, Ben Ladouceur, Michael Sikkema, Kate Siklosi, Ken Norris, Lillian Nećakov, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Cary Fagan, Amanda Earl, Buck Downs, russell carisse and Pearl Pirie with forthcoming interviews still to post with poets including Guy Birchard, Jill Stengel, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, N.W. Lea, Travis Sharp, Rose Maloukis and Gary Barwin, among others. Otherwise, I do post a round-up of new publications every two months or so, as well as a round-up of the weekly "author activity" posts, also every two months or so (but I didn't want the substack to simply be a replication of the blog, right?) Free to sign up! And lands as an email, direct to your in-box. Huzzah! And can you believe the press turns thirty-three years old this summer? Gadzooks!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jake Rose

Jake Rose is the author of JOAN, winner of the 2026 Phoenix Emerging Poets Book Prize, forthcoming in March, 2026. A poet, artist, and educator living in California’s Central Valley, Rose teaches at the University of California, Davis, and has work published or forthcoming in West Branch, The Seventh Wave, Foglifter, Coach House Books, and elsewhere. Other literary works include The Art of the Death, a book-length erasure poem; The Month Books, a collection of handmade chapbooks exploring chronic illness and hybrid form; and Spectropoetics, a location-based series of interspecies writing.

1. How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
JOAN will be my first published book! Honestly, it has changed my life in a way that still feels a little surreal because I never thought I would enter the world of traditional publishing. Before this, I had been in the practice of writing zines and chapbooks and circulating them amongst friends myself, or creating poetry projects and making them freely accessible online.

2. How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to fiction or non-fiction?
I never set out to write poetry. In college, a close friend of mine, the poet Jamie Thomson, said the craziest thing I had ever heard, which was that he wanted to be a poet. I really wanted to be his friend, and so writing my own poetry became a part of that.  So...I became a poet because I wanted to make friends! 

3. How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing come quickly, or is it a slow process?
I think copious notes is more my style. First there is a ritual, observation, interaction, or attention to the body or environment. Then notes, accumulation or accretion, then editing, which is like sculpture and collage. I'm trying hard to use as many words as possible to make writing not sound like writing, because the act of writing is hard for me, so I use every method possible to trick myself into thinking what I do isn't writing.

4. Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you working on individual poems or a book from the beginning?
Always a book or a project from the beginning as a container for the poem writing process. I like to start by outlining a structure, choosing a title, creating a piece of art, and assembling what I think of as a little shrine of objects, images, and texts. I usually make a ritual or constraint for generative writing before I begin drafting, and then the poems arrive inside that container.

5. Are public readings part of your creative process? Do you enjoy them?
Reading out loud to anyone, or even by myself is central to my creative process! It creates an easy way for me to find the parts of a poem that aren't working.

6. Do you have theoretical concerns behind your writing? What questions are you trying to answer?
My life is full of questions, so my poems are full of questions, too. Maybe whose language is considered legible or illegible, and what does it mean to inhabit illegibility? How can you maintain ambiguity or plurality and resist authority (of the narrator or of grammar or even text itself) in narrative forms?

7. What do you see as the role of the writer in larger culture?
Writers have many roles, or at least we should imagine that we do. One is to transform and renew language, taking it back from systems of empire and capital that instrumentalize it for their purposes. Another is to simply document, record, witness, testify. Another is to listen deeply. And another is to find the limits of language, what is communicable, use language as a mode of exploration.

8. Do you find working with an outside editor difficult or essential?
I love the times that I have been able to collaborate with an editor. It is so fun! I love talking about poems, trying new things, and experimenting with work.

9. What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard?
Honestly the best advice I ever got was "keep going", which doesn't sound like a lot, but it changed my practice. I had, I thought, finished an observational drawing, and a friend of mine who was an artist came over to look at it and just said, calmly, "keep going". I had resolved the image too soon, without taking any risks in the composition. It took me a long time to understand that, and apply it to my writing, and it's still something I think about every time I work, when I am trying to ask if I have committed myself to the page, have I said the truth yet, have I found what was at stake.

10. What kind of writing routine do you keep?
I don’t have a daily routine. Because my work is project-based, I may not write at all for months, and then design a project and write every day for a sustained period until a draft exists. So I have no daily writing practice.

11. When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn?
Reading, and being outside. I try to take pressure off myself, remove any self-imposed deadlines, and return to the world for perspective. I used to feel really bad about these times, but then I read, I think in The Importance of Being Iceland, the idea that periods of time when you aren't writing can be conceptualized as a fallow field. So you might look at it and say, why isn't anything growing here, when really, what's happening is nutrients are returning to the soil so new growth can occur. It's just harder to see.

13. Are there other forms that influence your work besides books?
All of them. I came to poetry after years of thinking of myself as a musician and visual artist, so writing feels like an expansion from those earlier practices. Nature and ecology are especially influential for me, I grew up in a small rural town, where your constant interlocutor was the outdoors, and I don't think that ever really leaves you.

14. What other writers are important for your work or your life?
Writers who have had an outsized impact on how I think about poetics are Bhanu Kapil, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, Jack Spicer, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nikky Finney, Eduardo C.Corral, Tiana Clark, and CAConrad to name just a few, but I think constant companions for me are my friends, people like Catherine Niu, Jamie Thomson, Lena Tsykynovska, Saba Keramati, whose work I am always in direct conversation with.

15. What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
I just started a literary magazine, and I would love to see it flourish.  Reading the work of new poets has been one of the most inspiring things that's happened to me lately.

16. If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?
I'm a teacher now, but I've had a lot of random jobs before this: delivery driver, barista, stablehand, construction worker, volunteer organizer. I think I would have a job that involved meeting new people. A waiter? If I got to wear something fancy.

17. What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Honestly, what made me stick with writing was practicality. Music and visual art weren’t as sustainable for me at the time when I turned to poetry more deeply, and poetry was something I could do by myself for free!

18. What was the last great book you read? The last great film?
I recently read Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones and loved it.

19. What are you currently working on?
Thanks for asking! I’m working on a second poetry book. It's a strange kind of memoir/anti-memoir about a time in my twenties, when I was moving around the country frequently, doing part-time sex work and manual labor. The poems are written in prose, lyric, and experimental forms, and are structured to reflect the nonlinear experiences of queer time, grief, and intimacy. It's much more directly autobiographical than my first book, and I'm trying to let that vulnerability guide the writing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jennifer Soong, Comeback Death

 

better my pain, my body
to swindle me than whatever is numb and fancy
who is responsible for these hacky people? 

I heaped my body over frozen routes
domed rosette traps crackling under me 

I was made, like the mother deer, to survive by the first
chamber of my goods

I will not deplete the world for myself
I will not deplete myself for the world 

and by what name do you know your suffrage?

I’m a bit behind, it would seem, just now seeing Denver, Colorado poet and literary critic Jennifer Soong’s recent title, Comeback Death (Krupskaya, 2024), and she’s already a new collection out since then I should probably attempt to garner, My Earliest Person (The Last Books, 2025). Otherwise, Soong is the author of titles such as Near, At (New York NY: Futurepoem, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit, 2022) (another book I seem not to have caught), as well as the dos-a-dos chapbook title When I Ask My Friend, by Jennifer Soong/Points of Amperture, by Daniel Owen (Brooklyn NY: DoubleCross Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Comeback Death is a book-length lyric suite constructed via a triptych of extended sections of lyric fragments and self-contained moments—“I. Contempt” (“for Sappho”), “II. Entr’acts: Or, the Gist of Uneven Bars, Sirens, and the Gossip of Fish and Feather” (“for Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian”) and “III. Smoke” (“for Ingeborg Bachmann”)—all of which collaborate in a book of voices and responses, clarifications and . Working her texts as a blend of response and homage to the works of particular poets, each section’s lyrics and lyric fragments wrap around and move through and across as a kind of conversation between Soong and her particular subject/target. “to this day I do not understand / though it seems I could / this unhappiness which without / I could not solve,” she writes, as part of the opening section, “yet with it am lost to / cleverer colors, sorrier troubles / always unrelating me to other men— [.]” The poetry-collection-as-conversation as a form, working so overtly, is certainly not a new one, and Soong’s approach is very different than, say, Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo) (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2023) [see my review of suchhere], and possibly might be closer to the approach of Philadelphia poet Laynie Browne’s array of book-length poet response collections [see my review of her latest here]. Soong responds, but she works through each particular author as a way through which to respond, as a means, perhaps, as opposed to an end. It is through her subjects, her dedications, that such responses might even be possible. As Soong’s third section, dedicated to Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) begins:

Why does this nothingness take me
            for one who cares for waking hours
drunklessness spent in shirts never touched by
                                                            the one I want.
I go to work and the nothingness
fills the insides of my fingers, my eyeballs
of nothingness, my heart.

To best understand another person, it is said, one needs to walk a mile (or kilometre, I suppose) in their shoes. For one writer to best understand another, subsequently, is to work this kind of literary response, one that can get far deeper into the bones and earth of a writer’s approach and thinking than writing a review or an essay. Or, as the second section, for Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010) and LynHejinian (1941-2024), two important (and even legendary) Bay Area poets, editors and mentors, begins:

was it always
that? my face
collapses in the sea
tender
splits
with which to slash
open requests. hmm.
the birds are becoming
watering vessels.
strangle me soon or I am
reluctant to have you over.
in the outer-space of your eyes
I’ve been thinking

“In Comeback Death,” Thom Donovan writes to open his note at the back of the collection, “Jennifer Soong dramatizes one of the key problems of our time, and indeed any time, which is how to reorganize the (negative) affects structuring intersubjectivity and thus conditioning our capacity to act in a common interest among others. This starts with direct address, with a you marked by a grammar of suffering different than I.” In her own note that precedes this, Soong writes of a shift of her work from sounding “mostly American and sometimes British” into a blend, after she relocated from New Jersey to Oxford, into elements of German, Russian and French. “Being Chinese,” she writes, “I didn’t have to worry as much about whether or not my poems, my feelings, or my tears would turn out Asian. They simply did. And being a Chinese-American in England meant that I could make my new pastoral surroundings, with its cows and swans, as Chinese as ever, since so many of the early Chinese poets had been landscape poets away from home. In any case, the opening section of what you’ve read was really an English thing, which means that I dedicated it, as I did, to Sappho.” As she writes to end her own two-page note:

None of this really matters too much when it comes to the reading of these poems, which are busy with dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity. It’s only because syntax is always related to feeling, and because feeling is always (in part) physical and therefore related to place, and because place is always (in part) imagined and felt, and because all of this allows us to be in multiple places at the same time that I have thought it may be of some interest to put this down.

 

Vera Hadzic, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery

 

CUBIC METRE OF INFINITY

after Michelangelo Pistoletto

This morning at the cemetery
a dead bird lay on the grass.
Half its throat, its globed rib cage,
and snappable bones exposed
to the elements. These animal corpses,
the kind you find beside the road
or on the lawn, are whistles
the wind blows into.
In the graves human bodies
do the same thing but unseen.
Turn into channels of air,
pathways for worms, infinite
things in an enclosed space.

I’d been eager to get my hands on Ottawa writer Vera Hadzic’s full-length poetry debut, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2025) [see her ‘six questions’ interview here; her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], produced as part of Stuart Ross’ imprint, A Feed Dog Book. Following her chapbook debut, Fossils You Can Swallow (Cobourg ON: Proper Tales Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], the poems in Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery (a stellar title, by the way) are expansive, and meditative; offering interesting rhythms and line-breaks across universes of intimate moments. As the title poem writes: “The single devotion to modern life is this: / keeping things inside yourself. This applies / to emotions, credit card details, urine, the impulse / to swear in front of children. Some of us are better / at this than others.”

Hadzic writes on art, history, literature, Benedictine monks, livestock, fish, Johnny Cash, death, snow, the internet, nail clippings and dead birds, etcetera; offering less a series of direct responses than incorporating ideas into her weave of far larger, more expansive tapestries of propulsive narrative thought. “The way flat fields / turn to gold hills / in waves.” she writes, as part of “OSSO BUCO,” “There is something I should be doing. // The heat in the chest, / the rising furnace / of the horse’s corpus; the crushing / of one’s own rib / cage; the horse on the ground, knowing, / or waiting.” Her poems are just so big, so precise; exact, even through and almost because of their expansiveness, attempting to navigate, articulate and investigate elements of the entire world of experience across her attention, wherever that might send her. “The monks communicate / by finger and wrist when / eating; a moving text of metacarpels,” she writes, as part of the poem “MONASTERIO DOS JERÓNIMOS,” “the major mechanism illumi- / nating the thin working page, / the palm. Boiled egg splits / gently under the tooth and lip. / No one can speak while / eating, and it’s just as well, / because no one will mention / the dark spot consuming / the wall. No one can speak / of it but the stone / animals, and they’ve sworn / silence.” There is something intriguing about how these poems float between poems and essays, poems and short stories, all seeking out ways to best understand her thinking across such vast distances.

There is, for example, the four-part narrative piece, “FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH,” a poem that reads a bit like a short story by Stuart Ross [see my essay on his most recent collection of short stories here], writing elements of surrealism, both swirling and propulsive across a huge mass of text. Here is but the opening of the five-page third section, “The Author,” that begins:

I once met Ernest Hemingway in Toronto. I was lost in the subway
and late for a concert. Ernest Hemingway was sitting in a coffee
house and writing clean, simple prose. This prose had periods
and precise words that were well-chosen and always sufficient.
It was both summer and winter, both rainy and snowy, and the heat
of the sun made sweat melt into my back and worm
like an excretable minnow back into my bloodstream, so that my
body was like the water cycle on a singular human scale, a tiny
microcosm that pumped out fluid and reabsorbed it almost instantly.
“How do you like Toronto, Hemingway?” I said Hemingway because
this is the way almost everybody refers to him, all the time. The first name
wastes syllables, when the last name is already an efficient synopsis
of all he wrote. I refuse to write William Shakespeare in my essays.
I want to cross out William when students write his full name in their
Essays. I want to write in the margins. Everybody knows who
Shakespeare is. Everybody knows who Hemingway is.
What’s the likelihood someone mixes him up with the wrong
Shakespeare? Oh, your reader might say upon reaching the sentence
where you mention Lear, oh, this is the Shakespeare who writes plays.
I mixed him up with the Shakespeare who sells mattresses. Or, I mixed
him up with his father who sold gloves. Or, I don’t want to read an essay
about the guy who wrote plays. I want to read an essay about a
mattress salesman who has the same name as a famous
playwright.