ISBN: 978-1-7341300-1-0 Published January 21, 2021 Available at Amazon and Small Press Distribution Translated by Danielle Legros-Georges IDA FAUBERT was born in 1882 in Port-au-Prince, Haïti, and is considered a Caribbean—and especially Haitian—literary foremother. She was among the rare women writers whose work appeared under her own name in early 20th-century Haïtian literary publications. An English-language volume of Faubert’s makes her work more widely accessible to students, scholars, and readers of Latin-American, African-diasporic, Caribbean and Haitian letters; and more generally available to readers of poetry and the poetry of women. Reared in Paris, Faubert neither easily fit socially-prescribed categories for women of color in France or Haiti, nor conformed to them—living and burning through France’s Belle Époque, world wars, and Haiti’s Indigenist revolt in art. Bicultural, biracial, privileged, and complex, Faubert was a deft writer and socialite who promoted and participated in the movements of Haitian writers and literature in Haiti and France. While her work is garnering growing critical attention, she is seen as one of Haiti’s great women poets. DANIELLE LEGROS GEORGES is a poet and academic. She served as the secondPoet Laureate of Boston. She teaches at Lesley University. Update: Island Heart review in The Arts Fuse, August 9, 2022. Update: Island Heart review in The Somerville Times, January 5, 2022. Update: Island Heart tops list of Words Without Borders’s “10 Translated Books from Haiti to Read Now” Nathan H. Dize writes: “In poems gracefully translated by Danielle Legros Georges, the second person ever to serve as the poet laureate of Boston, Ida Faubert’s life spent between Haiti and France, as well as at the center...
Brokedown Palace by Maggie Dubris. $22.00. ISBN: 978-1-7341300-0-3 Available from Small Press Distribution or Amazon Brokedown Palace is Maggie Dubris’s ode to St. Clare’s, the Hell’s Kitchen hospital where she worked as an EMT for more than 25 years, until it closed. She weaves together prose and verse, memory and reportage, documents and testimonies into an epic ride that takes in the crumbling Times Square of the ’80s, the parade of odd characters that passed through, the ad hoc expedients demanded by a hospital without funds, and then the crushing onslaught of AIDS. Her book is absorbing, funny, lyrical, and transcendentally sad, a stunning poetic monument to a New York City that no longer exists. —Luc Sante In any great work—one that fuses the imagination with memories—there is something deeper to be discovered about yourself and the time you live. Brokedown Palace is in that tradition if you allow it to be—it’s painfully alive about something that appears to be dead but if you just tilt your head a bit, glance out of the corner of your eye, step to one side, you will see it’s all there. It has jagged edges that feel punk with spaces in between that are like an invocation, a prayer, a reflection. It’s not easy but it’s rewarding, reminding us of our relationship to hope and fate. These tight, beautifully clear life sketches open in your mind as you read, less as settings but more as airy plunging ambiences in dreams. Dubris knows that you can’t show the whole world, but born of a fleeting moment like a snapshot, you can find the...
If This is Paradise Why are We Still Driving Brendan Lorber “Brendan Lorber sits at an ancient East Village window sill–a time traveler adept at the patterns of emotional cataclysm, a Chesire Cat mediator between science and what air believes in…’the world’s, not flat, it’s bubbly.’ To eavesdrop in the petri dish of New York City, is to be presented with a million stories that want some privacy…’the whatsit, and the hole, in the bag, it falls through.’ In these concise poems beamed into focus by wickedly honed undercurrents, Lorber captures our cities of concrete and happenstance in koan after koan, bundled by catchfalls we barely remember, there, at the turn of the page, containing keys to other portals. Lorber gives us continual nightfalls that keep us primed in the embers of morning. This book is a love song, to the timelessly urbane minutae and its gathered appendages masquerading as you, out there…’I see you humanity / and raise you.’ Indeed, shift your rise, paradise, and find me.” —Edwin Torres “I’m psyched on Brendan Lorber’s use of a line that’s broken into phrases/feet, leading to unexpected syntactical twists. You get set up for one meaning, then taken around another corner. One hears O’Hara across the spaces between phrases/feet and sometimes the Williams of the variable foot. Sometimes shorter phrases sculpt exact tone-of-voice and meaning, and the line is also great as a philosophical reasoning method. Technique aside, the poems are playful, pained, deep, erudite, vernacular of now, and funny. Lorber himself remains mysterious. What happened? you say, then, Maybe I don’t need to know. ‘We don’t address the origins...
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....
For those of us who fell in love with the putative end of DuPlessis’s lifework, Drafts—‘Volta! Volta!’—it’s a serious pleasure to discover that it has indeed taken a turn, the serial poem plumbing its manifold interstices for a way to ‘unbegin,’ and in so doing discovering new ‘ways of exceeding itself / and of losing itself / in strings of letters.’ INTERSTICES, however, also begins the work of turning back to look upon a life spent in letters, and what I love most about this brave, witty book is that it’s ultimately about being—in time, in language, in relation—a condition by nature contingent, partial, and mortal. ‘Not to so easy to answer what it’s like to be in time,’ it admits, ‘counting up / the little bits of self and / understanding.’ But what makes this book so miraculous and wise is that its ledgers and letters account for the thrill of the imagination and desire alive in language even while the writing mind knows how the ultimate sentence ends. ‘Let us meet it where we stand,’ these poems declare, and ‘enter the darkness mindfully.’ The great gift of this book is that it makes such high hopes seem possible. —Brian Teare See Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading “Letter 8” from Interstices at the Kelly Writers House here. In her first book since the conclusion of Drafts (Surge: 96-114), Rachel Blau DuPlessis has shaken language out, “dismantled it,” and then reconstructed it. Interstices is writing and reading between the lines but formally is epistolary (a series of letters to friends, real or imagined, alive or dead) and is also about “keeping books”...
“Max Winter’s poems are full of the permission of comedy and the precision of laughter. He is urbane, witty, and a New York poet, though that appellation doesn’t capture his eccentric grace, or his way of slipping to the center of another world by anaphora. He is one head of the perennially new generation of surrealists, infra-sub-realists, visceral as John Ashbery; what matters to both is drawing of the body, exploration of a mind. Such play is a foretaste of Heaven.” —David Shapiro Read a poem from Walking Among Them that appeared here in Verse Daily. Max Winter’s first book, The Pictures, was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2007. He has published reviews in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. He is one of the poetry editors of Fence Magazine, and he co-edits the press Solid Objects. Follow Max Winter on Twitter: @maxwinter37...
In her third collection of poetry, Camille Guthrie engages with Louise Bourgeois’s deeply personal sculptures, paintings, and drawings in her own taut, emotive abstractions, carving new meaning out of a body of work central to twentieth-century art. The poet converses with the artist’s preoccupations with love, alienation, sex, death, and identity. These poems offer a formally precise, playfully intense perspective—an essential vocabulary for monumental works. As Susan Wheeler observes, “Like Louise Bourgeois, Camille Guthrie makes great art from great discomfort. […] The rigor of Bourgeois’s inner life and studio practice supports these beautiful improvisations like an armature over which a billowing fabric drapes.” Reviews and Other Links Camille T. Dungy @ The Rumpus Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat Interview with Julianna Baggott Publisher’s Weekly Review Camille Guthrie is the author of the poetry books Articulated Lair (2013), In Captivity (2006), and The Master Thief (2000) (all Subpress books), and the chapbooks Defending Oneself (Beard of Bees, 2004) and People Feel with Their Hearts in Another Instance: Three Chapbooks (Instance Press, 2011). Born in Seattle, she has lived in Pittsburgh and Brooklyn. She holds degrees from Vassar College and from the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Brown University. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and on web sites, including Arsenal, Art and Artists:Poems, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, No: A Journal of the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and The White Review. She raises two children with her husband in upstate New York and teaches literature at Bennington College. Follow Camille Guthrie on Twitter: @GuthrieCamille...
ISBN-10: 1930068611 ISBN-13: 978-1930068612 The Diogenes of the New York langpo scene. —Ron Silliman
This work was commissioned by Isabella d’Este for the walls of her studiolo after she attended a daylong screening of Matthew Barney’s Creemaster at The Roxy in Brixton, London, and a few weeks later stumbled upon an artist’s talk by Raphael on Ed Rushca’s painting “They Called Her Styrene.” However, it was her experiences that same evening in a karaoke bar off Oxford Street that convinced her to go through with her planned idea and to approach a writer who could carry out her design for a bar rock pastel. At the time of the commission the patron was herself concerned with the plight of deer on the roads of Europe and North America and was an ardent campaigner for the introduction of sonic deer deterrents based on installations pioneered by Max Neuhaus. In a drawing, now unfortunately lost, and in this written description (for the first time available here within the text of a popular edition) she details her request for a masque of grotesque pastoral and mythic proportions, a cloven poetics that would feature commerical activity to be streamed live on the walls of her studiolo. She similarly required the inclusion of players as ordinary citizens—or often as ordinary citizens as artists—”got up in devious animal brocade,” to perform whatever forms of cultural consumption, display and collection they encountered over the duration of their everyday experience, all this for her personal entertainment and meditative consolation. D’Este paid for the work upfront safe in the knowledge that she had purchased a piece of poetic invention in which even the title was against itself. Redell Olsen’s publications include Film Poems (Les Figues...
“Kimberly Lyons wants to ‘stay with the poem in this uncomfortable singular place / Where the flies and moths co-exist.’ It is hard to listen when ‘The poems says: / You can’t have any lobster, you stupid, hungry poet.’ But that is exactly what the poet does. Instead of shutting the world out, she follows the sounds wherever they take her. ‘I abide / one who abets / a lady’s maid.’ It makes for an intricate music, a teasing out of possibilities. These are the poet’s ‘restorative analects.’ This is a book to read again and again.”—John Yau “Kimberly Lyons cracks open the primordial egg from which all creation originates. What issues from it: ‘glossy first milk / of time,’ an ‘aromatic hem,’ ‘the discharging thread,’ ‘a / kind of channel / a crystal / edge of the knife,’ ‘a stich of blue / for heating flame.’ Lyons’s absolutely magical reckoning with the world is as generative and hallucinatory as it is generous and honest. Thus The Practice of Residue pours out from its mythic eggshell the lost traces of amniotic fluid that every reader needs if she is to realize and be realized: divination becomes ‘a binding condensation.’ The only possible response to this poetry is gratitude and love.”—Elizabeth Robinson Kimberly Lyons is the author of several books of poetry including Rogue (Instance Press, 2012), The Practice of Residue (Subpress, 2012), Photothérapique (Katalanché Press/Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008), Saline (Instance Press, 2005), and Abracadabra (Granary Books, 2000). Asterisk 12 (fewer and further Press, 2012) is an issue of her work in broadside form. She is the publisher of Lunar Chandelier Press and lives in Brooklyn, NY....
“The experience of MATERIAL GIRL begins in a field of distinct flowers—poems are ‘the flowers of associational thinking,’ as Charles Bernstein teaches—each composition held in its own light, which it produces. Can the experiment ‘express our peasant sufferings’? Can the beauty of the language be made to make things clear? ‘Material Girl’ and MATERIAL GIRL abide in and arise from these questions, inhabiting them, moving through them, to the point of noticing, transmitting, ‘the nation’s wild flowers bow gently // around our waists in the open.’ If the thing is that we have to learn how both to inhabit and escape, adore and destroy—well, now I feel sure that this is the thing, because this is what Laura Jaramillo teaches.”—Fred Moten “Negative Ecstasy. She said it herself and it’s true. Laura Jaramillo’s poems are just short of too smart. Meaning they are too real to critique. Cascading (‘jism from the cock of a cartoon’) they (shake-shake) are it.”—Eileen Myles “Before Madonna was Monroe, before Monroe, Mina Loy, before Mina Loy, was Laura Jaramillo, who crosscuts a multitude of materialities so that a girl will appear, abject, yet a star, a girl who lives in Italian movies and in Queens, who, knowing her Adorno, is as well a materialist girl, a dazzling embodiment of critical thought and purest longing, awakening to life in and away from the city. True, as she intimates, Manhattan may not exist, but the romance of it lives on in every lyrical, sharp-eyed, exhilarating, witty, and sad line of this marvelous book. Reader, beware: Laura Jaramillo will make you miss New York so much it...
Opinions tend to be uninteresting, which is one of the reasons why I always like reading poet Gary Lenhart’s critical pieces: he gives us far more than thumbs up or thumbs down. In his clean, clear prose, Lenhart comes across as companionable, smart, well-read, alert, and sane. He has no terrible axes to grind and he never lords it over the work under scrutiny. Even on those rare occasions when I disagree with him, I trust his probity, I am delighted by his wit, and I applaud the fact that ultimately he is rooting for everyone to write well. —Ron Padgett Gary Lenhart is the author of five collections of poetry, including Compositions (2010), Father and Son Night (1999), and Light Heart (1991), from Hanging Loose Press. He also wrote The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class (University of Michigan Press, 2006). He has contributed poems, essays, and reviews to many magazines and anthologies, and was an editor of the magazines Mag City and Transfer. With Steve Levine, Gregory Masters, and Bob Rosenthal he edited Clinch: Selected Poems of Michael Scholnick (Coffee House Press, 1998) and with Christopher Edgar The Teachers & Writers Guide to Classic American Literarture (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2001). He also edited The Teachers & Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams (1998). He worked at Teachers & Writers Collaborative for 10 years and has taught at Mercy College, LIU-Brooklyn, Columbia University, Community College of Vermont, College for Lifelong Learning, and since 1996 at Dartmouth....
I’m standing in for a huge range of U.S. readers and writers for whom Rob Holloway’s work will be a delightful surprise—and a challenge, for we’re not used to a meditative, analytical poetry with this many moving parts. The first thing I notice about Permit is how verb-based it is; I get the sense of a swift creek scudding across stones, and the stones are the verbs making the whole thing happen. With his narrative continually shredding itself, dressing and undressing in a single motion, Holloway creates a society of underplayed males dominated by his incomparable heroine Pam, who, like Oedipa Maas in San Francisco, wanders through and activates a London tragic, gorgeous, and numinous as life itself. So I’m telling you, Rob Holloway’s poetry will open your eyes—and then some. —Kevin Killian Rob Holloway is a poet and teacher living in London, England. His first chapbook, American Heroines, was published by Writers Forum in 1999, followed by Permit: A Sampler (2000) and Permit IV (Spanner, 2002). Permit is his first book. His work has appeared in the magazines Mirage #4/Period(ical), Tongue to Boot, Kenning, Tolling Elves, and Axolotl and online in How 2, onedit, Pores, and past simple. From November 2002 to March 2004, he hosted the poetry radio show Up for Air on Resonance FM. In 2004, he launched the poetry CD label Stem, publishing CDs by Maggie O’Sullivan, Allen Fisher, Peter Manson, and Leslie Scalapino. A chapbook of new work, Mortmain, is forthcoming from Stem in 2009....
Steve Carey had the loveliest poetry voice I’ve ever encountered. When Steve sat down to write, all negativity dropped away and there was nothing left but this awed, shaping, most musical voice, informed by the negative in life and in his own character, but flying gently above it. Read this selection of his poems and hear the sound of his impartial—outside school or faction (nowhere but the present)—love of the art. —Alice Notley Steve Carey’s Selected Poems reminds you he’s been here all the time. Poems of oxymoronic elan, motility with inertia, the heartfelt and the facetious, the sweet and the defensively tart. He reserves the right, occasionally, to step in and out of role. His diction is exacting and his writerly stance is up to any date. A fellow-traveling Zen monk, he sees first his own world, and then the world, with intellect and irony. He’s on the map—you could look it up. —John Godfrey Steve Carey was born in Washington, D.C., in 1945 and published seven collections of poetry before his death in 1989. “Steve,” an essay on his life and writing, can be found in Alice Notley’s Coming After: Essays on Poetry. The Selected Poems of Steve Carey is the first book in over twenty years to make Carey’s work widely available. Edited by Edmund Berrigan....
One might argue that Rothschild s thesis in Theogony could be reduced to That which is not there is all that is the case. Although the book collects poems from as far back as 1997, it is a volume profoundly about the events of September 11, 2001 from the perspective of someone who lived in close proximity to the fallen towers. —Ron Silliman, Silliman’s blog My favorite book of poems for 2009 so far. And a long time a-coming. But finally here it is: as close as possible to a Douglas Rothschild Collected. The pleasure of Theogony starts in the hand: the square format, perfectly suited to the work, and the pleasant, solid, yet casual heft of its 210 pages. —Pierre Joris, Nomadics About the Author Douglas Rothschild’s life has been one long miasma of failure, disappointment, coffee & overarching desire. Though he has not yet accomplished anything of note, Mr. Rothschild intends to continue on for some time yet. Some of this life, such as it is, has been chronicled in Bill Luoma’s WORKS & DAYS & Jennifer Moxley’s THE MIDDLE ROOM....
Benjamin Friedlander speaks with ungainsayable clarity of what we had thought to forget —Robert Creeley Is melancholy good? I think Ben Friedlander has the moodiest ear for it in the field, and wit to match. Where he takes this immodest gift is to a tangled interstice where idiom intersects with the body’s fault lines. Uncannily the reader has almost had these thoughts. The attraction feels sideways, vertiginous. We receive, with these poems, the shapeliness of tact. Then suddenly he shows us the tax we pay to Rome —Lisa Robertson As a poet, scholar, editor, and translator, Benjamin Friedlander has dedicated more than half a lifetime to rigorously engaging with the concepts and practices of contemporary poetry, and this much-wished-for book provides a beginning survey of that commitment. Gathered here are poems from the first ten years of his wide-ranging, critically probing, and intellectually ambitious poetic project. This book will amaze, defy, and remind again how not to be made complacent by what poetry offers —Alan Gilbert In his earliest books of poetry, collected here from 1984-1994, Ben Friedlander constructed an argument–not simply an argument for postwar lyric poetry, but an argument for the relevance, even survival, of a poetic urge that casts its long shadow into all corners of art. —Rob Fitterman...
Moxley’s detailed and lushly-written memoir is set largely in San Diego and follows her life thus far from childhood to marriage. Consistently focused on poetry and poets, it dwells on the curious ways Americans now find their way into the literary life. “There was a secret force deep in my psyche which, like a Cold War double agent, worked in tandem with my insecurity, a sort of wicked interior spy that emerged at the most inopportune moments to make sport of all my fears and fill me with crippling self-doubt as regards my natural fitness to live the life of the mind”–from the text. Jennifer Moxley teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Maine. Her books of poetry include Imagination Verses, Often Capital, The Sense Record and The...
