above/ground press

readings and chapbook launches by:

Jason Christie (Ottawa), Monty Reid (Ottawa), Beatriz Hausner (Toronto), Ellen Chang-Richardson (Ottawa), Lina Ramona Vitkauskas (Toronto) + Mandy Sandhu (Toronto);

lovingly hosted by above/ground press editor/publisher rob mclennan
THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 2025 at RedBird
7pm door/7:30pm reading 

$18 ; includes copies of three recent above/ground press titles ; Tickets available via RedBird, or at the door; [see the report here from last year’s event] 

author/performer biographies: 

Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, and currently lives in Ottawa. He is the author of the full-length collection Karst Means Stone (NeWest Press, 1979), The Life of Ryley (Thistledown Press, 1981), The Dream of Snowy Owls (Longspoon Press, 1983), The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1985), These Lawns (Red Deer College Press, 1990), Dog Sleeps: Irritated Texts (NeWest Press, 1993), Crawlspace: New and Selected Poems (House of Anansi Press, 1993), Flat Side (Red Deer College Press, 1998), Disappointment Island (Chaudiere Books, 2006), Luskville Reductions (Brick Books, 2008), Garden (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and Meditatio Placentae (Brick Books, 2016), as well as a mound of chapbooks. The former Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, he was the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival for more than a decade.

Reid is the author of seven titles through above/ground press: Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (2000), cuba A book (2005), In the Garden (sept series) (2011), Moan Coach (2013), seam (2018), Where there’s smoke (2023) and cuba A book: twentieth anniversary edition (2025), which he will be launching as part of this event. above/ground press produced Report from the Reid Society Vol. 1 No. 1 (2022).

Jason Christie lives and writes in Ottawa with his wife and two children and no pets. His published books include Canada Post (Invisible), i-Robot (EDGE/Tesseract), Unknown Author (Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). He’s wrapping up a new collection that he wrote with/against/for AI.

Christie is the author of nine chapbooks with above/ground press: 8th Ave 15th St NW. (2004), Government (2013), Cursed Objects (2014), The Charm (2015), random_lines = random.choice (2017), glass language (excerpt) (2018), Bridge and Burn (2021) and glass / language / untitled / exaltation (2023; second printing, 2023), which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award, as well as PSA (2025), which he will be launching as part of this event.

Beatriz Hausner has published several poetry collections, including The Wardrobe Mistress (2003), Sew Him Up (2010), Enter the Raccoon (2012), Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart (2020) and She Who Lies Above (2023), as well as many limited edition chapbooks. Her books have been published internationally and translated into several languages, including her native Spanish, French, and most recently Greek. Hausner writes extensively about surrealism and her translations of Spanish American surrealist poets have exerted an important influence on her own writing. Hausner has edited journals and magazines, including Open Letter, ellipse, Exile Quarterly, as well as many of the books published during her tenure as a publisher of Quattro Books. She is the editor of Someone Editions, and its current project French Letter Society. Beatriz Hausner was President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and Chair of the Public Lending Right Commission. She lives in Toronto where she publishes The Philosophical Egg, an organ or living surrealism. Currently, with Russell Smith, she curates and runs the lecture series Soluble Fish. She will be launching her above/ground press debut chapbook, The Oh Oh (2025).

Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet, multi-genre writer, judicial assistant, and editor of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent. A third culture kid at heart, Ellen’s writing is informed by their love of contemporary art, their concern with humanity’s impact on Earth, and their experience moving through various societies as a femme-presenting genderqueer. The author/co-author of six other poetry chapbooks, Ellen’s multi-genre writing has appeared in Augur, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Ex-Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Plenitude, Watch Your Head, and more. Their debut collection, Blood Belies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. They are a co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, an editor for Room and long con magazine, and a member of the poetry collective VII. Find out more at www.ehjchang.com. They will be launching their above/ground press debut, The Moleskin Coat (2025).

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas is a Canadian-American-Lithuanian formerly from Chicago, living in Toronto. She is an award-winning, published poet & video poet. She was a 2020 recipient of a PEN America grant for her development of an experimental poetry collection that adapted poems from Vsevolod Nekrasov and Bill Knott. She was also the voice of George Maciunas’ mother in the documentary, GEORGE (directed by Jeffrey Perkins) screened at MoMA and in Vilnius. Her work has been most recently featured in/at: Film Video Poetry Society (Los Angeles); Octopus Film Festival (Gdansk, Poland); John Gagné Contemporary Gallery (Toronto): Post-Future Era with Kunel Gaur, Justin Neely, and Confusions (Ben Turner); Poetic Phonotheque (Denmark); MOCA Toronto (public installation); SIFF (Moldova); Newlyn Film Festival (UK); Festival Fotogenia (Mexico); Midwest Poetry Fest (US); Vienna Video Poetry Festival (Austria); and the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival (Canada). Her website is linaramona.com. She will be launching her above/ground press debut, The Deaf Forest of Cosmic Scaffolding (2025).

Mandy Sandhu is a poet based in Oakville, Ontario. Her work, often in sonnet form, blends vivid imagery with sharp observation, drawing inspiration from writers like Sylvia Plath, the Beats, Dale Smith and Ted Berrigan.  Mandy works at Toronto Metropolitan University in the Disability Office. She will be launching her chapbook debut, The Temporary Space of a Placenta (2025).

for media inquires, as ever, send a note to rob mclennan at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail (dot) com,

a small song

            For Andrea

If I struggle to arrive like a union of treated pianos,
then I’ll bind to that sound some vitamin D and toast
if I'm a hot Monday wavering, then, look,
what a way to start writing without myself.
If I'm somewhat public in the public’s mind, I’ll listen.
If your body says walls are a problem
where forests mean otherwise than being
is it a fine memory itself becoming afraid to village?
Either way, if I've held you close enough in that moment
when the aesthetic clicks, then I'm expansive in the way
I've used the word relentless to describe reading,
quiet mornings in letters or a tantrum, a roundabout
or in a round, a resounding ballad of dissonances plays
and a coffee machine beeps: sound in a box.

* * * *

I wrote the poems in this chapbook during a period of years where my language and memory were shattered by sleep deprivation. In order to keep myself connected to poetry, I started writing in a file about our life with young kids. I didn't think much about what I was writing. The point was to do it. I amassed a large repository of content, but I stopped adding to it as life found a new level.

While reflecting on how hard it was to remember anything as a result of years of disrupted sleep, I realized that what I had in the original file was literally stored in memory on my computer. I wondered if I could treat that original material with processes that would be similar to what was happening to my mind during sleep deprivation?

To replicate some of the effects of memory loss and the difficulty of thinking, I wrote Python scripts that cut up, recombined, and selected random lines from that source material. The results were a mess, but I edited them to try to make sense of the jumble that had once been rational.

Much like how memories are stories, how we gloss over the messy, difficult, or impossible to recall details, how we invent the connecting pieces to attribute to our memory a sense of completeness, I worked on the poems to attempt to let them become something new, an active remembering. Memory, as I now think of it, is not entirely an act of recall with varying degrees of fidelity, but also an act of creation. We look at the glossy or glossless images of our past and glue them together into a whole new collage.

I’m enormously pleased to hear that Jason Christie’s glass / language / untitled / exaltation won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award. This was Jason’s third time on the bpNichol shortlist, all of which were with above/ground press titles—his Cursed Objects (2014) made the 2015 shortlist, and Government (2013) made the 2014 list—three of some eight different titles of his that above/ground press has produced since 2004, back when he still lived in Calgary.

It is exciting to consider that this win adds Jason’s name to a list of Canadian writers that includes Mark Laba, Paul George Bowering, Janice Williamson, Barry McKinnon, Robert Kroetsch, P.K. Page, Stan Dragland, Lisa Robertson, Christine Leclerc and Gil McElroy, all of whom also won the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Jason’s work has long deserved an attention more than what it has been, although one might say that of most poets working in Canada. What am I even saying? Jason is great and his work is great and you should read more of Jason’s work. I am proud to know that above/ground press has played even a small part in any of this.

Congrats to the 2023 bpNichol Chapbook Award Finalists

Meet the Presses is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2023 bpNichol Chapboook Award. Please join us in celebrating the following chapbooks and supporting the authors and presses that made them happen! In not particular order:

Light Years — Laboni Islam — baseline press

The Lake – James Lindsay – knife/fork/book

glass / language / untitled / exaltation – Jason Christie — above/ground press

Third State of Being — Cassidy McFadzean — Gaspereau Press

I Need Not Be Good — kitchen mckeown — Rahila’s Ghost Press

Thank you so much to the two judges for this year’s award, Alice Burdick and Betsy Warland for their care and generosity with this year’s slate!

You can find out the winner at our Literary Indie Market, taking place as part of the Ampersand Literary Festival. The Eventbrite (which includes the schedule) can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-nd-festival-and-indie-lit-market-tickets-686326429827?aff=oddtdtcreator . You can also get more information through Facebook: https://fb.me/e/1bPyEPHSp .

Adrienne Adams (Calgary)

Dessa Bayrock (Ottawa)

+

Jason Christie (Ottawa)

Furthering this week’s thread as part of the above/ground press thirtieth anniversary as an adjunct to this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual Conference and Bookfair, one might begin to ask: just how offsite is offsite? What does it mean, exactly? One suspects that, in the end, we might discover that the true meaning of #AWP was actually inside of us this whole time.

Amish Trivedi is the author of three books, most recently FuturePanic (Co•Im•Press). He has poems in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. He has an MFA from Brown, a Ph.D. from Illinois State, and is a Post Doctoral Researcher at the University of Delaware.

Jason Christie lives and writes in Ottawa. He is the author of Canada Post (Invisible), i-ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract), Unknown Actor (Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). His most recent chapbooks are: Glass Language Untitled Exaltation (excerpt) (above/ground) and Heavy Metal Litany (Model press). He is looking for a home for a new manuscript of poetry he wrote with the help of several Python scripts.

Laura Kelsey is a poet and performer living in Nanaimo, B.C., which is on Snuneymuxw First Nations Territory. Her poems have appeared in publications including the New Chief Tongue, the Carnegie Newsletter, Stone Pacific Zine and Sea & Cedar Magazine; and her debut chapbook west coast shorts was published by above/ground press in May 2022. Her four-song debut EP Hunting Season is out April 29.

Angela Rebrec lives and works on the unceeded, ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, scəw̓aθən, Stó:lō, and qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ peoples. Her most recent writing has appeared in Vallum, Prairie Fire, GRAIN, The Dalhousie Review, as well as the anthology Voicing Suicide (Ekstasis Editions, 2020). Angela’s poetry films have been recognized at the Barcelona International Film Festival, FilmmakerLife Awards, and Santa Barbara International Shortfest, among others. Her 2020 collaboration with composer Mickie Wadsworth for ART SONG LAB has been included in NewMusicShelf’s Anthology of New Music for Trans & Nonbinary Voices, vol.1. Angela is active in her community supporting the arts by facilitating writing and expressive arts workshops for kids and adults of all age. She is the founding and current president of the Delta Literary Arts Society (DLAS).