poems selected and introduced by Antonino D’Ambrosio
ISBN-13: 978-1-930068-68-1 Published 2017 Available as Asterism here.
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.
“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 2014.
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.
From Publishers Weekly
If “our dear librarian is a devious machine” then “by force of needle not need but able/ do i explain myself,” in Jen Hofer’s debut Slide Rule. Hofer, who has edited an anthology of poetry by Mexican women due next year from the University of Pittsburgh, splits her time between Los Angeles and Mexico City, which may explain how parts of this “vivacious mismatch enclave missive” came to be. Divided into five parts, including two titled “The Denotative Sky” and one titled “Holocaust” (“There is an art museum./ There is a water pipe./ There is no weathervane.”), the book takes readers on a lexically intensive tour of “strategies to make the skeletal stick still.” Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Jen Hofer’s books include Lip Wolf, a translation of lobo de labio by Laura Solorzano (Action Books, 2007), Sexopurosexoveloz and Septiembre, a translation of books two and three of Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2007), The Route, an epistolary and poetic collaboration with Patrick Durgin (Atelos, 2008), and a book-length series of anti-war-poem-manifestos, titled One (Palm Press, 2008). She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a member of the Little Fakers collective which creates and produces Sunset Chronicles, a neighborhood-based serial episodic drama populated entirely by hand-made marionettes inhabiting lost, abandoned and ghost spaces in Los Angeles.
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” in sets called “Ledgers.”
At the end there is only structure
a grid of girders.
One meaning of ìledger
is horizontal timber.
As if one were building a house of words. And this structure with its spaces and gaps is likened to “networks caught in networks,” to multiple if not infinite connections and breaks. These are the interstices.
A reader may intuit these underlying structures, but the opposition, the turn toward chaos, is also there:
O Babel left in rubble,
a map of seams as large as the remains.
These terms, these tensions are given play throughout this work, these words, these worlds. Play: laughing and punning to the end.
—Beverly Dahlen, author of A Reading
Photo by Melody Holmes
Poet-critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Ph.D., Columbia University) is known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry, and as a poet and essayist. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, a book of essays, was published by University of Alabama Press in 2006; in the same year, Alabama reprinted DuPlessis’s classic work The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Another recent critical book by DuPlessis is Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her books of poetry are Drafts 1-38,Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). A poem from this book appears in American Poetry 2004. Torques: Drafts 58-76 appeared from Salt Publishing in October 2007 and Pitch: Drafts 77-95 is in press with Salt Publishing.
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
Photo by Drew Milne.
Redell Olsen’s publications include Film Poems (Les Figues Press, 2014), Punk Faun: A Bar Rock Pastel (Subpress, 2012), Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Book of the Fur (rem press, 2000), and the collaboratively produced Here Are My Instructions (Redell Olsen / Susan Johanknecht) (Gefn, 2004). Her film poems, and texts for performance and film, include: Bucolic Picnic (or, toile de jouy camouflage) (2009), Newe Booke of Copies (2009-10), Lost Pool (2010), and SPRIGS & spots (2011-12). From 2006-2010 she was the editor of How2, the international journal for modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics by women writers. She is the director for the MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.
“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.
