Sooner or later it seemed people would need to start writing in groups. It seems like the people who died in the World Trade Center must have died for someone and shouldn’t everyone write a book for them. And what about me? Shouldn’t everyone write a book for me. Who would write a book for all the women, or all the men. The queers. How about all the people who died in the holocaust. What about all the people who didn’t. What about the people working in the buildings not next, but not far from the world trade center. Or in other cities. Why doesn’t everybody write a book for them? And who would be its author. kari edwards comes up & down like a cloud writing a sneering exuberant millennial book, speaking for the army of us who know something else, but don’t know how to say or do. kari edwards’ a day in the life of p. is a total fucking masterpiece. She’s a monk postmodernist, kari writes in groups. People should start chanting this book on street corners. I can’t stop reading it, it’s screamingly grey, its better than phone sex, than Burroughs or proust, it’s outrageously cool. —Eileen Myles Burroughsian, transgressive, exceedingly sharp and witty, kari edwards has launched a startling and entertaining first novel. The “p” of the title is a visionary, agitator, bemused thinker, voyeur as well as the penultimate protagonist afloat in a world of mixed signs, genders, language, politics, irony. What’s solid? This picaresque book is the dislocated yet substantive narration of the future. —Anne Waldman To say kari...
From Publishers Weekly Born in Saigon, raised in Washington, D.C., and now living in Austin, Texas, Hoa Nguyen tongue-in-cheekily channels Your Ancient See Through, making time and space “numb where the knowledge knife is gifted/ and owl nimble-necked blinks at me.” Nguyen, half of Skanky Possum magazine’s editorial team and its related press, offers nearly 80 short poems in six sections (matched with line drawings by Philip Trusell) that refuse to accept experience as currently processed for consumption, and apply a steely whimsicality to its refiguration: “Bring specific flowers I will not know the names of/ Slowly pump your arms as you walk by.” The results are immediate and unique: “the center is/ light green… the tender part/ is the newest part.” Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information,...
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...
