above/ground press: Razielle Aigen

Thanks to The League of Canadian Poets' "poetry pause" series for helping celebrate twenty-seven years of above/ground press! The series allowed me to curate ten authors for recent slots, all of whom are Canadian (and/or Canadian-based) authors with 2020 above/ground press publications. Most of the poems included in the series are reprinted from their collections, but a few even provided new poems! Here are the authors' names, with the links to their "poetry pause" poems: Dani Spinosa, George Stanley, Khashayar Mohammadi, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Sarah Burgoyne, Lance La Rocque, J.R. Carpenter, Leesa Dean, Razielle Aigen and Dale Tracy. Can you believe we're twenty-seven years deep? What might the rest of the year bring? We are so close to thirty!

Light Waves The Leaves
Razielle Aigen
$5

Hello , World !

i like the way life collects itself around you . wind & sun .                           you say

i’m in the mood of the night & then it’s like “ hello world ! ” when our faces touch a touch , like the fetal zone inside a womb where there’s room . warm . womblike , womb life . lifelike . light cast on the dark places where we touch         in the night . reprogramming our basic syntax ,        morning moods our faces ,    a resemblance of who we might have been before we closed our eyes . blank spaces         just there in the where where life collects itself around you . wind . sun . mood . womb . face . we will have been         neither happy   nor sad                   like a mother with no hands collecting life

around

     you .

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2020
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Razielle Aigen is a Montreal-born writer and artist. Her poems appear in Entropy, Contemporary Verse 2, Deluge, Ghost City Press, Train: a poetry journal, Bad Dog Review, The Anti-Languorous Project, Talking About Strawberries all of the Time, and elsewhere. Razielle holds a B.A. in History and Contemporary Studies from Dalhousie/King’s University, and is an alumna of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.

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