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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 (1946—2024) 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 appeared in national and international journals and current projects include co-editing a mixed-genre collection of indigenous writing by Pacific women, Women Writing Oceania: Weaving the Sails of Vaka.

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, Inc.

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 edwards is a gifted, whip smart, tremendously inventive writer isn’t enough. a day in the Life of p. is much more than just a uniquely graceful and thrilling novel; it reimagines what it means to be an author from the soul outwards. This is an event. —Dennis Cooper

edward’s book is side-splittingly funny, when it wants to be, and tragic and mystic in turns from page to page. Like Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy, “p” gives a new twist to our received ideas of heroism, kindness and lucidity. —Kevin Killian

a day in the life of p is a dizzying non-stop read that rakes the reader through an urban world at once timeless yet contemporary, poetic yet rough hewn. There are enough possible impossibilities and impossibly coexisting opposites at work in this book that the read itself is both titillating and highly spiritual. Three cheers for kari edwards, the 21st century successor to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and William S. Burroughs. — Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw

Read more about kari edwards (1954-2006)  here

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, Inc.

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 10 years worth of his work yet to be published, and readers hopefully will have less of a wait to see how much further ahead McNally has gotten; but for now, followers of earlier, more well-known SF-scenes, Beats, Spicer, Duncan, Language, will find various, welcome forms of continuity here while others will find McNally a terrific in to a usually tightly knit community. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Poetry, geography, ornithology, and history. Daniel Bouchard is the captain of them all. Here is a poet who has found his place in the topography of a sprawling world. His navigations are a pleasure to behold.
—Lisa Jarnot

Daniel Bouchard’s book is wonderful. A pure and absolute democracy of insight.
—Jennifer Moxley

From Publishers Weekly
If in conventional lyric the lift and flutter of poetic language is a manifestation of spirit, Boston-based poet Bouchard here works toward spirit’s plainspoken redefinition as a product of a social, biological and economic processes. “A Private History of Books” describes the ways in even most radical rare volumes come to have outrageous prices (and the ways intellectuals are complicit in naming them), while “Repetitive Strain” invokes history as hazardous job site, “the subjective, selective, forgetful past/ drained of its sappy romantic aspect.” Birds—those lyric creatures—abound in the poems, but rather than being symbols of freedom, they are here revolutionaries in miniature, “go[ing] at it with beaks of needle-nose pliers/ shrieking and tearing at pizza through tight saran.” This mordant view of civilization’s micro-climates is worked through most impressively in “Wrackline,” the long opening poem which grounds its materialism in painstaking social documentary. Part elegy, part environmental study, this record of a season on the back of a garbage truck negotiates the psychic boundary between a world of nature ever in renewal and a human world ever in decay: “In a formal picture/ Ed stands with friends in a white suit./ Depleted plutonium becomes a military/ recycling success. I like the sober statements/ of age and matrimony/ engraved under angelic skulls/ on the old slate tombstones of colonial villages./ Heatwince beside idling truck/ as its vapors pass over skin.” Experimental writing often eschews the power of direct statement in favor of verbal pyrotechnics whose meaning is in the doing, not the saying. This debut volume is much more prosaic, but powerfully so. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The use of poetry in this day and age is for its lesson of relation. Bliss to Fill is full of love poems, full of I and you and all their difficulties in getting along. And here, in the midst of love’s intimacies, the poem is large and necessary, negotiating places and cultures, negotiating what it means to be relating across boundaries. This is a stunning collection.
—Juliana Spahr

While others were writing software Prageeta Sharma was writing “Dear ____ or Bliss to Fill”, a rhapsodic collection in which the poet uncannily braids the young and anticipatory with the elderly and elegantly alone. Her medium: loyalty; her climate: tender. She pleasures us by her agile shifts in mood and her lithe twists of tongue. This is a delicately fierce book.
—C. D. Wright

From Publishers Weekly
“I soak underwear with my head out to dry,// I am happy to be organized with my problems,/ keeping them simple and deft for an unremarkable bathtub oratory.” An ebullient, South Asian-American identity is put through the emotional wringers of lost love, first generationality, and New York City in this debut-and emerges triumphant. The book takes its title and one of two epigraphs from Dickinson (“Our blank is bliss to fill”), and is suffused with a Dickinson-like archaic diction that lends “Prageeta,” as she appears in the third person, an historical aureole: “Arguments/ do arouse this poem which oscillates in the same, trying space as arguments./ How do we rise to a spiritual position? Prageeta asks. Wanting to again, reading/ Hegel, she asks the book to fly to him.” The book is divided into two chapbook-length sections. The first, “Dear _____,” includes letters to a lover-like “Dearest echo,” and to disheartened comsumers of Prageeta’s poems; contemplates the arranged marriage of the poet’s parents; and exhorts a “Politician Bird” “Do continue to free the clouds from the firm, plastic, earth.” The second, “The Other Possibility,” considers lifestyles like those of the multi-part “All-Purpose Rockstar” (where a poet taunts fans, and deploys “The song designed for situational/ dumbness”); of a bitter, bizarre “Girl Vendor” (“my spacecraft is more project-/ oriented than your spacecraft”); of “The Assassins”; and even a “Suburban Address.” At once playful, ironic and affecting, this debut suggests that Sharma will “roll onward, to deviate, to leeward-I did have thrills/ or happily ate, or vigor caught me.” (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
The first-generation child of a South Asian immigrant family and a native of Framingham, Massachusetts, Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004; selected by Peter Gizzi for the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize), Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007), and Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013). She is also the recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Grant. Sharma is associate professor and director of the creative writing program at the University of Montana.

Camille Guthrie’s The Master Thief is a work of intricate architecture, allusive and elusive, as if one had been invited to a masked party in a remote gothic library, where the music is dissonant and the games as scary as a nightmare before a final exam. “I lay down on a bed of glass/ Small had mirrors examined my lunar profile/ When the giant imprinted its spine into my palm.” Like a modern Psyche, the heroine is tested. Her epic trials are turned by Guthrie into a compelling and ingenious vision

—Ann Lauterbach.

From Publishers Weekly

By turns gothic, romantic and reminiscent of Dickinson at her most riddling, this 12-part verse bildungsroman succeeds where so many recent archaically based girl-narratives fail. Unapologetically culling a loose patchwork of poetic and prosaic fragments from literary history, Guthrie’s speakers are alternately aphoristic (“Fear’s a calamity of translation”), petulant (“Betweenpie, I expected the loveliest brainchild ever”) and ironically exclamatory (“O monstrous act! I throw up a line and seize it right back”). Enigmatically named female characters—“She’s Big With,” “The Marked Child,” “The Girl in the Machine”—are drawn from the preoccupations and diction of 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century pulp; each reads as a facet of a larger persona, namely The Master Thief. Each of 12 installments takes a signature form, including pseudo-pantoums, fragmentary dialogues, ironic pastorals and impassioned litanies. By cutting antediluvian lexicons with the tonal invectives of a 21st-century feminist, Guthrie furthers the text-combing tradition of Susan Howe, infusing it with a wry humor and irresistible panache: “Give the lie/ my female evil,” says “Emilia” in an aside, “Come on,/ admit impediments, show the choice// Myself I forfeit/ to be parent’s sweet counterfeit./ Above the bedroom door/ In red letter, read: FREE TODAY, TOMORROW PAY.” High seriousness, farce, and melodrama ensue, making this multivalent—or, more precisely, decidedly ambivalent–narrative richly rewarding, hilarious and heartbreaking. (Feb.)Forecast: Guthrie’s brilliant poems on the art of Louise Bourgeois have been appearing steadily in magazines. This book, those poems and another set loosely based on the unicorn tapestries (excerpted in the recent “American Poetry: States of the Art” issue of Conjunctions) augur a promising career: “my sentence read, the hatchet flashed,/ my two hands buried at the root.”

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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