This anthology of not-yet household names, edited by Jordan Davis and Sarah Manguso, features work by Max Winter, Michael Savitz, Jeni Olin, Amy Lingafelter, Tanya Larkin, Jennifer Knox, Cole Heinowitz, Tim Griffin, Johannes Göransson, Greta Goetz, Alan Gilbert, Tonya Foster, Katie Degentesh, Del Ray Cross, Chris O. Cook, Carson Cistulli, Jim Behrle, and B. J. Atwood-Fukuda.
“What excites me about these poets is that, beside their talent, they are all blessed with the terrible freedom of not yet having published books. I take special joy in reading work by these poets who, while already setting their new stars into the poetical firmament, are not mired in the stability-enforcing, niche-assigning public consciousness.”
—Sarah Manguso
Given that there are two kinds of readers in English, those who are passionate fans of the poetry of Linh Dinh and those who have yet to read his writing, All Around What Empties Out is a major event, too long overdue. These are works without waste, with the driest sense of humor and, throughout, an underlying feel for the pain of living that calls to mind Kathy Acker as much as Kafka.
ISBN-10: 978-1930068193 Published 2003
— Ron Silliman
From Publishers Weekly
Following up on the short stories of Fake House, Linh Dinh compiles three coveted, lacerating chapbooks in All Around What Empties Out. From the hilarious and horrific rhetorical questions of “Drunkard Boxing” (“My hump for your glasses?”) to the withering stanzas and paragraphs of “A Small Triumph Over Lassitude” (“wildlife frolicking at ground level”) and the definitely half full “A Glass of Water” (“Baby I’m not a dictionary bloated I-Ching”), the cover’s translucent toilet seat is just the beginning.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam, came to the US in 1975, and is living in Philadelphia. In 2005, he was a David Wong fellow at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. He spent 2002-2003 in Italy as a guest of the International Parliament of Writers and the town of Certaldo. His books include the story collections Fake House (Seven Stories Press, 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press, 2004), and the poetry chapbook Drunkard Boxing (Singing Horse Press, 1998) and the collections American Tatts (Chax, 2005), Borderless Bodies (Factory School, 2006), Jam Alerts (Chax, 2007), and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (Chax, 2009).
Composed but in disregard for order,’ this marvelous collaboration after the fact results in a wisdom literature for our time, living out its adage: ‘the self is a planned obsolescence / and can be out done.’ Writing separately off of eastern philosophical texts, then splicing their work together, Carll & Marsh reaffirm a link between chance and change, wisdom and accident, while suggesting new possibilities for poetic two-upsmanship. When prompted by their names, my on-line I Ching pronounced their book a ‘Gathering Together. Success.’ And so it is.
—Susan M. Schultz
Richards’s diagrammatic readings of some classics in American cinema engage those ever present questions of race, identity, class, and culture with humor and chaos. Blowing apart the reading experience with boxes and columns that read both horizontally and vertically, and infusing each text with shadows and crevices from which retreat is impossible, Deborah Richards has created her own genre. Her own template, even.
—Renee Gladman
Richards’s work can seem more like an information map for the mind, like the insights recorded in a study guide we create for ourselves before an exam. She creates a form in which to record and relive the moment of insight.
After School Session is a generous and brassy cull of correspondence from Brett Evans to Brock Downs. The poems are a direct jack into the miniamp of postcard art sent between two friends; they hit hard in an open-all-night punk rock show for the audience of one. Like the form of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, limited by the small size of a breast pocket notebook, Evans’s gumbo is cooked in the scant pot of the postcard—an ‘afterschool rest stop of the imagination / real special.’ The poems offer one slamming and damming notation after another. Down’s artful arrangement and selection should stand as a model for what one can do with our hazardous mail.
—Tom Devaney
Cover art by Zach Wollard. Published by Subpress and Buck Downs Books.
Brett Evans’s work has been featured in the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Another South:Experimental Writing in the South, and Poets for Living Waters. It also appears in the biography Ernie K-Doe: the R&B Emperor of New Orleans. He is a regular contributor to One Fell Swoop, Lungfull!, and unarmed magazines. Other books of the author include Slosh Models, Ready-to-Eat Individual (with Frank Sherlock), and After School Session , as well as the chapbooks Ways to Use Lance and Pisa Can. A member of the bands Skin Verb and Splinter Group, he lives on the lee of the Bayou St. John levee in New Orleans, LA.
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
