A poetry ‘disjunctive’ but not disconnected from living as I know it, always saying something meant, always feeling something complexly, and singing sweet-voiced; also humor, sensuality, company, sensitivity to colors and shapes, scale; level of accomplishment very high. John McNally’s book would always be worth taking along and reading there. —Alice Notley From Publishers Weekly “My hippy branch of talk to cut through the stutter/ is clutter to music but beauty to the human me./ Why whisper when the speak of heart too easy/ yields reason, longevity, happiness no tears.” This deliciously torqued first full-length collection takes the reader back to the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1980s, when its author first appeared on the smallish but vibrant poetry scene there as the affable and knowledgeable manager of Small Press Traffic’s bookstore in the Mission District. Indeed, its author was then generally acknowledged to have the best ear among a band of younger poets only half-facetiously dubbed “The Small Press Traffic School” by Bay Area writer Kevin Killian. The poems here, written between 1987 and 1992, predate, by a decade, the current post-everything discourse that synthesizes the strategies, tropes, styles and general concerns of any number of tendencies beginning with, say, early 20th-century Modernism, and culminating with New York school poetry, language writing, slams and anything else in between. By 1988, McNally was not only there, but, as in “Post-Avant,” aware: “erasure taught causes me mean syntax jumble tunes/ though of wending my way I was before contact// the lapse in language to pastiche ours further/ the bear of another mode fixing the sky.” There’s at least...
Poetry, geography, ornithology, and history. Daniel Bouchard is the captain of them all. Here is a poet who has found his place in the topography of a sprawling world. His navigations are a pleasure to behold. —Lisa Jarnot Daniel Bouchard’s book is wonderful. A pure and absolute democracy of insight. —Jennifer Moxley From Publishers Weekly If in conventional lyric the lift and flutter of poetic language is a manifestation of spirit, Boston-based poet Bouchard here works toward spirit’s plainspoken redefinition as a product of a social, biological and economic processes. “A Private History of Books” describes the ways in even most radical rare volumes come to have outrageous prices (and the ways intellectuals are complicit in naming them), while “Repetitive Strain” invokes history as hazardous job site, “the subjective, selective, forgetful past/ drained of its sappy romantic aspect.” Birds–those lyric creatures–abound in the poems, but rather than being symbols of freedom, they are here revolutionaries in miniature, “go[ing] at it with beaks of needle-nose pliers/ shrieking and tearing at pizza through tight saran.” This mordant view of civilization’s micro-climates is worked through most impressively in “Wrackline,” the long opening poem which grounds its materialism in painstaking social documentary. Part elegy, part environmental study, this record of a season on the back of a garbage truck negotiates the psychic boundary between a world of nature ever in renewal and a human world ever in decay: “In a formal picture/ Ed stands with friends in a white suit./ Depleted plutonium becomes a military/ recycling success. I like the sober statements/ of age and matrimony/ engraved under angelic skulls/ on the old...
The use of poetry in this day and age is for its lesson of relation. Bliss to Fill is full of love poems, full of I and you and all their difficulties in getting along. And here, in the midst of love’s intimacies, the poem is large and necessary, negotiating places and cultures, negotiating what it means to be relating across boundaries. This is a stunning collection. —Juliana Spahr While others were writing software Prageeta Sharma was writing “Dear ____ or Bliss to Fill”, a rhapsodic collection in which the poet uncannily braids the young and anticipatory with the elderly and elegantly alone. Her medium: loyalty; her climate: tender. She pleasures us by her agile shifts in mood and her lithe twists of tongue. This is a delicately fierce book. —C. D. Wright From Publishers Weekly “I soak underwear with my head out to dry,// I am happy to be organized with my problems,/ keeping them simple and deft for an unremarkable bathtub oratory.” An ebullient, South Asian-American identity is put through the emotional wringers of lost love, first generationality, and New York City in this debut-and emerges triumphant. The book takes its title and one of two epigraphs from Dickinson (“Our blank is bliss to fill”), and is suffused with a Dickinson-like archaic diction that lends “Prageeta,” as she appears in the third person, an historical aureole: “Arguments/ do arouse this poem which oscillates in the same, trying space as arguments./ How do we rise to a spiritual position? Prageeta asks. Wanting to again, reading/ Hegel, she asks the book to fly to him.” The book is divided...
Camille Guthrie’s THE MASTER THIEF is a work of intricate architecture, allusive and elusive, as if one had been invited to a masked party in a remote gothic library, where the music is dissonant and the games as scary as a nightmare before a final exam. “I lay down on a bed of glass/ Small had mirrors examined my lunar profile/ When the giant imprinted its spine into my palm.” Like a modern Psyche, the heroine is tested. Her epic trials are turned by Guthrie into a compelling and ingenious vision —Ann Lauterbach. From Publishers Weekly By turns gothic, romantic and reminiscent of Dickinson at her most riddling, this 12-part verse bildungsroman succeeds where so many recent archaically based girl-narratives fail. Unapologetically culling a loose patchwork of poetic and prosaic fragments from literary history, Guthrie’s speakers are alternately aphoristic (“Fear’s a calamity of translation”), petulant (“Betweenpie, I expected the loveliest brainchild ever”) and ironically exclamatory (“O monstrous act! I throw up a line and seize it right back”). Enigmatically named female characters—“She’s Big With,” “The Marked Child,” “The Girl in the Machine”—are drawn from the preoccupations and diction of 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century pulp; each reads as a facet of a larger persona, namely The Master Thief. Each of 12 installments takes a signature form, including pseudo-pantoums, fragmentary dialogues, ironic pastorals and impassioned litanies. By cutting antediluvian lexicons with the tonal invectives of a 21st-century feminist, Guthrie furthers the text-combing tradition of Susan Howe, infusing it with a wry humor and irresistible panache: “Give the lie/ my female evil,” says “Emilia” in an aside, “Come on,/ admit impediments, show...
Remarkable intricacies of intelligence are at play in Scott Bentley’s wonderful new book. — Lyn Hejinian Scott Bentley is loud and clear and on fire cumulatively. Now we all get to sit down together. — Lee Ann Brown An efflorescence of avant-garde forms sprinkles these 37 people-and-place-specific” cracked love notes. Acrostics enter and depart, poems appear in serial bursts and then blossom into prose. But as with the forerunners of alternative pop music, from Elvis Costello to Sonic Youth, structural innovation and lyric derangement are always at the service of exuberant youthful communicationAsly, maybe; ironic, often. From poem to poem, Bentley can move from kittenish flirtation (“if you’d let me, say, warm hands on the cheek of your charm”) to awed resolve (“to wake, startled, over your celestial body/ a voice thus rushes in softness/ and in hush, avows, what a weak word/ love”). Shadowing the breathless sanctity of his intentions is the saucy chuckle of his wordplay, reliant on a game of visual and aural linguistic Twister. Common phrases, expected turns, words themselves and spellings are reblocked to quell their commonality and add little purrs and whirls to what could have become a maudlin brace of letters home. “Shank” is an update of Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons,” an open season on the sexuality of the culinary, whose implied narrator has turned from Sappho to Julia ChildAwhat was introverted and implicit here becomes giddily over the top. “U.S. 101” (subtitled “a prayer for America”) dips into mock stump speech: “One nation, under guns, invisible/ machines that liberate the individual/ of every measure to survive” until Bentley’s irrepressible comic...
This volume is a selection of the early work of the British poet John Wilkinson, whose work took its cue from J. H. Prynne–who, many would argue, is the most important living English poet. Wilkinson is perhaps the most distinguished poet of the post-Prynne generation: what this volume shows is that the influence of Prynne, and of American poets like John Wieners, has never been an overwhelming one for Wilkinson: even the earliest poems collected here are startlingly assured. (In fact, it’s the recent Wilkinson–in volumes like Sarn Helen and Flung Clear–that has seemed most directly Prynnean. For instance, much of Oort’s Cloud can be read without the help of a dictionary.) The poems seem wired: despite their restlessness & disjunctiveness, their confusion gives a good sense of what it must have been to be young & bright & stylish in the 1970s: you can almost hear the punk & reggae soundtrack to some of the poems. The significance of this book is partly that it reconstructs so many projects that never saw print: after the opening selections from published books like Aquamarine, The Central Line & Useful Reforms, we get samples of quite a lot of projects which remained scattered in periodicals, like Air Fleet Base and Sweet Balsam Leaves. It’s a pity that the terrific Tracts of the Country is only represented by one (long) section; & that Swarf: a prophecy is omitted (an ominous poem from the first year of Margaret Thatcher’s reign: the cover of the original edition shows an assemblage of razorblades). But this is an invaluable book–anyone interested in the experimental end of...
This deeply thoughtful assemblage from Catalina Cariaga documents the search for cultural clues suggested by her title. She reveals her generational memory both circumstantially and directly, where in her childhood ‘the sea is woman,’ the barong (traditional shirt) is an ironic symbol, and Billie Holiday, grunion, and the exact procedure for citizen’s arrest — like a palimpsest — further define her point-of-view…This is a brave, innovative, and ultimately searing book. — Joyce Jenkins Catalina Cariaga is a pyrotechnic burst of light in the horizon of American poetry. CULTURAL EVIDENCE is a worthy book of poems for all libraries and lovers of avant-garde literature. –Nick Carbo From Publishers Weekly This vital first collection by California-native Cariaga is a deep, occasionally tentative consideration of issues of nation and selfAof belonging and exileAand of the temporal and cultural traces of the “subaltern.” The epigraph to section one is quoted from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s seminal avant-garde visual/literary work Dictee, and Cariaga, like Cha, strikes the reader with a various salvoApolyglot prose, “Language” style fragmentation, disembodied dialogue (taken, it appears, from a real or imagined Ilocano/English primer), and such quotations as a sequence of passages from the Bible, or uncorrected transcriptions of her arthritic father’s commentary on her poems: “All along you had good humor, but your/ last sentence is the real trougth. That/ makes an ending or conclusion.” Her lyricism runs from direct, formally uncomplicated linesAa short poem runs “Of course/ They didn’t eat dogs./ They didn’t have dogs./ If they had dogs/ they would have eaten them”Ato more sophisticated structures that suggest Projective Verse’s atonality, such as the charming, but...
Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. He has received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught workshops at Naropa University, St. Marks Poetry Project, Bard College, Mills College and Miami University among others. His work has been published in many anthologies, and his CD, Holy Kid (Kill Rock Stars Records), is in the sound archives of The Whitney Museum for American Art. He is co-editor of the poetry journal/DVD Rattapallax. His books include In the Function of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books), The Popedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books), Fractured Humorous (Subpress), and The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker (Roof Books). His recent project is a collaboration with Spanic Attack (www.spanicattack.com) called NORICUA, a noh-boricua inspired non-movement gaining worldwide momentum, whose non-ideologies have been performed in the Bronx, Berlin, Loisaida and Puerto Rico. From Publishers Weekly Equal parts Joycean experimentalist, Nuyorican performance poet, New York School-style emoter and graphic concrete poet, Torres has been developing one of the most elaborate poetic hybrids around. In sets of time and site-specific poems (“Alaska:: five days/ with poets in snow”; “Berlin:: three days/ with pen on mayakovsky lane”; “Fracture:: one month/ with broken arm in bed”), Torres acts as Pied Piper to an incredible profusion of verbal and graphic tics across his perceptual continents. And as the title suggests, puns are the main lexical fault lines or, as one poem is titled,...
