new from above/ground press: Downs, Kelly, Souffrant, Hausner, Gray, Vitkauskas, Chang-Richardson, Sandhu, Brenza, Berlatsky, Touch the Donkey #46 + Verse on the Banks / Poèmes sur le rivage,

Buck Downs, B U R N T O R A N G E $6 ; J-T Kelly, More of How to Read the Bible $6 ; Leah Souffrant, BIBLIOMANCY $6 ; Beatriz Hausner, The Oh Oh $6 ; Steph Gray, Never Saw it Coming: prose poems $6 ; Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, The Deaf Forest of Cosmic Scaffolding $6 ; Ellen Chang-Richardson, The Moleskin Coat $6 ; Mandy Sandhu, THE TEMPORARY SPACE OF A PLACENTA $6 ; Andrew Brenza, Sigil Series $6 ; Noah Berlatsky, Spamtoum $6 ; Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] #46, with new poems by Kirstin Allio, Kemeny Babineau, Joseph Donato, Beatriz Hausner, Matthew Walsh, Nicole Markotić, Lisa Pasold, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas and Emily Izsak $6 ; Verse on the Banks / Poèmes sur le rivage, eds./dir. Véronique Sylvain and/et David O’Meara including new poems in English (alongside French translation) and new poems in French (alongside English translation) by: Manahil Bandukwala, Julie Huard, Amanda Earl, Myriam Legault-Beauregard, David Groulx, Michèle Matteau, Monty Reid, Clémence Roy-Darisse; translations by/traductions de Myriam Legault-Beauregard $6

and: “poem” broadside #355 : TWO POEMS: “she left under a cloud” by Christine McNair and “010 : I can lift ten thousand pounds” by rob mclennan

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

AND DON'T FORGET THAT SANDHU, CHANG-RICHARDSON, REID, CHRISTIE, HAUSNER + VITKAUSKAS WILL BE LAUNCHING THEIR NEW ABOVE/GROUND PRESS TITLES IN OTTAWA ON AUGUST 7TH, AS PART OF THE 32ND ANNIVERSARY READING/LAUNCH/PARTY! TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE! it is going to be a great event; did you see my report from last year's 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 that 2025 subscriptions (our thirty-second year!) are still available, yes? i can totally backdate; and you know above/ground press has a substack now? sign up (for free!) for announcements, and even new features! catch recent/new interviews with Orchid Tierney, Jason Christie, Steph Gray, Monty Reid, etc.

With forthcoming chapbooks by: Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Stuart Ross, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Michael Sikkema, Charlotte Jung and Johannes S.H. Bjerg, Jon Cone, Ben Ladouceur, Yaxkin Melchy (trans. by Ryan Greene, Mrityunjay Mohan, Laynie Browne, Nada Gordon, David Phillips, and probably others! (yes: others, (and: given I've been clearing a bit of a publishing backlog lately, I'm actually hoping to return to reading months' worth of submissions very soon,

Touch the Donkey : new interviews with J-T Kelly, Jennifer Firestone, Austin Miles + Alice Burdick,

Anticipating the release next week of the forty-fifth issue 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 forty-fourth issue: J-T Kelly, Jennifer Firestone, Austin Miles and Alice Burdick.

Interviews with contributors to the first forty-three issues (more than two hundred and seventy-four interviews to date) remain online, including: Henry Gould, Leesa Dean, Tom Jenks, Sandra Doller, Scott Inniss, John Levy, Taylor Brown, Grant Wilkins, Lori Anderson Moseman, russell carisse, Ariana Nadia Nash, Wanda Praamsma, Michael Harman, Terri Witek, Laynie Browne, Noah Berlatsky, Robyn Schelenz, Andy Weaver, Dessa Bayrock, Anselm Berrigan, Alana Solin, Michael Betancourt, Monty Reid, Heather Cadsby, R Kolewe, Samuel Amadon, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Miranda Mellis, kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Kimberley Dyck, Junie Désil, Micah Ballard, Devon Rae, Barbara Tomash, Ben Meyerson, Pam Brown, Shane Kowalski, Kathy Lou Schultz, Hilary Clark, Ted Byrne, Garrett Caples, Brenda Coultas, Sheila Murphy, Chris Turnbull and Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Stuart Ross, Leah Sandals, Tamara Best, Nathan Austin, Jade Wallace, Monica Mody, Barry McKinnon, Katie Naughton, Cecilia Stuart, Benjamin Niespodziany, Jérôme Melançon, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder, Genevieve Kaplan, Maw Shein Win, 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 forty-fifth issue features new writing by: Dag T. Straumsvåg, brandy ryan, Misha Solomon, D. A. Lockhart, Lea Graham, Jordan Davis + Larkin Maureen Higgins.

And of course, copies of the first forty-three issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press annual subscription! Which you should get right now for 2025! Our thirty-second year! and the above/ground press postal increase sale, which is happening right now!

We even have our own Facebook group, and a growing (new) above/ground press substack. It’s remarkably easy.

Ongoing notes: Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks: J-T Kelly + Mark Statman,

I’ve been seeing these Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks that Jordan Davis has been producing out of Brooklyn for a while now—see my review of Buck Downs’ GREEDY MAN: selected poems (2023) here and Nada Gordon’s The Swing of Things (2022) here—so I’m pleased to see copies of J-T Kelly’s LIKE NOW (2023) and Mark Statman’s CHICATANAS: SELECTED POEMS (2023) appear at my door.

The chapbook debut by Indianapolis poet and innkeeper J-T Kelly, LIKE NOW, offers an assemblage of short lyric first-person narrative and layered accumulations that sway and play, such as the short poem “Plunder”: “Pomegranate—ripe, / Unbroken— // I, too, hide my heart— / Fruitlessly.” There’s something of a disjointed lyric reminiscent of Canadian poets Stuart Ross, Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick, each composing poems that lean into disconnections, connections and surreal threads and sly humour across the short lyric. I’m curious in how Kelly’s poems form across such narrative disjoints and jumbles, and how these pieces shape themselves not simply through a completed thought run all the way to the end, but one that rests somewhere in the middle, allowing the reader the space through which to complete on their own. I am intrigued by these poems of J-T Kelly.

West

What I said when I was leaving.
Your friends and their boots.
I left it there on the key stand.
The road is dry. But I still think about
standing on the on-ramp outside of Bismarck.
At the mercy of. Sometimes forty-five miles
from a pay phone. I went north because
Zach didn’t listen and had gone south.
He had been picked up and taken to some field.
They tried to set him on fire, but the gasoline
dissolved the adhesive and he broke free.
The wheat so near to harvest must have swayed majestically
as he ran, pain in his eyes, suffocating,
And deciding to finish grad school, which he did.
You, it turns out, consider me to be.
The headlights extend sideways out of the low stalks of winter
    wheat.
The passenger seat holds my fur-lined leather mittens
and your anthology of poetry from The New York school which I
    will not give back.
You can go to hell. I’m going to Seattle.

I hadn’t actually heard of New York-based American writer, poet and translator Mark Statman before seeing this new title, although the acknowledgments of CHICATANAS: SELECTED POEMS offers that he is the author of six poetry collections, two works of prose and has translated collections by Federico García Lorca (with Pablo Medina), José María Hinojosa and Martín Barea Mattos. I’m fascinated by the idea of the chapbook-length selected poems, something Davis has been exploring for some time (there was also the chapbook-length Stuart Ross bilingual Spanish/English ‘selected’ I reviewed recently, published in Argentina), and I would almost think that putting together a chapbook-length selected would be far more challenging than attempting one book-length, even beyond the consideration of weighing the possibility of ‘best’ against potential ‘representative of this author’s work,’ etcetera. I’m curious as to how the poems in this collection might be representative of Statman’s larger canvas of writing, offering first-person lyric musings via hesitation, soft and slow unfolding of narration. There’s a slowness here his lines and breaks require, both firm and thoughtful, never in any particular hurry, because you’ll get there in the end, either way, whether losing a poem through a young woman’s accent (“the disappearance of the poem”) or a piece on the death of Kenneth Koch, that opens the collection, “Kenneth’s Death,” that begins: “he’s dead and / I still don’t believe: / years later / I’m walking someplace / and I’ll think / this is something / I’ll tell him / when he gets back / when he gets back / as though where Kenneth’s gone / is simply too far away / to telephone or / send a postcard [.]”

chicatanas

some mysteries have
to be that way
Alma asked me yesterday
if I was going to
the casita today
was I going to harvest
our chicatanas
giant ants from
whose toasted bodies
legs and heads removed
Alma makes a
sharp spicy salsa
the chicatanas only come out
once a year and every year
since we bought the
casita we’ve had them
they emerge before dawn
the ground wet it’s either
on the 24^th or 25^th of
every June St. John’s Day
I ask Alma
but how do you know
which day 24, 25 and she
smiles and says because
the morning after
the dawn fills with
small white butterflies