let lie\ 
by Elizabeth Rainer and Michael Blouin
above/ground press, 8.5x5.5, 20pp, $4.00 (CAN) 
published, January 2012


Excerpts from Impossible Books:  The Crawdad Cantos
by Stephen Brockwell
above/ground press, 8.5x5.5, 20pp, $4.00 (CAN)
published, February 2012

Sextet: six poems from Songs for little sleep,
by rob mclennan
above/ground press, 8.5x5.5, 20pp, $4.00 (CAN) 
published, January 2012




The quintessential poet's micro-press, above/ground press — founded and published by poet, writer, and editor Rob McLennan out of Ottawa, Ontario — publishes chapbooks by both newly emerging and established poets alike. What makes above/ground press titles stand apart from other micro-press poetry chapbooks (besides their nondescript covers, that is) is that they offer the reader glimpses into collaborations as well as individual works in progress. It's these glimpses which above/ground gives that makes their titles unique, revealing the process of the poet's composition, their collaborations, as each waltz's their muse along the thin razor's edge of creation.

In let lie\, an excerpt from a collaborative work by Elizabeth Rainer and Michael Blouin, we are given  glimpses into pieces which were written over a period of a year and a half and emailed back and forth:

to describe it\ I should not ask you when you touch yourself to think of me as I am there no probably this is the very type of thing I should keep to myself that and this is the failure of poetry to do you any kind of justice at all light tapping of my heart punching holes in the sky.

it would be\ nice for me if you were someone else for a change someone who didn't know me so well my tremors hopes then when we were making love it would all be different once more your ankles up around and there wouldn't be that look on your face him, again.

Here, Rainer and Blouin successfully combine masculine and feminine language and metaphor in an ongoing collaboration which mixes and juxtaposes contrasting identities into a string of textual and contextual and allegorical narratives.

Stephen Brockwell’s Excerpts from Impossible Books: The Crawdad Cantos is the latest installment of Brockwell's ongoing work-in-progress. At times pithy, sometimes brilliant, Brockwell's poems run the entire gamut in this ongoing project. For instance, both this chapbook and the following poem's self-deprecating dark humor reveals Brockwell at his poetic height:

"Brockwell, you're a fool, thrilled by a sunset
'beyond words.' The sunset is beyond; but
beyond words? No. Words for it outpace you.
God bless impala words you'll never speak."
Here's what I posted — you can slag it too:

Watched gorgeous sunset from window on flight
to LAX. Beyond words. Tried anyway.

"from Messages from Imaginary Friends: Karikura and the Inarticulate Sunset" 

Lastly, there is the controlled musicality and the experimental narrative quality in rob mclennan's Sextet: six poems from Songs for little sleep, which draws the reader inside by using repeated phrasings of short sentences and brief staccato rhythms:

1.

The gathering place of something, we. I can't recall. It was I who called, who called, who.

Watch the moon, full, you must. You must, we. We are watching the full moon, full of something. Was full, of only, possibly ourselves. Only full.

We were watching the moon we were.

from "The learning curve that sometimes manages, itself"

All three of these titles offer varying glimpses of excerpts, collaborations, and works-in-progress not found elsewhere by poets just reaching the height of their craft. In these above/ground press chapbooks they practice a high wire literary act. Sometimes failing. More often than not, though, succeeding brilliantly. It takes guts to write without a net, and particularly to publish those early efforts for all to see. Guts, indeed.

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To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada add $2)
to: 
above/ground press
c/o rob mclennan
402 McLeod St. #3
Ottawa, Ontario K2P 1A6

or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com


For more information, contact rob at:

rob_mclennan@hotmail.com

or

abovegroundpress.blogspot.com


rob mclennan was born in Ottawa, Canada's glorious capital city, and rob currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011), 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) - an essay on Phil Hall - (Obvious Epiphanies Press, 2010) and wild horses (University of Alberta Press, 2010) and a second novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottwater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com), and has edited numerous collections for Chaudiere Books, Insomniac Press, Black Moss Press, Broken Jaw Press and Vehicule Press, and, in June 2010, a special "Canadian issue" of the Swiss online pdf poetry journal Dusie. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. He is currently working to complete another novel or two, a collection of short short stories, and a post-mother creative non-fiction work entitled The Last Good Year.

Front & Centre #25: Special Edition — edited by Matthew Firth, Bill Brown
ISSN 1480-6819, 2011
Black Bile Press, 8.5x5.5 (perfect bound), 76pp, $7.00


In the Editorial Feature of Front & Centre's Special Edition celebrating their 25th Issue — "Two writers talking" — a discussion between writing couple Alexandra Leggat and Salvatore Difalco about his latest book The Mountie of Niagara Falls and Other Brief Stories (Anvil Press, 2010), Leggat and Difalco exchange:

Alexandra Leggat: Which medium do you think is the best vehicle for exploring the depths of more risk taking writing?

Salvatore Difalco: Whatever medium you're permitted to express yourself in. If you can't get your so-called experiments published then perhaps you should rethink things. Writing in a vacuum is death. Pushing boundaries is meaningless unless you have an audience that recognizes your bravery and ingenuity.

Difalco also suggested in his dialogue with Leggat:

I don't know if writers in Canada are really capable or permitted to write edgy fiction. But then again, that word is problematic, isn't it? If it means you're writing from the margins ... either by choice or circumstance, well, okay. If it means you're willing to explore certain darker regions of the human psyche and the human condition, I guess it's as efficient an adjective as any.

The dilemma with writing anything edgy or transgressive in Canada, isn't that it is all too often written from the margins, or by by choice or circumstance — it comes down to the harsh reality that edgy, transgressive writing is an unwelcome commodity at Canadian magazines, journals, and ultimately, publishers. The number of Canadian magazines and publishers that publish relatively edgy and transgressive writings by Canadian authors can be numbered on one hand. Given that edgy, transgressive writing is at best a niche genre in Canada, the skewed writer to publisher ratio almost assures that edgy, transgressive writing never sees print. It also does not help that Canada has no celebrated transgressive history of its own.

That's where a magazine such as Front & Centre (formerly known as Black Cat 115) has served so valiantly as a vehicle for new writing. Free of the shackles of government funding agencies, Matthew Firth and Bill Brown have created a seminal litmag of new Canadian and International fiction. Emerging fictioneers stand alongside established authors of the gritty, the urban, the hard-edged, the transgressive, and all with F&C's trademark mordant wit, and tongue-only-partly-in-cheek humor. Each issue is a mix bag of unexpected delights and reviews of current fiction.

F&C #25 is no different (only perfect bound this time):

New fiction by Zsolt Alapi, David Burdett, Christine Catalano, Julie McArthur, David Rose, Daniel MacIsaac, Chelsea Novak, Jeremy Hanson-Finger, Stacey Madden and Zachery Alapi. Reviews of books by Anne Perdue, Danila Botha, Chris Walter, Daniel Allen Cox, Mark Anthony Jarman (ed), Dave Newman, Jerrod Edson and Salvatore Difalco.

Get your copy before someone else does.

********************************************************************************************************************************

Order by sending a cheque (made payable to M. Firth) to:

Matthew Firth, Editor
Front&Centre
573 Gainsborough Avenue
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA
K2A 2Y6

and

Black Bile Press

Queries: firth@istar.ca

First you know, and then so ordinary, by rob mclennan
published in an edition of 200 copies, November 2010
above/ground press, 8.5x5.5 (saddle stitched), 8pp, price unknown

Rob Mclennan is a prolific poet, writer, editor, blogger, and publisher of the Ottawa-based micro-press, above/ground press. In his chapbook, First you know, and then so ordinary, we find a suite of six poems which perfectly illustrates the understated lyricism which weaves throughout mclennan's poetry. The poet uses restraint like a kind of inner punctuation in his poems in combination with notions of breath and distance, as in the title poem itself:

I wanted to say: the big dumb
excuse of me,

the phone rings
all the way from lakeshore,

Toronto Island Airport

Or in "To be entertained, in such release", the same understated lyricism is described in the lines: "I want nothing from you now/but faith; a question/of degrees" and "last night's full moon; betrayed/a threesome, reduced/to two; the ghosts of Preston Street."

These allegories of breath and distance and lyrical restraint continue in "For the rain between us, sheets" as the poet describes "bitter threads/pull at my edge;/a larynx & throat-sound/that you find beautiful, there" and

how low in the morning, sun
butters your shoulder-lengths,

milk-heavy breasts,

It is through McLennan's lyrical restraint that his exuberance for his subject matter is most clearly revealed, proving again and again, in title after title, one need not be flashy or provocative to make one's point.

*******************************************************************************************************************************

Available from:

above/ground press
c/o rob mclennan
858 Somerset Street West, main floor
Ottawa, Ontario K1R 6R7

and

rob_mclennan@hotmail.com

or

abovegroundpress.blogspot.com


rob mclennan was born in Ottawa, Canada's glorious capital city, and rob currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011), 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) - an essay on Phil Hall - (Obvious Epiphanies Press, 2010) and wild horses (University of Alberta Press, 2010) and a second novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottwater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com), and has edited numerous collections for Chaudiere Books, Insomniac Press, Black Moss Press, Broken Jaw Press and Vehicule Press, and, in June 2010, a special "Canadian issue" of the Swiss online pdf poetry journal Dusie. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. He is currently working to complete another novel or two, a collection of short short stories, and a post-mother creative non-fiction work entitled The Last Good Year.

God forbid should rob ever get sick. Take a shot of rum, rob. Keep those bones warm.~Editor

Eleven:Eleven by Liz Worth
published in 2008
Trainwreck Press, 8.5x5.5, 24pp, $5.00 (CAN)

Written during a stretch of unemployment in the spring of 2008, this micro-novel pieces together a narrative that speaks through a fragmented consciousness of abstract poetics, claustrophobic fantasies, and scraps of torrid memories salvaged from Worth’s personal journals.

The last time I encountered so successful a hybrid between autobiography, poetry, and fiction was the 1992 publication of Daniel Jones' Obsessions: a novel in parts from Beverley Daurio's, The Mercury Press. While Worth has yet to attain the high literary genius Jones exhibits in Obsessions - she is not without her own overflowing cup of literary talent as she pieces together a complex narrative labyrinth of female coming of age rituals, overt media images, and juxtaposed images of sexuality, identity, gender, love, and madness of an anonymous narrator.

15.

Life outside this bed is unimaginable. Grotesque. A dreaded, hunched figure you don't want to look at.

It seems there is no way to leave. It seems you will never want to.

Eleven:Eleven is one of those "must have" chapbooks of a young, emerging writer, particularly as an artifact of her early writing, revealing initial sprouts of brilliance (I'll let you decide which - there are just too many to choose from in this chapbook). Eleven:Eleven is an exceptional literary tease which begs one to wonder - what is forthcoming from Liz Worth in five years? Ten years? Twenty?

What sprouts in Eleven:Eleven can only blossom in later works.

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Available from:

www.ditchpoetry.com

Liz Worth is an experimental writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto. Her poetry has been featured on ditch, and the anthology Strong Words: Year 2. She is the author of the forthcoming tome on Toronto punk history, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond (Bongo Beat), and her writing has appeared in The Toronto Star, Toronto Life, Exclaim!, Punk Planet, and Broken Pencil, among other publications: www.lizworth.com

She May Be Weary by Cameron Anstee
published in a limited edition of 30 copies, April 18th, 2011
St. Andrew Books, 8.5x5.5 (saddle stitched), 28pp, price unknown

In She May Be Weary, produced and distributed for a reading in the blUe mOnday Reading Series at Cafe Nostalgia in Ottawa, Ontario, on April 18th, 2011 - Cameron Anstee has composed an intriguing nine part/nine page poem reflecting his exceptional grasp and comprehension of the form of the long poem generally, and the ghazal specifically.

The ghazal is often compared to the sonnet formally, since they are both brief "takes" on a situation, usually love. Each couplet is not only self-contained grammatically, yet also self-contained in terms of ideas, imagery, as well as allusions - but unlike the sonnet, the ghazal has no linear narrative or logic, no temporal progression, no contemplation of an incident in order to make sense of it. ("That Bastard Ghazal", Andy Weaver, Poetics.ca #1)

Anstee suite of ghazals insightfully makes the reader contemplate the nature of the poet's love affair with Jenn without the usual tools of lyric poetry (sex, confession, details of the poet's personal life) - opting instead to make sense of a love by how it has affected those it embraces - much like how a stone affects the river it is dropped into:

Jenn, the secret heart; please laugh
there is nothing to excuse

the body will never deny you
until one day the body denies you

the heart catches; these things, and others
the disarray unsettles me, you know that

we can't change the words
endlessly the words change

the body is a lousy mechanism
for the heart

What makes this collection so exceptionally intriguing and unique, at least to me, is how Anstee combines elements of the ghazal with elements of the long poem to create a hybrid melding of diverse forms into a unified whole.

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Available from:

Apt. 9 Press
Ottawa, Ontario

apt9press.ca | apt9press@gmail.com

Apt. 9 Press is an Ottawa based micropress founded by Cameron Anstee who publishes handmade chapbooks of poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction in limited editions by new and established writers.



Cameron Anstee lives in Ottawa ON where he runs Apt. 9 Press. Recent chapbooks include Frank St.(above/ground, 2010) and Water Upsets Stone (The Emergency Response Unit, 2009).

I Have Come To Talk About Manners by Stuart Ross
published in an edition of 50 copies, February 2010
Apt 9 Press, 8.5×7, 19pp, $10.00 (CAN)


In his first book of poems since 2008’s Dead Cars in Managua (DC Books), I Have Come To Talk About Manners collects eighteen new Stuart Ross poems in this attractive chapbook from Cameron Anstee's Ottawa based micro press, Apt. 9 Press.

From the first instance I encountered the poetry and prose of Stuart Ross -- in the Proper Tales Press titles When Electrical Sockets Walked Like Men (1981) and Father, the Cowboys Are Ready to Come Down from the Attic (1982) -- it was his sardonic, yet playful use of the surreal in the face of modern culture's hyperreality that struck me most. His use of ordinary, mundane, quotidian elements of everyday existence become extraordinary in Stuart's deft surrealist hand.

I Have Come To Talk About Manners is no different. Ordinary, everyday elements are constantly on the verge of becoming something else as Stuart's poems transfigure whatever hyperreality they happen to come into contact.

In "Fathers Shave", something as ordinary and seemingly innocuous an object as a Father's razor blade becomes a surrealist allegory for rigid codes of masculinity as viewed through the eyes of a child: "The blade rips the bristles / from his cheeks, his chin, / beneath his thunderous / nose", "rips the carpet / and the curtains, rips / Sylvester the Cat / right off the TV screen", "rips the welcome / mat off our porch, the / grass off our lawn" and Father's "boss caresses / his smooth face. The clients ohh and ahh."

In "Sorry Sonnet", the poet has a vision "of this thing I was going to create, / but it went too far", "words / started writing themselves", "political views / became more extreme than I had envisioned. / I stepped on more ants than I had meant to, / my feet went too far."

Still, nowhere else in I Have Come To Talk About Manners are Stuart's surrealist and fabulist transformations more poignant and antithetical with hyperreality than in his poem "(2009)":

a ditty fills your head (voice
and banjo) and a camel
falls on your head and a new
slogan pops into your head
and a kiss is planted
on your head where it
grows into an unusual
sculpture and you tug a pair of
parentheses around your shoulders
like an overcoat and
there you are
walking along a street

Through Stuart's playful, sardonic and surrealist simulation and imitation of transient reality in his poems, he constantly forces us, the reader, to confirm what we think or feel is real or authentic. The in-joke, I sense, is that Ross has all along known what I have long suspected - in a culture dominated by the hyperreal, nothing real remains, just it's simulated copy.

How do I suspect this? From Ross himself, of course. In "Stand Back" he announces:

I have come to talk about manners:
we live by lost rules.

******************************************************************************************************************************

Available from:

Apt. 9 Press
Ottawa, Ontario

apt9press.ca | apt9press@gmail.com

Apt. 9 Press is an Ottawa based micropress founded by Cameron Anstee who publishes handmade chapbooks of poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction in limited editions by new and established writers.

Stuart Ross is a Toronto writer, editor, publisher, and creative-writing instructor. Co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair and founding member of the Meet the Presses collective. Proprietor of Proper Tales Press. Fiction & Poetry Editor for This Magazine. Runs the "a stuart ross book" imprint for Mansfield Press.

Stuart Ross can be emailed at hunkamooga AT sympatico DOT ca.

To the Dogs by Thea Bowering
published in an edition of 100 copies, 2010
privately printed, 52pp, price unknown


Thea Bowering has worked in Edmonton as a bartender, freelance writer, and Film Studies and Creative Writing instructor. Her fiction involves a female flâneur - one who wanders through the streets and avenues, evoking the history of a place, past and present, visiting its bookshops and boutiques, monuments; providing gossip and background to each, all the while looking through blank walls and past mundane edifices glimpsing the human dramas behind and beneath. It is to the conflicting backdrop of Alberta's Oil Sector and Edmonton's University culture that Bowering has set her postrealist novelette, To the Dogs.

Bowering's narrative circles around the female protagonist, narrator, bartender and flâneur, Riel (after Louis Riel) and the romantic love triangle she finds herself a part of with the emotional and psychological grifter and conman, Billy, and the quintessential other woman: Jasmine. In her search for meaning and love, Riel wrestles with concepts of truth and self knowledge throughout To the Dogs, evoking "a hell of the mind" in as much as the possibility of the existence of any potential future:

After living with The Poor, he [Orwell] concluded that: the great redeeming feature of poverty is that it annihilates the future.

That was it. This was the key to Billy and Jasmine's world that I couldn't go down into. Somehow Billy and Jasmine had escaped tragedy by staying in the middle of it. They could stand anything. For them, happiness was merely a series of moral lessons missed. Jasmine would forever continue her theatrics in front of her camera, and her eyes would shine with the excitement of love renewed, over and over again; and Billy, he would continue to operate and rot under the guise of union. In the ongoing present there are no sins, only actions, and nobody dies from them. Well, if they do, it's only another action. Something for all those oil professionals, with their 50 thousand dollar trucks, to run over and obliterate. (To the Dogs, p.44)

I found To the Dogs very much reminiscent of Juan Butler's Cabbagetown Diary: A Documentary in the manner in which it described and documented the gentrification of Whyte Avenue (82nd Avenue) in Edmonton's Old Strathcona district during the mid to late 1990s, as well as Louis Rastelli's A Fine Ending.

Indeed, some might be put off by the otherwise unusually dark themes which abound in Bowering's work:

I try to imagine what would happen to someone like Billy, who, now I can see, is like so many on the Avenue. Does he just go on forever like this? No disaster, just one meager pay period to the next. One crappy apartment half furnished. A new pair of boots every 4 years or so. Until he's lived a lifetime more or less -- then, at around 50 or so, still working in a kitchen, some infection in the lung takes him one day. Perhaps there is a memorial at his last bar or restaurant and that is it. (To the Dogs, p.46)

And that is it. A superb novelette. I only hope that Thea Bowering decides to produce more copies of this dark little gem which delivers on every promise it makes.


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Thea Bowering is currently working on a collection of short fiction that explores themes and forms of contemporary flânerie. Her fiction has appeared in The Capilano Review, Dandelion, TESSERA, and Matrix.