Superstars – BlazeVOX [books]

Alice Through the Working Class by Steve McCaffery, illustrations by Clelia Scala

admin — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:36:30 +0000

Through a mischievous application of the law of the approximate homophone “Looking Glass” changes into “Working Class” and Alice is plunged into a new (for her) historical dimension. Witty, acerbic at times, and magisterially researched Alice through the Working Class introduces its readers to a new cast of characters and encounters including Mary Wollstonecraft, Lenin, Trotsky, Fidel Castro, Tsar Nicholas II and such historic figures as Prince Kropotkin and Emma Goldberg. Throughout McCaffery is faithful to Carroll’s own style, syntax, and vocabulary; the three can be sensed palimpsestically as can the original illustrations by John Tenniel in Clelia Scala’s forty-two delightful and at times mordantly witty visual collages. Now, nine years later Alice through the Working Class and the second of McCaffery’s “Carroll Caprices,” joins its sister text Alice in Plunderland (2015). Might we expect then an Alice through the Cooking Class and an Alice in Sunderland?

“From a man who once gave us a translation into the dialect of South Yorkshire of The Communist Manifesto (by Charlie Marx and Fred Engels, two North of England chaps) no icon of our culture is safe. So, having sent poor Alice down into Plunderland, the underworld of Toronto junkies, McCaffery, with his customary linguistic wit, now takes her through the working-class, into the industrial revolution, where Mary Wollstonecraft is the Red Queen, and the Soviet workers’ paradise, where Lenin is the Lion and the Unicorn is Trotsky. And, horribile dictu, it works. Don’t miss the Bolshevik Jabberwocky.”

—Jean-Jacques Lecercle, author of Philosophy through the Looking Glass.

STEVE McCAFFERY has been twice nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award and is twice recipient of the American Gertrude Stein Prize for Innovative Writing. He is the author of over 40 books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction and criticism and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. An ample selection of his poetic explorations in numerous forms can be savored in the two volumes of Seven Pages Missing (Coach House Press). As well as Panopticon (Blewointmentpress), Tatterdemalion (Veer Books), Revanches (Xexoxial), Parsival (Roof), and Carnival: The Complete Version (Veer Books). His book-object-concept A Little Manual of Treason was commissioned for the 2011 Shajah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. A founding member of the sound poetry ensemble Four Horsemen, TRG (Toronto Research Group) and the College of Canadian ”Pataphysics, McCaffery was a long-time resident of Toronto he now lives in Buffalo, New York. Born in the first month of 1947 in Jessop’s Hospital Sheffield, he is listed, along with John Ruskin, Margaret Drabble, Joe Cocker, and Patrick MacNee, as one of the top 100 people who were born or lived in that revered city immortalized in Peter Catanneo’s The Full Monty. Alice in Plunderland, the first of McCaffery’s two “Carroll Caprices” was published by BookThug in 2015, with collage illustrations by Clelia Scala.

CLELIA SCALA is a visual artist whose work includes mask and puppet design, installations, collage, and illustration. Publications include a series of 42 collages for the book Alice in Plunderland (BookThug, Toronto 2015) by Steve McCaffery and 11 collages for I Can Say Interpellation (BookThug, Toronto 2011) by Stephen Cain. She teaches puppetry and theatre design in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. www.clelia.ca

Book Information:

· Paperback: 178 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-467-3

$22

Pre-Orders Welcome

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Sleeping with Bashō by David Trinidad

admin — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 18:27:49 +0000

David Trinidad’s Sleeping with Bashō is a masterpiece of reinvention, reimagining, and engagement with haiku’s most famous practitioner. Trinidad’s intimacy with Bashō’s 17th century work comes through as he “translates” him for a modern audience. You’ll encounter Bashō’s splashing frog in a whole new pond, alongside the theme song from Green Acres and music from the B-52s, Donovan, Blondie, and more. You’ll see Bashō’s fireflies anew, this time as they shine on a toy Lite-Brite. Simply brilliant!

—Denise Duhamel

David Trinidad meets Bashō for a moon-viewing party under a willow tree amid a flock of warbling cuckoos. Bringing a deeply felt understanding of the history and practice of haiku, he restages Bashō’s complete body of work in a contemporary landscape of plum-eating boy toys, poetry-editor gatekeepers, and ill-timed Christmas carolers, among others. I was hooked by the meditative quiet and delightful irreverence of Sleeping with Bashō long before the grasses stirred beneath the melting snow.

—Tony Trigilio

David Trinidad’s numerous books include Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces, Notes on a Past Life, Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, and The Late Show. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith, and Divining Poets: Dickinson, an Emily Dickinson tarot deck. Trinidad currently lives in Chicago, where he is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 374 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-474-1

$22

Pre-Orders Welcome

Sleeping with Bashō by David Trinidad-af by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

Everything Turns On A Delicate Measure by Maureen Owen

admin — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 23:57:38 +0000

A keen awareness of the world, the lucidity of self-awareness, a textual energy whose propulsion melts line-breaks, a diction that teeters on illogic and yet creates their own sense, and a unique privacy from a poet’s deep meditations all combine to create a deceptive alchemy in Maureen Owen’s Everything Turns On A Delicate Measure. Such alchemy effects resonant and provocative lines that make the poems memorable, from “that grimace of the sky” and “that earth burps” and everything in between such as “the shadow of the ant moves at exactly the same speed as the ant.” Marveling, you voluntarily inhabit these poems until “at home you speak in tongues.”

—Eileen R. Tabios, author of Because I Love You, I Become War

What is the restless energized measure for an expanding universe? Maureen Owen is one of our most exploratory poet inventors whose sound and sense insure what’s hidden from view gets more mysterious. Always terrific juxtapositions of word-koans and settings — in relation, smart, original. Wonderment of Nature and flawed humanness of phenomenal world lock horns and dance. Odd transitions and layering impacts the dynamic glow of Neolithic Lalita, goddess of play whose eyes stay moist with compassion. It’s been my pleasure to follow Maureen Owen’s amazing trajectory in our entangled lifetimes, for her measured gnosis, wild head space, craft, beauty and wit. This book is a reason to celebrate and continue.

—Anne Waldman

Everything Turns on a Delicate Measure nails it exactly. I’ve known Maureen Owen’s poems since 1970 and have come to expect her vividness to become words, and vice versa. There will be the paradox of open-ended containment. A chanson of feeling, sensorium and solitudinous spiritual concern presented wittily and unsparingly in tangential, fluid collage — call it “not pastiche.” A quietly intense pagan attention to a pastoral, not urban, space of four dimensions. Multiple sensory observations complicated by simultaneity, and imagination, not grammar, will fuel the density of her words. At her most direct there will be passionate loopholes I’d call perceptions. Two poems, “What We Do” and “Washing Chard,” take eco-contrition to a sublime level that exceeds even my high expectations. Maureen doesn’t just have skill sets, she has abundant gifts, and in this collection her gifts continue to mature. Five stars won’t do; I give it unlimited stars.

—John Godfrey

In Everything Turns on a Delicate Measure, Owen scans the densely variegated material world, alert to its entangled particles. From bush crickets and pink roses, to the hippocampus posing like a boudoir diva, to the whoosh of a dress, or a frigate’s moan, the lyric cascades in a dynamic confluence: “at night I go to bed with everything I’m thinking.” Through Owen’s signature caesuras and wild jagged titles, such poetics of attention sound their “human whistle” and trace our existential passage on this earth, saying, yes, we were here.

—Chris Tysh

Maureen Owen is the former editor and chief of Telephone Magazine and Telephone Books, currently celebrated in a two vol. recap by The Poetry Collection at The University of Buffalo.
Her latest title is let the heart hold down the breakage Or the caregiver’s log from Hanging Loose Press. Another recent publication is Poets on the Road with Barbara Henning, a collaborative reading tour blog in print from City Point Press. Other books include Edges of Water from Chax Press and Erosion’s Pull, a Coffee House Press title that was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her collection American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has taught at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, and served as editor-in-chief of Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 82 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-450-5

$18

Pre-Orders Welcome

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Ephemera 1995-2022: On people, politics, art, justice, torture, and war by Bruce Jackson

admin — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 13:53:50 +0000

Bruce Jackson’s Ephemera finishes his recent triplicate of essay collections. This one, which starts with an almost breezy account of his own near heart-attack, feels as undeniable as his Places and Changing Tense. Jackson is a wonderful conversational writer. Even when he’s polemicizing against torture-mongers, Bush-men, Buffalo’s goodies, or bad Sontag, he doesn’t bring a hammer to the debate (though he’s glad to shiv a Dershowitz). Jackson’s writing always conveys his happy warrior’s appetite for life. This guy’s got eyes and ears and stories for the Ages. He also once had a great dog! Read all about it…

—Benj DeMott, editor, First of the Month

Bruce Jackson is a writer, folklorist, documentary filmmaker and photographer. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at University at Buffalo. He is author or editor of more than 40 books, the most recent of which are Ways of the Hand: A Photographer’s Memoir (2022), Changing Tense: Thirty memento mori (2021), and Places: Things heard, things seen (2019). Two of his early works have recently been dramatized by New York’s Wooster Group. In collaboration with SUNY Distinguished Professor Diane Christian, he has directed and produced five documentary films, three books, and, since spring 2000, curated the Buffalo Film Seminars. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was nominated for a Grammy Award, and was named an Associate Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters. The French government appointed him Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002 and Chevalier in the Ordre national du Mérite in 2012.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 256 pages 
· Binding: Perfect-Bound 
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]  
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-442-0

$22

Pre-Orders Welcome

Ephemera 1995-2022 by Bruce Jackson Book Preview-Af by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

Black and Yellow Notebooks by Stephen Ratcliffe

admin — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 16:01:47 +0000

With the Black and Yellow Notebooks, Stephen Ratcliffe adds another volume to his previously published Rocks and More Rocks — which, taken together, constitute a remarkable High Sierras literature, that, like John Muir’s, stands as hymn to and testament of the experience of being among peaks. Ratcliffe’s many works are everywhere and always build on strict musical form. In these new works he uses four line stanzas in sets of five, five syllables per line, without sentence breaks, that feel like breath, the deep regular breath a hiker breathes while immersed in the rhythm of alpine walking. Where Muir’s soaring romanticism focuses on the mountains’ echo within the human soul, Ratcliffe’s steady and repetitive music gives us the mountains themselves: silent rock, sky, cloud, lake, in light and shadow by day; by night meteors shooting through the star-studded deep black. These are thrilling, mesmerizing, elemental poems.

— Norman Fischer

These two notebook poems, written during backpacking trips in the Eastern Sierra, continue Stephen Ratcliffe’s ongoing concerns with environment, perception, and the durations of affect. His tightly focused four line, five syllable lined stanzas move between local details of campsite and trail and vast panoramas of rock, water, and weather. Ratcliffe never separates the perception of near and far, creating a constantly oscillating awareness of place as a phenomenological condition, “that moment showing / itself being seen.” Not since Gary Snyder’s early poems has a poet so accurately mapped the movement of walking and observing in these spectacular landscapes. Few poets of the recent period inhabit real time with such dedication and grace.

— Michael Davidson

The wonderful momentum of Ratcliffe’s clipped language echoes the staccato footsteps of his week-long hikes. It’s walking art in the tradition of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, yet kept in motion through a constantly shifting, ever-piercing attention that keeps the reader acutely present to the changing light, the passing crows, and the meteors streaking through the August night sky. To enter this book is to go uncommonly outside.

— Cole Swensen

You can write as if a monist, but that doesn’t mean you are a monist. Otherwise, the myriad particulars of landscape, weather, sunrise, stars, time, mind, or language would simply be what they are—and accessible only under unique circumstances. That is not Stephen Ratcliffe’s method—the gap between two cell phone photos is never the same gap. The same goes for word succeeding word and line following line in four-line stanzas in nonproportional type, transcribed from the irregularity of hand writing. And thus of interest we feel, as readers. I am writing this sentence by the shore of Barrett Lake, but I cannot tell you which lake. Everything is perspectival.

— Barrett Watten

Interview with Stephen Ratcliffe in Alta:
‘The Walt Whitman of Bolinas’
Stephen Ratcliffe’s thousand-page books of poems contain multitudes.
BY FORREST GANDER

Stephen Ratcliffe’s most recent books are Barbara Guest & Stephen Ratcliffe : Letters (Chax, 2022), Some Time and speaking of now (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022 and 2021), Rocks and More Rocks (Cuneiform, 2020), and sound of wave in channel (BlazeVOX [books], 2018). His ongoing series of seven 1,000-page poems written in 1,000 consecutive days is available at Editions Eclipse (http://eclipsearchive.org/editions.html) and his daily poems + photographs are at stephenratcliffe.blogspot.com. The poems in Black and Yellow Notebooks were written in two notebooks (one black the other yellow) on three backpacking trips in the High Sierra in August 2018, 2020 and 2021. He has lived in Bolinas, California since 1973.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 74 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-435-2

$18

Pre-Orders Welcome

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26 Tears by George Tysh / Chris Tysh

Geoffrey Gatza — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 14:58:49 +0000

What an abracadabra of abecedarian magic is 26 Tears! Evoking the Aramaic avra kehdabra, “I will create as I speak,” this collaborative incantation weaves a magical spell of language. Two poets riff in alphabetical measure with illuminating literary texts, an epidemic, and a quotidian of political angst. Here a double abecedary comes full circle as the responding poet counters the initial’s opening of “A to Z” with a “Z to A” turnabout. Powerfully ouroboric as alphabet’s tail joins origin with snippets from each corresponding letter!

— Maureen Owen

The shocks of the last half decade have left us breathless, with poetry gasping to catch up. Language itself registers the feints and shifts in unexplainable ways. In 26 Tears we have a quiet poetic conversation between two poets — who happen to be married to one another as they are to the art — in slant-stanzaed, short-lined poems that touch mind and heart in all registers. Nothing solved, described, or theorized, just the ever-shifting colors of words twisting back and forth on themselves in a world in pain.

— Norman Fischer

Chris Tysh is a poet and playwright whose latest publications are Hotel des Archives: A Trilogy (Station Hill Press, 2018) and Derrida’s In/Voice (BlazeVOX, 2020). She holds fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Kresge Foundation, as well as a Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts Award from Wayne State University where she teaches writing. She is the poetry editor of Three Fold, an independent arts quarterly, https://threefoldpress.org/current

George Tysh, in 1964, was a founding member of the Detroit Artists Workshop, and from 1980 to 1991 he coordinated LINES: New Writing at The Detroit Institute of Arts. He has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Kresge Foundation, and an Arts Achievement Award from Wayne State University. His most recent books include The Slip (2015) and A Thousand Words and Others (2020), both from BlazeVOX.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 122 pages 
· Binding: Perfect-Bound 
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]  
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-426-0

$18

Pre-Orders Welcome

26 Tears by George Tysh : Chris Tysh Book Preview by BlazeVOX [books] on Scribd

That Woman Could Be You by Vi Khi Nao + Jessica Alexander

admin — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 15:36:49 +0000

THAT WOMAN COULD BE YOU

That Woman Could Be You is an orphic documentary of the circadian, an archive of queer and quotidian rituals, an observant meditation on the ephemerality and defiance of chronic pain, desire, and grief as they manifest in daily acts. This intrinsically sapphic & feminist project does not chronicle an excursion so much as the stillness of interiority: Alexander fluctuates between belief and disbelief at the news of her brother’s death and Nao manages the fatigue and breathlessness of heart surgery. Meanwhile the Interstates carry them from Louisiana to Texas to Colorado; to work and away from it. That Woman Could Be You lends a euphoric, nostalgic, and dreamlike beauty to the everydayness of diurnal tasks. It is about moving through the world together, as women, in Nao’s case a Vietnamese woman, and the newness of their love and life together.

Like Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary seen through a fervid haze, its Super 8 frames fractaling in and out of memory’s forlorn theatrics, the pieces in this book invite the reader on a jaunt of vanishingly small, gigantic, public, and intimate dimensions. Accept the invitation. Reel with all the ways That Woman Could be You. –– ALI RAZ, author of Alien

The book, visually, looks stunning –– reminds me of The Fear of Losing Eurydice by Julieta Campos ––and the poems are so mundanely mystical that there’s no difference between the physical and the spiritual, the ‘me’ and the ‘you’. –– MARC ANTHONY RICHARDSON, American Book Award winner, and author of Year of the Rat and Messiahs

If a love story has a beginning, middle, and end, then this is a book of the middle, of the hundred middles –– of the rice, lemons, sweatpants , workdays, rented rooms –– that deep connection is made of. Danger, death, and chronic pain wait in the dark, so “we [walk] home like two lamp posts.” Familiar and strange, this wonderfully intimate, genre-bending book is a gift of trust to the reader. It’s like finding a witty, lyrical letter handwritten on the back pages of a library book you never want to return. –– BRAD AARON MODLIN, author of Everyone at this Party Has Two Names

Reading That Woman Could Be You is an overwhelming immersion in an intimate world of knowing and unknowing. The stunning work is steeped in love and grief and, most of all, in the persistent genius needed to expose them. –– IAN BEAMISH, Dr. James Wilson/BORSF Eminent Scholar Endowed Professor in Southern Studies University of Louisiana at Lafayette

What does it mean to be a woman, that Other? This book cannot tell you any more than your mother—remembered, fictitious—can. But what if every person you ever loved was Jessica Alexander who was Vi Khi Nao who was a singular writer with two heads and one heart and a thousand brains? But every person you ever loved was a verb. Grieve, thrust, probe, sear—for example. Not your mother, not remembered or fictitious, but language, in all its glory and precision and ambiguity. That is this book. And if you let it, this book will crack you open, replace your insides with ferns, shrimps, televisions: or tiny bits of the souls of two singular writers. –– JACLYN WATTERSON, author of Ventriloquisms

An unconventional masterpiece from two of the most transcendent writers working in America today. I dare you to read this collaboration and not be inspired in your own life and art.–– MICHAEL SHOU-YUNG SHUM, author of Queen of Spades

VI KHI NAO earned her B.A. in Art & Spanish from Central College and an M.F.A from Brown University. She is the author of five poetry collections: A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line (Press 11:11, 2021), Human Tetris(11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). She is an interdisciplinary artist who works in multiple and interchangeable mediums. Her drawings have appeared in literary journals such as NOON and The Adirondack Review. Her video, digital, and literary installations have been exhibited at the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts in Providence in Rhode Island and in the largest exhibition halls for contemporary art in Europe, Malmö Konsthall, in Sweden.Her work includes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, performance, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. https://www.vikhinao.com

JESSICA ALEXANDER earned an MA at Ohio University and her PhD at the University of Utah. Alexander’s work explores trauma and the power of violent comedy through the parodic repetition of old forms. She has given talks and taught courses on queering the thriller, the poetics of queer comedy, and hauntology. Her story collection, Dear Enemy explores the barbed though familiar form of fairytales, coupling their fatalistic simplicity—the paratactic, transition-less shift from small talk to death—with a blithe, whimsical, and often ecstatic narrative voice. Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her novella, “None of This Is an Invitation” (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) is forthcoming from Astrophil Press in the spring of 2023. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Louisiana where she serves as Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program and teaches Fiction at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. https://www.jessica-alexander.com

Book Information:

Paperback: 214 pages
Binding: Perfect-Bound
Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
ISBN: 978-1-60964-400-0

$22

That Woman Could Be You by Vi Khi Nao + Jessica Alexander Book Preview

WEBSITES & SOCIAL MEDIA

VI KHI NAO:
Website: https://www.vikhinao.com

Social Media:

https://twitter.com/vikhinao

https://www.instagram.com/vikhinao/

https://www.facebook.com/vikhinao

JESSICA ALEXANDER:

Website: https://www.jessica-alexander.com

Social Media:

https://www.facebook.com/jessica.alexander.50767/

https://www.instagram.com/iateaghost

https://twitter.com/iateaghost

Six Verse Plays: Or, Some Poems For Performance, by John Matthias

admin — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 17:11:54 +0000

The poetry, essays, and fiction of John Matthias are widely known. Less known are the plays and performance texts that he has been writing and adapting from his longer poems in the course of the last several years. This book contains six of these texts, only one of which has been performed. However, the success of staged versions of “Automystifstical Plaice” suggests that performances of the other texts would be equally exciting. Both by the reader and the hypothetical producer of these plays, this book will be warmly welcomed.

“The ironies [of “Automystifstical Plaice”] are multiple: an avant-gardism exploiting the distinctiveness of specific media and insisting on its antinomian freedom from representation becomes the technological basis for the primary form of electronic mass communication, and serves the militarized state. The sexual association of screen divas with missiles may be old hat, but the starlet as computer geek contriving systems of destruction and exchange might send Dr. Strangelove himself into unstoppable spasm.”

—John Wilkinson

“Well! I asked the girls and learned that this Mr. Matthias was no fly-by-night Johnny, no film flam man on the lam from the clink or the Studebaker plant at South Bend, Indiana, but the real thing, a prime mover and a shaker, too, top drawer, top dollar, the dropped banana, the silk drawers, the smoking jacket, the clinamen, the Paralete, the parakeet and the parachute.”

—Joyelle McSweeney

“Matthias is one of the great originals”

—John Kinsella

“One of the best poets in the USA.”

—Guy Davenport

“John Matthias is a kind of mid-Atlantic treasure.”

—Ian Pople, Manchester Review

“Matthias’s challenging poetry makes clear that what is needed today is a larger, more capacious conception of postmodern poetics, one that avoids the usual classifications so as to redraw the boundaries of the field”

—Marjorie Perloff

John Matthias is the author of some thirty-five books – poetry, fiction, memoir, literary essays, scholarly editions, translations, and drama. He taught literature and creative writing at Notre Dame for forty years, and he is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. His recent publications include three volumes of collected poems: Collected Shorter Poems, vol. 1; Collected Shorter Poems, vol. 2; and Collected Longer Poems, all published by Shearsman Books. Shearsman has also published Trigons, a long poem; Who Was Cousin Alice? And Other Questions, a volume of essays; and Different Kinds of Music, a novel. Matthias has also been active as a translator, working with Göran Printz-Påhlson on the anthology Contemporary Swedish Poetry (Swallow Press) and with Lars-Håkan Svensson on Three-toed Gull: Selected Poems of Jesper Svenbro (Northwestern). His own poetry has been translated into many languages. Editorially, his advocacy of the Anglo-Welsh modernist, David Jones, has been advanced in Introducing David Jones (Faber and Faber) and David Jones: Man and Poet (National Poetry Foundation). Two volumes of essays have been published on Matthias’s work: Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias, ed. Robert Archambeau (Swallow Press) and The Salt Companion to John Matthias, ed. Joe Francis Doerr (Salt Publishing). For twenty years John Matthias was poetry editor of Notre Dame Review, and he is currently Editor at Large.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 144 pages 
· Binding: Perfect-Bound 
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]  
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-210-5

$16

Tom Clark Collection

admin — Sat, 16 Oct 2021 15:25:50 +0000

The Tom Clark collection contains his six titles from BlazeVOX. This is a great set of electrifying work by one of America’s foremost poets.

At the Fair | Canyonesque | Feeling for the Ground
Truth Game | Evening Train | Distance

Truth Game

“Very exciting… The poems have the ‘now’ sound of current experience; they enable one to see a little further into life as it’s presently being lived.”

— John Ashbery

Get the full details on this book here

Evening Train

In Evening Train we witness people on a bus, a window in the night, greenery, a bird on its perch—and then at the center of this world, something nameless seems to open. It’s hard to say just what happens, other than the words of each poem itself. But that isn’t quite right. It’s as if the words are a way for the poet to inscribe silence. You turn the page, wondering, and it arrives again—something quite beyond what is told. Tom Clark is a master.

—Aram Saroyan

Get the full details on this book here

Distance

“You have kept your own mind and done your perceptive and singular work every day — on your own resources and with your own intent. For those who can care, you are a benchmark for what such industry and capability can realize. Your practical hand has been there for me, I know all the way…”
—Robert Creeley to Tom Clark, July 26, 2002

Get the full details on this book here

Canyonesque

“The place he writes from, of void/non-void overlap, is a pure arena for the imagination to play in; and Clark is likewise pure: austere, bleak, exalted too… shimmering as ever.”
—Alice Notley

Get the full details on this book here

At the Fair

I’ve known and read Tom Clark for almost half-a-century as a master of many genres: a writer of plays, biographies, novels; as an editor and critic — but always foremost, as a poet. At the Fair gives glimpses of this poet peering through the eyes of his reflection in the mirror of time and reporting on the memories of that image. Part autobiography of the author in shards; part philosophy of atmosphere and thought; part natural history of air, land and water; part defense of the local; part the literate writer at work, translating, being distracted by the logic and beauty of language: this book, which I read straight through, is a tribute to a lifelong addiction: a mutable one-handed keep-awake smack in the forest of loss. One’s hat is raised as observation passes.
—Tom Raworth

Get the full details on this book here

Feeling for the Ground

Pretty much exactly like Tom Thumb’s Blues, Mr. Clark goes on as ever letting his sensibility seep like rain through all the great American vernacular sites — film noir, baseball, the shore, dreams — and the result is a sequence of utterances that feel both timeless and inexhaustibly resonant.
—Jonathan Lethem

Get the full details on this book here

Tom Clark was born in Chicago in 1941 and educated at the University of Michigan, Cambridge University and the University of Essex. He has worked variously as an editor (The Paris Review), critic (Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle) and biographer (lives of Damon Runyon, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn), has published novels (Who is Sylvia?, The Exile of Céline, The Spell), memoirs (Jim Carroll, Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan) and essays (The Poetry Beat, Problems of Thought: Paradoxical Essays). His many collections of poetry have included Stones, Air, At Malibu, John’s Heart, When Things Get Tough on Easy Street, Paradise Resisted, Disordered Ideas, Fractured Karma, Sleepwalker’s Fate, Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats, Like Real People, Empire of Skin, Light and Shade, The New World, Something in the Air, Feeling for the Ground, At the Fair, Canyonesque, Distance and Truth Game. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and partner of forty-six years, Angelica Heinegg.

The Exploding Nothingness of Never Define by Anne Tardos

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 19:00:36 +0000

Anne Tardos, whose poetry & performances have delighted us for several decades now, emerges in her new book as the innovator of a work that incorporates, like the best of our poetry, a full range of thoughts & experiences & makes them stick in mind & memory. The Exploding Nothingness of Never Define is her complex, often surprising meditation on poetry and life that starts with a series of takes on the idea and image of “the poet” and goes on to make something new, which she arranges in a series of nine serial poems, delivered with a true poet’s intelligence, “the pride of lived experience,” she says and wanders, wide awake and dreaming, searching for new/old places/faces to observe and call to life.

—Jerome Rothenberg

In what seems to have been a surge of creative and linguistic energy, Anne Tardos in the space of two years has written nine dazzling poetic sequences. Each sequence speaks with its own authority and from its own imagined life-world, but all of them celebrate the existence of social happiness, love. From the sequence “Words on a Page,” which opens the book and is a tribute to the author’s sheer love of writing, to “Madagascar Mud,” the paean to the irreverent tumult of the natural world with which the book ends, Tardos establishes love as the foundation for writing On love’s grounds, she explores and invents with the vibrant wit familiar to readers and audiences of her previous work but with less restrained as well as warmer exuberance. The Exploding Nothingness of Never Define will outlast the destruction and triumph over hate. All power to it.

—Lyn Hejinian

This is a work of solid intent. The lines are taut, like the strings of a guitar. Not tight, taut. Tuned. Exquisitely correspondent. As if, by reading, one were to pluck the line & feel its vibration in the mind. The words feel caressed, not chosen so much as savored. Seasoned here & there with a little twist, a little distortion, a note bent by a semitone. This is the energy of consolidation, the harmonic response of image & meaning. The language manages to say very complex & surprising things with an elegant simplicity & that special kind of reverie that is exercised in singing.

—John Olson

Anne Tardos is the author of eleven books of poetry, and editor of three posthumous collections of poetry by Jackson Mac Low. Her work has been translated and published in dozens of anthologies and journals around the world.

Tardos pioneered a unique multilingual writing style, often complementing her texts with video stills, photographs, and collages. Her writing is renowned for its fluid use of multiple languages and its innovative forms. She has worked in numerous media, creating performance pieces, radio plays, videos, and musical compositions. Her multilingual and multimedia works have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the West German Radio, WDR; the XLIV Venice Biennale; and in many international sound poetry festivals, including Festival La Bâtie, Geneva; text-ljud Festival, Stockholm; Scene Wien, Vienna; and Zwischentoene, Cologne.

Among her grants, fellowships, and commissions are The Ford Foundation, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Emily Harvey Foundation. Her works have been commissioned by baritone Thomas Buckner and the Dominque Lévy Gallery.

Tardos lives in New York City with her husband, Michael Byron.

. Book Information:

· Paperback: 222 pages 
· Binding: Perfect-Bound 
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]  
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-368-3

$22

The Exploding Nothingness o… by BlazeVOX [books]