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In Kyla Houbolt’s rendering of the world, the goings-on of frogs, goats and chickens weigh just as heavily and with as much import as asking ourselves “Does a civilized nation exist?” Becoming Altar weaves themes of fire, dreams, magic, and the need for shelter in poems where there is widespread confusion, in which even the Ancients are unable to recognize and understand the bigger picture. In turns existential and surreal, Houbolt reminds us that “maps are optional […] aren’t we all lost?” while also reminding us that we are “in the direct company/of everything alive.” —David Harrison Horton, author of Model Answers and editor of Saginaw
Available from Asterism here
“All lives, all dances, and all is loud” from the Gabon Pygmy, is quoted by Jerome Rothenberg in the anthology Technicians of the Sacred. I was pulled to poetry because I wanted to participate in that, in the ways humans create. I grew up with poetry in the household, read aloud, on bookshelves, and immersed myself in it seriously at times, though I never sought a career. That kind of immersion into creation is also why I began gardening. I wanted to participate in the way the earth makes beauty. In this way for me poetry and gardening have shared roots. It has to do with life force and how it manifests all things. My five (so far) chapbooks are children of the internet, when it became relatively easy to find venues and connect with other poets and with publishers of poetry. But my very first published poem appeared in a little newsprint quarterly called Cedar Rock, out of West Texas, sometime in the early 1970s. (Neither it nor its editor is with us anymore.) —Kyla Houbolt
Appropriate Drowning Outfit
I’m not sure how to turn this life into a resume.
I don’t write that kind of poetry.
I do notice that the cloud
has a bone missing and
I can relate to that. I’ll be honest
and say I have learned only one word
of heron language and it may be
that I made it up. It’s easy for me to do that
and I hear people lie a lot in resumes
but I can’t, not without vomiting the truth
later on. Which defeats the whole purpose.
Meanwhile is a word I use too often.
It’s because so much else is also happening
all the time, and I keep noticing it.
For example, the way I continue to, impossibly,
live. Paying close attention
to the wrong things. The boneless cloud.
The inscrutable heron. The abuse of sound.
The first full collection by a poet who in the words of poet and critic Susan M. Schultz, “asks how anyone can be a poet, then answers with another question: ‘How can we not?’”
Kyla Houbolt’s poems are just so fresh and generous it’s delightful. They want to give the reader real things, but not as a burden… something to look at on the window sill that gets the sun. They go around ‘putting a knot in the universe’ with their quick images, alive to the ‘glancing unfelt / blow’ of line breaks, the wise surprise of scattered rhyme. Go on, try one. Take a few if you like. —Jeremy Noel-Tod, editor of the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry
Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina.
Learn more about Kyla Houbolt at her webpage here
In Young’s much-anticipated second poetry collection, the list form allows for the poetic embrace of a bewildering world that cannot be comprehended but can be endlessly explored as a catalogue of terrors, treasures and marvels. The poems in An Inventory of Almost Everything move back and forth, like the list form itself, between mundane reality and extravagant fantasy. They engage the form’s trajectory from Babylonian Star Catalogues to Buzzfeed’s “24 Tumblr Posts That Are Just Kind Of Weirdly Pure”. Here, the built-in rigidity of the form serves as a counterpoint to explorations of what is uncontainable and incomprehensible – consciousness, eroticism, spirituality. The list’s incantatory force is harnessed to examine and resist the “powers” that attempt to contain and control contemporary bodies and minds: religion, science, technology, politics and the pervasive discourse of self-optimization.
Available from Asterism here
An epic effort of listing: for desire, for encouragement, for gratitude, for the pleasure of strange juxtaposition mixed with insightful recognition. Here we have poems of accretion that share both question and quest. In conversation with cosmic origins and contemporary events, borrowing from self-help mantra, the poetic diary and surrealist catalogues, An Inventory of Almost Everything is a vibrant jamboree of poetic parataxis; it’s a relational network of delight. —Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
The endless urge to organize, categorize and catalogue is here put to wild and gorgeous extremes, generating an absurdist aesthetic of gathering-the-ungatherable. In the maximalist tradition of Whitman and Swinburne, Breton and Césaire, Joe Brainard, Bernadette Mayer and Lyn Hejinian (the list goes on!), here is Elizabeth Marie Young’s wild imagination expanding like the universe, spinning like an electron, drawing us in and out simultaneously. “Be joyful Be chaotic.” Forget yourself and let in the world’s overflow, “all of it and all of it an endless race against so what.” Yes! —Julie Carr, author of The Garden
Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag contains the Pleiades and the presidents, history and space. His writing traces the emotive impact of a walk home from the springs of historical discovery, asking not why we were never told things about ourselves throughout history’s recurrent nightmares, rather why do we often fail to seek that knowledge. We are trapped in a culture of our own making, our complicity with the banal and the bloodshed. Learning from Robert Duncan and Muriel Rukeyser, Razor Zigzag adds the aspect of irreverence to the faces of ongoing disaster. In this astounding collection, Bouchard charts a territory of forgotten narratives: from the lost works of early American poets, to the faded memory of the state’s victims, to the publishing ethics of outer space. This is the manifesto of a new community library: a wolf spider in the mailbox; there are bats in drive-in’s projector light; national politics as a slop of self-enrichment and corruption, and the rise of America’s secret police. This poetry lays out a curriculum for self-examination, calling for new notions of heritage, reclaimed from the right-wing, and charted through books, film, and music. The mole on the sidewalk and the June bug at the screen invite you to come along.
Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag is a delight. The poems are intricate but welcoming, circling around history, testing the limits of our knowledge of the past, and playing a deft logical hopscotch with what they uncover: if that happened, how did we end up here? If that was possible, what awaits us now? Bouchard’s rhythms straddle the ease of everyday speech and the compressed speed of silent curiosity, so the poems shimmer from phrase to phrase and line to line. It’s a book to be savored. —Chris Nealon, author of All About You
Amid the roar of misinformation and distraction, Daniel Bouchard’s poems act as necessary anchor, pulling us back to stillness, focus, and the realization of how good it is to read poetry amid the 24-hour spectacle, to work the brain, to remember in shaped line buried (or being reburied) American histories like rising oil from “where the bombed ship sank at its mooring/ beside the memorial to lost lives.” Per William Carlos Williams, Bouchard “asks hard” and is honest with his answers, or when there are no answers to be had. He does not pretend or mislead. Rather, he confronts the “nothing,” the helplessness and frustration of the poet who wants to offer, generously, alternatives to the nightmare. He writes, “the software caps letters/ and I back into them/ assembling line upon bending line/ balancing gravity levity/ witness is a sandcastle after eyes depart.” This is the true rebellion of Bouchard’s powerful work: that while others may scream “everything in poetry/ is failure by default,” the poet will witness, the poem will resist. —Marcella Durand, author of A Winter Triangle
The list of chapbooks from CCCP + Subpress is growing!
You can see them, and order them, here: https://cccpchapbooks.bigcartel.com/
Chapbook authors include
ISBN: 978–1–734130–03–4
Available from Asterism Books.
Gathering poems from Gordon’s seven collections (and her appearance in Flarf: an Anthology of Flarf), The Sound Princess presents the arc of Gordon’s development, from Bay area post-Language poet, to émigré poet in Japan, to avant-garde unclassifiable force of artifice in the New York enclaves of poetryland.
Island Heart by Ida Faubert
Translated by Danielle Legros-Georges
ISBN: 978-1-7341300-1-0
Available at Asterism Books here
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 (1964-2025) was a poet and academic. She served as the second Poet Laureate of Boston.
See Professor Philip Zapkin of Penn State discuss Ida Faubert’s Island Heart here
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 and the periphery of Haitian literary movements, comes into full view. It is quite rare to see a complete collection of Haitian poetry appear in English, let alone presented bilingually. And so with Island Heart readers gain access not only to Faubert’s original poems but also to Danielle Legros Georges’s translational memorial project as she brings a “Haitian literary foremother” from French into English. These formally rich poems speak of nostalgia, love, and longing addressed to lovers whose genders are not specified, allowing readers to experience an unfettered and daring sensuousness.”
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 whole in the detail of her words. —from the Afterword by Antonino D’Ambrosio
Maggie Dubris is a writer and sound artist based in New York City. For 25 years she worked as a 911 paramedic in the Times Square area. Much of her work draws on that experience. Other books by Maggie include In The Dust Zone, Centre-Ville Books, 2010; Skels, Soft Skull Press, 2004; Weep Not, My Wanton, Black Sparrow Press, 2002; and WillieWorld, Cuz Editions, 1999.
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 The origins address us.’ This is a really good book for thinking, which is probably what it’s about.” —Alice Notley
“Hearing the great Brendan Lorber anoint someone ‘the Ansel Adams of bathroom mirror selfies’ gives me license to call this new book the Flow Chart of Midwinter Day, or the ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ of ‘Second Avenue’: Lorber–whose poetry is gregarious, profound, syntactically opulent, and emotionally generous–has assembled a fiesta of koans, flights, and moody amalgamations, all narrated with a bliss-oriented, rhythmically-propulsive, death-haunted insouciance.” —Wayne Koestenbaum
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)