Author: admin
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Daniel Bouchard
Daniel Bouchard lives and works in Massachusetts.
“Razor Zigzag: I Don’t Remember” appeared first in Salamander magazine.
Hear him talk about plants and weeds in this interview with City Plants.
ISBN: 978-1930068711 Some of the poems in Art & Nature first appeared in The Nation.
Published by Ugly Duckling Presse. 
Published by Zasterle Press. ISBN: 978-8487467455 
Read Kevin Killian’s Amazon review of Some Mountains Removed here.
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The Collected Poems of Steve Carey
The Collected Poems of Steve Carey. ISBN: 978-1734130058 $30 A remarkable florilegium of poetry by underground stalwart Steve Carey, edited by the warmly astute Edmund Berrigan, with introduction, colorful history, and notation. Carey, a devotee of poetry, who died young at age 43, is quick to sound, lift his insight and register “panoramic”, formal too. Antics? He makes me laugh and weep. Such fluidity and confidence of wit, going askew. He peopled his poems. And craft? Steve is crafty, shaping, dallying with dailiness as well. His timing is great. Domesticity as a campfire. Our brash wayward century lost on harsh cusp of a cliff there’s something to it, in that I think he saw these hard times coming, and had propensity to stay “in”. Rescue the poetry inside, save the civilization. Carey came from a cinematic big time actor family. But inhabited a milieu his own, his core in friendships in poetry was quietly blooming, from west coast ways to NYC’s downtown mores. We talk about a special emotion in poetry only poetry hums. Steve Carey had it, has it. A soulful hermit’s gifted sophistication yet alive with mental, sinuous surprise. He noticed and listened, conversed, read books endlessly, loved poetry and heard the call. And in his work you get to get closer to the heart of language. The world will curl up/ The world will curl your remarkable lip/And you will live forever if, quip well, abiding time/ Abides/ And seizing time flies to seasons of will and want. — from “Song” Anne Waldman
Available at Asterism here
How terrific that Steve Carey’s “vast, amazing” poetry has been gathered in this sensational book, thanks to the careful, comprehensive work of Edmund Berrigan. We can now see, for example, how the exuberant capitalization — the “ROLLICKING LETTERS” — of “Fleur-de-Lis” catapult him towards his well-known, festive, and irresistible “Goodbye Forever” and “The Complaint: What Are You, Some Kind of…” Irresistible is the word for Steve’s work, in fact: it’s romantic, alive, and silly, a silliness so large it becomes profound. Elinor Nauen
These are definitely the poems of the wrong guy, a really good writer, writing sketches about movies for tv guide, but then suddenly having sex. Steve’s poems are heavy and whimsical, rambling through a house, in a bathrobe, captivating, classical sort of, yet haunted, and the way his verses keep speaking, spouting quotes, no, dialogue, these might just be the best poems in the world. Eileen Myles
Steve Carey, 1967. Photographer unkown. As The Collected Poems of Steve Carey reveal, Carey is a quintessential California poet of incredible sophistication and imagination. He was a lyric genius, master of the parenthetical aside, cinematic discontinuity, and cerebral derring-do nimble mind dance. Although not often recognized as such, Steve Carey was the poetry ambassador from California to the New York School. His was the voice of a truly original American poet. Pat Nolan
Steve Carey’s poetry is an ecstatic grin, a gentle serial fever. I’ve been dreaming of this book, and imagining its sounds in Carey’s booming Western voice, for years. Now, lovingly edited by Edmund Berrigan, “like a fracas of theologies,” “swacked / in honor of what you like,” “our systems touching / melting in the fable,” The Collected Poems of Steve Carey is here. Animated by “The list, and real pain,” Carey’s music of “whole fiestas / great pips ah spizzle” is the torqued sound of a New York School unlike any other. “You name it, spangle,” and these poems have it. Reach for this book—or the sky—pronto. Nick Sturm
Steve Carey’s poetry is a lighted aquarium filled with luminous debris. He leaves just enough space for the reader to swim around comfortably. It’s such a relief to finally have all his work in one place, including the ever-elusive sequence, The Lily of St. Marks. I hear reverb-like strains of Clark Coolidge, Eileen Myles and Jim Brodey. I am always shocked by the circuitry and static within Carey’s line. Its voltage has never let up. Cedar Sigo
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Young and Bouchard: Double Book Launch in Cambridge, Mass.
Subpress
will launch Elizabeth Marie Young’s An Inventory of Almost Everything
and Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag at The Lilypad in Cambridge
Craft beer, wine, hard cider, soft drinks, hot tea available.
Mingling, brief readings, socializing, and books for sale.
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Elizabeth Marie Young’s An Inventory of Almost Everything
Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag
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Becoming Altar: New and Selected Poems by Kyla Houbolt
ISBN: 978-1734130041 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
New review! from The Seaboard Review, Pearl Pirie writes: “Reviewing her book is like being in a painted canyons landscape at sunrise. I could set the camera on delayed shutter and throw it up and whenever wherever it releases, when it lands, it will have captured something beautiful. I don’t have to study the text and try to find an admirable line.”
“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
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An Inventory of Almost Everything by Elizabeth Marie Young
978–1–734130065 $20 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
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Razor Zigzag by Daniel Bouchard
ISBN: 978–1–734130–07–2 $20.00 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.
Available from Asterism here
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
Other Subpress books by Daniel Bouchard
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CCCP Chapbooks + Subpress
The list of chapbooks from CCCP + Subpress is growing!
You can see them, and order them, here: https://cccpchapbooks.bigcartel.com/
Chapbook authors include
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The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985-2015 by Nada Gordon
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.
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Island Heart by Ida Faubert
Island Heart by Ida Faubert
Translated by Danielle Legros-Georges
ISBN: 978-1-7341300-1-0
Available at Asterism Books hereIDA 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.”
