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.
ISBN-13: 978-1930068056 Published January 2000 Available at Asterism here
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
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.
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.
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
ISBN-10: 978-0966630350 Published January 1999
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.
