Daniel Bouchard constructs poems by meticulous accretion— and, before we know it, has made the world blooming, decaying, and blooming again. Here is a concentrated poetics of the everyday: the almost-forgotten town and the American highway, the snowstorm and the indisputable spring, the baby’s crying, the cycles that confirm we’re alive. —Danielle Legros Georges There is a sonic sensorium at work in Daniel Bouchard’s new book Spider Drop. There’s also a love of diction, of words and their histories, of things, and things as words. This is a highly crafted and hammered work artfully deployed. It is a terrific book. —Peter Gizzi In Daniel Bouchard’s Spider Drop, lush words for junk herbage evoke the humid thickets of New England summer, where “[a] thing to see / but never look at must be worship-worthy.” A commitment to cataloging the most immediate content, memorious of the moment, is rooted in seeing “…like an alien eye, probing a scene / just opened.” It’s the sense of sound, though—“leafy spurge” and “liverwort”—that holds the world here, holds it in, even as in one man’s and collective human time, it’s quickly ticking out. —Kate Colby An interview with City Plants on “Poem Ending with Clotbur” (p. 19). Other books by Daniel Bouchard Art & Nature (Ugly Duckling Presse) The Filaments (Zasterle Press) Some Mountains Removed Diminutive...
poems selected and introduced by Antonino D’Ambrosio Invoking the dreams of his Haitian ancestors, who now haunt his memories, Denizé Lauture’s poetry is imbued with a sense of never forgetting, reminding us all that the story of enduring must continue to be written, spoken, and dreamt. Writing and performing in Creole, French, and English, it’s impossible to turn away from Lauture’s moving and delightful poetry, which reverberates with all that he has experienced. At once a meaningful protest through the medium of words and sounds as well as a celebration of bearing witness, Lauture’s poetry retains an indefatigable spirit. There is something in Lauture’s work that emanates a quiet insurgency. It may come from his country’s history. Haiti defeated not one but three European powers—Britain, France, and Spain—on its way to securing independence after a successful slaves revolt. Lauture’s life’s work ensures that history doesn’t evaporate into the mist sprayed by those who want to tell a different story, one made unreal by spectacle and corrupted by the complicity of silence. We should read, see, and listen to Lauture who knows it’s the poet that shows us that it’s not about if we can but that we must —and will—prevail. Other Subpress books by Denizé Lauture: The Black Warrior and Other Poems ...
“In the eary 90’s hordes of gifted young experimental writers met and gathered in the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in a few years of making work that, were I more given to hyperbole, I would term a veritable galvanic, miraculous, reinvention of poetry! And Adam DeGraff, then a Berkeley grad student, was among the principal players. Hard to believe, but this volume of selected poems is his very first book. It’s been long in the making, yet will please fans old and new, overflowing as it does with linguistic and musical invention, and an elliptical, hard-earned wisdom. Reading the poems of Wherewithal one can’t help realizing that all those years ago DeGraff started writing for tomorrow, a moment that’s almost upon us now; he has prepared us for eventuality, for event, not for beauty alone, but for tears as well.”— Kevin Killian Adam DeGraff is a poet, musician, teacher and author of All This Will Become Dust In Just Three Minutes, from We Have A Fax Machine Press, and from Shark Books. Wherewithal is his first full-length book and collects work written between 1994 and...
Complex, original, and hard-hitting poetry collection. . . . This is political poetry at the uppermost level. —Peter Stein Larsen Moestrup again distinguishes herself as our sharpest (post) feminist poet (are there any others?). . . . The attitude in Kingsize is raw and political; her poisonous, glittering, lyrical nail polish makes several fresh assaults on Danish immigration policies. . . . Her anger is classy. Verse as sheer sublime weapon. —Lars Bukdahl For some time now Mette Moestrup, one of Scandinavia’s most important contemporary writers, has been writing an edgy poetry about the body, about being a mother and a lover in Denmark. She is renowned for love verse as uninhibited as it is feminist, and her provocative, mischievous, sexy poetry also happens to be headily intellectual and full of references to anything and everything, from Batman to Rilke. Moestrup holds true to form with this wildly interwoven collection full of word play and formal avant-garde experiments, kitchensinkfuls of references, recurring themes of ethnicity and sexuality, war and violence, sustained motifs, mythical female figures on a sensation-seeking TV talk show. But all of this, and much more, with an unease, an edginess, a vulnerability as political controversies and racism repeatedly appear to question what at first seems playful. It is a work that delights then challenges the delight. Kingsize is Mette Moestrup’s third and most acclaimed book. It won the Danish Montana Literature Prize for innovative writing....
From Publishers Weekly If “our dear librarian is a devious machine” then “by force of needle not need but able/ do i explain myself,” in Jen Hofer’s debut Slide Rule. Hofer, who has edited an anthology of poetry by Mexican women due next year from the University of Pittsburgh, splits her time between Los Angeles and Mexico City, which may explain how parts of this “vivacious mismatch enclave missive” came to be. Divided into five parts, including two titled “The Denotative Sky” and one titled “Holocaust” (“There is an art museum./ There is a water pipe./ There is no weathervane.”), the book takes readers on a lexically intensive tour of “strategies to make the skeletal stick still.” Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Jen Hofer’s books include Lip Wolf, a translation of lobo de labio by Laura Solorzano (Action Books, 2007), Sexopurosexoveloz and Septiembre, a translation of books two and three of Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2007), The Route, an epistolary and poetic collaboration with Patrick Durgin (Atelos, 2008), and a book-length series of anti-war-poem-manifestos, titled One (Palm Press, 2008). She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a member of the Little Fakers collective which creates and produces Sunset Chronicles, a neighborhood-based serial episodic drama populated entirely by hand-made marionettes inhabiting lost, abandoned and ghost spaces in Los...
