some author activity: Kaplan, Simpson, Boyle, eckhoff + Rosenthal,

Genevieve Kaplan is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Natalie Simpson is video-interviewed via Gap Riot Press; Frances Boyle has a new poem up in the poetry pause series via The League of Canadian Poets; kevin mcpherson eckhoff has a new comedy album, available here; and Sarah Rosenthal is interviewed by Heidi Van Horn for The Brooklyn Rail.

new from above/ground press: Fire and Flood: Enacting Rehearsal as Performance, by Sarah Rosenthal

Fire and Flood: Enacting Rehearsal as Performance
Sarah Rosenthal
$5

Author’s Note

This essay is from the collection One Thing Follows Another: Engaging the Art of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, a collaboration with poet Valerie Witte. In this project, we explore the work of dancer-choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti—both at various inflection points throughout their careers and in this particular moment. Through a combination of chance operations and intentional artistic choices that push us to unexpected places, and via innovative forms and techniques—including collage, erasure, and our own inventions—we deconstruct the essay form to examine what we as poets, each with our own highly charged relationships to dance, can contribute to the conversation about these pivotal figures in postmodern art.

I am grateful to the many people and organizations who have supported and continue to support this project. I look forward to acknowledging them all in the book.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
as the fourteenth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
December 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Cover art: Amy Fung-yi Lee

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Estelle Meaning Star (Chax, forthcoming), The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 2019; collaboration with Valerie Witte), Lizard (Chax, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009), and several chapbooks. She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her short film We Agree on the Sun has received numerous accolades on the film festival circuit, including Best Experimental Short at the 2021 Berlin Independent Film Festival. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award, a Creative Capacity Innovation Grant, a San Francisco Education Fund Grant, and writing residencies at Cel del Nord, This Will Take Time, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, and New York Mills. She lives in San Francisco where she manages projects for the Center for the Collaborative Classroom, works as a Life & Professional Coach, and serves on the California Book Awards poetry jury. More at sarahrosenthal.net.

This is Rosenthal’s second above/ground press title, after Estelle Meaning Star (2014).

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

some author activity: Hamilton, mclennan, Tate, Rosenthal + Trivedi,

["describe your writing process as a single gif"] Eaton Hamilton has a new essay up at Guernica magazine; rob mclennan has a new poem up at The Babel Tower Notice Board; Bronwen Tate has a new essay in the "Talking Poetics" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter; Sarah Rosenthal has a new essay up at Entropy mag; and Amish Trivedi has a new essay up at Post45.

some author activity: Birchard, mclennan, Tracy, Notley, Schmaltz + Rosenthal,

Guy Birchard has a new poem in the "Tuesday poem" series over at the dusie blog; rob mclennan has had two poems up at Stride magazine here, and here; forthcoming author Dale Tracy is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; above/ground press authors Alice Notley and Eric Schmaltz (among others) will have work included in the next edition of Best American Experimental Writing; and Sarah Rosenthal has new work in ELDERLY #30.

some author activity: Campanello, Rosenthal, Spinosa, Clayton + Earl,

Kimberly Campanello is being interviewed over at poetry mini interviews; Sarah Rosenthal has some new work up at Word for/Word; Dani Spinosa is interviewed over at The Maynard; Conyer Clayton is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and Amanda Earl has a piece in the "(Not) My Writing Desk" series at Queen Mob's Teahouse.

some author activity: Rosenthal, Koss, Thomas, Robinson + Ross,

Sarah Rosenthal and Valerie Witte have a two-part piece up at many gendered mothers, on Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti; Zane Koss has four poems in The Temz Review; Hugh Thomas has a new cento posted as part of the Proper Tales Press 40th anniversary essays series; Elizabeth Robinson has a new essay at my (small press) writing day; and Stuart Ross has work in SurVision magazine.

New Orleans Poetry Festival 2019: Hyland, Kaminski, Robinson, Rosenthal, Smith, Sweeney + Tate,

above/ground press authors MC Hyland, Megan Kaminski, Elizabeth Robinson, Sarah Rosenthal, Jessica Smith, Heather Sweeney and Bronwen Tate (as well as a whole slew of other writers) participate in the 2019 New Orleans Poetry Festival and Small Press Fair, which will be held from April 18-21, 2019. I might not be able to attend, but you should totally go! Check out the full schedule here.

some author activity: Kaminski, Collis, Rosenthal, Lederer + mclennan,

Another article on Megan Kaminski and her new above/ground press title appears, this time via The University Daily Kansan; Stephen Collis has a new essay up at my (small press) writing day; Sarah Rosenthal has new work posted in all the sins; Katy Lederer is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; and rob mclennan has a new poem over at his clever blog.

some author activity: Johnstone, Polyck-O'Neill, Smith, Rosenthal, Sharp + Brockwell,

Matthew Johnstone has some new work in the final issue of interrupture ; Julia Polyck-O'Neill is interviewed over at Touch the Donkey; Jessica Smith, Sarah Rosenthal and forthcoming author Travis Sharp (etcetera) all have work in the third issue of DREAM POP JOURNAL; and Stephen Brockwell has a new poem up at NewPoetry.

Amanda Earl reviews Sarah Rosenthal's Estelle Morning Star (2014), Hugh Thomas' Albanian Suite (2014), N.W. Lea's Present! (2014), Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014), Eric Baus' THE RAIN OF THE ICE (2014) and Rachel Moritz' Many forms in water (2014)

Amanda Earl was good enough to review Sarah Rosenthal's Estelle Morning Star (2014), Hugh Thomas' Albanian Suite (2014), N.W. Lea's Present! (2014), Camille Martin's Sugar Beach (2014), Eric Baus' THE RAIN OF THE ICE (2014) and Rachel Moritz' Many forms in water (2014) as a group post on a variety of above/ground press in 2014 so far over at her enormously clever blog (might this be a time to remind you about the 2015 subscriptions?). Thanks, Amanda! See her original post here, and all of the titles she mentioned are still available (so far). And, for those keeping track, there are three previous reviews of Martin's chapbook here and here and here, a previous review of Baus' chapbook here, a previous review of Lea's chapbook here, and two previous group reviews that include Lea and Thomas here and even here.

hunting for the dark: above/ground press...2014 so far...

on an unseasonably rainy & cold night in mid-August I had an appetite for the above. I wanted to look in less obvious places. I have a stack of above/ground press chapbooks published in 2014, since i am a subscriber…i was curious to see if any of the authors had a penchant for the Gothic, etc. what i found primarily was an overriding tone of anxiety concerning the monotony of 21st century existence. seems scary enough to me...

Sarah Rosenthal’s "Estelle Morning Star" fits the bill nicely with descriptions of women carrying “dying dead things” “emaciated/mangled/animals” I love her turns of phrase & odd juxtapositions, a sense of the macabre amongst business like celebration: “hard core birds in the / ballroom throw themselves/at convention windows/clatter to the table      their/colours running out.” she paints a vivid picture. Estelle wears mary janes.

Hugh Thomas gives us absurd portraits of anxious composers pursued by fierce demons in "Albanian Suite."“When I was with you, the ravens/and milktrucks made such music.” a fun use of black & white. in “Epithalamion” there are bite-marked necks, the monotony of waiting. “It misunderstands today’s poetry/overgrown with wildflowers to forget these sojourners.”  “Poetry is a pagoda, built of friendly embracings, like a square dance complicating society” … a ticket to days of radishes/and saliva” not to discount the beauty in these poems. it’s there between ice-cold moments: “Time, you murderous sun fills my lungs with honey,” there’s something sweetly chilling about that image. & another from “Selfportrait Unwilling to Sit”: “a tramcar apocalypse/on the move/dragging behind dissonance, divine regret.” there’s something Gothic about that image. & in “Metropolitan”: “The two sicknesses frequent in this epoch are heat and isolation.” Thomas’ poems alternate between the tiniest, spot on observations to elaborate, absurd images. I have to say, this is one of my favourite chapbooks this year so far. some of the poems are translations.

In "Present!" N.W. Lea opens with a gangster with rubber extendable arms holding someone up like a baby. an absurd image & not without its horrifying effect…followed later in the next poem in the sequence by “the swans of hurt/burn circles in the snow” there’s lots here about the terror of mundanity, of the burbs…even a littered cough candy is menacing: “a pale pink/half-sucked lozenge/on the pavement/glinting//plus us//have to contend with the teeth of the neighbourhood” you are “snug in your death-sweater.” there are “great swarms/of dusk-bats” "Present!" is a sequence of estrangement.

there are some menacing animals & a kind of helplessness, a monotony in Camille Martin’s "Sugar Beach:" “A leap of leopards under a crescent moon/happens without us, but we’re there/just the same.” “Newfangleness” Sharpshooters are juxtaposed with picnics in “Blind Engine.” In “No Such Identical Horses,” Martin writes, “I was counting on my favourite superstition/to endow the mirage with authority.” There are rotted leaves, wormy fruit, a beast stampeding down a trail, “the chitinous exoskeleton of a locust” & in the title poem a feeling of wasted extravagance in an image of a rusty tanker scooping “mounds of raw sugar.”  “Machine in the Ghost” evokes a cemetery scene. The poems in this chapbook are sound & image collages.

Eric Baus gives us fanciful nightmares of octopi with burned tentacles, ghosts, insects in “The Rain of Ice.” I loved how imaginative & unusual these prose poems were.

In “Many forms in water,” Rachel Moritz gives us white coffins, bitter flowers, gathering storms, “the ribbon of heat rising past digits black in air.” In “The finished forms in the sand record movement that has ceased,” this is a particularly grotesque image: “I carried her through the woods, slept in waterlogged leaves with her body on my chest.” This poem & the others manage to create a tone of melancholy, grief, poignant emotions. I’m quite enamoured of these poems, especially imagery like “How we carried the bell down irrevocable stairs, passed our sentence of doubt and kept moving.” in “Flowing water encounters a widely submerged outside.”

some author activity: Hall, Ball, Rosenthal, Browning, Hajnoczky + Pirie,

Phil Hall was featured on The Toronto Quarterly for poetry month; Open Book: Ontario posts a "Poets in Profile" interview with Nelson Ball; Sarah Rosenthal has new work in issue 8 of Lightning'd Press; Sommer Browning has a short piece on writing up at NPM daily; Helen Hajnoczky has one of her folk-art poems up on the McGill-Queen's University Press site for Poetry Month; and Pearl Pirie has a new poem up at Moss Trill.

above/ground press at AWP: Marthe Reed, Sarah Rosenthal + Jill Stengel, etc

above/ground press has (at least) three authors reading at this year's AWP in Seattle: Marthe Reed, Sarah Rosenthal and Jill Stengel, all part of an off-site reading hosted by Black Radish Books and the Dusie Kollektiv, Friday, February 28, 7:30pm at The Pike Brewing Company, 1415 First Avenue, Seattle. Even if I can't be there directly, maybe you can? See the Facebook invitation here.

new from above/ground press: Estelle Meaning Star, by Sarah Rosenthal

Estelle Meaning Star
Sarah Rosenthal
$4

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Produced, in part, as a handout for the 2014 AWP Conference and Bookfair, Washington State Convention Center & Sheraton Seattle Hotel, Seattle WA, February 26 - March 1, 2014. Thanks much to Susana Gardner for her (ongoing) help and support.

To pick up a free copy at AWP, head over to the combined Black Radish / Dusie booth.

Sarah Rosenthal is the editor of A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey, 2010) and the author of Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009) as well as several chapbooks: The Animal (Dusie, 2011), How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), sitings (a+bend, 2000), and not-chicago (Melodeon, 1998). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Dusie, Eleven Eleven, Sidebrow, Zen Monster, ecolinguistics, and Little Red Leaves, and is anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, and Stories for Children (Black Radish, 2013), Building is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim (P-Queue, 2008), Bay Poetics (Faux, 2006), The Other Side of the Postcard (City Lights, 2004), and hinge (Crack, 2002). Her book Lizard is forthcoming from Chax Press. She serves on the California Book Awards jury and manages programs for the Developmental Studies Center.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com