Category: Books

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

Spider Drop

Some Mountains Removed 

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.

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.

If This is Paradise Why are We Still Driving

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)

Some Mountains Removed 

Diminutive Revolutions 

poems selected and introduced by Antonino D’Ambrosio

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.

Other Subpress books by Denizé Lauture: The Black Warrior and Other Poems 

“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.

$16

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

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.