Author: admin

Remarkable intricacies of intelligence are at play in Scott Bentley’s wonderful new book. — Lyn Hejinian

Scott Bentley is loud and clear and on fire cumulatively. Now we all get to sit down together. — Lee Ann Brown

An efflorescence of avant-garde forms sprinkles these 37 people-and-place-specific” cracked love notes. Acrostics enter and depart, poems appear in serial bursts and then blossom into prose. But as with the forerunners of alternative pop music, from Elvis Costello to Sonic Youth, structural innovation and lyric derangement are always at the service of exuberant youthful communicationAsly, maybe; ironic, often. From poem to poem, Bentley can move from kittenish flirtation (“if you’d let me, say, warm hands on the cheek of your charm”) to awed resolve (“to wake, startled, over your celestial body/ a voice thus rushes in softness/ and in hush, avows, what a weak word/ love”). Shadowing the breathless sanctity of his intentions is the saucy chuckle of his wordplay, reliant on a game of visual and aural linguistic Twister. Common phrases, expected turns, words themselves and spellings are reblocked to quell their commonality and add little purrs and whirls to what could have become a maudlin brace of letters home. “Shank” is an update of Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons,” an open season on the sexuality of the culinary, whose implied narrator has turned from Sappho to Julia ChildAwhat was introverted and implicit here becomes giddily over the top. “U.S. 101” (subtitled “a prayer for America”) dips into mock stump speech: “One nation, under guns, invisible/ machines that liberate the individual/ of every measure to survive” until Bentley’s irrepressible comic self-effacement rears its welcome rear: “The time is now to form a nucleus of active reactors, activating paradigms that continually create forums for exhaust and diatribe.” Throughout, Bentley’s speakers fiddle successfully with the rabbit ears of the poem of address, bringing us clear pictures and glorious static.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This volume is a selection of the early work of the British poet John Wilkinson, whose work took its cue from J. H. Prynne–who, many would argue, is the most important living English poet. Wilkinson is perhaps the most distinguished poet of the post-Prynne generation: what this volume shows is that the influence of Prynne, and of American poets like John Wieners, has never been an overwhelming one for Wilkinson: even the earliest poems collected here are startlingly assured. (In fact, it’s the recent Wilkinson–in volumes like Sarn Helen and Flung Clear–that has seemed most directly Prynnean. For instance, much of Oort’s Cloud can be read without the help of a dictionary.) The poems seem wired: despite their restlessness & disjunctiveness, their confusion gives a good sense of what it must have been to be young & bright & stylish in the 1970s: you can almost hear the punk & reggae soundtrack to some of the poems.

The significance of this book is partly that it reconstructs so many projects that never saw print: after the opening selections from published books like Aquamarine, The Central Line & Useful Reforms, we get samples of quite a lot of projects which remained scattered in periodicals, like Air Fleet Base and Sweet Balsam Leaves. It’s a pity that the terrific Tracts of the Country is only represented by one (long) section; & that Swarf: a prophecy is omitted (an ominous poem from the first year of Margaret Thatcher’s reign: the cover of the original edition shows an assemblage of razorblades). But this is an invaluable book–anyone interested in the experimental end of contemporary poetry will want it. —Nate Dorward

Ripped from surveillance: a last line from a first book now a quarter-century old marks out the pathway of disinheritance which English poet John Wilkinson has blazed ever since. Here that first, final look takes us past Useful Reforms and on, through Prior to Passage to Sweetness and Light, backslicing many others both included and absent, from Maudie’s Umbrella to Ondine’s Curse, dispersed to the outer/inner band of Oort’s Cloud in a kaiserschnitt of sovereign dismemberment.

Published by Subpress and Barque Books.

This deeply thoughtful assemblage from Catalina Cariaga documents the search for cultural clues suggested by her title. She reveals her generational memory both circumstantially and directly, where in her childhood ‘the sea is woman,’ the barong (traditional shirt) is an ironic symbol, and Billie Holiday, grunion, and the exact procedure for citizen’s arrest — like a palimpsest — further define her point-of-view…This is a brave, innovative, and ultimately searing book. — Joyce Jenkins

Catalina Cariaga is a pyrotechnic burst of light in the horizon of American poetry. CULTURAL EVIDENCE is a worthy book of poems for all libraries and lovers of avant-garde literature. — Nick Carbo

From Publishers Weekly
This vital first collection by California-native Cariaga is a deep, occasionally tentative consideration of issues of nation and selfAof belonging and exileAand of the temporal and cultural traces of the “subaltern.” The epigraph to section one is quoted from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s seminal avant-garde visual/literary work Dictee, and Cariaga, like Cha, strikes the reader with a various salvoApolyglot prose, “Language” style fragmentation, disembodied dialogue (taken, it appears, from a real or imagined Ilocano/English primer), and such quotations as a sequence of passages from the Bible, or uncorrected transcriptions of her arthritic father’s commentary on her poems: “All along you had good humor, but your/ last sentence is the real trougth. That/ makes an ending or conclusion.” Her lyricism runs from direct, formally uncomplicated linesAa short poem runs “Of course/ They didn’t eat dogs./ They didn’t have dogs./ If they had dogs/ they would have eaten them”Ato more sophisticated structures that suggest Projective Verse’s atonality, such as the charming, but haunting, poem about the mating season of the grunion. Other passages strike with the first-hand authority of a survivor, as in “No Mercy.” The long poem “No Tasaday” is a fascinating account of National Geographic’s potentially fabricated story on the Tasaday people of the Phillipine Islands, who, in some accounts, are merely a hoax: “the easiest way to visit the Tasaday is not in the caves, but in the Saturday markets” states one epigraph. Whether deconstructing myths of anthropology’s objectivety, of “culture” as defined by different, often incompatible worldviews, or self-sustaining myths of non-fluid time, nation, place or language, Catalina’s passionate investigations provide ample evidence for their dispersal.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Catalina Cariaga was born in Los Angeles, California (1958), and received her Bachelors of Music from Mount Saint Mary’s College in Los Angeles and her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is a contributing editor of Poetry Flash, A Poetry Review and Literary Calendar for the West. She has taught on the adjunct faculty of the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco. Her poetry has been published in many journals including Chain, New American Writing and Zyzzyva. Cultural Evidence is her first book of poetry.

Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. He has received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught workshops at Naropa University, St. Marks Poetry Project, Bard College, Mills College and Miami University among others. His work has been published in many anthologies, and his CD, Holy Kid (Kill Rock Stars Records), is in the sound archives of The Whitney Museum for American Art. He is co-editor of the poetry journal/DVD Rattapallax. His books include In the Function of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books), The Popedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books), Fractured Humorous (Subpress), and The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker (Roof Books). His recent project is a collaboration with Spanic Attack (www.spanicattack.com) called NORICUA, a noh-boricua inspired non-movement gaining worldwide momentum, whose non-ideologies have been performed in the Bronx, Berlin, Loisaida and Puerto Rico.

From Publishers Weekly
Equal parts Joycean experimentalist, Nuyorican performance poet, New York School-style emoter and graphic concrete poet, Torres has been developing one of the most elaborate poetic hybrids around. In sets of time and site-specific poems (“Alaska:: five days/ with poets in snow”; “Berlin:: three days/ with pen on mayakovsky lane”; “Fracture:: one month/ with broken arm in bed”), Torres acts as Pied Piper to an incredible profusion of verbal and graphic tics across his perceptual continents. And as the title suggests, puns are the main lexical fault lines or, as one poem is titled, “Torresian Revelation[s].” The perhaps unfortunately titled “Through the Looking Ass” begins with typical Torresian jive: “Waterbug boogaloo, picture screws/ backpack jonesy, poison toothy/ glitchy position … hanging fringe/ along the organ (groan) & (purr).” But the beat spittoon of the first stanza resolves miraculously into stark economic circumstance: “Repairs: momentary disaster equals long term comfort/ Bathroom tiles seeking freedom/ are scattered on my floor, by the toilet/ a hole in my wall–as big as a cat.” “Diana:: one day/ with sister in boston” is divided into 19 short sections, each titled with ideogrammatic tags from “Green Breeze” to “Blessing,” resulting in a strange soup of domestic discomfort: “A can of Goya beans for an older daughter/ wedged inside her pillowing sleep.” Overall, when compared to Torres’s previous published work–three or so books (including Lung Poetry and SandHommeNomadNo”) and the CD “Holy Kid”–this collection contains many more short lyrics exploring overtly emotional territory (“Explanatory Friday night: wigging out/ for mom”) but with bracing Torresian torque. This book will allow more readers happy access to “the lockspur diction quelled of boys.” (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.