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30 November 2008

New Reviews, Interviews, and Video "Other"

M. Perel interviews Kaisa Ullsvik Miller, re: Unspoiled Air (Fence Books, 2008)

Paula Koneazny reviews Susan Briante's Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press, 2007)

And a certain TSky editor with a camcorder expresses gratitude for two recently received book-events: Mary Burger's A Partial Handbook for Navigators (Interbirth Books, 2008) and Matter #11: "The Woods" (Wolverine Farm Publishing, 2008).

22 November 2008

Trickhouse #3

TRICKHOUSE.ORG

Curated by Noah Saterstrom, the house just keeps getting trickier.

Featuring

visual artist: Eric Baden
writers: Brenda Iijima, Rebecca Brown, Michelle Naka Pierce
guest curator: Miriam Kathrein
sound: Andrew Klobucar
video: Abigail Child
correspondent: Erik Anderson
interview: Mathias Svalina with Shelton Walsmith
experiment: Denise Uyegara with Natalie Nguyen

trickhouse.org

16 November 2008

Now Available: Teresa K. Miller's _Forever No Lo_

Teresa K. Miller
Forever No Lo

Chapbook. Poetry
4" x 4.75", saddle-sewn, French flaps, 36 pages
November 2008
$10 includes shipping in the US

- click here for more info & images
- click here to order

Vehicular homicide, relationship dissolution by imperceptible degrees, genocide, terror by war, linguistic disorientation—though not equivalent, they interact in Forever No Lo, through the self-consciously philosophical and the mundane swallowing international crisis. The setting is Portugal, but it is also East Oakland, Rwanda, Chicago, Iraq, nowhere discernible. The language fragments multivocally in broken Portuguese, elementary French, and dialectical English. This serial poem asks what comes of global and personal tragedy—what grows, haunts, decays, redeems—in the gut, on the news, or from local communities.


About Teresa K. Miller

Teresa K. Miller received her MFA from Mills College. Her work has appeared in Tarpaulin Sky, ZYZZYVA, Columbia Poetry Review, MiPOesias, Coconut, DIAGRAM, Shampoo, and others. Originally from Seattle, she currently teaches in Oakland.

Now Available: Brandon Shimoda's _The Inland Sea_

Brandon Shimoda
The Inland Sea

Chapbook. Poetry.
6" x 8", perfectbound, black endsheets, 40 pages.
November 2008.
$10 includes shipping in the US

- click here for more info
- click here to order

In remembrance of and in thinking through the grand and generative compromises of birth, migration, dementia, sacrifice and ancestor worship, The Inland Sea is a raveling entreaty for the life of both a family departed and a family spectrally present in both complex breath and body. Spiritually addressed to Midori Shimoda, as well as factually to the inland seascapes of his birth (Hiroshima, Japan, thrice, in 1909, 1910 and 1911) and death (Lake Norman, North Carolina, the United States, once, 1996), The Inland Sea navigates the substance between origination and departure, in an attempt to find a relic of responsible and radiant life outside of benighted time. Composed of doubts, dissolutions, laments and a widening circumference of water and hope, The Inland Sea is a soft, yet urgent, ceremony, through which the ruptures of the past might find celebratory echo, and keep—


About Brandon Shimoda

Brandon Shimoda was born in California, and has since lived in five countries and nine states, most recently North Carolina and Montana. His writings have made appearances in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, Octopus Magazine, Practice: New Writing + Art, TYPO, Verse and elsewhere, as well as in two recent book projects, Lake M (Corollary Press) and The Alps (Flim Forum Press). He currently lives in the state of Washington, where he takes part in the lives of both Slope magazine and Wave Books, among other takings, partings and taking-aparts.

Now Available: Mark Cunningham's _Body Language_

Mark Cunningham
Body Language

ISBN: 9780977901975
Prose Poetry. 5"x7", 136 pages
Perfectbound, tête-bêche

- Click here for more info
- Order here ($14 includes shipping in the US)

Two full-length collections of prose poems contained in Body Language, one titled Body (on parts of the body) and one titled Primer (on numbers and letters), together form a diptych investigating the body in language and language in the body.

Advance Praise for Body Language

In Mark Cunningham’s asymptotic collection, two discreet texts, Body and Primer, form a provocative, loopic continuum in which prose poems “defining” body parts (The Spleen, The Pituitary Gland, The Pimple, The Thumb) mesh with an abecedarium/cipher concerning topics as various as fate, reality, and phenomenology. With its trope of clue-like instruction and unique, flip-book embodiment, Cunningham‘s book creates a kind of hybrid detective f(r)iction, an intrepid mash-up of high and low cultures in which the reader is as likely to encounter Rilke and Proto-Sinaitic inscription as Lacan, Film Noir, The Three Stooges, cell phones, higher mathematics, binary thought, and Coyote and Road Runner cartoons. Cunningham pitches with surprising clarity the most abstract meditations (“The sperm cell is the first zero. The vagina the second. Wait—before you floated in the placenta (the third), your mother floated and your father floated in theirs, and before them their others and their fathers . . . . You get dizzy, as in that moment in Citizen Kane when Kane pauses after leaving his wife’s bedroom and image after image recedes in mirror reflecting mirror. Another thing about DNA: if space curves, so does time,” for example, from “O as a Beginning”), offering in almost reportorial style a (d)evolutionary mix of anachronistic, equally relentless somatic and figurative explorations of the body (“a paradise of sorts”) and the mind. Northrop Frye called a riddle “essentially a charm in reverse . . . the revolt of the intelligence against the hypnotic power of commanding words.” Cunningham’s work moves in this direction; as Frye would put it, “Poem and object are very quizzically related: there seems to be some riddle behind all riddles which we have not yet guessed.” These poems are not the mere game-playing of an extraordinarily gifted and restless intellect; stalked by pain, fear, guilt, and the burden of awareness,, they can also be tender, betraying a capacity for happiness: “I rarely talk about myself, but I’ll tell you this: one of the best days I’ve had was when I passed a cinema and decided right then to see The Cameraman. Another time, I switched restaurants at the last minute, and met an acquaintance there, and ate with her, and three years later we’re still going out.” As obsessed as they are with the ironies and processes of mind and body, the poet’s concern is ever with the mysteries this human armature holds up: “life itself.”

—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Satin Cash and Blue Venus, and editor of Acquainted with the Night and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems.

About Mark Cunningham

Mark Cunningham lives in central Missouri. He is the author of 80 Beetles (Otoliths, 2008) and two chapbooks from Right Hand Pointing, Second Story and the forthcoming nightlightnight.

Excerpts from Body Language

* from Primer, "G"
* from Primer, "O as a Beginning," "A," "M," and "X"

Recently Received

All titles below are available as review copies, except for titles marked with an asterisk, which are hand-bound or otherwise short-run editions and thus are limited, if still available at all.

*Rosa Alcalá, Undocumentary / Ash Smith, Water Shed (Dos Press, 2008)

Robyn Art, The Stunt Double in Winter (Dusie, 2007)

Penelope Austin, Bow (Slope Editions, 2008)

*Jesse Ball, Parables & Lies (The Cupboard, 2008)

Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press, 2008)

Mary Burger, An Apparent Event (Second Story Books, 2006)

* Mary Burger, A Partial Handbook for Navigators (Interbirth Books, 2008)

Megan Burns, Memorial & Sight Lines (Lavender Ink, 2008)

Trevor Calvert, Rarer and More Wonderful (Scrambler Books, 2008)

Amy Catanzano, iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs Press, 2008)

Brian Culhane, The King's Question (Graywolf Press, 2008)

Kate Eichhorn, Fond (BookThug, 2008)

Karen Fastrup, Beloved of My 27 Senses (BookThug, 2008)

Jennifer Firestone, Holiday (Shearsman Books, 2008)

Skip Fox, For To (BlazeVOX, 2008)

Mark Goldstein, After Rilke (BookThug, 2008)

Dmitry Golynko (Tr. Rebecca Bella, Eugene Ostashevsky, & Simona Schneider) As It Turned Out (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008)

Anne Gorrick, Kyotologic (Shearsman Books, 2008)

Thomas James, Letters to a Stranger (Graywolf Press, 2008)

Lisa Jarnot, Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008)

Karen an-hwei Lee, Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008

Kelly Lydick, Mastering the Dream (Second Story Books, 2007)

Norman MacAfee, One Class (Harbor Mountain Press, 2008)

Travis MacDonald, The O Mission Repo (Fact Simile, 2008)

Mariana Marm (Tr. Daniela Hurezann & Adam J. Sorkin) The Factory of the Past (Toad Press, 2008)

Edgar Mollere, Driven Or Forced Onward, By Or As If By wind or Water (Vagabond Press, 2008)

Rich Murphy, Family Secret (Finishing Line Press, 2008)

Eugene Ostashevsky, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008)

Meredith Quartermain, Matter (BookThug, 2008)

Judith Roitman, No Face (First Intensity Press, 2008)

Joe Ross, Strata (Dusie, 2008)

Jared Schickling, Submissions (BlazeVox Books, 2008)

Christopher Schmidt, The Next In Line (Slope Editions, 2007)

*Ash Smith, Water Shed / Rosa Alcalá, Undocumentary (Dos Press, 2008)

Logan Ryan Smith, The Singers (Dusie, 2007)

Carol Snow, Placed (Counterpath Books, 2008)

Elizabeth Treadwell, Cornstarch Figurine (Dusie, 2006)

Grzegorz Wroblewski (Adam Adrodowski, tr.), Mercury Project (Toad Press, 2008)

Eddie Wright, Broken Bulbs ('86 Newman, 2007)

Journals

* Birkensnake One, 2008

Denver Quarterly
(Vol 43 #1, 2008)

Fence
(Vol 11, #2), 2008

The Great Ecstatic Reporter
(Issue #2, Summer), 2008

* Matter 11: The Woods


No Colony
(Issue 1), 2008

White Fungus
(Issue 9), 2008

Brandon Shimoda's _The Alps_



New from Film Forum Press: Brandon Shimoda's debut collection, The Alps.

ISBN 978-0-9790888-2-7
144 pages, 7x9
$14 (+ $2 shipping & handling)

"Part elegy, part celebration, Brandon Shimoda’s debut interweaves glimpses of individual lives, fragments of revolution and war, and a bird’s-eye view of the waxing and waning of generations in mapping profound issues of identity and history. Viewed through the lens of his particular family history, Shimoda stations The Alps in an eerily beautiful yet threatening landscape, one entangled, inextricably, with the brutality of human existence. By turns playful, detached, and deeply emotional, the myriad voices of The Alps resonate with a spare and violent beauty."

Laura Sims author of Practice, Restraint


"There are the Alps, standing impossibly high and shining like pieces of the Moon grafted onto Earth. They pour their substance down into the valleys, rewriting the human landscape with passages of ice. The words of Brandon Shimoda’s The Alps also seem to arrive in this way, transfixed by cold cascades of glacial time. Human narratives embedded here are carried great distances across the white space of the page. And while Shimoda’s poetic glaciers may have the power to grind words themselves to rubble, they also serve as windows (symbolized by the empty frames of one section) into a meaning beyond words. Here, frozen records of the past––personal memories, along with the traces of ancestors both literary and familial––are fractured and reassembled according to an ‘unknown intermixture of laws’ (in the words of the British physicist Tyndall, describing glacial structure). Shimoda (citing Tyndall) looks toward the ‘order and beauty’ hidden behind the ‘utter confusion’ of the Real."

Andrew Joron author of The Cry at Zero


"Brandon Shimoda’s The Alps is an exploration across modes of perception and through them, primarily the visual and the intuitive, which encompasses the feeling-out of experience (whether one’s own or others’) as memory, invention, collage, bricolage. A formally interdisciplinary text, The Alps expands the borders around forms of identity and, in one section, confronts the breakdown of language as the medium constitutive of identity.

Shimoda’s is a welcome voice among a new generation, one saturated by images and so compelled, at times, to creatively, renewingly engage and remake them."

Lisa Fishman author of The Happiness Experiment


"A scattering, a drowning, a droning, a hoofing; a bombing, a sinking, a plugging, a mapping; a feasting, a birthing, a stitching, a sewing, The Alps is an avalanche inventory ceremony. Part Maximus, part Cremaster, The Alps proceeds across a 'cropping continent"' variously sounding, muffling, digesting, and smoking out histories and voices 'eroding nation-blankness sort of.' If it is true that '[…] there is/no witness//to vanquish/language from the books you know,' The Alps, in its omnivorous, flesh-eating pursuit, invites us at least to banquet with it, to be among the 'self-fertilized/guests, among ghosts' in its vast and nomadic recalibrations performs a dazzling new archeology."

Anthony Hawley author of The Concerto Form