Hurray and congrats to Irene Koronas and Daniel Y. Harris! Their new books have been reviewed by Joshua Martin and are posted in Synchronized Chaos.

Joshua Martin Reviews Irene Koronas’ gnōstos in “Synchronized Chaos.”

Joshua Martin reviews Irene Koronas’ gnostos

Joshua Martin Reviews Daniel Y. Harris’ The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu in “Synchronized Chaos.”

Joshua Martin reviews Daniel Y. Harris’ new book The Metempsychosis of Salvador Dracu

The Xenopoetics of Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series
Andrew C. Wenaus, the University of Western Ontario

(click on the above title for the following description and link to the VICFA site)

In November 2023, Andrew C. Wenaus of the University of Western Ontario gave a lecture with the title “The Xenopoetics of Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series” in a panel discussion titled “Artificial Progeny, Determinism and the Limits of Posthumanism,” at the 2023 Virtual International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (VICFA). The conference’s 2023 theme was “AI, Algorithms, Automation, and Art.”

Andrew C. Wenaus’ lecture, “The Xenopoetics of Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series,” considered the speculative xenopoetics of poet Daniel Y. Harris’ ongoing The Posthuman Series (2016-present) and its singular approach to speculative poetry and, more specifically, xenopoetics. For Harris, the future of poetry will involve a metamorphosis from written language to executable computer code. Xenopoetics formally embodies the novum—that is, it literalizes defamiliarization—Harris’ work offers itself to science fiction readers and critics as a possible gesture forward for the field as writers increasingly negotiate emerging AI technologies.

https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/page-1820583

Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing
by Jack Skelley
BlazeVOX
June 2022, Paperback, 204 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1609644116

The titular opening poem in Jack Skelley’s Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing, invites the reader to an avant-garde setting where the speaker proclaims prayer-like a listing of “I want” items to consider. This is a place where “Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd” could “levitate the Tomorrowland Terrace” or where “Fruity Pebbles vaccination bars, with stalactites nippling jelly babies” can both simultaneously coexist, alongside other punk aesthetic and pop culture artifacts. Skelley creates worlds in his poems that are immediately recognizable, while also somehow suspended in nostalgically futuristic places. Whether a poem is set in Disneyland, a cemetery, or a “Demon-Sized Planet,” the natural or reimagined vision of each setting looms large “colored bubbles making worlds multiply.”

Read the whole review here

E·ratio is a premier venue for postmodern and experimental poetry. It is edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino.

Here’s the link to the interview:

http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com/HarrisInterview5523.html

On 26 Tears by George Tysh and Chris Tysh
Tyrone Williams

26 Tears by George Tysh and Chris Tysh
BlazeVOX Books, 2022

Though they have not always received due credit for their contribution among the oral (and, of course, musical) artistic innovations that have dominated the history of poetics in Detroit, George and Chris Tysh have been crucial to the development of a materialist countertradition of poetics, literary and otherwise. They have not been alone in this endeavor, especially if we think of Detroit as the hub of an experimental, even avant-garde, cultural matrix in southeastern Michigan (for example, Ken Mikolowski’s The Alternative Press and Clayton Eshleman’s journal Sulfur). Nevertheless, the LINES Reading Series that George Tysh initiated at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1980 provided an important complement, if not rebuttal, to the traditional lyric and narrative poetics propagated by most of the poetry I encountered in the English Department at Wayne State University and, more generally, throughout the surrounding Cass Corridor. Both traditions, the dominant lyric/narrative one and the innovative/experimental one, were crucial to my development as a writer when I lived in Detroit (e.g., I took classes at DIA with Chris Tysh and with Edward Hirsch at Wayne State) and so everything that follows must be punctuated with a qualifying asterisk.

Read the whole review here

Buy 26 Tears here

CHRIS MCKINNEY reviews Lilith Walks on Hawaii Review of Books

In Lilith Walks we read how Susan Schultz, Hawai‘i’s celebrated and (dogged) literary experimentalist, reacted to the daily challenge of walking her pooch while rational down a gantlet of Trumpeting, COVID-denying, conspiracist neighbors.

Is Kāne‘ohe the punchiest neighborhood on the island?

You could argue it. I would.

It’s the home of Castle High, the school that my stepfather, two siblings, and a long list of cousins never graduated from. Poet and publisher Susan Schultz lives there, and while this may sound odd at first, Susan is tough. If publishing challenging experimental poetry for twenty-two years doesn’t prove that, there’s her new book, Lilith Walks.

It’s a walk through a human minefield with only a poi-dog mix for company.

Obviously, when a pandemic hits, everyday life shifts dramatically. However, some routine tasks must continue to be fulfilled. Groceries must be purchased. Kids must be fed. For most dog owners, dogs must be walked. Susan Schultz’s Lilith Walks is a collection of her observations and conversations with her neighbors and fellow dog walkers, during what has been one of the most tumultuous eras in this country’s history—the Trump and Covid years.

The book, less a meditation and more a series of observational accounts, is filled with eye-catching juxtapositions. The majestic Ko‘olaus shadow townhouses, the graves of Temple Valley, and a growing population of feral chickens. The mundane task of dog walking in clement weather frequently devolves from friendly, idle conversations to flat-out hostility.

Read the whole review here

Buy Lilith Walks by Susan Schultz here

on P I E C E S, poems by Hank Lazer
reviewed by Susan M. Schultz

For many years, words like “it” and “is” seemed to be my arch enemies. Student essays and poems would be littered with non-referential pronouns (to which I add “this” and “that”) along with that weakest of the verb forms. When I suggested to a student he not use the “to be” verb so much, he asked what that meant. Being is ever a mystery, as are verb forms. “It is” writing can leave the reader fluttering in the air. It’s a pronoun and verb without a map.

Then I taught an entire course on the writing of Gertrude Stein. That was it. It was everywhere. Its significance outweighed its lack of reference; in fact, in Stein’s play of language, It was one of the central characters. It was a pronoun that needed no referent other than itself, rather like the “He” in Ashbery’s early sonnet that refers not to what any particular “he” does in the world, but to the world created by sentences beginning with the word “he.” In the Stein class, our task became one of talking about it, not what it referred to. That was the point; it was a word with its own substance, agency, allure even. If you can’t close-read “it,” then at least you can revel in it.

Which brings me, by commodious vicus of recirculation, to Hank Lazer’s PIECES. Nearly a third of the way in to his diary-poem, he notes: “eventually / we all become / miniaturists.” At the least, Lazer and his poetic tradition do. He quotes Robert Creeley throughout, that master of the thin line, the sudden enjambment. Creeley wrote a poem titled “A Piece”: “One and / one, two, / three.” Three words, three points of punctuation, three lines. This might be yelled out at the beginning of a race (though that would more likely be 3, 2, 1), or it might be a jazz musician’s count to launch a riff. Or it might simply be three words that take us somewhere that has no meaning outside of a left-out context. Three what? Or, as Lazer adds (by subtracting): “too few words / better than / too many.” The triumph for Stein was in recognizing that words were themselves the miniatures we collect, tchhotchkes of the language. Lazer’s approach is different. For him, the word “it” is crucial because it contains multitudes. What the meaning is is the question. It is there somewhere, beginning from the note left to him by his uncle in an unfinished notebook; or as ritual; or as the weather; or as a koan (“what / is / it”); a state of being, or coming into not being (my own father’s last words were “I guess this is it”); as a pointer; as an anchor in time; as a spirit; as a ghostly presence (as of his recently deceased mother). It is also a book, this one, sweeping in circles away from uncle’s handwritten words into meditations on grief, descriptions of a farm, then folding back to the unfinished notebook, the dead yet unfinished uncle. That Lazer has written for so many years in notebooks (both in lines and in shapes) means that he is especially drawn to them. Does his notebook finish the one begun by his uncle? No, but it expands it even as it is born through the miniature.

Read the full review here: On the Seawall: A Community Gallery of New Writing & Commentary

Read more of P I E C E S, poems by Hank Lazer, or buy a copy here

Book Review

I’ll begin my review with this somewhat embarrassing disclosure: In recent years, I’ve been basically a TV show illiterate, never having watched popular series such as The Killing, The Good Place, The Real World, Westworld, Game of Thrones, or Madmen. Why does this matter? Not keeping up with American TV programs can limit one’s repertoire for small talk when in conversation with family, friends, neighbors, new acquaintances, coworkers—i.e., with many of one’s fellow Americans. It can also limit one’s avenues for processing some of the conflicts, anxieties, and cultural values swirling around America in the present moment. It can even limit one’s appreciation of an innovative book of poetry such as the one under consideration here. Emma Winsor Wood, author of The Real World, is someone who is conversant with television. And the kind of televised entertainment that interests her in this book—mostly shows with continuing storylines that develop across seasons—makes the book’s disjunctive, aphoristic responses to what’s on TV both strange and fascinating. And, for the most part, very funny.

The names of the first four programs I mentioned serve as section titles for Wood’s book, and these, along with two other sections entitled “Commercial Break” and “Saturday Cartoons,” provide The Real World with an organizational frame that lends an overall coherence and continuity to a book whose serial poems thrive on incongruity and discontinuity. The tensions between order and disorder (in two sections poems are even further divided into episodes or seasons) sets up a sort of rivalry between the comic and the serious, between the author and her speakers, between what’s outside the book and what’s in it. The gaps provide Wood with ample grounds for trenchant social critique and inventive satire.

Read the whole review here

Buy The Real World by Emma Winsor Wood here

Check it out here: BlazeVOX22 Fall 2022

Roger Craik has been interviewed by Tiffany Troy about his new book, In Other Days, in the most recent issue of Compulsive Reader. Here is an excerpt: