new from above/ground press: Witek, Kolewe, Christie, Ballard, Reid, Jenks, Tierney, Houglum + Quartermain,

Terri Witek, DOWN WATER STREET $6 ; R. Kolewe, Tierra del Fuego (excerpts from a fiction) $5 ; Jason Christie, PSA $6 ; Micah Ballard, A N G E L D U S T $6 ; Monty Reid, cuba A book: twentieth anniversary edition $6 ; Tom Jenks, Chimneys $5 ; Orchid Tierney, pedagogies for the planthroposcene $5 ; Brook Houglum, INVENTORY $5 ; Meredith Quartermain, Things Musing $5

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

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 THE ABOVE/GROUND PRESS POSTAL INCREASE SALE CONTINUES UNTIL JULY 9, 2025! oh, and you know above/ground press has a substack now? sign up (for free!) for announcements, and even new features! AND SAVE THE DATE: the above/ground press 32nd anniversary reading/launch/party will be at RedBird Live in Old Ottawa South on Thursday, August 7th! tickets available soon.

With forthcoming chapbooks by: Michael Sikkema, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Charlotte Jung and Johannes S.H. Bjerg, J-T Kelly, Beatriz Hausner, Mandy Sandhu, Jon Cone, Yaxkin Melchy (trans. by Ryan Greene, Mrityunjay Mohan, Laynie Browne, Nada Gordon, Andrew Brenza, Noah Berlatsky, David Phillips, and probably others! (yes: others,

R Kolewe, A Net of Momentary Sapphire

 

38.

Not as if starting an inventory like Perec
(notepad, pencil, stack of dishes, gloves, the cat)
(again I’m lying) but overlap or fold or

I haven’t understood a thing.
Heard what I wanted flowers I don’t know.
Word cuttings in knotted lines & gaps.

The latest from Toronto poet R Kolewe is A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023), a collection that “offers three closely related poetic sequences, random rearrangements of a poignant but obsessively recurrent source text – streams of consciousness in which no stable self can be elucidated.” There aren’t that many Canadian poets these days overtly working in the tradition of the long poem – Vancouver poets Stephen Collis [see my review of his latest here] and Renée Sarojini Saklikar, certainly – and Kolewe has been feeling out the boundaries of formal innovation across the long poem form for some time now, from his Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017) and The Absence of Zero (Bookhug Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as through a handful of chapbooks. There are even fewer Canadian poets working so deeply and through such lengthy works via the recombinant—although works by Grant Wilkins, Gregory Betts, Margaret Christakos [see my review of her latest here] and Sonnet L’Abbé [see my review of her recombinant project reworking Shakespeare’s sonnets here] certainly come to mind.

Across three numbered parts, three separate sequences—“PART ONE: The foretaste of a vision, but never the vision itself,” “PART TWO: Like the noises alive people wear” (part of which landed previously as an above/ground press chapbook) and “PART THREE: Beginning again & again is a natural thing even when there is a series”—Kolewe extends a sequence of collage-thoughts, writing a moment, another moment and a further moment in a lengthy, continuous string of gestures. “I can’t write what I really cant. / Remember leave things out I am like bees,” he writes, in the fifth part of the one hundred and twenty numbered sections of the second sequence, “That’s the real thing is what I said I said. // Ah, but then we would be come more than / modern, & death / always so contemporary.” Two pages further, part seven writes:

Rework this as there’s no joy here
& not enough voices no long poem containing
history –

too many ways to divide all these pages & letters & elegies
archaic forms of life unchanged by notebooks or photographs
or beauty unnameable recognized –

If literary writing can be considered a kind of study, which I deeply think it is, Kolewe is one of our more thoughtful contemporary practitioners, allowing a wildly diverse series of threads to weave through his deceptively-straightforward lyric collage. As part forty-eight, held in the second cluster of the second section, reads: “Rework this as there’s no joy here / & not enough voices no long poem containing / any vision or revision of history – [.]” Through A Net of Momentary Sapphire, Kolewe examines lyric thinking, recombinant works and the long poem through the very form of the long poem, seeking to examine critically from the inside. “If there were a poem that made this / clear I would copy it here.” he writes, to open part ninety-two, “I can’t / say if that’s true but I want it to be.”

 

Touch the Donkey : interviews with Betancourt, Reid, Cadsby, Kolewe, Amadon, Kemp-Gee, Mellis + eckhoff/Dyck!

Anticipating the release in a few days of the thirty-ninth 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-eighth issue: Michael Betancourt, Monty Reid, Heather Cadsby, R Kolewe, Samuel Amadon, Meghan Kemp-Gee and Miranda Mellis. And even this hold-over interview from the prior issue with kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Kimberley Dyck!

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-seven issues (nearly two hundred and fifty interviews to date) remain online, including: 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 thirty-ninth issue features new writing by: Robyn Schelenz, Andy Weaver, Dessa Bayrock, Anselm Berrigan, Noah Berlatsky, Rasiqra Revulva and Alana Solin.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-seven 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 2024!

We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

R. Kolewe, The Absence of Zero

My review of Toronto poet R. Kolewe's third full-length poetry title, The Absence of Zero (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2021), recently appeared online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Profile of Margaret Christakos' Influency, with a few questions, at Open Book: Ontario

My profile of Margaret Christakos' Influency Salon, with a few questions, is now online at Open Book: Ontario. Photos by Ralph Kolewe.