Os by Roberto Harrison

Harrison’s practice in Os is coherent both in modulation and argument—not a modest achievement given certain habits of our radically inclined. Out of the dense corners his poems inhabit or perform—indeed, as “red horses / drink their fields in finished sentences”—the poems travel a familiar defiance, to the degree that their particular instance of manufacture remains largely difficult to ascertain. However, the mood is as immersive as it is prepared to situate and make links in definition of larger claims to reverse or bifurcate the assumptions of our social identities and the rhetorical representations that make them a liability. —Roberto Tejada   Roberto Harrison was born in Oregon to Panamanian parents; he and his family moved to Panama when he was a year old, and then to Delaware in 1969. Harrison pursued studies in mathematics and computer science as an undergraduate; after a year of graduate work in mathematics at Indiana University, Bloomington, he traveled in the United States, Europe, and North Africa. His collections of poetry include Counter Daemons (2006), Os (2006), elemental song (2006), reflector (2008), and Urracá (2009)....

In Captivity by Camille Guthrie

Camille Guthrie transposes the pastoral themes of the medieval Unicorn Tapestries with those of modern, urban life in an ingenious reimagining of both. Amidst her flora and fauna we encounter a lookout, a boyfriend, informants, hunters, poets, and a rock star—all fresh translations of familiar figures. Here the unicorn becomes a blank figure for the beloved, knowledge, and vision. The allegory of the hunt becomes the pursuit of the elusive prey of meaning. As in The Master Thief (Subpress, 2000), Guthrie agilely uses traditional and modern poetic forms. These fearless poems invite the reader to be startled by ideas and ambushed by beauty. Camille Guthrie’s sharp eye for lyric detail, her use of shifting connections, narrative fragments, quotations, and demarcations have produced a haunting and powerful collection of meditations. This sequence is the work of an impressive new voice in American poetry. —Susan Howe A captivating composition. A loving trap. —C. D. Wright 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...

War, the Musical by Robert Fitterman and Dirk Rowntree

War, the Musical condenses the written, visual, musical and interpretational aspects of the musical form into a small well-compiled book. Robert Fitterman and Dirk Rowntree have produced an ingenious collection of images, blank pages text and sheet music that can be examined in many ways. War, the Musical reads as a flipbook, allowing the carefully selected images to pass by you like a lively drama. Upon careful examination this collection has a plot and a score to accompany it. It is a wonderful, multi-faceted innovation in the written word.   From Publishers Weekly Combining the cut-and-paste graphic art and radical typesetting of artist Rowntree with texts that poet Fitterman (Metropolis) has found, altered and composed, this hybrid work orchestrates a multiplicity of voices singing out against an ever changing backdrop. The result is a book that harmonizes the contradictions between lines like “all you can/ think about is there’s/ someone out there// trying to kill you or/ your buddy” and “Hunter satisfaction is of the utmost importance to us.” Rowntree offers up a profusion of incongruous yet moving scenes and figures. The text reads like spliced Internet chatter presented with strategic orthographic alterations. As elements repeat, they produce the disorienting sense of a business-as-usual homefront (“1 made the cheerleading squad 6ecause 1 yelled the cheer as loud as 1 could”) obliterating a real war with a mouse click. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved....

Opposable Thumb by Joe Elliot

This is Joe Elliot’s second collection of pitch-perfect poems.   Opposable Thumb is essential reading. In these poems, Joe Elliot brings a whopping arsenal of technique to the table to create a sumptuous feast of meaning without equal signs or slashes…Here, song is thought. It all rings true. Essential the way mindfulness is essential. Enjoy the view —Mitch Highfill How has the world limped along for so long without Joe Elliot’s new book? If you want to relearn language, please read these poems, which release the kinetic potential of the page like toasters dropped into bathtubs —Marcella Durand   A fixture on the New York poetry scene for more than 20 years, Elliot’s massively summative debut is as rigorous as it is loose, and casual as it is elegant. Each of these nearly 50 poems, grouped into four sections, progresses not so much by telling stories as describing several events, on a tiny scale, at once: “A Godzilla statuette steps/ crushing grey offices at the far// end of a bar. Next to it in a 3-piece/ suit a gratuitously rude// drunk sways, points his palm/ corder at a man who// is paid to expertly slice/ a variety of fish and smile// evenly.” Over the course of the book, Elliot’s speaker takes “a slow roll through Baltimore,” chooses a fork “In Orlando when the day of the dead finally arrived” and finds that “Super-model-dom is to dungarees as attitude is to thought.” But one-liners are not the point. As Elliot’s observations accrue, a portrait emerges of a singular consciousness driven by a wry, subtle, detective-like love for its time and...

The Black Warrior and Other Poems by Denizé Lauture

The Black Warrior and Other Poems showcases Lauture’s powerfully unadorned verse. Strands of French and Creole dot the surface of this mostly English-language work, evoking both Lauture’s Haitian origins and present-day realities as a politically engaged college professor in the Bronx. Denizé Lauture’s poetry uses simple words that create striking and unexpected images carrying the light and the freshness of the air of the high altitudes where he was born and cannot forget, with the intent of helping to change an unjust society. Thus, his poetry is functional in order to awaken those stuck in lethargic indifference. —Franck Laraque   About the Author Denizé Lauture, first born of 13 peasant children, migrated to the US from Haiti in 1968. He is a professor of French and Spanish at St Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill and lives in the Bronx. Lauture writes in Creole, English, and French. He is the author of Blues of the Lightning Metamorphosis, Father and Son, Running the Road to ABC, Mothers and Daughters, The Curse of the Poet, and When the Denizen Weeps....

Some Mountains Removed by Daniel Bouchard

  In his new collection of poetry, Daniel Bouchard responds to our contemporary dystopia with exacting description and incisive criticism. The cognitive dissonance between what we are in daily life and what we know about the history we inhabit in America: this is the matter of this book. It is laid out in such a way that we can see what our minds are made of, and study the problem. Here the rhetoric of new poetry (“Hades faces environmental crises”) is at ease with both beauty and corruption. —Fanny Howe   From Publishers Weekly New England land-, sea- and cityscapes draw reinforcement from blue-state frustration and aggression in this smart, energetic, original second collection. Bouchard (Diminutive Revolutions) first surveys coastlines and towns where winter and spring unsettle the citizens: “We have mockingbird/ for neighbor I wonder/ what his rent is.” Soon enough, though, the collection merges its descriptive interests with invective against bad writers and bad world leaders: after September 11, Bouchard says, “Where we trudged along to disaster/ Now we shall sprint.” Bouchard’s mix of slippery forms and obvious anger lands him in heretofore unknown—and clearly productive—territory halfway between Juvenal and James Schuyler, between ancient ideas of poets as stern social critics and newer investigations of language’s roots. Bouchard may be best known for editing the provocative poetry-and-criticism journal The Poker, and his poems do give familiar certainties and worldly powers a poke in the eye. Just as impressive as their intellectual efforts, though, is the dry lyricism that underlies them, in which Bouchard shows us not just what he believes, but why he feels as he does,...

Of poems & their antecedents by Sherry Brennan

Sherry Brennan, poet and translator, lives in New York and works at New School University. Earlier chapbooks include Taken, again today and The Resemblances. She has published widely in journals such as Chain, How(ever), New American Writing and raddle moon. Recent essays can be found in African American Review and the online journal...

Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books, edited by Jordan Davis and Sarah Manguso

This anthology of not-yet household names, edited by Jordan Davis and Sarah Manguso, features work by Max Winter, Michael Savitz, Jeni Olin, Amy Lingafelter, Tanya Larkin, Jennifer Knox, Cole Heinowitz, Tim Griffin, Johannes Göransson, Greta Goetz, Alan Gilbert, Tonya Foster, Katie Degentesh, Del Ray Cross, Chris O. Cook, Carson Cistulli, Jim Behrle, and B. J. Atwood-Fukuda. “What excites me about these poets is that, beside their talent, they are all blessed with the terrible freedom of not yet having published books. I take special joy in reading work by these poets who, while already setting their new stars into the poetical firmament, are not mired in the stability-enforcing, niche-assigning public consciousness.” —Sarah...

All Around What Empties Out by Linh Dinh

Given that there are two kinds of readers in English, those who are passionate fans of the poetry of Linh Dinh and those who have yet to read his writing, All Around What Empties Out is a major event, too long overdue. These are works without waste, with the driest sense of humor and, throughout, an underlying feel for the pain of living that calls to mind Kathy Acker as much as Kafka. –Ron Silliman   From Publishers Weekly Following up on the short stories of Fake House, Linh Dinh compiles three coveted, lacerating chapbooks in All Around What Empties Out. From the hilarious and horrific rhetorical questions of “Drunkard Boxing” (“My hump for your glasses?”) to the withering stanzas and paragraphs of “A Small Triumph Over Lassitude” (“wildlife frolicking at ground level”) and the definitely half full “A Glass of Water” (“Baby I’m not a dictionary bloated I-Ching”), the cover’s translucent toilet seat is just the beginning. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam, came to the US in 1975, and is living in Philadelphia. In 2005, he was a David Wong fellow at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. He spent 2002-2003 in Italy as a guest of the International Parliament of Writers and the town of Certaldo. His books include the story collections Fake House (Seven Stories Press, 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press, 2004), and the poetry chapbook Drunkard Boxing (Singing Horse Press, 1998) and the collections American Tatts (Chax, 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School, 2006), Jam Alerts (Chax, 2007), and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (Chax, 2009).   Published by Subpress/A’A Arts/Tinfish....

Tao Drops, I Change by Steve Carll and Bill Marsh

Composed but in disregard for order,’ this marvelous collaboration after the fact results in a wisdom literature for our time, living out its adage: ‘the self is a planned obsolescence / and can be out done.’ Writing separately off of eastern philosophical texts, then splicing their work together, Carll & Marsh reaffirm a link between chance and change, wisdom and accident, while suggesting new possibilities for poetic two-upsmanship. When prompted by their names, my on-line I Ching pronounced their book a ‘Gathering Together. Success.’ And so it is. —Susan M....

Last One Out by Deborah Richards

Richards’s diagrammatic readings of some classics in American cinema engage those ever present questions of race, identity, class, and culture with humor and chaos. Blowing apart the reading experience with boxes and columns that read both horizontally and vertically, and infusing each text with shadows and crevices from which retreat is impossible, Deborah Richards has created her own genre. Her own template, even. —Renee Gladman Richards’s work can seem more like an information map for the mind, like the insights recorded in a study guide we create for ourselves before an exam. She creates a form in which to record and relive the moment of insight. —Ed...

After School Session by Brett Evans

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....

Alchemies of Distance by Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard

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...

The Bundle: Selected Poems by Steve Malmude

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,...

a day in the life of p. by kari edwards

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...

Your Ancient See Through by Hoa Nguyen

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,...

Exes for Eyes by John McNally

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...