some author activity: Manery, Markotić, Doller, Straumsvåg, Heroux, Fagan, Barwin, Reid + Solomon,

forthcoming author Sandra Doller is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Dag T. Straumsvåg and Jason Heroux's collaborative chapbook gets a nice mention by Cary Fagan over at his review blog; Gary Barwin has an archived poem up at The Walrus; Monty Reid is reviewed by Dawn Macdonald; and Misha Solomon has new work up in the Spotlight series.

new from above/ground press: then / here / now / there, by Cary Fagan

then / here / now / there
Cary Fagan
$5

a man on tenth street planting begonias / how afraid
and yet desperate to get up before class / she’s trying
to learn harmonica / torn / you say to him, ‘you are my
torturer’ / last night dreaming that i was dreaming of
my father / it isn’t necessary to finish war and peace,
is it? / when I have a good pen i want to write for its
sake

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cary Fagan has two books coming in 2025, A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News (book*hug) and Robot Island (Tundra Books). He is the co-publisher of the chapbook house espresso and the publisher of another chapbook house, Found Object and occasionally reviews chapbooks on word.music.blog.

This is Fagan's second above/ground press title, after Fifty-Two Lines About Henry (2024).

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 rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Cary Fagan reviews Lydia Unsworth's These Steady Bulbs (2024) at Word Music

Toronto writer (and above/ground press author) Cary Fagan was good enough to provide the first review for Lydia Unsworth's These Steady Bulbs (2024) over at his Word Music blog. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

When I was a kid, so long ago now, we played unsupervised from evening into dark. We hid in back yards, ran from garden to garden, picked up fallen pears from a neighbour’s tree and hurled them at the rare passing car. That time came back to me as I read These Steady Bulbs, a text that both offers and withholds meaning–somewhat in the manner of childhood itself.

The English poet Lydia Unsworth (above/ground is a rare Canadian chapbook press to have an international list of authors) has an interesting premise here. Her book, as she explains in a note, is a response to Ian Waite’s Middlefield: A postwar council estate in time, which I gather is a sociological/cultural study of British subsidized housing. She tells us that “the concerns and nostalgia are in part abstracted,” although I admit to being uncertain as to what exactly this means. The sequence of prose poemns is presented as a looking backwards into childhood, as a visit to places once intimately known, as an attempt to find and understand the past. It is certainly nostalgic, if not warmly so. It is as much exhumation as recollection.

Can anyone else see these streets, their buried gods, the blood from our shins like shadows in gravel, these graves?

Somewhere out-of-focus were the adults, uninterested in such spaces as the empty lot that drew them:

And the adults, they didn’t disobey the signage or peek over walls designed expressly to keep them out. Nothing for them to see but their imagination, creased and left to rot. Wild fear, rumour, grey flowing capes half-seen and blinked away. We lied and camped wherever it looked soft enough. Metal bridges, leftover streams, fat wet furniture, mossy and bright. We wanted rain in our shoes, we wanted to smell damp like the soil of the planet.

This is rather overwrought language, appropriate for an adult reliving the intensity of collective childhood experience. These were places were the dangers were felt, if vague and unnamed, making them all the more exciting. When the poet says “We didn’t want to go home (we never wanted to go home)” it isn’t hard to wonder whether home is now, for the adult looking back, a place that simply can’t be entered anymore.

The voice of these poems is oddly passionate and alienated at the same time. It isn’t always easy to say why one sentences follows another. Near the end we are told that “Everything is here for the taking” but this feels more like a past, a memory, a fiction that has us in its grip whether we like it or not.

Catherine Marcotte reviews Cary Fagan's Fifty-Two Lines About Henry (2024) at The Miramichi Reader

Kingston, Ontario-based reader, editor and writer Catherine Marcotte was good enough to provide the first review for Cary Fagan's Fifty-Two Lines About Henry (2024) over at The Miramichi Reader. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

Mourning favourite colours, cooking for dachshunds, and feeding birds gummi-worms: these are the kind of adventures that animate Cary Fagan’s charming new chapbook, Fifty-Two Lines About Henry.

Faithful to its title, this fifty-two-line collection is a fragmented look into the strange and whimsical life of a man named Henry. His is a tale of misplaced energies, unlikely luck, and lasting anxieties about anything from flag-raising and hat-wearing to door-slamming.

And as these small, out of context stories multiply and expand, clarifying our sense of our protagonist, the book ultimately reminds that no one line can aptly convey the absurdity of human life.

Although Henry contemplates dancing to calm an enraged bear, orders enough sardines to fill two bedrooms – I hope they’re canned – and writes an 861-page chapter to a novel, his unlikely battles remain rooted in a world well-recognized where neighbours are suspicious, dinner parties are taxing, and things learned at school are revealed to be alternately fateful (the sousaphone, surprisingly) and superfluous (trigonometry).

Punctuated by unexpected guests like a thorn-ridden lion and existential questions about littering, Fagan’s work engages the surreal and the hyperreal to lay bare the unknowability of life’s many moments. And as these small, out of context stories multiply and expand, clarifying our sense of our protagonist, the book ultimately reminds that no one line can aptly convey the absurdity of human life: “My life, he said into the dark, can’t be reduced to a single line.” A funny, heartfelt ride, Fifty-Two Lines About Henry is a fast-paced, witty, and undeniably charming meditation on the many thoughts and feelings that populate our strange, unknowable days.

some author activity: mclennan, Armantrout, Fagan, drystek, Tate + Schapira,

rob mclennan is interviewed by Megan Nichols as part of the What We Aim To Do podcast; Rae Armantrout has a poem, draft and short write-up at underbelly; Cary Fagan has started doing chapbook reviews again over at his blog; nina jane drystek has a concrete sound poetry recording newly up at the ex-puritan; and Bronwen Tate did a short substack write-up on what Kate Schapira has been working on the past few years.

new from above/ground press: Fifty-Two Lines About Henry, by Cary Fagan

Fifty-Two Lines About Henry
Cary Fagan
$5

He felt vaguely guilty that blue was no longer his favourite colour.




He should never have bragged about loving the scariest horror movies but now there was nothing he could do about it.




Yes, he would write a sequel to Crime and Punishment.




Hello? He said, hello, hello, hello, hello?

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2024
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cary Fagan’s first chapbook was published in an edition of six copies, all typed by him. Some forty years later he is a co-editor of the chapbook house, espresso. He also publishes books for adults and kids, most recently The Animals (Book*Hug). He lives in Toronto.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

Cary Fagan reviews Jordan Abel’s TIMELESS AMERICAN CLASSIC (2017)

Toronto writer Cary Fagan was good enough to provide the first review for Jordan Abel’s TIMELESS AMERICAN CLASSIC (2017) over at his Word Music. Thanks much! You can see Fagan’s post here.

Cary Fagan reviews Stephen Collis, FIRST SKETCH OF A POEM I WILL NOT HAVE WRITTEN (2017)

Toronto writer Cary Fagan was good enough to provide the first review for Stephen Collis’ FIRST SKETCH OF A POEM IWILL NOT HAVE WRITTEN (2017) over at his Bodies and Words. Thanks much! You can see Fagan’s post here. As he writes:

Stephen Collis, First Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written.  Ottawa, above/ground press, 2017.

abovegroundpress.blogsplot.com

An emotion not felt so often in poetry is anger.  But I certainly feel it in Stephen Collis’ long poem (something above 150 lines) – anger at contemporary culture, at the stubbornness of capitalism, and perhaps at the corruption of poetry itself.  It’s full of interesting contradictions, the main one for me being that it is no flag-waving manifesto or populist call to the masses but instead intricate, fragmented, and often as not difficult.

At borders, frontiers, reaching
into the historical moment of listening
to insurrection and speech /
spur and limit
in place of the street / we have Facebook
Google is a universe we
No longer have to search the limits of
the revolutionary subject lies elsewhere
can we revive?

Sometimes he sounds like a tired and aging, but still raging lefty, hating the opium of the internet and pop songs that “tell us / nothing” (surely an unfair generalization these days).  He might be in an old-fashioned working man’s tavern, talking to a half-listening friend (“and sometimes David when I say politics / I mean poetics”), feeling defeated but with still some of the old energy in him.  His thoughts jump around, as if he might be half drunk or falling asleep-

swing low
Campanera. Missing. Cellphone. Rift. Blank. Space. Rosebud.
What body is general? Autonomous?
Gras. Roots. Bit. Torrent. Detainees. No one.  Illegal.

There’s another moment when a name is mentioned, likely a wife or partner: “Late now. Sound of the furnace. Cathy out. Girls asleep.”  This also gives the impression of a restless and unhappy soul wrestling with defeats and losses in the dark hours. But the lines always have a clean, sharp edge, expressing an intelligent consciousness that feels to me trapped inside a spiral of argument, trying to find a way out:

I ponder Empedocles and volcanos
the history of the oppressed
“If you go out and look for the economy
it is hard to find”
desire to become cosmos
to live in the limitless
connection of all things

As I read I began to expect some kind of uplift or release, some hope in the end, if faint or bleary.  Instead the poem ends in cynicism or perhaps just resignation: “god didn’t die / he was translated into money”.  But I took this as a momentary feeling, as if another moment chosen (five minutes before, one minute after) might have given us a different ending, a sense that the fight – in the street and on the page – must go on.

Cary Fagan reviews Carrie Olivia Adam's Grapple (2016)

Toronto writer Cary Fagan was good enough to provide the first review for Carrie Olivia Adam's Grapple (2016) over at his new Bodies and Words. Thanks much! You can see Fagan's post here. As he writes:

Carrie Olivia Adams, Grapple.  Ottawa: above/ground press, 2016.
abovegroundpress.blogspot.com

It is notoriously difficult to capture one art form in another; can one do more than search for clumsy equivalents, fractured reflections?  And yet when I read Carrie Olivia Adams’ Grapple for the first time, it was if I could see the movement and struggle of bodies in my mind.  Not only the words themselves but the placement of the lines, fragments across a wide page, evoked extension and constriction, stillness and action.

My first reading was without benefit of the “Notes on the Composition” which comes after the eight-page poem.  I did have the image on the cover, and two inside, to know this was a dance in words.  And the epigraph by Nawal El Saadawi told me that the poem was about movement and passivity, surrender and resistance.  But it was only upon reading the notes that I understood the poem to actually be a text that had accompanied a dance performance–a performance inspired (if that’s the right term) by the arrest of “a young African American man during a protest as part of Moral Mondays Illinois in Chicago in November 2015.”

The poem begins with two definitions of the title–“to stop the progress or movement of / (something)” and “to attract and hold the attention of / (someone or something).”  This apparent contradiction, or mirror-imaging, is carried on throughout, with “strength” linked to “vulnerability” and going “limp” being an “act of resistance / …an act of / strength”.  There is a particularly telling moment when

We cannot see your face                              you cannot see ours                                                                                                              pressed

                                                      But we are so close

These words seem to me both powerful, frightening, and almost beautiful.  On the poem’s next page, however, the poet becomes somewhat less nimble, writing in true, if sloganeering fashion, of a city that “forgets / the backs on which it is built”.  But then the poet becomes more suggestive again:

Tell us again how you know

how you submerged us
how we re-wrote the movement of sidewalk and street
how it bent up to meet us

These words were spoken to a dance created by Chicago choreographers Jamie Corliss and Lydia Feuerhelm, who were also the performers.  According to the “Notes,” the dance and the words were intended to “work with and against each other,” echoing the tension within the poem itself.  I certainly would have liked to see this performance in which “intimacy and aggression overlap” but the poem works well on its own, especially with the accompanying photographs.  It is a work that, while for the most part not allowing its political purpose to diminish its artistry, never forgets that purpose.