some author activity: Rexilius, Mody, Earl, mclennan, Logan + Dewinetz,

Andrea Rexilius is interviewed, alongside Heather Garbo, for Westword; Monica Mody is discussed in an article by Yashaswini Krishna, "Poetry's role and the financial struggles of poets today," at NewsTrail; Amanda Earl has a visual poem in the "poetry pause" series via The League of Canadian Poets; rob mclennan has an excerpt of the work-in-progress, "the green notebook," up at Annulet, and is interviewed by Ivy Grimes for Writing Thoughts; Nate Logan has a new poem up at LEAVINGS and then another new poem up at LEAVINGS and also a poem at The Tiny; and did you know that Jason Dewinetz received a "Distinguished Alumni Award" from the University of Victoria a few years back?

some author activity: Kemp-Gee, Mody, Beaulieu, O'Reilly, Scroggins, van Vliet + Berlatsky,

Meghan Kemp-Gee has a new poem in Southeast Review; Monica Mody has new work in the Spotlight series; Derek Beaulieu has new work at petrichor; Nathanael O'Reilly is interviewed over at The Wild Umbrella; Mark Scroggins is interviewed at talking about strawberries all of the time, where Robert van Vliet also has poems; and Noah Berlatsky has a new poem at dadakuku.

some author activity: Mody, Berlatsky, Johnson, Rogal, Morton, Boyle + Kronovet,

Monica Mody has a substack now, and has work featured at Scroll India; five fleas has published a short poem by Noah Berlatsky; Chris Johnson is interviewed by Andrew French for the Page Fright Podcast; Stan Rogal, Colin Morton and Frances Boyle each have new work in the latest issue of Pinhole Poetry; and Jennifer Kronovet has new work up at Zocalo: Public Square.

some author activity: Reimer, Mody, Armantrout, Niespodziany + periodicities,

Nikki Reimer is interviewed by Ariel Gordon in Prairie Books Now; Monica Mody is welcomed to town in an article celebrating Diwali by Melinda Palacio, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, in the Santa Barbara Independent; Rae Armantrout is featured over at Only Poems with poems and even an interview; Benjamin Niespodziany has new work at gone lawn; and you saw that periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics is now at Blsky, yes?

some author activity: Hawes, Mody, Robinson + Berlatsky,

The Encore Poetry Project includes a poem by James Hawes; Monica Mody now has a substack; Elizabeth Robinson has new work up at Posit; forthcoming author Noah Berlatsky has a poem up at New Feathers Anthology.

some author activity: mclennan, Brink, Mody + Chadwick,

rob mclennan has a new poem up at his blog, and a video online of him reading to promote his upcoming online event via Vancouver's Poets Corner Reading Series; Kōan Brink has a new poem up in the "Tuesday poem" series; Monica Mody is featured on The Beat: a poetry podcast; and Leigh Chadwick has new work up at The Airgonaut.

some author activity: Brown, Mody, Tucker, Melançon + Dennis,

Simon Brown has some new poems and a short statement in the Spotlight series; Monica Mody is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Aaron Tucker is on the longlist for the CBC Non-Fiction Prize; Jérôme Melançon was interviewed for the Mauricie-Centre-du-Québec Views and Voices podcast series, to talk about poetry, translation, and living in French outside Québec, including a bonus reading of "Solidarité", from En d'sous d'la langue, as well as a bonus reading of "Irregularities" from Tomorrow's Going to Be Bright; the late Michael Dennis' "Shelf Portrait" (writ in 2019) is newly posted at The Richler Literary Project.

some author activity: Pirie, Moseman, Dolman, Earl, Radmore, mclennan, Boyle + Mody,

Pearl Pirie has been posting a slew of interviews lately, including Lori Anderson Moseman, Anita Dolman, Amanda Earl, Claudia Coutu Radmore and rob mclennan; Frances Boyle has a new poem up at Rust & Moth, and another at After poetry; and did you know that Monica Mody has an email newsletter of personal and creative updates worth following?

some author activity: Niespodziany, Brown, Unsworth, Melançon, Mody + Eleftherion,

Benjamin Niespodziany is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Simon Brown has some work in the eleventh and final issue of antilang; Lydia Unsworth has new work online at Pamenar Press; Jérôme Melançon is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Monica Mody is interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; and Melissa Eleftherion has new work up at The Hunger, hot pink mag and The Hopper.

some author activity: Graf, Mody, Lea, Pirie, Armantrout, Anstee, Dyckman + mclennan (plus Pakdel launch info!

Adele Graf has a poem on the Chaudiere Books blog as part of National Poetry Month, as does Monica Mody, and N.W. Lea ; Pearl Pirie continues her mini-interviews and write-ups, featuring Rae Armantrout and Cameron Anstee; Susanne Dyckman has new poems online via Conjunctions; rob mclennan has a new poem up for Steven Heighton (1961-2022) ; and Saba Pakdel launches her forthcoming above/ground press title in Vancouver on May 14th!

some author activity: Archer, Collis, MacEachern, Niespodziany, Mody + The Free Nashville Poetry Library,

[above/ground press items seen in the wild at The Free Nashville Poetry Library; photo by Megan M. Garr] Sacha Archer is interviewed over at Artisanal Writer; Stephen Collis has a new poem up at the scales project; Jessi MacEachern has a new poem (audio and text) up at Vallum magazine; Benjamin Niespodziany has some new work up at Blue Arrangements; and Monica Mody has a poem up in the Tuesday poem series over at the dusie blog.

some author activity: Hogg, Mody, Carpenter, Earl + Niespodziany,

Robert Hogg is interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; Monica Mody is featured in Episode 223, S3 of the podcast Jazz Ready, hosted by Magdalena Gómez, Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA; J.R. Carpenter was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize; Amanda Earl writes on the artist statement, and revisiting old ones; and Benjamin Niespodziany has new work up at HAD.

Zoe Tuck reviews Monica Mody's Ordinary Annals (2021)

Zoe Tuck was good enough to review Monica Mody's Ordinary Annals (2021) over at their blog. Thanks so much! This follows the lovely paragraph Lantern Review offered, as well, earlier this year. See Tuck's original post here. As they write:

It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in extraordinary times, although as Monica Mody writes in her new chapbook Ordinary Annals, “Everything was being shredded long before we noticed.” And yet, Mody’s title is unassuming. Ordinary: run-of-the-mill, quotidian—right? Still, the ordinary world, and her revolutions, are a marvel: “Every season that turns brings us back / to pitted dark, moon folding into sun.” Poets have a responsibility to record the revolutions of the world, hence annals.

The extra/ordinariness of our times—that is to say, the admixture of the unprecedented and the cyclical—gives a spiral shape to Ordinary Annals. Mody reaches for the extraordinary but is still “entangled with the world, that place / I become / me, ordinary / shattering into we.” Grief and weariness lead her to lay her body down (I think here of the Nap Ministry), enabling her to “connect with tendril, still—,” drawing energy from the hurt and beautiful earth to be reborn.

Mody lovingly but firmly critiques the desire to erase the specificity of our griefs:

Now don’t say,

We’re all the same
& love is the answer.

What does it take to attend—
not flinch—at different

trajectories of suffering?
Can we honor healing

histories,
their immense particularity

and is that love
rehearsing?

and elsewhere:

If through our gestures
we take away

another’s power
—enable colonization—

we fail
Earth & Waters.

She also critiques the impulse (imperative?) to ‘return to normal’ and repress our grief (since we can’t simply erase it) at the interlocking crises of our time.

Mody begins Ordinary Annals knocking into the glass walls of language: “I want to rise above my limitations.” What limitations? “I want to let bird shapes of words flock together into language that will / change skies.” Can language change skies? Mody writes elsewhere, “I’m just so sick & tired of being Poet” and in that moment it is because “losses stitch [her] tongue into clawed mouth” and another of the responsibilities of the poet is to sing the losses. I read into this not just despair for the losses themselves, but despair at not having been able to forestall them with the poet’s tool, language.

This desire to solve or resolve or memorialize in tension with another mode, that of, “rocking in this moment of undecidability, not becoming anything at all,” a formlessness that presents itself as a space of repose in between breaths or throbs.

Ordinary Annals is the work of a poet attuned to the entanglement of word and world, memory and moment, love and suffering. With her willingness to share her progress in language through “this time of grave despair,” Mody joins her elders in:

tell[ing] us of the many gates around the world that are opening
Gates opened by great white wings of love—of sorrow

Each gate points straight to our hearts
That place where broken

            realities are woven

She models her movement toward these gates for all of us ordinary would-be weavers “shattering into a we” and I’m grateful for it.

Lantern Review includes Monica Mody's Ordinary Annals (2021) in An Asian American Poetry Companion: Fresh Books for Fall 2021

Lantern Review was good enough to include Monica Mody's above/ground press chapbook debut, Ordinary Annals (August, 2021), in their list of "An Asian American Poetry Companion: Fresh Books for Fall 2021." Thanks so much! As they write to introduce the post: "Even we find ourselves at the close of another challenging summer, Asian American voices continue to shine in print. Earlier this year, we celebrated the proliferation of spring Asian American poetry releases. Today, we’re excited to highlight just a small portion of the new and forthcoming works coming out of the AsAm poetry community this fall." Be sure to check out their full list! As they wrote of Mody's chapbook:

Monica Mody, Ordinary Annals (above/ground, August 2021)

Contributor (and past staff writer) Monica Mody’s newest chapbook, written over the course of the last year, reflects on the tumultuous events of 2020 and 2021 as the poet herself contended with the US’s notoriously thorny visa system. In her signature resonant and deeply grounded poetic style, Mody examines the limits of the body in all its many senses—as creative work, as organism, as site of protest, as political subject, as resident (of community, of nation, of habitat, of ecosystem, of Earth)—resulting in a prescient work that, in the poet’s own words, “falter(s) towards a ripple, a ground of healing.” A beautiful artifact of these difficult times, this lovely little handmade chap is not one to miss.

some author activity: Konchan, Reid, Maloukis, Mody + Hogg,

Virginia Konchan has some new work up at Bennington Review; Monty Reid is interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; Rose Maloukis is the July winner of the "Arc Award of Awesomeness" from Arc Poetry Magazine; Monica Mody has some new work up at The Fabulist; and Robert Hogg has some new work (that I seem to have missed last year, when it appeared) up at BlazeVOX.

new from above/ground press: Ordinary Annals, by Monica Mody

Ordinary Annals
Monica Mody
$5

Trees still burn

at edge of consciousness,

gray. Ash

crinkles in gust.

Ash-sky marked us.

We are tangled with living

Earth. I keep trying

to find the rhythm of this poem.

Asphyxiated, in anguish,

it urgently wants to come out.

I need to breathe

but paper-thin parchment

somewhere within my lungs—

sky laid waste.

Mind wants to find ways

to make it better

but I am tired. I rest

into air.

Spirit of air,

ever-changing,

turning nothing into something

through simple action.

Brush us with your feathers

that we may yet return to forests

friends of fire.
                (“Ordinary Annals”)

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

cover image: “Heera,” Oil and powdered stone on Canvas, 2020
by Palija Shrestha https://palijashrestha.com

Monica Mody's poetry collection Bright Parallel is forthcoming from Copper Coin Press. She is the author of Kala Pani (1913 Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies including Extinction Violin: The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets, What is Time: An Anthology of New Indian Writing, Hibiscus: Poems that Heal and Empower, and &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing. Her poetry also appears in Poetry International, Indian Quarterly, Almost Island, Boston Review, and other lit magazines. She has been a recipient of the Sparks Prize (University of Notre Dame), the Zora Neale Hurston Award (Naropa), and the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing.

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