After School Session is a generous and brassy cull of correspondence from Brett Evans to Brock Downs. The poems are a direct jack into the miniamp of postcard art sent between two friends; they hit hard in an open-all-night punk rock show for the audience of one. Like the form of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, limited by the small size of a breast pocket notebook, Evans’s gumbo is cooked in the scant pot of the postcard—an ‘afterschool rest stop of the imagination / real special.’ The poems offer one slamming and damming notation after another. Down’s artful arrangement and selection should stand as a model for what one can do with our hazardous mail. —Tom Devaney Cover art by Zach Wollard. Published by Subpress and Buck Downs Books. Brett Evans’s work has been featured in the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Another South:Experimental Writing in the South, and Poets for Living Waters. It also appears in the biography Ernie K-Doe: the R&B Emperor of New Orleans. He is a regular contributor to One Fell Swoop, Lungfull!, and unarmed magazines. Other books of the author include Slosh Models, Ready-to-Eat Individual (with Frank Sherlock), and After School Session , as well as the chapbooks Ways to Use Lance and Pisa Can. A member of the bands Skin Verb and Splinter Group, he lives on the lee of the Bayou St. John levee in New Orleans, LA....
Sinavaiana-Gabbard draws her imaginative strength and mana from the fertile depths of her Samoan people’s mythologies, past, and wisdom, as well as from the cultural soil of North American and Tibetan Buddhism. Her voice is a new blend of Samoan, American, and widely ranging poetic and philosophical languages. A unique, vibrant, undeniable voice which shapes the now fearlessly, with profound understanding and forgiveness. —Albert Wendt, University of Auckland From Publishers Weekly “Growing up ‘colored’ in the American south of the 1950s, amid the hooded dangers of working class, immigrant life, I understood poetry as oxygen. And I wanted to breathe,” writes Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, born in Samoa, and now a professor of literature at the University of Hawai’i Manoa. Alchemies of Distance contains 20 poems that alternate between lyric and narrative, verse and prose. At a local fair, a shopper has a heart attack amid “bric-a-brac & over-priced t-shirt dresses dried grasses in garish colors, gaily be-ribboned clumps of pathos, fake tapa & hawaiian deities air-brushed on tanks & tees.” Another poem tracks a “thing with feathers,” finding it in southern Florida, Berkeley, Samoa, Hawaii, and New Zealand, ending up at “Turtle Island the wakened song of your long dreaming and wandering into sunrise. Haere Mai.” Haere Mai is Maori for welcome. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Published by Subpress/Tinfish/Institute of Pacific Studies. About the Author Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard was born in Utulei village, Tutuila, Samoa. She completed degrees in English and Psychology at Sonoma State University, an MA in Folklore at UC Berkeley, and a PhD in American Studies at the University of Hawaii. Her poetry and scholarship have...
This retrospective collection of Malmude’s short lyrics contains work included in collections previously issues by Shell Press and Goodbye books, as well as poems included in Best American Poetry 2002. From Publishers Weekly Veteran New York poet Steve Malmude gathers “Little daughters/ in the middle of the night,” “the perfume/ stewardesses lay so thin,” “Jim/ Henson’s/ hidden/ hands” and “A gagged aorta,/ a light prison, a field of azure-tinted wheat” into The Bundle: Selected Poems, his first full-length collection. In nearly 60 short lyrics, Malmude describes events as they happen: in one poem “You open/ the safe/ and begin/ the day,” in another “I draw my snow cap off/ so you can see my age/ for I have walked enough/ in youthful camouflage.” From there, “if it were a farm/ and he were a friend/ it would confer an/ axial sense on me.” Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information,...
