New Video for Big American Trip: Kim Gek Lin Short

Posted to the Big American Blog and re-posted below. Performed by Kim Gek Lin Short, directed and edited by James Short, and just in time for Halloween.

The Language is Pronounced "Dead"



Kim, in case you don't know, has a book in the hopper at TSky Press. It's called The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits, and its one of the more entrancing, mystifying, gorgeously creepy, even for-realz disturbing books that I've encountered in a while (Think Lynch meets Gorey, as told by Katherine Dunne, perhaps, but in prose poems recalling... or, well, just read some excerpts here).

I put down a new floor, so I'm feeling pretty proud

I'd never actually done a floor before, so I was a little scarecrow at first . . .



but everything worked out fine.

I also took out the enormous pedestal underneath my woodstove, and paneled over the wallpaper that drove us Charlotte-Perkins-Gilman-crazy, as it did Noah Saterstrom, who featured the wallpaper in an issue of Trickhouse.

Exhibit A: old floor (chipped white paint on pine 1x3, complete with wolf-spider-size gaps), pedestal, and wallpaper:




Exhibit B: removing the pedestal & masonry blocks beneath--with help (upper left corner)




Exhibit C: pine floor sans furniture




Note: the crappy appearance of the old floor was only part of the incentive to lay down the new one. Other incentives included, but were not limited to, being able to see through the floor to old insulation fairly dangling in the crawlspace under the house, from which warm seasons' insects and cold seasons' winds both enjoyed free access to the livingroom.

Having fired up the woodstove for the first time last week, I can tell already that the space is much warmer. The floor where I built the addition is extra insulated as well. Above the sub-subfloor and the R-19 fiberglass insulation, I added two sheets of R-5 rigid insulation between risers underneath the new subfloor. Then I screwed down the pine.




Exhibit D:

1x10 shiplap local white pine on the walls; 1x12 centermatch local white pine on the floor. Woodstove sans ginormous trip-hazard pedestal.



Toasty warm.

Why pine and not, say, oak? Oak is 3X the price, and I don't mind floors "showing wear." I like wear. It reminds me that I'm alive. And that my actions have consequences.

I also like creaking floorboards, which I achieved with ease. Go figure. Especially in the more wonky uneven areas.

Exhibit E: Kitty approval: check!

UPDATE: Next Friday (Oct 23) Elena Georgiou & I will *NOT* be reading from our collaboration

at the Yes Reading! series in Albany, NY. We no longer have transportation, and are rescheduling for Spring. Tonight you can still go to the reading and hear James Belflower, whose beautiful and terrifying poetry explosion, Commuter, is just out from Instance Press.

Hosted by Colie Collen
7PM@ The Social Justice Center
33 Central Avenue
http://yesreading.wordpress.com

Elena Georgiou and Christian Peet are collaborating on a book with various working titles such as “He Bled / She Bled,” “An Improvised Explorative Device,” and “Insurgents in Love.” Georgiou is the author of two poetry collections, Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants and mercy mercy me, and is co-editor of anthology, The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave. Peet is the author of a forthcoming memoir, No Evidence, No Jury, No Justice: The Story of Jeremy Barney, CT Prisoner #318764; a collection of postcards, Big American Trip; and two chapbooks in an ongoing cross-genre project, The Nines; and is the publisher for Tarpaulin Sky Press.

from “Time to Kill”

The pianist plays Chopin. On the factory floor there are thirty sewing machines with women sitting at them, not yet working, dipping breadsticks covered in sesame seeds into their tea. Move your arm through first to second. Keep pressing your heels into the floor. A huge wooden counter stretches along an entire wall. Underneath it are giant bolts of fabric. Don’t roll. Above it there are electrical wires that connect to an industrial strength cutting machine. Knees open. The factory owner turns on the heat. Resist: push down as your heels push up.

He waits in the truck. There is nothing else to do. There is the factory and there is class. In either, she is working. He is not. He is listening to the radio. The radio announces things. The sun is setting on the Western Empire. Tomorrow will be sunny, with a chance of rain. He has “time to kill.” He has time to put quotation marks around “words”: “producers” and “consumers”; “men, women, and children.” The radio says “the plan.”

It is so cold that she keeps opening and closing her fingers, making fists, trying to stave the growing numbness taking over her hands. Knees open. The three windows overlooking the street do not close; heat leaks out and cold leaks in. Repeat. Car horns seeps through, accenting the slow growl of machines. Move your feet back to first. Don’t let your feet roll. Check each dress from neckline to hemline and cut off every strand of dangling white thread. Lower your arm back to bras bas.

The radio says the plan has been re-drafted. Entering and exiting doors of places of business, people around him are thinking of places other than businesses, thinking of business in which they are not presently engaged, thinking of some time other than the present, some place other than “there.” He has “all the time in the world,” but he has no business there. The radio says a plan has been re-drafted, following “the erasure.” He imagines her looking over her shoulder at the saffron sunset, the reflections in unshattered windows, imagines her turning again to say “Thanks for being here.” The radio says a plan has been re-drafted following the erasure of “a people,” but he can think only of her.

TSky's news is my news. Perhaps it is yours as well.

RE: OPEN READING PERIOD

Two weeks remain for submissions of full-length manuscripts to Tarpaulin Sky Press's open reading period. Details here.

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Now available for pre-order (ships Nov 1st):

Ana Božičević
Stars of the Night Commute

ISBN: 9780982541609
Poetry | 6"x8", 84 pp, pbk | Nov. 2009
$14 includes shipping in the US

Cover: Remedios Varo | Ícono, 1945 [Icon]
Óleo, incrustaciones de nácar y hojas de oro sobre tríptico de madera [Oil, mother-of-pearl and gold leaf inlays on a wooden tryptich] | 60 x 39,3 x 5,5 | Malba - Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires | Reproduced with kind permission of Anna Alexandra Gruen.

Click here for more information. Click the PayPal logo to pre-order online:

Stars of the Night Commute haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams. Many of the poems carry a shamanistic, elemental quality, as if real matter were articulating out of word-fragments. Božičević writes, "At the end of poetry the poem can no longer be remote." If this is "the end of poetry," perhaps poetry is, after all, reaching forward back to its beginning.
—Annie Finch

Ana Božičević's poetry has everything—a mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound. The words bristle with life, and they command the deepest reverence for the Ineffable, for pure Being. This poetry is clever without being shallow, and this is truly rare. Silence is my most honest response to her work, but a silence rooted in respect and awe for that which is truly great art.
—Noelle Kocot

Ana Božičević's work is sort of animist—it’s either about silence or the racket of the world. How does she do it? Clicks the switch to say it’s silent & it’s happening then on a distant tiny stage. She’s muttering, and then it’s a story and a very good one. I mean in poetry at some point you don’t know what the writer means. In Ana’s work I watch “it” vanish (all the time) & I trust it.
—Eileen Myles

Ana Božičević's work is filled with a wild freedom, and reading it often reminds me of reading Wallace Stevens, in that you know absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect. In her poems she expresses an attitude of solemn responsibility to history, both the world's and her own, yet there is often a marvelous lightness, even playfulness about them. She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial. These are not just technical matters. An émigré from reality (in the form of one of modern time's most monstrously and moronically cruel wars) and a Cassandra, she is able to perceive with the eyes of language—then render with lyrical immediacy—the experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream.
—Franz Wright

About Ana Božičević

Ana Božičević was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1977. She emigrated to NYC in 1997. Stars of the Night Commute is her first book of poems. Her fifth chapbook, Depth Hoar, will be published by Cinematheque Press in 2010. With Amy King, Ana co-curates The Stain of Poetry reading series in Brooklyn, and is co-editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School. She works at the Center for the Humanities of The Graduate Center, CUNY. For more, visit nightcommute.org.

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This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like

features an essay by TSky Press publisher Christian Peet. Peet's response includes three mini-essays on the work of past TSky Guest Editors Bhanu Kapil and Selah Saterstrom, as well as the work of Aase Berg.

In May 2009, Danielle Pafunda curated the first installment of Delirious Hem's "This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like." This forum featured women discussing the relationship between their feminism & their poetry, and these contributions elicited thoughtful responses from women & men bloggers alike. Mark Wallace was one of those bloggers. Together, they've curated "This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like."

All this week, new essays are posted:

Monday October 5: Brian Teare, Christian Peet, & H.L. Hix
Tuesday October 6: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Kareem Estefan,
& Kevin Simmonds
Wednesday October 7: Mark Wallace, Mike Hauser, & Nate Pritts
Thursday October 8: Philip Jenks, Tim Atkins, & Tony Frazer,
Friday October 9: Tony Trigilio, David Lau & Rodrigo Toscano

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In mudluscious #9, J.A. Tyler provides a kind & concise review (shoutout may be a better term?) re: Christian Peet's Big American Trip.

Says Tyler, "The most impressive aspect of Big American Trip is how Peet is able to interlace politics, linguistic commentary, and a subtle narrative through-line into one book, undercutting any notion that we cannot swell a sentence to something more than just words by breaking its structure, by making it new, by challenging our readers to read for more than one thing, and even more than two; in fact, like the narrator in Big American Trip, Peet asks each reader to look for and decipher everything, all at once.

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Fence & Tarpaulin Sky Press author Joyelle McSweeney is interviewed as only Joyelle McSweeney can be interviewed, at Rob McClennan's blog.

Here's a taste:

When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word!) inspiration?

I turn to South Bend. Really, until you have lived in a rotting rust belt town you have not lived. People are hurting here, and they are dogged and ingenious. They drive their trucks through the walls of their living rooms on a nightly basis. They get in fights and throw pregnant dogs at each other. They find remarkable items to pawn (one winter morning two middle aged people were standing outside one of the many pawn shops at 7 AM trying to hold a window airconditioning unit up out of the snow. They were wearing sweatsuits and no coats.). There are residential motels here, one is called the Wooden Indian and it has almost no interior. So it’s a shelter without any shelter. We have a lot of yard sales around here where everyone tries to sell used goods to everyone else. The same used goods just pass back and forth. Capitalism is played out and distended here and very visibly broken. As a pregnant woman and a mother with a toddler, I fit right in to most expectations about women in this place, at least until I open my mouth and reveal myself not to be a Hoosier. But most of the time, at the supermarket, the BMV, the playground, the IRS office, daycare, I do not open my mouth. One is not invited to do so. As Denis Johnson writes at the end of Jesus’ Son, “I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

Go here for the rest.

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Sean Lovelace wins the TSky Press "Hells Yeah, Go Fondle Some Art" Award for most entertaining review of Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay.

Here's a taste:

I would like to light my velvet pipe, stuff it with velvet tobacco, lean back, and say to you now that only sophistry could infer the “existence” of nonbeing. The nothingness which fascinates recent literary folks/analysts is a myth of declining capitalist society, and I should know. I got your tower ivory. The earth is black and buckled.

I finished the Andrew Zornoza book and it had me thinking. It was a small animal gnawing my shin, a teething, bloody type of thinking. I had class in five minutes and my head felt like the way men lay on a loading dock. You know how reading can be a cave (writing too, and Percodan). I didn’t know how I was going to use these feelings from Zornoza’s book in my class. I mean I wanted to do something.

So I took the class down to the BSU art museum and told them to touch something, to reach out and teach a piece of art, a painting or a sculpture. The BSU museum contains Warhol and Greek statues and Jesus bleeding all over lush crosses and all those museum necessities. The response was interesting . . .

Go here for the rest.

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TSky Press author Mark Cunningham has been busy since publishing Body Language. Not one but three new chapbooks are available from Mark:

nightlightnight, a collaborative web chapbook, with photographs by Mel Nichols, hosted at Right Hand Pointing

&

Nachträglichkeit, an ebook (PDF file) from Beard of Bees

&

10 specimens, an ebook (PDF file) from Gold Wake Press

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Alan Semerdjian's In the Architecture of Bone is now available from GenPop Books. Order directly from GenPop Books, get free shipping anywhere in the U.S., and save around $5 off what you'd pay at Amazon. Yeah, it's a sweet deal.

Click here for excerpts and more information. Click here to order

Alan Semerdjian's In the Architecture of Bone reads like a long poem cycle that pulls the reader into an open field in which Semerdjian weaves his explorations of language and art, Armenian history and family. These dynamic poems mingle the ghosts of the past with the pace of contemporary life. This talented, young poet is well worth your reading.—Peter Balakian

Writer/musician Alan Semerdjian’s poems and essays have appeared in several print and online publications and anthologies including Chain, The Lyric Review, Adbusters, Arson, Ararat, and Diagram. He released a chapbook of poems called “An Improvised Device” (Lock n Load Press) in 2005. His songs have appeared in television and film and charted on CMJ. Alan has performed and read all over North America. He currently teaches at Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, NY and resides in New York City’s East Village.

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Also, if you haven't checked out GenPop Books' online magazine, No Contest, now may be a good time to start. They've just posted new work by Alissa Nutting, whose first collection of short fictions, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, was picked by Ben Marcus for publication by Starcherone Books. Nutting kicks off October at New Contest with a story about "free sex" on the set of a children's television show, dancing in a mouse costume, and a little blond star named "Missy."

An excerpt from "Dancing Rat":

I’m haunted by how physically perfect Missy is, her clear skin and her white white teeth. She just landed a detergent commercial, and because I want to punish myself I will not be able to resist switching to that brand. I am a zombie-slave under Missy’s control, I often think. I don’t have a child and I probably will never have a child: I hate this but trying any harder to have one seems like it would make the reality sink in even more. It is far easier to just do the bratty things Missy asks me to do, buy her endorsed products, and act like this agonizing relationship somehow brings me closer to motherhood. . . .

Going back on set when I know I have semen inside of me reminds me of that urban myth about a chemical that will turn all the water around people purple if they pee in the pool. I kind of expect that one day, while walking across the Rainbow River Bridge over to the Sharing Seat, I will look down and realize my crotch is flashing like a police siren due to some product that detects seminal fluid on the sets of children’s shows.

Go here for the rest.

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NEW REVIEWS AT TARPAULIN SKY

some excerpts:

Albert Goldbarth's Griffin, reviewed by Katie Eberhart

[Griffin] explores the nature of truth, of illness, and relationships, deftly hooking together information and experience in a shape-shifting narrative that moves forward, reverses, follows surprising detours and tangents, settling for truth that resides in the complicated messiness somewhere between a carnival ride and a Carl Sagan lecture. The narratives tackle tricky topics like failing relationships, illness and mortality with the grace of a poet, the thoroughness of a historian (and student of “the contemporary”), sensitivity, and humor. . . .

Chris Tonelli's No Theater, reviewed by Christopher Salerno

Masks here are also symbols of potential, often allowing the speaker the distance he needs to gain perspective on nature and the self: “Memories, / interior resonance, you / are inventing / new natures.” If a mask is a symbol of potential, it is one that, for Tonelli, certainly doesn’t muffle the voice. The masks of No Theater are a vehicle through which the character navigates emotional complexity, and the result is often personal and forthcoming: “The audience, / a constellation / scalding the silence. / They are waiting / for my feeling. I am waiting / to feel their absence." . . .

Michelle Detorie's Ode to Industry, reviewed by Juliet Cook

Many of the poems in Ode to Industry also present certain domestic trappings within unlikely contexts, so that ordinarily innocuous or even utilitarian objects suddenly take on a tone of menace or veiled threat. Seemingly routine assembly line rhythms are juxtaposed with an underlying sense of unease that just might spring forth like the blades in a spring loaded tampon, hidden within until a moment of hideous impact. Flesh containers and domestic constraints intermingle and brush up against each other, sometimes coalescing; other times, repelling or resisting. . . .

Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas, reviewed by J.A. Tyler

Scorch Atlas is a world of mold, a world of festering wounds, a world of hurt. Scorch Atlas is a carefully and meticulously distraught world of language, a trembled and shaken line of thought, a vibrant dead trance of phrasing, the measure of words put together all and in the right ways. Blake Butler has made something enormous here, in the reams of his Scorch Atlas, and if nothing else, we are simply destroyed by it, mistaking our skin for its cover, our blood for its damage, our eyes for its violent and broken images. . . .

Alexis Orgera's Illuminatrix, reviewed by Mark Rockswold

Illuminatrix . . . questions the rigid boundaries between high and low art, the sciences and arts, and language’s conceptualizing work in general: “there are mighty critics, illuminators deft / in the art of finding meaning /where none should exist” (30). Therefore, in the midst of its own illuminating project, the collection asks, is illumination a good thing? What is lost in the process? To have illumination, there must inevitably be darkness—in this way paradox and equivocal possibility become Illuminatrix’s only sure reality. . . .

Skip Fox's For To, reviewed by Megan Burns

Fox tells us early on: “Even the boy raised by wolves had a language” (15). He wavers between presenting language as quintessential to the human condition and also limiting and laughable in its design. In witty aphorisms and slingshot asides, Fox pokes fun at us, the users of language, who think we know what we’re talking about when we do talk. “Reason is one thing that happens” (61) . . .

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More great news: ecopoetics 06/07 is now available, and comes highly recommended by TSky.

Edited by Jonathan Skinner, ecopoetics is "a (more or less) annual journal dedicated to exploring creative-critical edges between making (with an emphasis on writing) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings)."

ecopoetics 06/07 2006-2009 is 324 pages of poetry, essays, fiction, translation, interviews: Emily Abendroth, Fatho Amoy, mIEKAL aND, Kristen Andersen, Karen Leona Anderson, Stan Apps, Robert Ashton, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Christine Boileau, Timothy Bradford, Pam Brown, Julieann Brownton, James Bunn, Andrew Burke, Bonny Cassidy, Louise Crisp, Justin Clemens, Jon Cone, Jack Collom, Matthew Cooperman, Gregory Day, Tyler Doherty, Thom Donovan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theodore Enslin, John Estes, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Alec Finlay, Lisa Fishman, Benjamin Friedlander, Forrest Gander, Jody Gladding, Liberty Heise, Krista Ingebretson, Jill Jones, Patrick Jones, Michael Kelleher, John Kinsella, Kyhl Lyndgaard, James Koller, José Martí, John McBain, Ray Meeks, Graeme Miles, Stuart Mills, Peter Minter, Luis-Aguilar Moreno, Derek Motion, Jesse Nissim, Alistair Noon, Lucas North, Antonio Ochoa, Peter O’Mara, Isabelle Pelissier, Carol Quinn, José Rabéarivelo, Daniel W. Rasmus, Joan Retallack, Sarah Rosenthal, Linda Russo, Kate Schapira, Andrew Schelling, Jared Schickling, Jonathan Skinner, Gary Snyder, Juliana Spahr, James Stuart, Alf Taylor, Angélica Tornero, Rodrigo Toscano, Lauren Tyers, Erica Van Horn, Stephen Vincent, Damian Weber, Simon West, Les Wicks

$17 Postage included; outside US & Canada, add $5

ecopoetics current and back issues are distributed by SPD and are also available directly from the publisher: Please make checks payable to Jonathan Skinner: ecopoetics ~ 145 Carding Machine Road _ Bowdoinham, ME ~ 04008

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Edited by TSky faves Adam Clay and Matt Henriksen, Typo 13 features poems from TSky contributors Laynie Browne, Carolyn Guinzio, Lucy Ives, and Rauan Klassnik, along with a host of other greats: Cynthia Arrieu-King, Zach Barocas, Brooklyn Copeland, Christopher Deweese, Claire Donato, Kathryn Donohue, Joshua Harmon, Philip Jenks, Ben Mazer, Rachel Moritz, Sara Mumolo, Tom Orange, Anthony Robinson, Susan Scarlata, Nate Slawson, and Stephen Sturgeon.

* * *

We're new to Wag's Revue, and were pleased to discover that its new issue contains interviews with John D'Agata, Lee Gutkind, and George Saunders, as well as six H.C. Artmann poems translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, and Rimbaud translated by Christian Bök.

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RECENTLY RECEIVED

Most of the titles below are available for review, though we include the friend copies and the purchased copies as well, thinking we can probably scare up another copy if you're interested in reviewing one for TSky. Titles marked with asterisks are hand-bound books or are otherwise special editions and are limited, if still available at all.

* Emily Abendroth, Toward Eadward Forward (Horseless Press, 2009)

* Sarah Bartlett and Chris Tonelli, A Mule-Shaped Cloud (Horseless Press, 2009)

James Belflower, Commuter (Instance Press, 2009)

Birkensnake #2

* Sommer Browning, Vale Tudo (Horseless Press, 2009)

Brigitte Byrd, Song of a Living Room (Ahsahta Press, 2009)

* Allison Carter, Shadows Are Weather (Horseless Press, 2009)

* Thomas Cook, Anemic Cinema (Horseless Press, 2009)

Denver Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1

Kate Durbin, The Ravenous Audience (Black Goat, 2009)

Elena Georgiou, Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants (Harbor Mountain Press, 2009)

Kate Greenstreet, The Last 4 Things (Ahsahta Press, 2009)

Barbara Henning, Thirty Miles to Rosebud (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

* Alex Lemon, At Last Unfolding Congo (Horseless Press, 2009)

Michael Leong, e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009)

P-Queue, Vol. 6

* Andrea Rexilius, To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Horseless Press, 2009)

Alan Semerdjian, In the Architecture of Bone (GenPop Books, 2009)

Jered Schickling, O (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Zachary Schomburg, Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean, 2009)

Jason Whitmarsh, Tomorrow's Living Room (Utah State University Press, 2009)

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like

I am very pleased to be a part of this.

I've said a lot in my essay, so I won't say much more here, other than I hope you'll check out the forum: This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like

I'll also say, my essay includes three mini-essays on three women writers whose work shakes my foundations: Aase Berg, Bhanu Kapil, and Selah Saterstrom. Three folks I've been meaning to blog, meaning to recommend--if you don't already read them, which you probably do.

In May 2009, Danielle Pafunda curated the first installment of Delirious Hem's "This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like." This forum featured women discussing the relationship between their feminism & their poetry, and these contributions elicited thoughtful responses from women & men bloggers alike. Mark Wallace was one of those bloggers. Together, they've curated "This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like."

Monday October 5: Brian Teare, Christian Peet, & H.L. Hix
Tuesday October 6: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Kareem Estefan,
& Kevin Simmonds
Wednesday October 7: Mark Wallace, Mike Hauser, & Nate Pritts
Thursday October 8: Philip Jenks, Tim Atkins, & Tony Frazer,
Friday October 9: Tony Trigilio, David Lau & Rodrigo Toscano

Shuffling papers, and just plain shuffling, in the office

I have limited space in my "home office," but possess a seemingly unlimited desire to collect things.

Most of these things are paper goods. Some are fake teeth and alien masks.

& Of course I have to keep every magazine I bugger in the name art.



The Wall Street Journal's newest issue contemplates the fate of "luxury sector" in a period of economic downturn. O, woe is the luxury sector!

Ha. Don't kid yourself: the luxury sector is booming. (What a shock. The rich are still rich.)

One WSJ editor even tests out a $200,00 shotgun--though, unfortunately, not by firing it into his face.




Lucky for me, I'm spared from the luxury debate. I may not have a retirement fund, or even any savings to speak of, but by golly, I've seem to have managed to acquire a few collectibles!




This church fan, for example, should net me a pretty penny when I need one.

Yes, a church fan advertising the 666 product line from the Monticello Drug Company.

Surely I jest, you think. But no. You can visit Monticello here.

And you can have a good laugh reading this.

Click on the image of the back of the fan, below, to see 666 endorsements by the Archbishop JJ Higgs, among goodies.





Earlier this week I had the good fortune to be invited by Paige Ackerson-Kiely (In No One's Land, Ahsahta Press) to read with Kate Greenstreet, whose second book from Ahsahta, The Last 4 Things, is now out. Not far from Bristol, VT, where we read, I was delighted to find a warehouse turned used bookstore, in the middle of a couple self-storage buildings. Though I was surprised that I was not able to lay hands on a copy of Peter & Wendy (anyone?), I was thrilled to find this, a book that I confess I didn't even know existed:



Am I that far out of the loop? Has everyone else read Dylan Thomas' Adventures in the Skin Trade? What other surprises was this man sitting on?

A detail from the back cover:



By chance does anyone have this photo as a poster? I can trade you a Wall Street Journal....

Profitable Hobbies

Writing and publishing small press books just isn't cutting it anymore. I need to diversify my portfolio. Lucky for me, this weekend I stumbled on some helpful magazines at a barn sale. I never realized how lucrative some hobbies can be, or how many there are to choose from.



Peach-pit sculpting certainly has its appeal. Just be sure that any sculpting mishaps are covered by your health insurance: those pits are hard, and the blades tiny and sharp. Anyhow, I'm more of a plum guy--though I imagine the real money is in sculpting apple seeds. Now that takes some skill. Best of all, should your new apple-seed-sculpting business tank, you'll have the "golden parachute" of knowing that apple seeds contain cyanide. You can just eat all your stock and say Goodbye, cruel, uninsured world!



I'm not sure why the puppeteer above was pasted into a mausoleum background--unless to suggest that all puppeteers are kinda creepy--but nonetheless, in the realm of "profitable hobbies," puppetry is an obvious choice, given the mass appeal of marionettes and the recent spate of puppet blockbusters.

Another perennial favorite in the hobby world (made famous by John "Len Tukwilla" Malkovich), is driftwood sculpting:



The best part of driftwood art is that most of the "art" part is taken care of already, thanks to Mother Nature's ample skills. Talk about a time-saver!

And lastly, good news for the broke and childless:



Charge busy parents to throw a party for their unloved child. It's a win-win situation for all involved. You don't even have to pay for party favors, if you can sculpt peach pits!

I can only read so many issues at once, due to my mildew allergy, but I'll report back soon with more Profitable Hobbies. And remember, folks, it's not capitalism that's the problem, it's your lack of imagination!

Rebecca Brown's American Romances

Rebecca Brown
American Romances
City Lights 2009

Rebecca's a friend and this is not really a review. I don't really do reviews. Ask any of my friends; they love that I don't write reviews of their books.

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Re-reading & taking notes on Rebecca's collection of essays, American Romances, I've struggled in vain to put together even a semi-cohesive non-review. I realize, now, that it's not going to happen. American Romances is not fully in my head yet. Much of it is still in my gut. And much of it is sort of floating in and around that other place that isn't really a place, that seems inside our body, sometimes, but also way, way, way outside, out there, up there.

That said, I would welcome the opportunity to publish your review at Tarpaulin Sky.

*

The first essay alone, “Hawthorne,” is worth the cover price. A sure thing, a hit single at the beginning of the album, it moves seamlessly between—or rather interweaves, somehow—the lives of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Beach Boy Brian Wilson, the Puritans and surfers, the witch trials and Abu Ghraib. . . . Bloody. Brilliant.

Though Murray [Wilson, Beach Boys' dad] pushed his boys, often literally, to get what they wanted, as soon as they started getting it, he resented them. . . . His sons remember him shouting...the Puritan work ethic upon which this great nation was founded; "You've got to get in there and kick ass!"

What Rebecca does with the concepts of time and chronology, in “Hawthorne” and throughout, is much of the fun. And much of why her essays are every bit as artful as her fiction.

The Puritans dreamt of the City on the Hill and came to the New World to build it. Then when it went to hell their sons and sons of sons went west, and daughters, too. . . . The future's there! And beaches, too! . . .

And so to California they went, eventually to Hawthorne, suburb of the City of Angels. . . .

They set out with their modest,pure, angelic wives and found on the other coast the tanned and leggy, long-haired girls, perditious daughters of their bedeviled dreams. . . . Way out west their malefactress daughters uncovered, grew, then cut their hair (Where did their long hair go?), their sons grew theirs, and everyone removed their sober clothes. The children and their children's kids who'd been spared not the rod, were scruffy, unwashed, drugged, and had an awful lot of sex. . . . They called these others witches (hippies, commies, terrorists) and they were stoned. . . .

The witches were condemned to drown.
Like Dennis Wilson drowned. When he was stoned.

As she examines these patterns and cycles seemingly wired into our (and here, "our" means particularly (US) American DNA), famous Americans meld and morph into ambiguous antecedents:

He wrote The Scarlet Letter the year of the California gold rush. He wrote "The Warmth of the Sun" after the assassination of Kennedy. An elegy, a fantasy. A warning, a regret.

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While most readers would not associate Rebecca’s fiction with a lot of laughter, it is a well kept secret that Rebecca-the-person is funny as all hell. Thus, one of the major perks of American Romances is that we get to hear Rebecca's voice throughout.

Not to say that her narrators are never any fun. It’s just that sometimes they’re also, well, a little off, perhaps even psychotic.

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Another treat: the "footnotes" in American Romances are given their own pages—and go on for pages, in full-size font (in one case, they are longer than the essay itself). Rather than dry explanations or addenda, the footnotes run the gamut from quirky to inflammatory to heartbreaking. Again, we are treated to unadulterated Rebecca: alongside dead-serious facts & scenarios we have descriptors such as "fab," "creepy," and my favorite, "icky"—as in "lyricists such as the icky Mike Love."

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Rereading "The Priests" now, I can’t help but think this is one of the better essays I've read on Gertrude Stein, Oreo cookies, erotic childhood play, and early 13th century homosexual religions.

I will be teaching American Romances this Fall, to try to help my students relax a little and realize that essays need not be dry, but rather as wet as the students desire.

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How wonderful it is to think keyword-search overlaps between this new book and those of the “other Rebecca Brown,” the “Christian author” might cause some inadvertent cross-pollination, wherein pious but conflicted folk might find solace in this brief but moving look at the ancient tradition of gay and lesbian and bisexual priests and devotees and otherwise spiritual human beings.

After all, who can deny an Oreo?

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Certainly not Elena Georgiou, whose latest blog post also pertains to Rebecca’s new book, quoting from the essay, “Extreme Reading”:

Every time you read a book you read what you desire.
Every book you read includes the story of your life.

Says Elena, who will certainly help to confuse the Browns Rebecca in the blog world: "Then, this book, for me, is about the long search for faith. Reading is her faith. Writing is her faith. And I’m not talking about the kind of faith that enters your body as a Divine Presence. No, I’m talking about the kind of faith that you take into your body from the outside—a Eucharist. I’m talking about the faith found in syllables, but not words. The faith found in sounds, but not words. I’m talking about the faith that exists in music."

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As I’ve grown accustomed to cowering through some of Rebecca’s surreal “fictional” brutal micro-macro human “relationships”—from tender honeymoon-stage bloodletting to murderous end-of-romance hacking and gutting—I’ve also grown accustomed to crying (weeping, really) while reading others of Rebecca’s less Kafkaesque books (Gifts of the Body, Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, et al). And in this way, American Romances is no different.

In “Extreme Reading,” a simple memorial placque on a bench—the kind we overlook a zillion times—suddenly moves Rebecca to convulsive sobbing, and at this point, 89 pages, five essays into the books, I was right there with her again.

(Feels suddenly strange to say “her.” Hi, Rebecca. “Her” is you, and for that, this “I” is even more grateful, my friend.)

Rebecca’s—I’m going back to “Rebecca,” now, OK? It’s just easier—Rebecca’s examination of this time in her life, after the death of her parents, came as a welcome perspective to me, and will, for anyone who has suffered personal loss. Especially for writers and artists who may find themselves unable to use the very skills they have come to depend on for dealing with “smaller” issues (eg., starvation or plague or war or genocide, or anything that happens to people-who-are-not-family-or-deeply-loved-ones). It is heartening and inspiring to see how Rebecca eventually—eventually—is able to transform loss into creation.

For a long time after my parents died, I also couldn’t read. I could flip through magazines or stare at the backs of cereal boxes and even read liner notes, but books were too much. They took concentration and an ability to track and to remember, and if they had stories, the stories were wrong. Or perhaps I should say what the words added up to was wrong, although not every single word was wrong, because some words were right. As I tried to read, the wrong words faded or disappeared, leaving only the horrible right ones.

I picked up one of those old twenty-five-cent books I had lying around and, though I couldn’t really read it, individual words jumped out at me. Words like “dead” or “mother” or “no.” Or “gone” or “father” or “dead.” I started going through the book and finding the words in it that made sense to me. I discovered that the book was, unbeknownst to itself, telling exactly the story of what I feeling and not feeling and remembering.

Organically moving through the ever-more-popular technique of erasure (which she prefers to call “cut and paste”—“because it sounds more like what you did in grade school and less like something you are going to call Art”), Rebecca edits/morphs “The Mortal Storm, a novel about heroic people fighting proto-Nazis in the ‘30s,” into “The MortalS, less a narrative than a collection of fragments about the death of my parents.”

Every time you read a book you read what you desire.
Every book you read includes the story of your life.

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I read the whole of American Romances, the first time, over the course of two days while sitting in sun and wind and sand on the shore of Truro, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It’s a given, methinks, that the ocean has the power to tap more than a few people into what we might call their “spirit.” And so, in combination with the first days of decent weather in over a month, and in combination with sobbing in salt spray, I was a ready acolyte before Rebecca’s essay, “God Without Words,” regarding, among other things, Mendelssohn, Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching, and a Texas highschool in the early 1970s.

At Joe Bailey Junior High, home of the Fighting Rams, there were a lot of clubs: Music and Spanish and TARS (“Teens Aid Retarded Students”), Science and Pep Squad and Drama and Chess and Math. . . . The biggest club in the school was God Squad. A lot of those kids were nice, quiet girls, but God Squad also had almost every kind of kid in it. It was an amazing thing—a miracle—that God Squad could bring together nerds and popular, jocks and “retardeds,” and that everyone was nice to everyone else.

A young Rebecca finds her self drawn to the God Squad’s kind acts at the same time that she wrestles with reconciling the Bible’s more extreme interpreters, and the concept of Heaven and Hell, with her recent introduction to the concepts of metaphor, the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Lord of the Flies, Herman Hesse, Jimi Hendrix, etc.

By the time she goes to college she is no longer a candidate for fundamentalist

which was good, because that was about the worst thing in the world to the feminists and gays and bi’s and artists I was starting to hang around with. I was embarrassed about my Christian past and didn’t talk about it with anyone.

How many of us could say the same? (Substitute the religious persuasion of your choice.)

How many of us, I can’t help but wonder, could also say the following:

Part of me also missed it.

I missed having faith in something and believing things could turn out right over time.

Just typing those words, today, with the world the same steaming pot of shit that it was yesterday, that it’s been since humans descended from the trees into the gardens, it make me want to cry again. Weep, really. Sob.

Jesus, I’ve been sad a long time. For all of us.

And I say such things aloud, every so often, to the night sky—still wanting, like Fox Mulder, to believe. After seeing so much evidence to the contrary—still hoping, as one hopes the next lottery ticket is the One—still hoping that something, somewhere, is listening.

It’s enough to make me want to find a my own God Squad.

But instead, I’d prefer to keep re-reading this essay, which, as the title implies, is not really about God Squads, or about any of those petrified (in-)versions of our innate spiritual quest (my words, not Rebecca’s), called “organized religion.”

Rather, it’s about the ineffable, and the personal—the ineffable personal relationship that at least one person believed any of us can have with our understanding of the Great Mystery we call ______________.

It’s also about Mendelssohn’s mistrust of words, his belief that they were too ambiguous (said he: “For a man who loves hunting, the fox hunt and praise of God might well be equivalents; he would feel that the winding of horns was really and truly the right way to praise God. To us a fox hunt is merely a fox hunt. . . .”).

It’s about a line from the Tao Te Ching; “One who knows does not speak; One who speaks does not know.” It’s about how difficult it is for a writer to merge such wisdom with their chosen pursuit.

And it’s about how I’m going to shut up for now, except to say this: gay, bi, straight, rabbi, bride of Jesus, heathen, writer, musician, Stein student, Hawthorne scholar, Beach Boys fan or general pop culture enthusiast—come aboard Rebecca's commodious Love Boat! A new romance awaits you.

Chapbook Open Reading Period & Some Other Things I Would Have Mentioned Earlier If I'd Not Been Avoiding the Internet for the Last Month or So

TSky Press Chapbook Reading Period
(ends 31 August)

Tarpaulin Sky Press is reading chapbook manuscripts during the month of August. Chapbook manuscripts should be postmarked between August 1 and August 31, 2009.

There is no need to query first; simply mail the manuscript according to the chapbook submission guidelines.

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The New TSky is the New Trickhouse

Tarpaulin Sky #16
Summer 09:
Trickhouse

The current issue of Tarpaulin Sky is the current issue of Trickhouse; i.e., the current issue of Trickhouse is the current issue of Tarpaulin Sky. Think of it as Trick Sky or Tarp House. Or just don't worry about all that, and instead proceed directly to the goods:.

Trickhouse Vol. 5 / Tarpaulin Sky #16
Curated by Noah Saterstrom

• texts by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Thalia Field, and Joanna Howard (from Heide Hatry's Heads and Tales)
• video by Anne Waldman and Lisa Jarnot
• sound by Caroline Bergvall
• correspondence from Lisa Birman
• an experiment conducted by Brandon Shimoda & Lisa Schumaier
• an interview with Gordon Massman, conducted by Ana Božičević, Blake Butler, Elena Georgiou, Amy King, and Selah Saterstrom
• visual art by Josh Friedman
• and guest curator, Verbobala's "Hex-ologram"

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Steven Karl reviews Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay & Your Truly's Big American Trip

Which is something of a nightmare scenario, for me, the freakish BAT being examined alongside something as beautiful as WIS. Or something as beautiful as, perhaps, the work of Wong Kar-wai, for crying out loud. Mercifully Steven Karl has room in his heart for all the above, and does a bang-up job articulating the whys and hows. Thank you, Steven.

An excerpt:

Both Peet and Zornoza’s books are examples of not submitting to a status quo in literature, instead they use the traits once synonymous with Wong Kar-wai: originality, vision, risks, and experimentation to give you back this country as it is: flawed, fractured, hypocritical, greedy, beautiful, breathtaking, mesmerizing, and the constant dialect of a lie and a truth.

Read the entire review here.

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Where I Stay is also reviewed at Small Press Reviews:

"As haunting as it is gritty, Where I Stay has the feel of an impressionist watercolor and underscores the value of the small press in literary culture. Indeed, I hesitate to simply call it a book; its ambitions, beautifully realized, make it a hybrid of textual and visual arts." Read the full review here.

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See also: a great interview with Andrew Zornoza at Bookish Us. I don't know about the part where he refers to his publisher as "twitchy," however. I'm pretty sure his publisher would say that his twitchiness was a direct result of Andrew's obsessiveness.

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Fence Vol. 12 No. 1 Spring/Summer 2009

The latest issue of Fence is particularly stellar, methinks. The two poems by Janaka Stucky are worth the price of admission alone. And since I couldn’t afford to make the AWP where Kate Bernheimer, Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Eric Lorberer, and Joyelle McSweeney were in a panel discussion on nonrealist fiction, I was delighted to be able to read the transcript. TSky faves Karla Kelsey and Eugene Ostashevsky also figure prominently in the mix. As well as Kate Greenstreet, with whom I'll be reading--huzzah!--in October.

Need more? Well, then, you’ll also find James Gendron, Jannifer MacKenzie, Chris Pusateri, Lizbeth Keiley, ennifer Kronovet, Meena Alexander, Steve Langan, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Dean Young, Chris Tysh, Heather Winterer, Christine Hume, Rachel Sherman, Gregg Bordowitz & Lisa Johnson, images by Jason Middlebrook—and yet more. Including my new favorite Editor’s Note from Rebecca Wolff—an op-ed, really, which is at the end of the issue rather than the front—not actually and editor’s note at all, but rather a look at real estate demographics, a plea of sorts, a call metaphoric arms, regarding Athens, NY, population 1743.

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The Best of Fence

And while I’m on the subject, now is a good time to express my appreciation for The Best of Fence, The First Nine Years.

Stuff of mine is in there, so there's that, but there's also this: essays from the editors who have shaped Fence over the last, well, nine years. I read all the essays first. I'm only now making my way through all the work.

"Weird is an Emotion," Rebecca's intro essay, is certainly her most straightforward editor's note to date. Though part of me hoped it would be something like "the best of" her more bizarro ed notes, the straightforward approach proves rewarding as well.

In Fence's first years, I was often asked to make statements about Fence, in the media. . . . And make them I did, often to the chagrin of Fence's other editors, as it was then made to seem as though we were all in agreement over whatever statement or other I might have made, however of-the-cuff, partial, or ambivalent a statement it was (and it was). Again, Fence has never been a product of solidarity, aesthetic or otherwise, but rather an intentional engine of dissimilarity.

An intentional engine of dissimilarity. Yes indeed. And this is why I have been reading Fence for years without getting tired of seeing the same names (my own, my friends', or otherwise) recycled ad nauseum. I can always count on Fence to trot out someone new. People who won't stay new for long. (I still recall the day I was knocked out by Danielle Dutton's work, which was around the same time I was floored by another piece of hers in 3rd bed, I think. Little did I know . . .)

Caroline Crumpacker's essay particularly interested me, partly because I haven't read her thoughts on the Fence process before, partly because she is asking a question very dear to me at the moment: What's next?

In Fence's early days, says Crumpacker, "We were celebrating and staking out an open space for writers." But things have changed.

The credo that the "exigency" of the work was the defining criteria rather than allegiance to a specific camp or tradition has since been taken up by many other magazines. (I won't name them here becuase you know who they are.). . .

The magazine has lived long enough to outgrow and, in many ways, reinvent itself. It has outlived its original raison d'etre and way of being--which is both a challenge and a privilege for its current editors. . . . Certainly, the original, vaguely polemical mission of creating " a distinguished gray area" between literary camps is rather moot. That gray area now envelopes many magazines . . . .

Also particularly resonant for me is Frances Richard's discussion of accessibility, which, combined with What's next? seems to be at the heart of my current personal and editorial dilemmas.

More on the that when I have even a tiny clue what may be next. More on the Best of Fence as well. Soon.

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Francis Raven's Provisions

Interbirth Books is pleased to announce Francis Raven's hybrid collection of poems & prose: Provisions. Fifty books were printed, assembled, and hand bound in-house at Interbirth Books using a combination long / kettle stitch. Twenty-six books are lettered A through Z and signed by the author. This hardcover edition includes cover art by Francis Raven. 84 pages — 5.25 x 7.25 — $22 (free shipping in the US).

I have a copy. You should too. Micah Robbins' Interbirth Books--in case anyone's missed my prior dozen mentions of this--is publishing my second chap in The Nines series: "Pluto: Never Forget." That's reason enough to support his work. A better reason is that Interbirth's books are beautifully designed. Even if you're broke, you should go to the Interbirth website just to peruse the photos: interbirthbooks.org. Oh yeah, another reason: the contents of the books are pretty alright, too. The David Hadbawnik is sold out, but Francis Raven, Mary Burger? Handbound? I mean, what the heck else can we ask of a book?

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Also check the latest issue of kadar koli, from Habenicht Press. Edited by Roger Snell; designed by Ann Marie Snell; cover by Yasuhiro Esaki. Featuring work by Joanne Kyger, John Phillips, Nicole Mauro, Lal Ded (trans. Andrew Schelling), Betsy Andrews, Beau Beausoleil, Jacques Roubaud (trans. Eleni Sikelianos), George Albon, Kate Colbu, David Miller, Carol Snow, Dale Smith, Laura Solorzano (trans. Jen Hofer), Chuck Stebelton, Rosmarie Waldrop, Theodore Enslin, Gypsy Cante (trans. Will Kirkland), and Kristin Prevallet. $5 plus shipping.

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H_ngm_n #8

The long-awaited 8th issue H_ngm_n is live.

Edited by Nate Pritts, the issue features art from Nikki Painter; fiction by Bill Dunlap, Christopher Higgs, A D Jameson, and Zachary Tyler Vickers; comix by John Dermot Woods; poems by Nico Alvarado-Greenwood, Scott Bade, Erica Bernheim, Joseph Bienvenu, Jason Bredle, Paula Cisewski, Nina Corwin, Jordan Davis, Jessica Dessner, John Duvernoy, John W. Evans, John Findura , Matt Hart, Steve Healey, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Eric Kocher, Ben Kopel, Gregory Lawless, B.J. Love, Tony Mancus, Anthony McCann, Pete Miller, Alexis Orgera, Chris Rizzo, Broc Rossell, Brandon Shimoda & Julia Cohen, Rachel M. Simon, Jeff Simpson, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Chad Sweeney, Robert Whiteside, Joseph P. Wood, and Jon Woodward; and a hell of a lot more. See for yourself.

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RECENTLY RECEIVED

Most of the titles below are available for review, though I include the friend copies and the purchased copies as well, thinking I can probably scare up another copy if you're interested in reviewing one at TSky. Titles marked with asterisks are hand-bound books or otherwise special editions and are limited, if still available at all.

* Samuel Amadon, Each H (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009).

Shaindel Beers, A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009)

A Best of Fence, the First Nine Years: Vol.1 Poetry & Nonfiction
* Ross Brighton, A Pelt, A Shrub, A Soil Sample; with drawings by Anne Mackenzie (Neoismist Press, 2009)

Rebecca Brown, American Romances (City Lights, 2009)

Allison Carter, A Fixed Formal Arrangement (Les Figues Press, 2008)

René Char, The Brittle Age and Returning Upland, Gustaf Sobin, tr. (Counterpath Press, 2009)

Ginnetta Correli, The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scarelli (Marshmallow Press, 2008)

Michael Cross, Throne / Michelle Detorie, A Coincidence of Wants / Johannes Göransson Majakovskij en tragedy (Dos Press, 2007)

Jeremy M. Davies, Rose Alley (Counterpath Press, 2009)

* Shira Dentz, Leaf Weather (Tilt Press, 2009)
Denver Quarterly, Vol. 43. No. 4

* Claire Donato, Someone Else's Body (Cannibal Books, 2009)

* Jeffrey Encke, Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse (Last Tangos Editons, 2004)

Fact-Simile, Spring/Summer 2009

Fence Vol. 12 No. 1 Spring/Summer 2009

Christine Gardiner, My Father’s Sister (Nascent A Press, 2009)

K. Lorraine Graham, Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009)

* Carolyn Guinzio, Untitled Wave (Cannibal Books, 2009)

*Caia Hagel, Acts of Kindness and Excellence in Times Tables (The Cupboard, 2009)

* Melanie Hubbard, Gilbi Winco Swags (Cannibal Books, 2008)

Elizabeth Hughey, Sunday Houses the Sunday House (University of Iowa Press, 2007)

Robert Krut, The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Fred Marchant, The Looking House (Graywolf Press, 2009)

Sabrina Orah Mark, Tsim Tsum (Saturnalia Books, 2009)

* C.J. Martin, City (Vigilance Society, 2007)

* Laura Nash, Brownfields (Ugly Duckling Presse Dossier, 2009).

* Akilah Oliver, The Putterer's Notebook (Belladonna Books, 2006)

Timothy David Orme, Catalogue of Burnt Text (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Poezija June 2009: If We Crash Into A Cloud, It Won’t Hurt (Croatian Poetry 1989 – 2009)

Kevin Rabas, Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano (Woodley Press, 2009)

* Francis Raven, Provisions (Interbirth Books, 2009)

Tomaž Šalamun, There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair; edited by Thomas Kane; translated by the author with Thomas Kane, Peter Richards, Phillis Levin, Joshua Beckman, Ana Jelnikar, Christopher Merril, Matthew Rohrer, Brian Henry, Anselm Hollo (Counterpath Press, 2009)

* Carter Smith, Therefore You Are That Other One You Love (Dos Press)

* Andrea Strudensky, Incident Light Poem (Dos Press)

Marina Temkina, What Do You Want? (Ugly Duckling Presse Eastern European Series, 2009)

Mark Wagstaff, In Sparta (Troubador Publishing, 2009)

Rebecca Wolff, The King (W.W. Norton, 2009)

John Dermot Woods, The Complete Collection of People, Places, & Things (BlazVox Books, 2009)

Elizabeth Marie Young, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize (Fence Books, 2009)

John Barr, Poetry Tool

Four months ago, I sent John Barr a copy of Big American Trip.

"Why on earth would you do such a thing," you ask. Well, because one of the postcards is addressed to him.

It's this one:



It addresses this particular article by John Barr. I've yet to hear back from him.

Why, John Barr? Why have you nothing to say for yourself? You had so many brilliant things to say in that article...